Crowded House

Thoreau and Emerson are making room for Walt Whitman, whose "Song of Myself" is on the reading agenda this week. Thoreau scowls and says he's going to move to the garage, while Emerson, despite his essay "Self-reliance," is being very social and agreeable. I suspect that Whitman doesn't notice either of them. As one of my fellow students once said about a yoga instructor in Centralia, "He's, like, really into his body."

There's more to Whitman than that, but I'm too new to his work to say much more. It's interesting that so many teachers have assigned this poem to my classes over the years, but always only in parts. It's easy to see why they left out most of the poem: there's a lot of material that probably isn't suitable for grade-school students, and it's a phenomenally long work. I can just imagine what Marvin, the guy who sat behind me in sixth grade, would have asked Mrs. Ryan if he'd seen more than two pages of the "Song."

I don't have to imagine how my parents would have reacted to my reciting parts of the poem if it had been assigned in its entirety. As I said earlier, Whitman was really into his body, and a lot of other people's, too. The difference between Whitman and a zillion other similar minds is that he says it so well. He must have been irresistable in the flesh.