“Containing Multitudes”: Walt Whitman

As psychoanalysts, we need to be clear about just how bad things can be. Our empathy for those wounded in the human project would be meaningless, mere sentimentality, without such clarity. At the same time, we depend on a hopefulness about the possibility of improvement, about cure, about growth, about development—a hopefulness we want to muster and communicate to those we want to help.

Wherever our optimism comes from (maybe it's characterological, bred in the bone; maybe it reflects early family experience; maybe it reflects deeply held religious conviction….), it requires a capacity to contain sharply contradictory attitudes. Our optimism argues with our painful realism; our excitement about what could be argues with everything we know about how difficult the achievement will be.

Interestingly, poets face a version of the same challenge. How to make art in the face of the evidence that the universe is indifferent to art and to all else we value? How to embrace beauty when we know the universe doesn't care? (Or if it cares, as some good people will insist, it has a subtle and altogether inscrutable way of showing it.) Walt Whitman is a case in point. He could sit with dying and wounded soldiers in the hospitals of the Civil War. And—he could sing like this.

Walt Whitman was an interesting fellow. He is regarded by many as the father of Modern American poetry (with Emily Dickinson as the mother). His poetry and his life constitute an entire academic field of scholarship. (Much of this scholarship, including a fascinating archive of his work at Civil War military hospitals, is available online.) And of course he wrote some extraordinary poetry—astonishing in part because new and unheard of for his times. His poetic utterance was direct. His lines were prosy, unrhymed, messy on the page; his was a cri-de-coeur freed from the poetic conventions of the age and of the ages before him. (He has had notable Modern successors: among them Allen Ginsberg, who referred to Whitma