Like most people, I first heard about Walt Whitman in the movie Dead Poets Society (1989), which I watched when I was 12. I remember the powerful scene where John Keating (Robin Williams) quotes some verses of Whitman's poem "O Me! O Life!" and ends up asking his students "What will your verse be?" I also remember trying to find the poem to read it again. Of course I failed to grasp the full meaning at the time, but the power of those final words really echoed in my mind and continue to do so nowadays.
O Me! O Life!
BY WALT WHITMAN
Oh me! Oh life! of the questions of these recurring,
Of the endless trains of the faithless, of cities fill’d with the foolish,
Of myself forever reproaching myself, (for who more foolish than I, and who more faithless?)
Of eyes that vainly crave the light, of the objects mean, of the struggle ever renew’d,
Of the poor results of all, of the plodding and sordid crowds I see around me,
Of the empty and useless years of the rest, with the rest me intertwined,
The question, O me! so sad, recurring—What good amid these, O me, O life?
Answer.
That you are here—that life exists and identity,
That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.
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| Walt Whitman (http://whitmanarchive.org) |
If you are interested in yet another dimension of Whitman's writing, you may like to take a look at The Walt Whitman Archive, a comprehensive resource about Whitman's life and work co-directed by Dr Ed Folsom and Dr Kenneth M. Price. There is a very interesting section including Whitman's personal correspondence, both incoming and outgoing.
There you see the complete Civil War correspondence (1848-1889) and part of the two-way correspondence from the Reconstruction (1867-1876) and post-Reconstruction years (1877-1887), including intimate letters exchanged with his mother, Louisa Van Velsor Whitman or his brother, Thomas Jefferson ("Jeff").
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