Poet, Nurse, Solider
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I am the poet of slaves,
               and of the masters of slaves
I am the poet of the body
And I am
[Entire passage struck through]

I am the poet of the body
And I am the poet of the soul
The I go with the slaves of the earth are mine and
             The equally with the masters are equally [illegible]
And I will stand between
       the masters and the slaves,
  And I Entering into both, and
so that both shall understand
  me alike.

 


I am the poet of slaves ms


As Betsy Erkkila has written, "When in his notebook Whitman breaks for the first time into lines approximating the free verse of Leaves of Grass, the lines bear the impress of the slavery issue" (Whitman the Political Poet, p. 50). This "impress" is important--indeed, the word "impress" is especially good here for marking the way Whitman the life-long-printer's poetic practice is everywhere shaped by, founded upon, imprinted with, traces of the political controversies and issues of his day.

But if Whitman imagines the poet as a mediator between slaves and masters, somehow reconciling opposites that appear irreconcilable (only more so as civil war looms ever larger), the very next page of the same notebook offers a somewhat different way of thinking about the role of the poet.

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