Whitman in the VQR

The Virginia Quarterly Review dedicated an entire issue in 2005 to Walt Whitman. It's a fairly impressive thing--writers and academics and fellow poets thinking about writing about the same poems that you're reading for next week.

Here's the poet Jane Hirshfield writing about Section 26 of "Song of Myself":

“I Hear America Singing” holds one example of Whitman’s listening. Equally powerful is section 26 of “Song of Myself.” The halfway mark in that work’s liturgical year, it begins, “Now I will do nothing but listen.” Recorded in the lines that follow are the “bravura of birds, bustle of growing wheat, gossip of flames,” the sounds of stevedores’ labor and laughter, of a judge gravely, reluctantly, pronouncing a sentence of death. The passage moves from the sounds of the natural and industrial worlds to those of violoncello, tenor, and a soprano whose voice “wrenches such ardors from me I did not know I possessed them.” Whitman asks no less ardor of us. His omnivorous, compassionate insistence that we live as his companion “cameradoes” in the fullest pitch and range of existence—that is the irresistible music of Whitman, for me, the song of all of ourselves.

You can read the rest here.