"And, so, tomorrow is Thanksgiving Day!"

Thanksgiving, a day as distinctly American as any on our national calendar, figured much in the writing of Walt Whitman, the most distinctly American of our poets.

The individualist fantasy of the current day -- with its imagining of a self-absorbed and fearful "patriotism" that neglects our country's radical roots in "committees of correspondence" and the conspiring of rebels engaged in "the peerless, passionate good cause" of overturning empires -- would have had little appeal to Whitman.

Though the poet sang a "Song of Myself," Whitman understood his country as a great communal experiment, a place of coming together rather than drifting apart.

I will make divine magnetic lands, with the love of comrades, with the life-long love of comrades , promised the poet, who declared:

I will plant companionship thick as trees along all the rivers of America, and along the shores of the great lakes, and all over the prairies; I will make inseparable cities with their arms about each other's necks.

In his celebration of our connectedness, Whitman was of course drawn to what was then and what remains our national day of ingathering, with its great common feast.

"And, so, tomorrow is Thanksgiving Day!" he would announce at the head of ruminations written as the young editor of The Brooklyn Eagle.

In his epic "Leaves of Grass," Whitman would speak of how:

The pure contralto sings in the organ loft;

The carpenter dresses his plank -- the tongue of his foreplane whistles its wild ascending lisp;

The married and unmarried children ride home to their Thanksgiving dinner.

In his later years, Whitman dispatched delightful greetings from his home in Camden, N.J., to old friends on the newspapers of New York. On the eve of one Thanksgiving, he wrote to his compatriots at The New York World: "Out of buoyant spirits, fine weather and brightest sunshine (Nov. 18, 1890), I send hearty salutations to The World readers, staff and printers - Why not say all the commonwealth - aye the orb itself, all hands? Carlyle said the truest poetry was impelled by gratitude, adoration, the richness of love, thanksgiving. ... I sometimes wonder whether this native festa of ours is not to be kicked out of all the celebration days of our New World, and spread to all our confines, and become our distinctive day, autochthonous, representative of our whole nationality."

Whitman knew of what he spoke, of the genius of our native festa and of the great value of our common ideals.

In the grand preface to the original editions of "Leaves of Grass," where he argued that "the United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem," Whitman wrote of those ideals:

"This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body."

This is the radical vision of the American, an American who recognized in the Thanksgiving celebration another expression of his faith that the gathering around a commonweal, and the comradeship shown in all such moments of connectedness, was the great strength of the United States.

Whitman's truth is still America's truth, or at least it should be.

Indeed, if there is a sentiment to be shared on this Thanksgiving, it might be Whitman's wise question, and wiser response from his "Democratic Vistas":

"Would you have in yourself the divine, vast, general law? Then merge yourself in it. And, topping democracy, this most alluring record, that it alone can bind, and ever seeks to bind, all nations, all men, of however various and distant lands, into a brotherhood, a family. It is the old, yet ever-modern dream of earth, out of her eldest and her youngest, her fond philosophers and poets. Not that half only, individualism, which isolates. There is another half, which is adhesiveness or love, that fuses, ties and aggregates, making the races comrades, and fraternizing all. Both are to be vitalized by religion (sole worthiest elevator of man or state) breathing into the proud, material tissues, the breath of life. For I say at the core of democracy, finally, is the religious element. All the religions, old and new, are there. Nor may the scheme step forth, clothed in resplendent beauty and command, till these, bearing the best, the latest fruit, the spiritual, shall fully appear."

In comradeship, in fellowship, in the gathering around the common table, Whitman believed, there was always something of the divine.

This deeply American faith merits renewal -- not just as part of one Thanksgiving, but as a defining force in an American experiment that strives still to achieve the democratic ideal.

John Nichols is the associate editor of The Capital Times. jnichols@madison.com

 

 

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