Walt Whitman's Fragmented Process

"For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you."

Walt Whitman (1819-1892) genuinely believed that poetry could heal the divisions he saw in nineteenth-century America. “The United States themselves,” he wrote, “are essentially the greatest poem.”¹ And like a poem, opposing ideas could coexist.

For Whitman, fragmentation was a lived reality in the United States as he experienced it. After all, he witnes…