Crossing Brooklyn Ferry

“The Snow-Storm” by Ralph Waldo Emerson (1835)

“Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” is Whitman at his most Emersonian. This poem, which Whitman was known to recite from memory, records Emerson’s own awareness of the limitless energy and sheer power of nature and how that expansive energy field includes individual humanity. The poem celebrates the transformative power of a massive New England blizzard that reminds the speaker of our connection to that same energy. The artist is powerful, certainly, but not as powerful as nature itself.

“To Think of Time” by Walt Whitman (1855)

A companion piece to “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” and its radiant optimism over the ebb and tide of time itself, the poem, which predates “Crossing,” meditates on the implications of time. The poem draws on the image of the sea as a symbol of time’s flow and the complex relationship between people who are by definition living in time and always moving toward death but have the awareness of timelessness. The poem is more philosophical, more abstract than “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” which is grounded in the detailing of Manhattan and the East River, but it reveals Whitman wrestling early on with the concept of time.

“A Supermarket in California” by Allen Ginsberg (1956)

Ginsberg’s free verse poem, with its incantatory rhetoric and its celebration of cataloging, reflects Whitman’s fascination with the elastic energy of the imagination. Indeed Ginsberg, long an advocate for Whitman’s prominence in modern poetry, actually talks with the ghost of Whitman. Ginsberg takes a similar premise, how an otherwise dreary commonplace environment (in his case a supermarket full of shopping drones) can both inspire the poet and create a compelling metaphor for America itself.