Walt Whitman loved Washington's trees and the Capitol grounds, the river and the dome. During the decade he spent here, he wandered the city endlessly, without restrictions, as one could in the 1860s, yes, in wartime.
Now, 38 local poets have searched this city for images Whitman might have seen -- the Whitman who found friends and love here, who worked in the Bureau of Indian Affairs, who volunteered as a nurse in many of the 40 hospitals set up to treat the wounded returning from the Civil War.
The poets -- teachers and federal workers, librarians and self-professed Whitmaniacs -- found Whitman all around us. Next month, a festival marking 150 years since the poet's "Leaves of Grass" was published will feature readings and walking tours of his Washington. Right now, a tribute to Whitman is online in Beltway, a quarterly of poetry (washingtonart.com/beltway).
The poets collected here use Whitman as subject, inspiration, even as a character in today's world. As they scanned the frieze on the National Building Museum or looked anew at Mathew Brady's Civil War photographs, they found doorways into the poet's days as a clerk in a capital torn by war, in a country still uncertain of its fate.
Some poets found a city Whitman would probably still recognize in character, if only dimly in physique. Joanne Rocky Delaplaine writes of
the curse of picking up your trail, so sweet:
mulberries and honeysuckle, early morning Potomac River mist,
rain-drenched railroad ties, Pennsylvania Avenue trolley grease.
Some places look much as they did in Whitman's day. M.A. Schaffner describes the aqueduct bridge over Rock Creek:
The bridge was stone and carried a canal
over the river where African hymns
rose from the docks up cobbled streets and clung
to the porticos of clapboard mansions.
There are moments in Washington that call for Whitman's voice. Patricia Gray, who runs the Poetry at Noon program at the Library of Congress, responds to a shooting by summoning an image of "rain smashing against glass -- a wildness breaking in. . . .
