My First Walt Whitman Experience

I thought it would be a good idea to start off my Whitman fan site with the story of my very first experience with Walt Whitman's writing. That moment has been so influential in my life, I can remember it as if it were just yesterday, though it has been more than five decades.

The person who introduced me to Walt Whitman was my fifth grade teacher, Mrs. Wheelington. God bless her, she was 70-something years old then, so no doubt she's long gone. She was an eccentric and interesting woman, an ex-nun, a lover of poetry, a woman who tried her best to teach Shakespeare to antsy fifth grade students more concerned with baseball and radio broadcasts than poems and plays.

That fateful day, Mrs. Wheelington ended the day's lessons with a short bit of poetry she wanted all of us to memorize. She'd written the eight lines on the chalkboard while we were studying out math lesson, keeping them hidden from view with a big screen of some sort, as though she were going to share some great secret with us. Naturally, this made us all very curious. So when she moved the screen to reveal eight lines of a poem, we were all more than a little let-down.

"Write these lines down, quietly. Memorize them tonight. Be prepared to recite the lines tomorrow. You should also think about what the lines mean to you and be prepared to share that with the class."

That's all she said. She stood to the side and watched as we all dutifully wrote down the great secret she'd shared with us:


"I sing the Body electric;
The armies of those I love engirth me, and I engirth them;
They will not let me off till I go with them, respond to them,
And discorrupt them, and charge them full with the charge of the Soul.
 
Was it doubted that those who corrupt their own bodies conceal themselves;        
And if those who defile the living are as bad as they who defile the dead?
And if the body does not do as much as the Soul?
And if the body were not the Soul, what is the Soul?"

No doubt I was the only student who read those lines and felt charged with energy, as though I'd stuck my finger in a light socket. I still can't say what called out to me that afternoon, scribbling the lines as fast as I could, already at work memorizing the enchanting words.

Funny thing is, I don't remember the next day. I'm sure I memorized the lines perfectly, and I'm sure that Mrs. Wheelington got some sort of interpretation out of me, but I cannot recall any of it for the life of me. All I know is that I immediately found the source of the lines (chapter 19 of Whitman's Leaves of Grass) and started to memorize the entire thing. That started my life-long obsession with Whitman, Leaves of Grass, poetry, and metaphysics. Thank God for Mrs. Wheelington, wherever she is . . .