Abstract

This essay traces Whitman’s transcendental legacy as a mystic interlocutor between the divine and the eternal Universal Being and its reception in contemporary ecopoetic water poetry. This close study of “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” and “As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life" charts Whitman’s move away from viewing nature as a resource for human domination and exploitation towards a sense of our interconnectedness within nature as part of this Universal Being. Comparing Whitman’s transcendentalist American poetry with Graham’s contemporary ecopoetry, this essay examines how the different historical contexts of frontier expansion (Whitman) and erasure caused by the late-stage climate disaster (Graham) exert their different influences on the mystic, transcendental speakers of these poems. Consulting Graham’s “The Wake Off the Ferry” and “Ebbtide” in answer to Whitman’s poems, it explores how the climate crisis negates the possibility of eternity or any assurance of our value or place within the divine or eternal, and instead offers only the certainty of the moment, before that too begins to crumble.

Keywords: Walt Whitman, Jorie Graham, Transcendentalism, Ecopoetry, Water, Universal Being

How to Cite:

Penn, V., (2024) “"Whoever You Are, We Too Lie in Drifts at Your Feet": Walt Whitman's Mystic Self in Jorie Graham's Water Poetry”, Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 41(3/4), 67-95. doi: https://doi.org/10.17077/0737-0679.31876