This Day in History: 1819-05-31

Walt Whitman, a great American poet, is born this day in 1819. Whitman wrote Leaves of Grass, I sing the Body Electric, O Captain, My Captain, and other poems. His success was in speaking to the American people he loved so well. He was, like Emerson, a transendentalist, as is evident in this passage from the essay “Democratic Vistas.” I say the question of Nature, largely consider’d, involves the questions of the esthetic, the emotional, and the religious — and involves happiness. A fitly born and bred race, growing up in right conditions of out-door as much as in-door harmony, activity and development, would probably, from and in those conditions, find it enough merely to live — and would, in their relations to the sky, air, water, trees, &c., and to the countless common shows, and in the fact of life itself, discover and achieve happiness — with Being suffused night and day by wholesome extasy, surpassing all the pleasures that wealth, amusement, and even gratified intellect, erudition, or the sense of art, can give.