The Brooklyn Bridge in New York was 125 years old this past weekend. The New York Times has some good celebration pictures of the celebration.
Since I couldn’t go hang out in New York, I’m celebrating with this super exciting educational reading of Walt Whitman’s masterpiece, “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.” I know, I know. I’m a real wild man.
Whitman is writing during the period of Romanticism. Technically, I suppose you’d say he’s a light romantic. He fits in with other transcendentalist writers like Emerson and Thoreau. (But not Poe. His gothic stuff made him a dark romantic.)
Whether you like the light or dark, Romanticism emphasizes feelings and impressions over fact and science and form. Whitman is especially interesting to me because he’s a good bridge between romanticism and realism. He maintains the ruthless optimism of the light romantics Emerson and Thoreau, but his experiences as a nurse during the civil war give his writing a hard, visceral edge. He celebrates himself and the crowds of Manhattan and he acknowledges how beautiful people are even with all of their faults.
In one sense, Crossing Brooklyn Ferry is about just that—riding across the river to Manhattan on the Brooklyn Ferry before the Brooklyn Bridge was completed. But it’s also about shared experiences and the personality of humanity, about what those shared experiences mean for the people who remember us, and ultimately about crossing the gap between the writer and the reader.
Something about this poem makes me think of blogging. Someday all of this turn-of-the-21st-century online flurry will be staring into the faces of people in the future—speaking to them. This blog maybe. Many podcasts. The bests one anyway—the ones with the most truth and beauty will endure. And who knows but that we writers will be looking back at our future readers?
It’s a silly Romantic notion, I know.
But I always feel romantic when I read Whitman.
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