Walter Whitman wore many names throughout his life and posthumously. When Whitman was born, his parents shortened his given name to Walt, paying homage to, and yet differentiating him from, the father whose name he bore.

As a freelance writer, Whitman often signed his pages with the pseudonym, Mose Velsor. Since gaining acclaim later in life, and thereafter, he’s been called everything from the Bard of Democracy to the Father of Free Verse.

Today, the name that appears on his works—Walt Whitman—has taken on novel connotations, serving as a byword for early Western poetic notions of the transcendental and physical; as one who strived to be unabashedly true, a realist reveling in the everyday and the common, championing the other while claiming everyone, as well as himself—warts and all.

"I celebrate myself, and sing myself, and what I assume you shall assume," he tells us in the poem, Song of Myself, "for every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you."

The Influence of Emerson and a Young Nation

For Whitman, I would argue the moniker he felt the most comfortable donning was, simply, Poet. And that he took this name very seriously. Some say it was Emerson, in an 1842 New York lecture that Whitman attended entitled The Poet, that made him acutely aware of its weight—made all the heavier by the context in which the cloth was cut.

"We have yet had no genius in America… [who knows] the value of our [seemingly] incomparable materials, and saw, in the barbarism and materialism of the times, another carnival of the same gods whose picture he so much admires in [the greats]," Emerson said at the time. "Our logrolling, our stumps and their politics, our fisheries, our Negroes, and Indians, our boats, and our repudiations… are yet unsung. Yet America is a poem in our eyes." And so it seemed to many who called themselves Americans.

Two generations removed from Great Britain and her baggage, the New World was as a blank page or canvas, with all the potential and uncertainty that entails—which Whitman himself was witness to from the Civil War, where he volunteered as a nurse on the battlefield, on through Reconstruction and the nation's slow and contested shift from a largely slave-based agrarian system to an industrial one.

With the precarious state of America and the rise of transcendentalist philosophy inspiring his thought—and the literary celebrities to come from it serving as evidence—Whitman knew that the artist, more than ever, was in a unique position to sing a song and pen a verse to tomorrow, today, all the while acknowledging the negligibility of critics in the face of what is genuine.

"Has it never occurr’d to anyone how the last deciding tests applicable to a book are entirely outside of technical and grammatical ones, and that any truly first-class production has little or nothing to do with the rules and calibres of ordinary critics? or the bloodless chalk of Allibone’s Dictionary? [sic]," Whitman writes in an excerpt from a journal found in the book Specimen Days & Collect.

Tapping Into the Past to Create the Future

Art is often said to recreate life. While this is true for this writer, and I believe for Whitman, it is as Oscar Wilde penned in his dialectic The Decay Of Lying, "Life imitates Art, far more than Art imitates Life" or at least, ought to; the richest art acts more as a reflective window which, from a distance, functions as a looking glass, broadcasting back the image of the day; but, up close, reveals new and impressionable views.

The reason we still sing Whitman’s Song—what has allowed him, his contemporaries, and the names of those they inspired to still usher forth from our mouths, as prophets and visionaries—is the fact that they understood both the function of the artist in society and the nature of the craft. Just as the young America was doing, they towed the line between convention and invention, erecting their own edifices using the scaffolding of the past. Whitman walked this line with the gusto of a trapeze artist, the ornateness of a preacher, and the guile and determination of an entrepreneur.

Whitman's seminal work, Leaves of Grass, reads as much as a religious text or metaphysical treatise as it does a book of poems. In the vein of a sage, Whitman tells us "past and present and future [for the poet] are not disjoined but joined. The greatest poet forms the consistence of what is to be from what has been and is. He drags the dead out of their coffins and stands them again on their feet… says to the past, 'Rise and walk before me that I may realize you'… places himself where the future becomes present."

Apart from Whitman's Eastern-derived transcendentalist thought, echoes and allusions to both the Old and New Testament, and their themes, sound throughout the pages of Leaves of Grass. The former in its national overarching thread, the latter in its focus on the individual, and both in the redefining of identity. This was, arguably, all intentional; as was Whitman's steadfast commitment to making his book accessible to the masses in form and shamelessly casting it into the light by any means (publishing the first edition himself, writing his own favorable reviews under aliases, and slapping a private letter of praise from Emerson onto its second printing without his consent).

Whitman and those artists whose worlds we continue to peer into for inspiration realized artistic expression is just as contingent on the old as it is the new; that you need to lean on the rules to bend and break them; that the strength of a piece lies more in the reconfiguration of the parts gifted to one through their "I" and eyes, rather than wholly reinventing the wheel and blindly reaching into the ether.

Like Nietzsche’s Madman, Whitman made his proclamation. He knew, as in the Parable, that in a sense, he had come too soon. But just as Nietzsche did, Whitman understood this always appears to be the case, and maintained his artistic proselytizing until his death, out of the belief that he might help to carve a higher lane—despite those contesting, or blind to its coming.

"Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged," Whitman writes in the conclusion to his life’s work, Leaves Of Grass. "Missing me one place search another, I stop somewhere waiting for you."