Today I stopped by the Mall of America to pick up new pages for the old Franklin planner. (Yes, I'm a member of the Franklin-Covey 7 Habits planning cult.) Wandering past the Levi's store I noticed a big poster proclaiming the source of their new ad campaign: Walt Whitman. The Walt Whitman - they guy whose poem "Song of Myself" was such a big part of my undergraduate poetry class. Remember in the movie "Dead Poets Society" when Robin Williams clapped his hand over his heart and shouted, "O Captain, my Captain!" That was Walt Whitman he was quoting, words that inspired me to choose a major which involved three hundred pages of reading a week. How could the words of Walt Whitman, the abolitionist and champion of the poor, be abused in the purveyance of $100 jeans?
English majors all over the country are furious. Poor Walt is probably turning over in his grave. How sad to see his words stolen away for the vain purposes of commercialism.
Whitman is a guy I can look up to. We've done a lot of the same things; teaching, typesetting, and working at a newspaper. If only I could hope to be one-tenth as decent a person as he, and one-hundredth as good of a writer.
Along with Emerson, Thoreau and Frost, Whitman rounded out the group of happy poets I liked to read as an undergrad. To me, Whitman is relentlessly optimistic. In "Song at Sunset" he writes there is "good in all" even "In the grandeur and exquisiteness of old age, In the superb vistas of Death." In the next stanza he cries out, "Wonderful to depart; Wonderful to be here!" Mr. Whitman, I wish you were here. You could put Levi's in their place, or at least shame them into donating the proceeds from your words to a worthy cause.
Hear Whitman reading from his poem "America" on the site of the Walt Whitman Archive. He doesn't mention jeans even once.
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