Reading Whitman
Four SessionsA literary course for adult readers and writers · taught by James F. Mulhern
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Important Information & Course Materials▾
An Invitation▾
Walt Whitman published Leaves of Grass in 1855 and spent the rest of his life rewriting it. He included himself on the frontispiece in a workman’s shirt with his hat cocked. He sent a copy to Emerson, who wrote back the most famous letter in American literary history — “I greet you at the beginning of a great career.” Emerson was right.
Whitman is what happens when American democracy tries to speak in verse. His long lines, his catalogues, his indiscriminate embrace of everything he sees, his willingness to praise the body and the soul in the same breath — no poet before him had done any of this, and every American poet since owes him.
This four-session course reads Whitman slowly. Not the way an anthology reads him — a stanza here, a stanza there — but the way Whitman asks to be read: at length, aloud, and with time to breathe. Three sessions on Leaves of Grass, one session on Whitman’s Civil War poetry.
What This Course Is▾
- A four-session close-reading course
- Selections from Leaves of Grass plus Drum-Taps
- Ninety minutes per session, discussion-based
- Non-graded, non-competitive, open to any adult reader
- In person or on Zoom, adaptable to any partner venue’s calendar
What This Course Is Not▾
- Not a survey of nineteenth-century American poetry (Whitman is his own kingdom)
- Not a poetry-writing workshop (though we take Whitman’s craft seriously)
- Not a biography course
About the Instructor▾
James F. Mulhern is a Kirkus-starred novelist, Oxford Writing Fellow, poet, and Professor Emeritus of English. Whitman has been a lifelong reading practice for him — a poet he returns to every year, in every season. His own poetry has been shortlisted for the Aesthetica Creative Writing Award.
Course Details▾
- Instructor: James F. Mulhern
- Location: in person or on Zoom
- Format: Weekly, 90 minutes per session
- Duration: 4 weeks
- Cost: Contact for current terms
- Enrollment: Open to all adults; no application required
- Grading: None
- Required texts: None to purchase. All poems are free and linked in this document.
- Materials to bring: This document (printed or digital), and something to write with
What to Expect Each Week▾
Each session follows the same shape:
- Read aloud — every Whitman session is anchored in reading aloud, sometimes at length
- First response — what did the poem give you before you thought about it?
- Close reading — one passage, one catalogue, one paragraph-long line — unpacked
- The Whitman question — what does the poem propose? What democracy is it imagining?
- Craft takeaway — one thing to carry from Whitman’s line into your own attention
Readings▾
All texts are available free online through the Poetry Foundation. No book purchase is required.
A Companion Volume▾
Coming soon — an annotated Whitman reader with James F. Mulhern’s marginal notes.
A Few Promises▾
- Every session begins on time and ends on time.
- Every discussion is generous. Nothing said in the room leaves it.
- No one is asked to speak. Silence is a legitimate contribution.
- Whitman is read aloud in every session. His poems live in the mouth.
A Few Asks▾
- Read the assigned sections before the session.
- Bring the printed or digital text. We refer to specific lines constantly.
- Come to as many sessions as you can. Whitman rewards the whole arc.
Registration▾
To register or bring this course to a partner venue — libraries, universities, museums, veteran organizations, literary festivals — please email jamesfmulhern@gmail.com. The course can be delivered as a four-session workshop, a two-day intensive, or four evening lectures.
About the Use of These Materials▾
These materials — course descriptions, reading lists, syllabi, discussion questions, session pages, and prompts — were written and designed by James F. Mulhern for Silver Current Press. Readers are welcome to read, print, share, and quote them for personal use and study.
Teachers, program directors, and institutions who would like to use any of this material in a classroom, syllabus, publication, or paid program are asked to write first — a short email is enough. The answer will almost always be a warm yes, with a note on attribution. Please contact Professor Mulhern at [email protected].
The Sessions▾
Session 1 — "Song of Myself," Sections 1–15
Focus: The first third of Whitman’s greatest poem. The opening — “I celebrate myself, and sing myself” — is one of the most familiar lines in American poetry. The next four hundred lines are less familiar and much stranger.
Main Points of the Lesson
- The Whitman “I” is not autobiographical. It is a democratic experiment — a self that contains multitudes.
- The long line is Whitman’s invention. Read aloud, it breathes at the pace of speech. Read silently, it disappears into prose.
- Whitman refuses hierarchy. A blade of grass and a general are given the same weight of attention.
- The catalogue is his defining device. He lists — bricklayer, opera singer, prostitute, slave, president — and by the listing insists on their equal existence.
- The poem’s opening question governs the whole: “What is the grass?” Everything in the poem is an attempt to answer.
Reading
- Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself,” Sections 1–15 (1892 “deathbed” edition) — Poetry Foundation
Critical Reception
- Walt Whitman — Poetry Foundation biographical entry — for context on Whitman, Brooklyn, and the great experiment.
In-Class Practice
Read Section 6 (“A child said, What is the grass?”) aloud, one line per person around the room. Notice how each voice hands off. What does the poem do that a single reader could not do alone? (15 minutes.)
Discussion Questions
- Read Section 1 aloud. What does the sentence “and what I assume you shall assume” ask of the reader?
- In Section 6, what does Whitman decide the grass is? What does he refuse to decide?
- Whitman’s line is longer than any English line before him. What does length let him do that shorter lines could not?
- Section 11 — the woman watching twenty-eight bathers — has been read and re-read for its layered voyeurism. Read it aloud. What is Whitman doing?
- Which section of the first fifteen felt truest to you? Which felt most excessive?
Homework
Continue reading “Song of Myself” through the middle sections. Bring one section to next week’s discussion.
Session 2 — "Song of Myself," Sections 16–33
Focus: The middle sections — the catalogues expand, the “I” grows to continental scale, and Whitman writes some of his most tender and some of his most extravagant lines. This is the poem’s dilating heart.
Main Points of the Lesson
- The catalogue as democratic form. In Section 16 alone, Whitman lists more Americans than most poets name in a lifetime.
- Whitman crosses class lines. He writes about the surgeon, the mechanic, the deckhand, the enslaved. His attention is his politics.
- His body-and-soul are one. “I believe in the flesh and the appetites, / Seeing, hearing, feeling, are miracles.”
- The middle sections extend the “I” until it dissolves. By the end of Section 33 the speaker is no longer a person but a continent.
- Whitman is the first modern American poet. These sections show why: he trusts what he sees, he refuses received categories, and he lets his voice go where his eye goes.
Reading
- Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself,” Sections 16–33 — Poetry Foundation
In-Class Practice
Take Section 33. Read the first twenty lines aloud, then jump to the last twenty. What has moved between them — physically, emotionally, politically? (10 minutes.)
Discussion Questions
- Section 16 begins “I am of old and young, of the foolish as much as the wise.” How does the poem prove that claim over the sections that follow?
- Whitman writes: “I do not despise you priests, all time, the world over.” What in the catalogue makes that credible?
- What does the “I” mean in Section 24 (“Walt Whitman, a kosmos”) that it did not mean in Section 1?
- Section 33 is a virtuoso performance of imaginative travel. What is Whitman proposing about the imagination?
- Which section shifted your reading of the poem most? Which section might you skip? Are you sure?
Homework
Read the closing sections of “Song of Myself” (34 through 52) before next week.
Session 3 — "Song of Myself," Sections 34–52
Focus: The closing third of the poem, including its most famous ending. Whitman comes back from continental dispersion to the intimate address that opened the poem — but now the reader has traveled far enough that the intimacy means something different.
Main Points of the Lesson
- The poem circles back. By Section 52 we are once again with a single speaker on a single afternoon — but with all the intervening vision earned.
- “Do I contradict myself? / Very well then I contradict myself, / (I am large, I contain multitudes.)” The heart of Whitman’s ethics.
- Whitman prepares for his own death — and refuses to mourn. The closing sections are calm, generous, and unafraid.
- “I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love.” The circle of the whole poem in one line.
- The final “You” is you. The poem ends addressing the reader who will encounter it after Whitman is gone. “I stop somewhere waiting for you.”
Reading
- Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself,” Sections 34–52 — Poetry Foundation
In-Class Practice
Read Section 52 aloud. Then close your eyes and hear the last three lines spoken by someone else in the room. What arrives in your ear that did not arrive in your reading? (10 minutes.)
Discussion Questions
- Section 51 ends with “I contradict myself.” Read the whole section aloud. Is it a defense, a boast, or a confession?
- In Section 52 Whitman writes: “Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged, / Missing me one place search another.” What does the last line, “I stop somewhere waiting for you,” ask of the reader?
- Compare the opening of “Song of Myself” to its closing. What has the poem — and the poet — become?
- If you had to teach one section of “Song of Myself” to a person who had never read Whitman, which would you choose? Why?
- What does the poem ask you to do after you finish it?
Homework
Read the Civil War poems in Drum-Taps before next week. Especially recommended: “Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field One Night,” “The Wound-Dresser,” and “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.”
Session 4 — Whitman's Civil War: *Drum-Taps* and the Elegy for Lincoln
Focus: During the Civil War Whitman worked as a volunteer nurse in Washington hospitals. He wrote the poems in Drum-Taps while tending dying young men. After Lincoln’s assassination he wrote “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” — widely considered the greatest elegy in American English.
Main Points of the Lesson
- Whitman’s war poems are not martial. They are hospital poems, tenderness poems, elegies.
- The catalogue turns mournful. The device that celebrated a continent now names the dying. Same technique, different music.
- Whitman writes the war as a democracy in pain. He does not choose sides more than he must; he chooses the wounded.
- “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” is a formal elegy. Three symbols — lilac, star, hermit thrush — braid through the poem. Learn the pattern; the poem will open.
- This is Whitman at his highest. After the exuberance of “Song of Myself,” the war taught him a deeper music. Both are him.
Reading
- Walt Whitman, “Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field One Night” — Poetry Foundation
- “The Wound-Dresser” — Poetry Foundation
- “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” — Poetry Foundation
- “O Captain! My Captain!” — Poetry Foundation
In-Class Practice
Take Section 6 of “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” — the coffin passing through the country. Read it aloud slowly. What does the pace of the poem do to the reader? (10 minutes.)
Discussion Questions
- “Vigil Strange” tells a story in the shape of a single sentence. What is the effect?
- “The Wound-Dresser” says of the field hospitals: “The neck of the cavalry-man with the bullet through and through examine.” What does Whitman ask of the reader by making us examine?
- “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” has three symbols. Trace one — lilac, star, or hermit thrush — through the whole poem. Where does the symbol change meaning?
- “O Captain! My Captain!” is Whitman’s most famous poem and his most conventional. Is that consistent? Are they related?
- After reading the Civil War poems, do you read “Song of Myself” differently? How?
Homework
None. Instead: read one Whitman poem aloud to someone else this week. Any poem. Any listener. Whitman’s poems want ears.