My Good Gray Poet

Three years ago (three whole years ago?!?) I took my first graduate seminar class that I thought might be my last. It was an American Romanticism class, and in comparison to other seminars I would eventually take as a grad student, it wasn't particularly challenging or difficult. We read stuff, talked about stuff, and at the end of the semester, I had to write a 20-ish page seminar paper about that stuff. Looking back on it now, it really wasn't a big deal. But at the time, I was in a very weird place in my life, and I don't think that I had the proper frame of mind for a first semester graduate English student. I struggled with getting out of bed and brushing my hair every morning, so I had zero motivation to exert thought and energy into 19th century transcendental literature.

But then I met my man Walt Whitman, and this calm, positive, patient, appreciate man spoke to me and told me everything would be OK. Other people had told me that too, but with Walt I finally understood. In the quiet of a study room in ID Weeks Library, he said, just to me:

“Not I, nor anyone else can travel that road for you.
You must travel it by yourself.
It is not far. It is within reach.
Perhaps you have been on it since you were born, and did not know.
Perhaps it is everywhere - on water and land.” 

In the midst of my own grief and self-pity and confusion, I read Leaves of Grass and I felt... better.  I still hurt, but Whit consoled me saying:

“These are the days that must happen to you.”

He promised that he wouldn't leave me like I'd been left before:

“I will You, in all, Myself, with promise to never desert you,
To which I sign my name.”

And I believed him when he confessed:

“Whoever you are, now I place my hand upon you
That you may be my poem
I whisper with my lips close to your ear
I have loved many women and men, but I love none better than you.”

Though I found Whitman's Leaves of Grass to be brilliant and (to me) life-changing, my essay about the collection of poems definitely was not brilliant. I'm not being modest here; the paper was awful. My thesis was something about ecology and Whitman "going green," but really I wanted to write about how this Brooklyn born, American farmer/poet woke me up and helped bring me back to life. I submitted my shitty essay on a beautiful blooming day in May and told myself that if I didn't pass the class, then that would be it. It would mean that grad school wasn't meant to be, and I wouldn't go back to school that next fall.

I passed. I got an A.