Whitman’s urban kaleidoscope

Walt Whitman lived in the New York area and spent most of his life in urban environments, so it is perhaps not surprising that he should have declared his intention to chant urban life at the very outset of Leaves of Grass, thus laying the foundation stone of his reputation as the first American poet to celebrate the city. What is perhaps less known about Whitman is that behind his posturing as an urban guide and celebrant of urban life, is an understanding of the more shadowy recesses of the urban environment. Like a kaleidoscope, Whitman’s poetry provides what might be called a two-mirror model which yields a constant flow of ever-shifting pictures, or perspectives, just as he promised in the 1855 Preface:“I will have nothing hang in the way, not the richest curtains [...] You shall stand by my side and look in the mirror with me.”