“Wheel in Large Circles”: Whitman’s Spiral Poetics

Abstract

This article explores the expansive poetics of positivity and affirmative relationship deployed in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” by Walt Whitman. By engaging with other readings of Whitman’s poem, this essay highlights the ways themes such as doubt and indeterminacy have been included in the scope of Whitman’s poetics. However, it is shown that a focus on these negative themes within the positivity of Whitman’s oeuvre can occlude the greater accomplishment of his verse: the inclusion of negativity within positivity and vice-versa—the turn of one into the other and the turn outward produced by just such a continuous turn. Furthermore, the argument asserts that this radical inclusivity, this simultaneous inward-outward turn, achieves Whitman’s goal of expanding notions of the self and of the poem, both of which are empowered to expand beyond the body (of the work) and into the whole of the universe. Thus, Whitman’s poetic project is to contain everything within the realm of the poetic and in so doing free all things to the play of poetry.