Water Wars, Talking Water: Art, Activism and the Eco-politics of Whitman's Walk to the Water

Abstract

Ten years before his death in 1892, Walt Whitman arranged to have the penultimate edition of his opus Leaves of Grass published in Philadelphia, along with a new collection of writings, 'Specimen Days and Collect' (1882). In one of the poetic prose fragments in this collection of 'livraisons', entitled 'To the Spring and Brook', Whitman's poet-persona, the wandering rhapsodist of 'Song of Myself' in 'Leaves of Grass', comes into view, 'sauntering' to the banks of what has become his spring. He attends to the 'song' of the stream with hermeneutic attentiveness: "gurgling, gurgling ceaselessly - meaning, saying something, of course (if one could only translate it - always gurgling there ... never giving out". Measuring his own ephemerality against the seemingly eternal 'soft sound-gurgle' of the water, he pledges an acolyte's devotion: "Babble on, O brook, with that utterance of thine ... I will learn from thee, and dwell on thee - receive, copy, print from thee" (Whitman (1882) in Buell, 'Leaves' 631-2).