As I Walk These Broad Majestic Days

Few nations survive the ravages of the kind of brutal civil war that split America when Whitman was just beginning in his self-appointed role as America’s Poet. The reality of the Civil War, which was brought home to Whitman during his stint as a volunteer nurse in Washington, grieved Whitman. With the possible exception of Abraham Lincoln, a man whose generosity of spirit and profound sense of cosmic consequence drew Whitman, few in the North took the Civil War as personally as Whitman. His poetry during the era, most notably the collection Drum Taps and his powerful elegies on Lincoln’s assassination (“When Lilacs Last at the Dooryard Bloom’d” and “O Captain, My Captain”), reflected his wounded spirit and his flagging optimism in what he had hailed in the years leading up to the war as the great American experiment.

The war is now over—in these “days of peace” (Line 1), the speaker hails the resurgence of the American experiment. He celebrates the sheer energy of a nation compelled by the spirit of invention and by its defiant confidence in its own being. The “growth of cities” and the “spread of inventions” (Line 9), widely seen at the time as indicators of how America was losing touch with its rural, pastoral identity, testify here to a nation intent on rebirth, intent on growth and evolution, intent on embracing the possibilities of the new industrial age.