Blight Reading

David Blight, Sterling Professor of American History

I always keep Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass” and William James’ collected essays, especially those on pragmatism, nearby. I have been sending my students in my lecture course Whitman poems, especially “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” because of what it says so poignantly about our “distance” from other people we are so close to, as well as what it says about human curiosity. I also have read in full and sent students Whitman’s “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.” It is one of the greatest poems ever written on the meaning of mourning, especially collective mourning. It is Whitman's immortal tribute to Lincoln, but even more, it is his imagining of the slain president’s funeral train in April 1865, traveling across the country to Springfield, Ill. The “warbling” thrush, singing in the bush, to Whitman seems to capture the meaning of the death more nobly in its songs than we humans can.

With James, one can always find the moving and brilliant discussion of pragmatism as the quest for the open mind, for pluralism, for essential humility. “The only enemy of any one of my truths is the rest of my truths” is one of James’ best lines.