In his poem “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” Whitman describes the act of taking a ferry boat as a unifying event. Everything he sees, everything he notices, the throngs of people also present during his ride, is something he knows that others have experienced before him, and the poem is the revelation of that fact. In Emerson’s essay “The Poet,” he talks about the poet being a kind of spokesperson for society, and I feel that Whitman does this in an unexpected, interestingly direct way. He outright tells the reader that he knows what he is writing is nothing extraordinary; he knows that “Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt, /Just as any of you is one of a living crowd, I was one of a crowd, /Just as you are refresh’d by the gladness of the river and the bright flow, I was refresh’d…” Whitman has an almost conversational tone with the reader that further carries this idea of universality.
Crossing Brooklyn Ferry
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