I Contain Multitudes

Perhaps my favourite poet that I have had the chance to stumble across in recent months is the great Walt Whitman, best known for his poetry anthology Leaves of Grass (1855). Whitman was one of the most influential poets of his time, especially considering the political and cultural state of America. A young, developing nation, founded only decades earlier following the Revolutionary War, America was still trying to derive its own cultural identity and find its place against the great incumbent cultural powerhouses in Europe throughout history. Thousands of years of well-documented history and culture across the Atlantic Ocean, and America was this youngblood nation who had just entered the gladiatorial arena.

When Leaves of Grass was composed, America was a country fractured over the morality of slavery and the economic power it represented, with tensions preceding the Civil War flaring up that divided the country. Whitman served as a nurse in Washington DC during the Civil War, and vehemently opposed the practice of slavery, though his views on race, like those of many in his era, were complex and evolved over time, shaped by both his family background and the pressures of a conflicted nation.

I’d like to believe that Whitman’s poetry was written in an attempt to celebrate the multitude of identities present in America at the time, and this was in no small part thanks to his unique poetic structure. Whitman rejected metrical traditions like the dactylic hexameter or the iambic pentameter of ancient epic and Elizabethan plays, but rather wrote in free verse, an open and democratic form that reflected the country he celebrated. In his use of poetry to forge national identity, Whitman echoes Virgil and the ancient Roman literary tradition. Where Virgil reshaped Rome’s trajectory through the divine lineage and imagery of Aeneas, Whitman forged an image of America’s identity by celebrating the individuality of its people. Virgil’s epic hero is singular, aristocratic, and symbolic of what the people should be striving to emulate, whereas Whitman dissolves the notion of the individual hero into a collective identity, where each American citizen can become the heroes of their own stories.

From Song of the Open Road:

Allons! the road is before us!
It is safe—I have tried it—my own feet have tried it well—be not detain’d!

Let the paper remain on the desk unwritten, and the book on the shelf unopen’d!
Let the tools remain in the workshop! let the money remain unearn’d!
Let the school stand! mind not the cry of the teacher!
Let the preacher preach in his pulpit! let the lawyer plead in the court, and the judge expound the law.

Camerado, I give you my hand!
I give you my love more precious than money,
I give you myself before preaching or law;
Will you give me yourself? will you come travel with me?
Shall we stick by each other as long as we live?

From Song of Joys:

O to struggle against great odds, to meet enemies undaunted!
To be entirely alone with them, to find how much one can stand!
To look strife, torture, prison, popular odium, face to face!
To mount the scaffold, to advance to the muzzles of guns with perfect nonchalance!
To be indeed a God!

O to sail to sea in a ship!
To leave this steady unendurable land,
To leave the tiresome sameness of the streets, the sidewalks and the houses,
To leave you O you solid motionless land, and entering a ship,
To sail and sail and sail!

O to have life henceforth a poem of new joys!
To dance, clap hands, exult, shout, skip, leap, roll on, float on!
To be a sailor of the world bound for all ports,
A ship itself, (see indeed these sails I spread to the sun and air,)
A swift and swelling ship full of rich words, full of joys.

This is one of the most attractive parts of studying abroad in America - students here are encouraged to really explore intellectually and seek their own pathway through college and life. Arguably, America has succeeded on the world stage because of its foundation in liberty and individualism (though also leading to social divide). America has always been built on the national narrative of the ‘American dream’, of creating one’s own opportunities and self-reliance, and has indeed led to a wide-ranging mixing pot of immigration from all across the world. America’s push for innovation is impossible to neglect. Ambition here is truly uncapped. Truly, no two days in America have been the same for me.

Sophomore year at Harvard is a confusing time for most undergraduates. There’s a good reason why we tend to call it the year of ‘sophomore slumps’ as we navigate our new residential circumstances (moving into our new Houses), social and extracurricular opportunities, and more challenging classes become widely accessible to us. Students must choose a concentration (major) this semester, which lead many to start thinking about professional opportunities after college. For many, this is the semster which students start engaging in networking to enter the finance recruiting process, or perhaps it leads to students seeking out research opportunities, thinking about graduate school, medical school, or law school.

I used to be quite prejudiced against students that make pre-professional choices that close them off from other opportunities at college, but I now realise that there are very good reasons for them to do so, and I’m sure that everyone makes the best decisions for themselves at the end of the day. However, I think I have shifted my critique to a more systematic one. A little more than a year into their college journeys, perhaps a third of the way through, students are forced to consider whether they’ll choose a particular pathway for themselves, this being that of high finance. Harvard is a tough place for students to reconcile with their egos because everyone enters college as exceptionally high achievers, now surrounded by other exceptionally high achievers.

As a result, many strive to re-establish their high achieving status at Harvard by seeking out high-prestige labels that can give them a sense of stability, without understanding how they are investing their time. Weeks spent making networking calls leads to a summer internship, three months working to the bone, before two years of more working to the bone as an analyst and beyond. It’s not so much an issue for students to choose this pathway - I have much respect for those who do so, but it’s more of a systematic issue which makes students double down on their careers and restrict them from exploring what else may be even more fulfilling and rewarding.

I’ve realised this semester that my identity is highly fluid, and that I have contradicted myself many times, which I suppose is to be expected of periods of growth. Especially in a time where my intellect is expanding, ambitions are evolving, emotional life is becoming richer, and social world is diversifying, life becomes confusing to process. I find myself weighing up my values when making decisions - I’m ambitious and want to do great things with my time, and yet I simultaneously seek peace and comfort. I love to have freedom and pursue my intellectual curiosities, but also find myself craving structure and stability. The list goes on. I want breadth but also depth, I want to belong to a community but also love independence. Whitman always said that we’re too complicated to be boiled down into one single description. Beware anyone who demands your identity be singular - you are allowed to grow faster than what language can capture.

Even two hundred of years ago, Whitman’s poetry is such a relevant reminder to young people. He celebrates the intense individual striving that now distinguishes America from the remainder of the world. The line often makes me think about how lucky I am to be in a place that helps me reinvent my identity every day due to the new experiences I get to appreciate every day. In some sense, I’m constantly and subconsciously updating my identity in a Bayesian style. Some noise and variance certainly exists, and the hardest part is certainly having faith amongst times of uncertainty. Faith that you are becoming who you are meant to be. As David Foster Wallace aptly says, ‘although of course, you end up becoming yourself.’

If an older version of myself were to speak to me now, I imagine he would tell me to remain fluid, and freely try on new selves without hesitation. Inspired by Whitman, I’d tell myself to take on the endlessly open road for travelling souls without fear, to sail, wander, traverse, and explore, never to settle for a one-dimensional descriptor that cannot hold the truth of a human identity. Despite the lack of certainty on the endless journey of becoming, there are certain things I hope to never discard. I want to retain my curiosity, ambition, intensity, and kindness toward strangers.

As Whitman said so aptly in an era of change,

“Do I contradict myself?
Very well, then I contradict myself.
I am large, I contain multitudes.”

Yurui