“Great or Small, You Furnish Your Parts toward the Soul”: Walt Whitman’s “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”

Forging a unified whole out of the manifold aspects of experience and contemplation as an essential feature of creativity characterize Mikhail Bakhtin’s philosophical elaboration of authoring in his early work and Walt Whitman’s thematic concerns and poetic practice in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.” Reading Whitman through Bakhtin allows us to avoid the general tendency to gloss over one or more parts of the poem, and to bring to the foreground the poet’s careful thought process, orderly sequencing of the sections, and development of an intuitively coherent meaning.