“Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” first appeared in 1856 under the title “Sun-Down Poem.” It was one of the twenty new poems added to the twelve originally untitled poems of the first edition of Leaves of Grass (1855), the collection that Walt Whitman thought of as a single poem that he continued to expand and revise over the course of nine distinct editions. “Sun-Down Poem” became “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” in the third, and again expanded, edition of Leaves of Grass published in 1860. The poem, in its final form of 132 lines, develops a single major idea throughout nine sections, the last of which serves as both reprise and climax.

The original and revised titles introduce the temporal and spatial figures that play such important parts in the poem and in the context of Whitman’s other writings. With the sun still “half an hour high” and the flood tide running, the narrator—not Whitman the man or Whitman the poet but the Whitmanic persona—is seen making the crossing between Brooklyn and Manhattan aboard the Fulton Street Ferry. Just as the literal ferry carries him from shore to shore, the figurative ferry and the equally figurative flood tide carry him “far away” to that purely poetic place from which his highly metaphorical meditation on time and space, doubt and faith, issues.

The extensive panorama of city and river as seen from the ever-moving (yet in a sense seemingly stationary) ferry gradually comes to coexist with the narrator’s imagined sight of those who, in a hundred years or even hundreds of years, will occupy the place he occupies now, who will see what he sees and feel what he feels. The curiosity of the Whitmanic I/eye thus extends from the physical to the imagined, from the perceptual to the conceptual, as he draws his “impalpable sustenance” from each and all. Poem and narrative poet alike cross from shore to shore, from tangible to intangible, sight to feeling, object to subject, and, more important, from present to future as Whitman attempts to go beyond the doubts, questions, and fragmentation of (then) modern experience caused by various psychological, political, and spiritual uncertainties. He crosses to the future less as a pilgrim in search of his faith than as teacher, prophet, and comrade (three of Whitman’s favorite poses). He offers the consoling vision of a “well-joined scheme” in which all things (natural and man-made) are “dumb, beautiful ministers” and in which everything and everyone, now and ages hence, has its, his, or her part to play, whether “great or small,” in the making of a soul that seems to resemble more closely the Hindu atman than the individualized Christian spirit.

The title, “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” announces the poem’s basic structure and line of development: the movement from separation through similarity and identification to the eventual fusing of I (or eye) and other, of part and whole (or the Emersonian “each and all”), present and future. The specific stylistic means by which Whitman accomplishes this integration are individually noteworthy.

One is Whitman’s idiosyncratic Transcendental style—less philosophical than Ralph Waldo Emerson’s and less learned and literary than Henry David Thoreau’s but no less effective than either and, in terms of its political implications, far more radically democratic. Whitman’s style is at once minutely inclusive and broadly expansive. It involves the merging, or juxtaposing, of the particular and the general, of private confession and public announcement, of the self-reliant individual and—democracy’s flip side—mass humanity. Whitman’s preoccupation with the crafting of a completely new and entirely democratic poetic becomes especially pronounced in his catalogs, including the one that takes up...