Walt Whitman

The Central Queens Historical Society had recently revealed that Walt Whitman had once taught in a one-room schoolhouse on what is now the campus of Queens College.

"I am delighted to be dedicating the Walt Whitman Garden here, 166 years after he taught here in a one-room schoolhouse..." said Queens College President James L. Muyskens.

"It is incredibly fitting that the schoolhouse where Whitman taught is now our Student Union."

According to Jeff Gottlieb, president of the Historical Society and a 1964 graduate of Queens, Whitman was the lone teacher at the school known as "The Jamaica Academy" between 1839 and 1840.

Noting that the ceremony was being held 150 years to the month after publication of Whitman's signature book of poetry - Leaves of Grass - Muyskens unveiled a plaque dedicating a new "Walt Whitman Garden."

Muyskens noted the links between Whitman and Queens College go beyond the old, demolished one-room schoolhouse.

For instance, when Queens College opened in 1937, the very first English Department chair was Emory Holloway, who ten years earlier had won the Pulitzer Prize for his biography of Whitman - the very first Pulitzer awarded for a biography of an American literary figure. The book was titled Whitman: An Interpretation in Narrative.

Holloway, who died in 1977, would go on to produce two more notable works on his favorite subject, Free and Lonesome Heart and Portrait of a Poet.

The ties, figurative and literal, between Whitman and Queens College go on and on.

A building on the campus was named Whitman Hall early in the college's history; and for a time, according to Muyskens, there was "an informal museum" of Whitman artifacts making the rounds of the campus.

The demolition of the Whitman building in the 1960s inspired a wistful poem by Stephen Stepanchev, who at the time was a professor in the English Department. The poem was unambiguously titled The Demolition of Walt Whitman Hall at Queens College, and it reflects the author's emotional kinship with the bard of a century earlier. The last stanza beseeches:

Walt, be with them in their hope.
Be with them in their harmony.
Lost in the leaves of your lilac,
They live in a green fire.

Stepanchev had joined the Queens College faculty in 1949 and was thus a colleague of Holloways's. He taught there for 36 years and in 1997 was named the first poet laureate of the borough of Queens. Now 90, he is the author of 11 volumes of poetry.

Stepanchev attended the Whitman ceremony this summer.

After an introduction by Muyskens, he read to the audience his ode to the college he still loves very much, "Words for Queens College". The lilacs found in Whitman's work re-blossom as a "sprig" that is "now my golden bough/For the millenniums opening up ahead."

Queens College is by no means the only CUNY institution with a claim on Whitman. Michael Cunningham of Brooklyn College wrote a novel, Specimen Days, which weaves Whitman into its tales. Earlier this year Brooklyn College hosted a symposium on the famous Brooklyn Eagle newspaper, where Whitman was an editor.

David Reynolds, Distinguished Professor at the CUNY Grad Center and Baruch College, has written books on the poet, including Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography and the recently published Walt Whitman.

Gary Schmidgall, a Hunter College English professor who is also books editor of CUNY Matters, is the author of Walt Whitman: A Gay Life, which details the poet's romantic affairs and says Whitman's attraction to men was at the root of his poetic vision.

But this past summer the bond between Whitman and Queens College was the one most illuminated.

On the day of the plaque dedication, President Muyskens read from Whitman's "Song of Myself."

Do I contradict myself?
Very well, then I contradict myself.
(I am large; I contain multitudes.)

Muyskens went on to say the poet might well have been describing a certain college that would open a century later in Queens.

"Queens College is a large, contradictory, multitudinous community of great spirit and open mindedness, that I am sure Whitman would have enjoyed," the president said.

Rising, rising
I walk toward the skyline
Where Manhattan rides
The gray waters of the East River and the bay.

I walk by lilacs with heart-shaped leaves
And pyramids of bloom
Purpling the air.
Bees hum in the blossoming cherry trees,
Which rise, as always, out of themselves
The death they were.

I walk by building rising for a global reach:
A bell tower ringing for the history
It houses: here the great makers of the past
Sit on their shelves and speak their monologues
A din of truths.
And in the building given over to science
Scholars refine by experiment
The languages by which the universe
Can know itself.
Rising, rising out of the subways of the self,
The self-pity of illness, loss of friends
I walk with Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass in hand
And think of the Great Depression, years of death,
When a vision of the future moved New York City
To build a college on this hill,
Here where a school for wayward boys once stood:
Here where I found a message on a sill
A homesick boy had scrawled there: "Ma, I love you."

That cry still haunts me as I recall the years
Of pain, the darkness more intense than light,
Deteriorations of spirit, damaging grief.
We may still be living in a leaden time,
Shadowed by a rising mushroom cloud.

Rising, rising, I see a portly ghost
Come back to Paumanok, his native island,
Walt Whitman rises from my boot-soles, takes
My hand, and shows me waves of immigrants
Come to renew the land. He shows me a passage
From India, Korea, Latin America
He shows me the oceans lapping against this hill
Carrying voyagers in wide-eyed dream
To the gleaming torch of the lady in the harbor.
He shows me that life, not death, is permanent.
He leads me to a lilac bush, breaks off
A sprig, and gives it to me with a smile.
I salute him. It is now my golden bough
For the millenniums opening up ahead.