I would sit at my desk and read Specimen Days, his bizarre memoir, for hours. Part of what makes the book bizarre is that Whitman, because he wants to stand for everyone, because he wants to be less a historical person than a marker for democratic personhood, can’t really write a memoir full of a life’s particularities. If he were to reveal the specific genesis and texture of his personality, if he presented a picture of irreducible individuality, he would lose his ability to be “Walt Whitman, a cosmos”—his “I” would belong to an empirical person rather than constituting a pronoun in which the readers of the future could participate.
As a result, while he recounts a few basic facts about his life, most of the book consists of him describing natural and national histories as if they were details of his intimate biography. And many of his memories are general enough to be anyone’s memory: how he took his ease under a flowering tree or whatever. (Whitman is always “loafing,” always taking his ease, as if leisure were a condition of poetic receptivity.) As a memoir, it’s an interesting failure. Just as in the poems, he has to be nobody in particular in order to be a democratic everyman, has to empty himself out so that his poetry can be a textual commons for the future into which he projects himself. And he is always projecting himself: “I am with you, you men and women of a generation, or ever so many generations hence; / I project myself—also I return—I am with you, and know how it is.”


Ben Lerner, “10:04” (2014)