Great Uncle Fred? What is the best poem ever written? (Tom, Winter 2008/9)

"Song of Myself" by Walt Whitman. What? You want me to explain that answer? Well, I can try. The important word in the question is "written". If a poem is an attempt to bring something into the light, and the best poems are the most illuminating, then the very best poem was probably one of the first. Adam and Eve might be mythical but there must have been equivalent figures in our history: someone went around naming the universe. It must have happened and those namers, who made a poem of the whole world, could hardly be superseded as illuminators. However, "written" is in the question: so whose pen has caused the most light to be shed on the human condition? (I am only thinking of writers in English.) To me, the answer is Walt Whitman and especially his poem "Song of Myself". It was written in 1855 but still seems urgent. It alerts the reader to the joy and tingle and responsibility of life. It seems very relevant to now, to every turn of the zeitgeist since 1855. It has not been displaced, I think, by any self-consciously ambitious works like "The Wasteland", as an illumination. Try it. You might like it.

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