Since the geographic focus of our particular course includes nothing so far off and up the continent as the Penobscot River (Jim says we’re a Southern town, so this is in the interest of balance), I figured we could use a partial compendium of the more obscure towns, regions and bodies of water Whitman calls up in “Song of the Broad-Axe.” Whitman proves again to be the father of a popular and entirely contemporary cultural practice: the place-name shout-out. (See Wu-Tang’s 36 Chambers album for more current evidence.)
- Willamette (332): a regional name in Oregon that belongs simultaneously to a town, a valley, that valley’s river, and a national forest.
- “the most ancient Hindustanee” (337): Hindustan is an umbrella term for South Asia, though it now commonly refers more specifically to the Republic of India. The name refers, of course, to the region’s prevailing currents of Hindu religion and culture.
- “Cutters down of wood and haulers of it to the Penobscot or Kennebec” (339): Both the Penobscot and the Kennebec are south-flowing Maine rivers that empty into the Atlantic Ocean.
Penobscot River watershed
Of course, these names might have seemed no less distant, and even exotic, to mid-nineteenth-century American readers than California, Ottawa and the Rio Grande, which Whitman also includes in the poem’s vastly encompassing enumerations. Such far-reaching invocations lend the poem an inclusive scope that acknowledges the specific identity of every inch of the nation Whitman apostrophizes in his writing:
“(America! I do not vaunt my love for you,
I have what I have.)” (338)
All geographical information provided by Wikipedia. Whitman would use it, you know.
