Prompt: What would Frederick Douglass have thought of Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself”? 

Writing as Frederick Douglass, compose a 1-1/2 to 2 page letter that the abolitionist might have sent to Walt Whitman in 1855 after reading the poem in Leaves of Grass for the first time. What might Douglass praise in the poem? What if anything might he criticize? Be specific! 

You’re welcome – but not obliged – to devote part of the letter to commentary on style (Douglass was himself a man of literary sensibility and accomplishment, after all). But keep your focus mostly on the substance of Whitman’s ideas about American identity, slavery, rights, and democracy. For your knowledge of Douglass’s views, draw on what you read in his 1852 speech “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?”

Dear Mr. Whitman:

Your song is sung by those you have sung to—and for right reason, as what other than the experience of life, given by Almighty God, is the greatest call to joy! To be alive and know you are alive. To breathe air and know you are breathing air! To know there is a mind inside you—an unrested mind that will not reach completion until that very “self” you speak of acts in accordance with the destiny of the mind! To know there is potential, a purpose of the mind! To learn how to read, to study poetry, just as you said! It is all part of the beautiful one life we all share. We are Americans. We have our Independence Day traditions and celebrations, and you will go about your extravagant feast, and I will toss on my suit on this sun-scorching day, walk the stairs to the pulpit, and pour out my sorrowed, withered heart and soul on the hypocrisies of our lost America, and say, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?”, but the luster of my speech will not resonate in the cries, but the hope for America’s attainment of light and truth! In my past, I would spend your holidays picking crops in the plantations, with a shattered heart, knowing I was hindered from my human dignity. But, just as you said, we are all the same... Surely this is a wonderful perspective. The canal-boy and the conductor; woman and man, and white and black alike, how warm and comforting that is to the heart. How intellectually enlightening for a poet so independent in life and thought to see himself in the runaway slave he invited into his home and took care of; to see himself even in his awkwardness and terror from his traumatic times; for not even caretaker and the cared for are separate! How beautiful—to recognize that we are all, indeed, created in the same image! We are all the same...is this what you believe?

Mr. Whitman, I do believe I have just exposed your underlying confusion. If you would please allow me to kindly act as a humble, genuine guide, I should make it most clear—keep singing! Keep dancing! Forever celebrate your self, but not because you are one self among all others of the same self, but because you are your own self! Mr. Whitman, it is true that you are different from me, and I am different from you! This is why we should celebrate! Man is a rational, soulful species of individual creatures, unique to each other, in community, under God. You and I are two different men. I did not have a bond with my parents. I was brutally beaten multiple times a week, and the beatings did not cease at the scene of blood. Our lives are very different. You may imagine yourself living my life, but that is an impossible thing to do since you are not me. You will never feel the fierceness of that pain. Curiosity of that kind would be disordered and unrighteous. You do not have a right to suggest my experience and yours shared, but your expansive mind may surely contemplate, with wisdom, the similar intellect of man. The stumbling block in your awareness lies in your dissociation of the similarity with the reason of this similarity—God! God is the Creator of all beautiful persons and nature and things; it is because of God! God is light! God is truth! For those who believe, God is in you and in me and in all things, but beware, Mr. Whitman, without God, who is wisdom itself, we are lost!

God bless,

Frederick Douglass