On Walt Whitman & Making Hopeful Art at a Time Like This
Soul Gum
by Victoria Hutchins
4.9 • 560 Ratings
🗓️ 31 March 2025
⏱️ 42 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
I’m thinking of someone. Guess who? They’re a trailblazing artist. LGBTQ-adjacent. A Gemini from Long Island. An artist trying to make sense of rapid technological change and political division. No, not Lady Gaga. Not RuPaul. Not Frank Ocean. Think older. Centuries older. Today we’re talking about the great American poet, Walt Whitman.
Walt Whitman was born in 1819, but his world feels eerily familiar. His New York was reeling from technological change and caught in a web of political division. Sound familiar? In this episode, we explore Whitman’s life—from his roots as a Brooklyn typesetter to his rise as the great American poet. We’ll unpack his most famous work, Leaves of Grass, and the ideas in it that scandalized entire towns. We’ll talk about the beauty of contradiction, the divinity of the mundane, and the radical interconnectedness of all things. We’ll ask: what does it mean to write about hope and unity at a Time Like This? If you’re questioning how your art (or your heart) fits into a collapsing society, this episode is for you.
EPISODE OUTLINE
00:00 Intro
02:56 Life Update: Tour! USA Today Bestseller! Bali?
05:32 Walt Whitman: a Long Island Gemini
06:03 1800s NY: Nationalism, populism, manifest destiny
07:52 Sound familiar?
09:02 Walt Whitman’s early life
10:11 Walt Whitman, the reluctant teacher
11:05 Walt Whitman, the starving artist
12:27 Walt Whitman does a social media detox
13:00 Walt Whitman emerges with a first draft
13:14 Leaves of Grass: not like other girls
14:00 1855 Walt Whitman is giving Woodstock
14:14 Publication expert level: just like us
14:44 Walt Whitman gets left on read
14:48 Enter: Ralph Waldo Emerson
15:54 Walt Whitman is his own cheerleader
17:47 Walt Whitman is as petty as the rest of us
18:22 Leaves of Grass starts to get legs
18:41 Leaves of Grass gets smuttier
18:57 Walt Whitman is not an angel
21:02 The Civil War changes everything
22:21 Leaves of Grass, an OG banned book
23:01 Walt Whitman’s legacy
24:03 Walt Whitman quotes that will change your brain chemistry
24:18 1. “Every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you”
25:07 My ego nap
25:59 2. “I am large, I contain multitudes”
26:39 The categorification of the human experience
27:10 you are not a cottagecore coastal grandma clean girl mob wife u are a spiritual being having a human experience
28:48 3. “The smallest sprout shows there really is no death”
31:09 4. “Do you guess I have some intricate purpose?”
EPISODE LINKS
• Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
• Stuff You Missed in History Class episode
• My Writer’s Digest article on writing about hope
MY LINKS
• MAKE BELIEVE is out everywhere now
• Get a signed copy of MAKE BELIEVE from Blue Willow Bookshop
• Join me in Bali June 1-7!
• Find me @thedailyvictorian on Instagram
• Find me @thedailyvictorian on TikTok
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Let's play a game. I'm thinking of someone. Guess who? They're a trailblazing artist. |
| 0:06.4 | They're linked to the LGBTQ community, Brooklynite. They make art to make sense of rapid |
| 0:12.8 | technological development and political division and unprecedented times. No, I'm not talking about |
| 0:20.7 | Lady Gaga. It's not RuPaul. It's not Frank |
| 0:24.4 | Ocean. I'm thinking of someone older, like centuries older. I'm talking about the great American poet, |
| 0:33.3 | Walt Whitman. Let's talk about it. |
| 0:37.2 | Sogum. Welcome back to SoulGum, the self-development podcast with philosophical, psychological, |
| 0:43.7 | and literary flair. I'm your host, Victoria Hutchins. My goal is to give your soul something |
| 0:51.2 | to chew on. And today's episode is going to be a little different. |
| 0:56.6 | I usually like Soulgum to be very self-development focused with a side of philosophy, psychology, |
| 1:05.1 | literature. But today we're going to be very literary focused. Today I want to do a deep dive on Walt Whitman. |
| 1:15.5 | As some of you know, I'm on book tour right now for my poetry book Make Believe, the subtitle of |
| 1:22.0 | which is Poems for Hoping Again. And something I've been asked a lot in the past few weeks is, |
| 1:29.6 | what does it mean to write about hope at a time like this? What does it mean to make art |
| 1:38.1 | at a time like this? And on one hand, it's a good question. We're living in unprecedented time. On the other hand, |
| 1:48.4 | are we? I'm thinking of one of my favorite quotes from James Baldwin, which is this. |
| 1:53.5 | You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world. |
| 1:59.3 | But then you read. It was books that taught me that the things |
| 2:04.6 | that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, |
| 2:10.6 | who had ever been alive. And so partially in a long-winded ambling response to this existential question creatives are facing right now, |
| 2:21.0 | what does it mean to make art at a time like this? |
| 2:24.0 | And partially because I've been talking about myself so much by way of promoting make-believe, |
... |
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