City of my walks and joys
Except for a few months in New Orleans as a young newspaper editor, Whitman spent his life in five places: Long Island, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Washington, and Camden. During his New York City years, he lived mostly in Brooklyn but spent much of his free time in Manhattan, riding the bus down Broadway, sitting in taverns like Pfaff’s, visiting the Egyptian Museum, going to the theater and opera, and, above all, strolling the streets.
Whitman was the first great English-language poet of cities. He was to New York what Charles Baudelaire, born in 1821, was to Paris. In his 1863 essay, “The Painter of Modern Life,” Baudelaire defines the flâneur as a “passionate spectator” of urban life, a boulevardier, stroller, saunterer, loafer, or lounger – some of Whitman’s favorite words and activities. In modern cities, one could be solitary, detached – perhaps even alienated – and yet immersed in the mass of humanity and charged with the electric eroticism of the crowd.
The idea that love is the highest value in the world is certainly not original, but the love Whitman describes is not for God, country, family, mate, or lover. Instead, he describes something normally considered shallow: the “frequent and swift flash of eyes” offering him love as he passes. Perhaps, the flashing eyes are a prelude to a love that is later consummated. The poem is open to this interpretation. The last line, “Lovers, continual lovers, only repay me,” seems actively erotic. Furthermore, in subsequent editions, he changed the first line to “City of orgies, walks, and joys” and gave it the title “City of Orgies.” This is a rare case of him revising a poem to make it more erotic. The word “orgy” comes from the Greek orgia, which meant secret rites, especially those honoring Bacchus. By Whitman’s time it had come to mean “licentious revelry” (although it did not yet have today’s meaning of a sexual encounter involving many people).
Maybe Whitman is hinting at erotic encounters that begin with eye-contact, and he simply does not dare say so explicitly. But maybe what he is celebrating is simply the flash of eyes, charged with erotic potential, with lambent electricity. He loves swimming in crowds as he loves swimming in the ocean; it is an erotic immersion, but one that finds its ultimate fulfillment in writing poems about it. As Emily Dickinson writes, to dwell in possibility is the essence of poetry; it is to “gather Paradise.”