This is, in large part a concession to my wife who wanted this poem as part of this circle, though Whitman certainly deserves a spot due to Roadmarks.
Up today, Doorways in the Sand!
I had to bump a different Whitman piecem Song of Myself (paired with Bridge of Ashes ("I am large, I contain multitudes") to make room.
However, I think this deserves a spot. Fred's entire personality is a rejection of learned expertise in favor of lived, intuitive experience, just like the speaker in the poem.
When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer
When I heard the learn’d astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.
I'm unsure that the characterization of Fred as being opposed to learned expertise. He attends college constantly and learns a great deal. We see him draw on bio-chemistry knowledge, delve into a personal soliloquy on the nature of advanced math, heck to quote Fred "... allowed me to rest full-burnished, not grow dull in use, while following the winking star of knowledge." He definitely loves sensation and emotional life but in the realm of the motivations of human kind, catagorized out to money, sex, power, and "elephants." I think knowledge would be Freds elephant.
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