Chris Lott's elaboration of his objections to my comment last Tuesday that Whitman's "When I Heard the Learned Astronomer" was "dangerously wrong" sent me back to Whitman himself, and I've spent most of the last few days re-reading all of both the 1852 and 1891-92 editions of Leaves of Grass (reprinted in Whitman: Poetry and Prose). I recommend doing the same if you think Whitman was no craftsman: the changes from one edition to the other are almost always improvements and often exhilarating. If you don't have the time for 600 pages of Whitman, try the excerpts in W. D. Snodgrass's wonderful De/Compositions: 101 good poems gone wrong. Anyway, go read Chris's post before reading on here.
Chris's main points seem to be, first, that Whitman was not so much denigrating scientific activity as promoting another kind of truth, an aesthetic truth, and, second, that given when Whitman lived, it was natural for him to turn away from the ugliness and social disruption of the Industrial Revolution.
Whitman did write, in the preface to the 1855 edition, "Exact science and its practical movements are no checks on the greatest poets but always his encouragement and support. . . . [T]he anatomist chemist astronomer geologist phrenologist spiritualist mathematician historian lexicographer are not poets, but they are the lawgivers of poets and their construction underlies the structure of every perfect poem. . . . In the beauty of poems are the tuft and final applause of science." He also wrote the following in the body of what later editions titled "Song of Myself":
Hurrah for positive science! Long live exact demonstration!
Fetch stonecrop and mix it with cedar and branches of lilac;
This is the lexicographer or chemist . . . . this made a grammar of the old cartouches,
These mariners put the ship through dangerous unknown seas;
This is the geologist, and this works with the scalpel, and this is a mathematician.
Gentlemen I receive you, and attach and clasp hands with you,
The facts are useful and real . . . . they are not my dwelling . . . . I enter by them to an area of the dwelling.
Notice the ending of that passage, which, in any case, doesn't appear in the 1891-92 edition. Wherever scientists or their work are mentioned in that last edition (in "Eidolons," "Passage to India," and "When I Heard the Learned Astronomer") it is only to reaffirm that last phrase: the poet's work supersedes that of the scientist.
I don't think it's because Whitman didn't like the Industrial Revolution. Indeed, over and over again he praises the mechanic and the engineer, the railroad, the steamship, and even the machinery of war, even after his horrific experiences as a nurse in the Civil War. Chris pointed me to this piece by Gary Sloan, who wrote "Rather than science preying on him, Whitman preyed on science." Whitman did pay attention to current scientific work, but only as a kind of scenery, another landscape, in which to present his metaphysical views.
That is what I think is dangerous for poetry. In Whitman's own words, from the preface to the 1855 Leaves of Grass, "From the eyesight proceeds another eyesight, and from the hearing proceeds another hearing, and from the voice proceeds another voice, eternally curious of the harmony of things with man." Too often, and certainly in "When I Heard the Learned Astronomer," Whitman neglects that first eyesight and that first hearing, and his beautiful voice just blathers, already convinced of that harmony.
8:44:29 PM 
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