Just attention, sympathy, empathy

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Mary Oliver praises Walt Whitman in several places in her book Upstream.  Having found a kindred spirit and a mentor (and a religious sage), it's like she's trying to establish "what is it that I so like about his work?"  In an essay titled  some thoughts on Whitman, she explains the importance of Whitman's work.  She begins the essay referencing William James' descriptions of the mystical, an idea she frequently returns to.  Here, she argues that his writing holds a special place in literature that is the attempt to speak out a mystical state in order to change your life.  The poem deserves to be seen as both literature and also a religious document.

[Whitman's] message was clear from the first and never changed: that a better, richer life is available to us, and with all his force he advocated it both for the good of each individual soul and for the good of the universe. 

That his methods are endlessly suggestive rather than demonstrative, and that their main attempt was to move the reader toward response rather than reflection, is perhaps another clue to the origin of Whitman's power and purpose, and to the weight of the task. If it is true that he experienced a mystical state, or even stood in the singe of powerful mystical suggestion, and [Henry] James is right, then he was both blessed and burdened--for he could make no adequate report of it. He could only summon, suggest, question, call, and plead. And Leaves of Grass is indeed a sermon, a manifesto, a utopian document, a social contract, a political statement, an invitation, to each of us, to change. All through the poem we feel Whitman's persuading force, which is his sincerity; and we feel what the poem tries continually to be: the replication of a miracle.  (p 95)

 On page 107

What cannot be told can be suggested; such is the theater of Leaves of Grass, hugely long, opulent, illustrative, intense, oracular, tender, luxurious. And you must take it to the hilt, you must stay with it almost beyond endurance, for

This is the grass that grows wherever the land is

and the water is,

This is the common air that bathes the 

globe. (p. 43)

Of all American poems, the 1855 Leaves of Grass is the most probable of effect upon the individual sensibility. It wants no less. We study it as literature, but like all great literature it has a deeper design: it would be a book for men to live by. It is obsessively affirmative. It is foolishly, childishly obsessively affirmative. It offers a way to live, in the religious sense, that is intelligent and emotive and rich, and dependent only on the individual—no politics, no liturgy, no down payment. Just attention, sympathy, empathy.