"Song of Myself" and Walt Wit — Much Abrew About Nothing

The Beer: Walt Wit, Philadelphia Brewing Company’s “Belgian White-Style” Ale

I’m always happy to find beers inspired by literature. (I have a bottle of New Holland's The Poet in the fridge just waiting for a Halloween blog post. The label art features a raven, highlighting the "Poe" in "Poet.") And I was especially excited to try this wit from Philadelphia Brewing Company because it's named after one of my all-time favorite poets, Walt Whitman. The glitzy label and the punny name of the beer certainly do justice to a founding father of American poetry, so we were off to a good start.

As that shiny label suggests, the beer’s color is pretty: a hazy straw-gold. But while the label and the color of the beer are lovely, the lack of head disappoints. This is where I started to wonder whether this beer was the best one to pair with Whitman. When pouring a wit, I expect that it will be difficult to not accumulate a ton of foam on the beer. This one, though, generated very little head, even when I poured it high and straight down the middle of the glass. What little foam I did manage to produce dissipated pretty quickly, before I could even snap a photo.

The beer’s aroma is pretty subtle (which is certainly not the first word that one would use to describe its namesake). Per the BJCP, traditional Belgian wits should give you “moderate zesty, orange-citrusy fruitiness" on the nose, but I don't get much zest from Walt Wit. It’s not zesty in terms of being reminiscent of an orange rind, nor is it zestly more generally, as "having a strong, pleasant, and somewhat spicy flavor, lively and pleasing.” As you'll see from Whitman's poetry below, "zest” is a perfect adjective to describe Whitman's tone. His verse is just full to overflowing with a zest for life and its “strong, pleasant” “lively and pleasing” abundance. In order to do justice to Whitman, Walt Wit needs way more of that kind zest in both its aroma and its flavor.

In terms of flavor, this wit definitely veers away from tradition. Rather than using coriander and orange zest, the Philadelphia Brewing Company brewed this one with chamomile and grapefruit peel. The chamomile must have something to do with why this beer tastes so much more mellow than traditional wits do; coriander packs a punch of spice, whereas chamomile brings Sleepytime Tea to mind. This is an interesting take on a witbier, to be sure, but it's not the right direction to go for a beer that is linked to Whitman. His poetry is anything but mellow and sleepy.

More suitable for Whitman would be a beer that wakes you up, one that is super sparkly, effervescent, exuberant, and zippy -- absolutely bubbling over in appearance and flavor, just as Whitman’s lines spill over line breaks, radically pouring down the page, too quickly and lively to bother attending to meter or rhyme. In the end, Walt Wit isn't quite right for Walt Whitman.

The Poem: Song of Myself

Whitman’s long poem Song of Myself opens in celebration and song, with existential wonder and boundless energy. Whitman started this poem in 1851 (though he would amend and add to it for the next thirty years), a time when it was a massive break with tradition to write without meter and regular line breaks. He broke with tradition for a reason. In this poem, form echoes content perfectly: the poet is too exuberant about his subject matter - life itself - to be contained about it in any way. It begins:

I celebrate myself and sing myself,
and what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.
My tongue, every atom of my blood, form’d from this soil, this air,
Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their parents the same,
I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin,
Hoping to cease not till death.

Along with the long lines and longer syntax, Whitman’s use of repetition makes these stanzas ebullient. It’s as if he’s feeling so much about this overflowing, overlapping life that he just can’t contain himself, repeating words as he struggles - almost stammers - to find an apt language with which to convey his thoughts (“myself…myself” (line 1), “assume…assume” (2), “loafe…loafe” (4-5), “this soil, this air” (6)). By line 7, this formal device - repetition - culminates in another perfect pairing of form and content. Here, Whitman strikes on the subject of his ancestors and the recurrence of propagation, generation after generation: “Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their parents the same”. The repetition accrues: “born here… born here,” “parents … parents,” “the same… the same.” What an apt way to express one’s awe for ancestry, to use repetitive language and syntax to mirror the repetition of genes in generations.

The line break that follows is pretty killer, too: in line 7, Whitman marvels at his lineage, extending back as far as America itself, and this thought lands with a thud at the beginning of line 8. Line 7 is about the narrator’s lineage, but line 8 breaks with that to start again with a capital “I”: “I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin,” he writes. It’s not that Whitman is ignoring tradition - metered, regular line breaks - he’s simply breaking with it to make a point. His poem’s content - ancestry and generations of procreation - necessitates that line 7 extends longer than any other line - and that this line breaks only with the introduction of the narrative “I”, beginning and “hoping to cease not till death” (9).

In Song of Myself, Whitman is master of adapting form to mirror content. I wish I could say the same for Philadelphia Brewing Company’s Walt Wit, but the beer doesn’t mirror its namesake’s effervescent zeal for life. The break with tradition to use chamomile instead of coriander is certainly Whitman-esque - it just echoes Whitman in the wrong direction; rather than a subtler spice than the traditional, a Whitman beer would need more spice. He broke with tradition to blow it up, not to calm it down.

So while Philadelphia Brewing Company doesn’t knock their Whitman beer out of the park, I’d love to see another brewery try. As Whitman reminds us in Section 51 of Song of Myself, there’s room for multiple Whitmans in the world: “(I am large, I contain multitudes)”, he notes parenthetically, as if whispering to us a simple secret of the universe.

I’d especially love to see a New York City brewery pay homage to Whitman. While I think of Whitman as a quintessentially American poet, I would never associate him with Philadelphia: no, Whitman is nothing if not a poet of early New York. On the bottle, the Philadelphia Brewing Company notes that the beer is inspired by Whitman’s writing, in Specimen Days, of a sunset over Philadelphia.* But Specimen Days is prose, and Whitman is foremost a poet - a poet best known for Leaves of Grass, a collection of poems that are absolutely riddled with New York City. (For example, in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” he sighs: “Ah, what can ever be more stately and admirable to me than mast-hemm’d Manhattan?”)

I’m lookin’ at you, Brooklyn Brewery. Bring on the Whitman-inspired beer that does right by this founding father of American verse.

*It’s a lovely passage, to be sure. In his Specimen Days entry for January 12, 1882, Whitman - ever a poet of nature and the natural - grapples with the uncanny disconnect between the beauty of a sun setting over a ferry boat, recognizing the latter as an unnatural symbol of industry but acknowledging its beauty nonetheless: “Only a new ferry-boat, and yet in its fitness comparable with the prettiest product of Nature’s cunning, and rivaling it. High up in the transparent ether gracefully balanced and circled four or five great sea hawks, while here below, amid the pomp and picturesqueness of sky and river, swam this creation of artificial beauty and motion and power, in its way no less perfect.”