English majors will likely remember No. 3 in our favorite astronomy poems, “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer,” by Walt Whitman.
Here’s a picture of the old scallawag:
Not as pretty as Audrey Hepburn, but a fine writer. He only had formal schooling up until the age of eleven, after which he supported himself with printing and journalism. He made his name as a poet with “Leaves of Grass,” a collection of poems he self-published at age 36, winning praise from Ralph Waldo Emerson, although others condemned his writing for being obscene.
He described himself thusly: “Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos, disorderly, fleshly, and sensual, no sentimentalist, no stander above men or women or apart from them, no more modest than immodest.”
Little known fact: some say Walt Whitman was the original model for “Dracula” in the novel of the same name by Bram Stoker, a long-time admirer of his.
Here’s the poem, from 1865:
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.