Walt Whitman's "When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer"

Walt Whitman's "When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer"

Walt Whitman's "When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer" is a poem about a man who learns about astronomy. The narrator begins by describing his encounter with the "learn'd astronomer" and how the astronomer tried to explain to him through facts and data what astronomy was. The narrator soon loses interest in astronomy due to the astronomer and decides to figure it out for himself. Then the narrator enters nature and experience it for himself as sees perfection.

Multiple different ideas and parallels fit in with this passage. The first parallel lines up with Berger's "Ways of Seeing" in which Berger states that the problem with art is that people try to explain it to us and thereby corrupt our perception of it and stop us from fully understanding the art. This parallels with the problem of the astronomer. The astronomer continually is stating what he believes to be true and is surpressing the perception of the narrator. However the narrator does not fully fall for this "mystification" because he gets bored and instead goes out to discover it for himself. The fact that the narrator gets bored by the astronomer also brings into parallel transcendental ideas of nature. As Emerson declares in his "Nature", Nature is something that is perfectly true, it needs no explanation because it is its own explanation, and finally that we can only true understand nature through experience. The fact that nature needs no explanation is prevalent in the problem of the learn'd astronomer. In the eye of the transcendentalist the astronomer is redundant because he is merely explaining things which are self evident in nature. This therefore makes him boring and renders him useless. Therefore the narrator goes to nature to experience it for himself. This is how he truely understands nature through his own experience, because he is able to see it with his own eyes, nature's truth can therefore directly enter into him, without the hinderance or mininterpretation of the learn'd astronomer.

Astronomist have many tools with which they use to closely view and study the universe, and have also been studying the stars for many years. Therefore because they can see the stars better, would they not be better sources for understanding the stars than one's own personal experiences?