Clustering of cognitive biases in Walt Whitman’s ‘Crossing Brooklyn Ferry’: An Ecocritical Analysis

ABSTRACT

Walt Whitman’s ‘Crossing Brooklyn Ferry’ (CBF) (1856) conveys and constructs an exhilarated passenger’s experience with public transportation facilities of mid-nineteenth century New York against the background of modernization, urbanization, industrialization and globalization. With Whitman’s America exploiting the continent’s diverse resources along imperialist lines, CBF exposes the poet’s implication in the early stages of the climate crisis. This article draws on scientific insights into human cognition to furnish a productive interpretative lens for analysing poetry and its role in human relationships with the more-than-human world. Exploring culturally adapted cognitive features relevant to the perception of time and scale in the context of ongoing planetary disruption, it argues that Whitman’s attitude towards the future anticipates major issues in present-day environmental (in)action.

KEYWORDS:

• Climate change
• extractivism
• human cognition
• intergenerational justice
• planetary crisis
• poetry
• population
• public transportation

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Lies Wesseling and Louis van den Hengel for providing extensive feedback and guidance, and to the anonymous reviewers for inspiring valuable revisions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Unless otherwise indicated, parenthetical references cite the final version of CBF from the 1891–1892 edition of Leaves of Grass by line number(s). Original stanza breaks are omitted.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Dawid Bernard Juraszek

Dawid Bernard Juraszek is a lecturer at Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, an external PhD candidate at Maastricht University and an analyst at The Michał Boym Institute for Asian and Global Studies, with a research focus on ecocriticism and the wider environmental humanities.