Poems from the academy selected by Christopher Ricks

Walt Whitman provides this week's verse inspired by university life

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.

Walt Whitman (1819-1892), printer and prophet, exulted in the Democratic Vistas that were America's manifest destination. He exalted the ordinary man to an extraordinary degree, being very well aware that no single one of his fellow citizens could rival his ability to be every single one of them. The higher learning? It was poetry that was to be the supreme teaching, for the academic classroom got classy. So his single sentence of a poem, When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer , does pass a sentence. An adverse judgment, these verses, for the lecturer performs all too well, and Whitman doesn't join in the applause. He soon prefers the night air to those intellectuals with airs. True, he concedes a little something ("How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick"), but he needs to be on his own. Yet not on his own, for he has the company of the stars, those heavenly bodies that are for Whitman almost as divine as the human form that he celebrates elsewhere. How relaxingly he has his poem come to rest - after all those end-stopped lines of various length - with the most traditional of cadences, his old English friend the heroic line: "Look'd up in perfect silence at the stars." The rest is (literally) silence.

Christopher Ricks is professor of poetry at Oxford University and professor of English at Boston University, US.