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I think the reason we are reading Whitman is because there is evidence that he too was thinking about the world and change along the same lines as evolutionary theory describes the world.  In class with Professor Grobstein on Thursday, he pointed out several lines from the first "prose" part of Leaves of Grass that say things that sound very much like statements that Darwin made in "On The Origin of Species" (and it is interesting to note that Leaves of Grass was published first).  So I think I understand why we are reading Whitman: not only is his work itself a great example of a transitional and important piece of the history of American poetry, but there are also similar themes in both Darwin's work and this book of Whitman's.

Something else that we discussed in our class was whether or not Whitman himself was similar to an evolutionary process...a parallel that sounds silly at first, in my opinion, but the more we explored it the more it made sense.  Evelyn said that she found "Song of Myself" to be strange because there were moments when Whitman seemed brilliant, but the rest of the poem feels like too much (even useless).  An evolutionary process creates some brilliant things which will go on existing, but it also creates things that are "useless" in that they do not persist.  Whitman and this process, then, are similar in that they create both things that are brilliant and useless. 

I guess my main problem with this comparison is that I don't think that Whitman wrote what he did at random, whereas an evolutionary process works in a very random way.  While Whitman's writing does seem random and scattered at times (like he was on drugs, as many people suggested in class), I have to believe that Whitman was aware of what he was writing.  Maybe this is just me looking for meaning, and therefore believing that Whitman had a definite purpose while writing.  I don't think he would have taken the trouble to revise "Leaves of Grass" as many times as he did without having a purpose for writing and revisiting his work.  I don't think you can dismiss this book as just random ramblings of some man, and it deserves our attention (whatever that may mean).