A Revival With Rhyme And Reason In Camden, Walt Whitman's House Is The Focal Point Of A Plan That Is A Tribute To The Poet And That Could Be A Boon To The City.

This is about poetry and planning, strange companions at first glance. The incongruity seems especially acute when the poetry is that of Walt Whitman - that self-consciously spontaneous bard - and the city is Camden, a city that often combines thoughtless abandonment with willful sterility.

Yet Whitman is the man who wrote of the public road, that fundamental element in American planning: "You express me better than I can express myself." And Camden is, of course, where he lived once he ended his travels; the city where, as an old man without the vigor of youth, the poet bought

himself a modest house, the only one he ever owned, and an elaborate tomb besides.

What poetry and planning have in common is that they are expressions of values that are often accepted as predigested building blocks of thought. Both poetry and plans can help shape expectations, even of those who have never come into direct contact with them.

Today, you can hear Whitman in the discursiveness and the joyous verbal virtuosity of rap music, though not in the mean-spiritedness that sometimes

mars its message. And when we build, the ghosts of planners past - from William Penn and Thomas Jefferson to Daniel Burnham and Robert Moses - help us decide what is possible and how it should be built.

Unfortunately, planning is too often prosaic. It does not seek, as Whitman did, to embrace the world. Rather, it seeks to simplify it, and to force humanity and nature into patterns that are reductive and deadly.

Whitman's house at 330 Mickle Blvd. is, in fact, a victim of planning. Most obviously, it has been harmed by a grossly insensitive form of highway planning that treats the city as an obstacle to be conquered by the automobile. The poet's two-story frame house stands not on a city street, but a multi-lane, divided arterial designed for far greater traffic volumes than it carries.

But the street is hardly the only problem. Like the rest of Camden, Whitman's neighborhood was depopulated during the last 45 years, largely

because of planning principles that encouraged new construction at the expense of existing buildings and that encouraged use of highways, rather than railroads, for both freight and personal transportation. We have remade the American landscape since World War II, and one of the costs is devastated urban neighborhoods caught in cycles of poor education, bad housing, inaccessible jobs and crime.