This chapter illuminates the irreplaceable value of poetry in cultivating a cosmopolitan and democratic imagination. The authors contend that poetry evokes unanticipated or overlooked ideas, emotions, and possibilities; it provokes people to look beyond their settled views. Poetry uniquely fuels their ability to engage new thoughts, values, and practices. This ever-renewing quality of mind can, in turn, help people reimagine the nature and value of education continuously as circumstances and the needs they call out evolve. The authors suggest that these imaginative capacities are significant given the cosmopolitan and democratic challenges, and prospects, generated by an intensifying process of political, economic, and cultural globalization. The chapter features a reading of Walt Whitman’s well-known epic poem, “Song of Myself” (first published in 1855), which the authors show both articulates and enacts the most profound promise in a cosmopolitan and democratic imagination.

Chapter 4 analyzes the psychological and physical effects of slavery. Here, it is argued that we continue to place trauma within existing psychological frameworks but fail to understand the effect of ownership and objectification, which presents unique challenges to survivors of slavery and has ramifications for the support structures that are put in place. The chapter argues that the need to bear witness, on both the part of the listener and the narrator, is crucial to meaningful growth in the light of current ill-suited support and allows an acknowledgment of the truth of survivors’ lives. This chapter in particular draws on autobiographies and my own interviews with survivors, mapping their journeys and experiences to the psychological literature on trauma, and exploring the need to bear witness as a powerful means of growth