POETS Day! My Problems with Walt Whitman

I live in a city that is not prepared for cold weather. My northerly relatives laugh when we shut down for snow or icy conditions but we don’t have all the toys they have. If these were regular enough occurrences to justify a snowplow corps or whatever you call the truck that salts the road, we’d have one. But they aren’t. So we don’t. Or maybe we wouldn’t.

The truth is, we like the snow days – “snow days” being a catch all for any day off due to snow, freezing rain, or because James Spann or one of the lesser weatherfolks says there might be snow or freezing rain. Nobody can get to work except the people who own a liquor store and everybody can get to the liquor store. Kids, in particular, love snow days. Every so often we get a real event where cars are abandoned on highways and schools have to host impromptu sleep overs in the gym. Those are important because they give cover when the county preemptively calls a for closings when the weather forecast indicates the chance of something threatening and everybody wants a day off to go to the liquor store. “Better safe that sorry,” says the thirsty school board.

When I was a kid, I would sit near the radio with my sister on promising mornings waiting for word about the schools. We might already have three inches – a blizzard for Birmingham – on the ground but the people in power were stingy with the academic calendar and might not let us know until 7:45. They’d stretch it out too. “Blount County, Tuscaloosa County, Bibb County…” They’d name every county in the nation, probably throw in parishes too if they thought they’d get away with it, before finally getting to Jefferson County. And then we’d hold our breath waiting to hear “including all Catholic schools.” Now I get an email the night before.

I’ve gotten a lot of emails lately. Last Friday one of the kid’s schools was closed because of a power outage. I didn’t get an email Monday, but that was Martin Luther King Day. Tuesday: closed for a Winter Weather Advisory. Wednesday: the same. Thursday the city went back to normal. It’s POETS Day, so Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday, I guess. It feels like a Tuesday to me.

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Walt Whitman is unavoidable. His influence is everywhere. He was the first major poet to write exclusively (to my knowledge) in free verse. He’s transcendentalist-adjacent which means he’s adored by the type of person who wants to influence young minds and likes to read poetry at you. Ezra Pound wrote of him: “America’s poet. He is America.” Hart Crane felt himself the inheritor of Whitman and Dickenson. Gerard Manley Hopkins took a measure of him: “I always knew in my heart Walt Whitman’s mind to be more like my own than any other man’s living. As he is a very great scoundrel this is not a pleasant confession.”

I am not a fan. I’ve said that here before. He has some wonderful verse, but I’m happier reading what he inspired rather than what he produced. I get funny looks from a lot of people when I say that. He’s a major poet. Leaves of Grass changed English literature in wonderful ways. I love the landscape he helped shape. I’m glad he was, but regarding his work, I’m not on board. A decent respect to the opinions of fellow poetry readers requires that I should declare the causes.

Whitman started off brilliantly in the intro to Leaves of Grass (1855). He makes his case for a new American literature. From the introduction:

“America does not repel the past or what it has produced under its forms or amid other politics or the idea of castes or the old religions . . . accepts the lesson with calmness . . . is not so impatient as has been supposed that the slough still sticks to opinions and manners and literature while the life which served its requirements has passed into the new life of the new forms perceives that the corpse is slowly borne from the eating and sleeping rooms of the house . . . perceives that it waits a little while in the door . . . that it was fittest for its days . . . that its action has descended to the stalwart and wellshaped heir who approaches . . . and that he shall be fittest for his days.”

That’s heady stuff. He goes on about the American character:

“Other states indicate themselves in their deputies  . . .  but the genius of the United States is not best or most in its executives or legislatures, nor in its ambassadors or authors or colleges or churches or parlors, nor even in its newspapers or inventors  . . .  but always most in the common people. Their manners speech dress friendships—the freshness and candor of their physiognomy—the picturesque looseness of their carriage  . . .  their deathless attachment to freedom—their aversion to anything indecorous or soft or mean—the practical acknowledgment of the citizens of one state by the citizens of all other states—the fierceness of their roused resentment—their Curiosity and welcome of novelty—their self-esteem and wonderful sympathy—their susceptibility to a slight—the air they have of persons who never knew how it felt to stand in the presence of superiors—the fluency of their speech their delight in music, the sure symptom of manly tenderness and native elegance of soul  . . .  their good temper and openhandedness— the terrible significance of their elections—the President’s taking off his hat to them not they to him—”

Okay. A little droning, but he can’t go on like that forever.

“To him the hereditary countenance descends both mother’s and father’s. To him enter the essences of the real things and past and present events—of the enormous diversity of temperature and agriculture and mines—the tribes of red aborigines—the weather-beaten vessels entering new ports or making landings on rocky coasts—the first settlements north or south—the rapid stature and muscle—the haughty defiance of ’76, and the war and peace and formation of the constitution. . . . the union always surrounded by blatherers and always calm and impregnable—the perpetual coming of immigrants—the wharfhem’d cities and superior marine—the unsurveyed interior—the loghouses and clearings and wild animals and hunters and trappers. . . . the free commerce—the fisheries and whaling and gold-digging—the endless gestation of new states—the convening of Congress every December, the members duly coming up from all climates and the uttermost parts  . . .  the noble character of the young mechanics and of all free American workmen and workwomen  . . .  the general ardor and friendliness and enterprise—the perfect equality of the female with the male. . . . the large amativeness—the fluid movement of the population—the factories and mercantile life and laborsaving machinery—the Yankee swap—the New-York firemen and the target excursion—the southern plantation life—the character of the northeast and of the northwest and south-west—slavery and the tremulous spreading of hands to protect it, and the stern opposition to it which shall never cease till it ceases or the speaking of tongues and the moving of lips cease.”

I’m reading the above from a book I bought used. The previous owner was an underliner. It’s an anthology and flipping through I can see highlights and scribbling in the sections on Hopkins and Dickenson and on and on and on. He underlined quite a bit of the first two pages of the intro to Leaves of Grass. The rest he left unmarked.

I can’t imagine what made him stop underl-

“He is a seer. . . . he is individual  . . .  he is complete in himself. . . . the others are as good as he, only he sees it and they do not. He is not one of the chorus. . . . he does not stop for any regulation  . . .  he is the president of regulation.”

Oh for f… I can’t read that. The previous owner of my book couldn’t read that. Nobody… Whitman’s begging you to get bored, give up, and scan to the end. It’s like having dinner with Colm from Derry Girls.

The poetry promises relief, but it’s worse. “Song of Myself” is thirty pages long. From the poem:

There was never any more inception than there is now,
Nor any more youth or age than there is now,
And will never be any more perfection than there is now,
Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.

He needed an editor. I’m assuming because of context that he means there is a land of fullness. Why doesn’t he say this? This is only forty lines in and I’m already feeling very un-Christian towards the poem because I just went through a litany of “You shall”s. So much is parenthetical or clarifying that it’s distraction. It doesn’t justify the length. And what about apples? Was there ever more or less fruit?

In A Survey of Modernist Poetry (1928), by Laura Riding and Robert Graves, the authors state,

“Modern poetry, that is, is groping for some principle of self-determination to be applied to the making of the poem – not lack of government, but government from within. Free verse was one of the largest movements towards this end. But it has too often meant not self-government but complete laissez-faire on the part of the poet, a licence to metrical anarchy instead of harmonious enjoyment of liberty.”

It can be debated whether Whitman was the first of the Modern poets, among the first, or a herald of what was to come. The above point applies. They go on to compare Tennyson’s In Memoriam with Eliot’s The Waste Land in order to demonstrate a point about cohesion.

“A long poem was not thought to need the same unity as a short poem: the unchanging metre was enough to keep the loosely connected parts of the poem together. This is the case with In Memoriam, where the different sections are digressive rather than progressive. But The Waste Land has to be read as a short poem: that is, as a unified whole. The reader can no more skip a passage in it than a line in a short poem and expect to understand the poem. For it is not a long poem in the usual sense of being a number of short poems in a uniform metre, joined by mere verse padding.”

A long work need something unifying. It can be meter or controlled subject matter. “Song of Myself” has neither. It is a shout of exuberance echoing off jagged rocks. The poem is divided into fifty-two sections. I would bet that if you separated the odd sections from the evens, renumbered them one through twenty one and gave two fresh readers a half, after reading they could sit down and discuss the work without ever realizing they’d read separate copy.

It’s not, as Riding and Graves say, “A number of short poems.” It’s not even a long poem in the sense we’d normally consider. It’s an idea for a single short poem given too many overlapping permutations. Read any twenty or thirty lines and you have the gist. The rest is padding and probably read with dwindling attention.

When he wants to be concise, Whitman can be very good. In this short poem, with the exception of a “clank” he doesn’t engage any sense but sight. He’s painting.

Cavalry Crossing a Ford

A line in long array where they wind betwixt green islands,
They take a serpentine course, their arms flash in the sun—hark to the musical clank,
Behold the silvery river, in it the splashing horses loitering stop to drink,

Behold the brown-faced men, each group, each person a picture, the negligent rest on
the saddles,
Some emerge on the opposite bank, others are just entering the ford—while,
Scarlet and blue and snowy white,
The guidon flags flutter gayly in the wind.

Here’s another but with the addition of the first person expected from Whitman.

I Saw in Louisiana a Live-Oak Growing

I saw in Louisiana a live-oak growing,
All alone stood it and the moss hung down from the branches,
Without any companion it grew there uttering joyous leaves of dark green,
And its look, rude, unbending, lusty, made me think of myself,
But I wonder’d how it could utter joyous leaves standing alone there
without its friend near, for I knew I could not,
And I broke off a twig with a certain number of leaves upon it, and twined
around it a little moss,
And brought it away, and I have placed it in sight in my room,
It is not needed to remind me as of my own dear friends,
(For I believe lately I think of little else than of them,)
Yet it remains to me a curious token, it makes me think of manly love;
For all that, and though the live-oak glistens there in Louisiana solitary in a
wide flat space,
Uttering joyous leaves all its life without a friend a lover near,
I know very well I could not.

When keeping it brief he shows discipline and consideration; he wonders rather than raves.

Despite my admiration for poems like the two above, I stick to “I don’t care for his stuff,” without clarification or qualification when asked about him. The long stuff I don’t like is what everybody claims to know anyway, and I cringe at the images “Whitman fan” conjures; wannabe Annie Savoys from Bull Durham singing the body electric with perfume sprayed pink chiffon draped over estate sale lamps, incense burning in competition, Edith Piaf quietly crackling on a turntable. Great movie, but there’s only one Susan Sarandon and I don’t want to worry about crystal alignment or what Seth said.

I like what Ezra Pound wrote about Whitman. Not “America’s poet. He is America.” This poem. I’ve put this in a post once before, but it’s good. From Pound:

A Pact

I make truce with you, Walt Whitman—
I have detested you long enough.
I come to you as a grown child
Who has had a pig-headed father;
I am old enough now to make friends.
It was you that broke the new wood,
Now is a time for carving.
We have one sap and one root—
Let there be commerce between us.