Yes, almost the first thing they teach you in Fourth Grade Creative Writing is "mind your I's." On the other hand, Borges famously analyzed that I of Whitman (his mind's eye, as it were) and pronounced it W.W.'s finest invention.
Then all the realtors,
Pickpockets, salesmen, and the actors performing
Official scenarios,
Turned a deaf ear, for they had contracted American dreams.
But the man who keeps a store on a lonely road,
And the housewife who knows she's dumb,
And the earth, are relieved.
All that grave weight of America
Cancelled! Like Greece and Rome.
The future in ruins!
The castles, the prisons, the cathedrals
Unbuilding, and roses
Blossoming from the stones that are not there...
Some lines from "Walt Whitman at Bear Mountain" by Louis Simpson, by way of saying Whitman was no mere composer of pretty verses, either.
The "barbaric yawp" should have told Santayana he was barking up the wrong tree. It has been suggested to me, however, that I have missed somewhere the subtlety in his backhanded praise.
Italian Music in Dakota
("The Seventeenth—the finest Regimental Band I ever heard.")
Through the soft evening air enwinding all,
Rocks, woods, fort, cannon, pacing sentries, endless wilds,
In dulcet streams, in flutes' and cornets' notes,
Electric, pensive, turbulent, artificial,
(Yet strangely fitting even here, meanings unkown before,
Subtler than ever, more harmony, as if born here, related here,
Not to the city's fresco'd rooms, not to the audience of the opera
house,
Sounds, echoes, wandering strains, as really here at home,
Somnambula's innocent love, trios with Norma's anguish,
And thy ecstatic chorus Poliuto;)
Ray'd in the limpid yellow slanting sundown,
Music, Italian music in Dakota.
While Nature, sovereign of this gnarl'd realm,
Lurking in hidden barbaric grim recesses,
Acknowledging rapport however far remov'd,
(As some old root or soil of earth its last-born flower or fruit,)
Listens well pleas'd.
[This message has been edited by Christopher Mulrooney (edited December 15, 2001).]
|