If there are many on this board who "sneer" at Whitman, you must forgive us (if I should be so bold as to include myself) because Whitman has been, in many cases, the stick with which the literati of the day beat us and the kind of poetry we admire. When literary modernism came to fruit, a lot of poets began to embrace the kind of stylistic freedom of Whitman's poetry, while rejecting (and I'm speaking of here of Pound, Eliot, the Imagistes like H.D., and maybe Marianne Moore) his particular brand of Romanticism, his occassional sloppiness, and his exuberance. Then, however, WC Williams (who may have admired the hell out of Whitman but still wrote nothing like him) became the primary example of what a poet (an American poet at least) should be, then we have the Black Mountains poets and Allen Ginsberg and what maybe you could call "postmodernism", and Whitman is the firmly established golden calf of American poetry (though Emily Dickinson sometimes holds that title too). Now here at the forum, a lot people may like the moderns, but they would rather write more formally, and in some cases they feel that modernism totally killed form---in this opinion, modernism went to far; however, the current trend of academic thought is that modernism didn't go far enough. Thus, the Formalist school of poetry, the one which is probably the most representitive on this forum (though this is one of the only such places where that is true) is seen not only as an anachronism, but a double anachronism. Whitman was a revolutionary, but we are mere reactionaries, and every time we have to hear about it (which isn't that often, because we are mostly just ignored), we get just a little embittered toward Whitman, although its really not his fault.
[This message has been edited by kevincorbett (edited June 27, 2005).]
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