Kevin made a very good point about the problem with Whitman being the way he has been used. But as Mark points out, this is a specifically American problem; I would say it was with the promotion of Whitman as the first true American poet, that the absurd association began to be made between free verse and a free nation. And hence the corollary that using formal verse was anti-American and reactionary. (Amid all this nonsense nobody seemed to notice that one of the great American promoters of free verse, Ezra Pound, was hardly to be noted for his liberal political views.)
But, as I say, this is a purely American problem and probably is part of the reason why the war between free verse and formalism is not such a big issue outside the States. And as Kevin also points out, it's not really fair to blame Whitman for the crass ideas of some of his later supporters.
It's also interesting to note that Whitman was quite probably better appreciated at first in Britain than in America. Unlikely-seeming early fans were such people as Swinburne, Hopkins, Edward Dowden and Chesterton. I guess to a certain extent he was enjoyed as a wonderful barbaric phenomenon, along the lines of the Buffalo Bill Wild West show, which was also hugely successful in London.
I, too, find Whitman a marvellous poet - in places. Let's admit it: he can go on. In some of his longer works (not “Song of Myself”, which is nearly all superb), you really do get the feeling there is no reason at all why he should ever stop, once switched on - but at the same time you start to ask yourself why you should go on reading it. Tell me the truth: can anybody out there truthfully claim to have read the whole of poems like “Song of the Exposition” or “Song of the Broad Axe”? Speaking for myself, if I had, for a bet, to read every single poem ever written by either Longfellow or Whitman, I know that I would choose Longfellow. At the same time, I recognise that Whitman is clearly a more important poet for the history of American literature.
Gregory
|