I love Whitman, always have. I love him for his great poems ("Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" is my favorite) and lines, but I love him so much more for his utterly, unimaginably terrible lines. I think it was Randall Jarrell who pointed out that when Whitman is bad, he's bad like no other poet on Earth. Here's two of my favorites:
Ebb stung by the flow and flow stung by the ebb, love-flesh swelling
and deliciously aching,
Limitless limpid jets of love hot and enormous, quivering jelly of
love, white-blow and delirious nice,
Bridegroom night of love working surely and softly into the
prostrate dawn,
Undulating into the willing and yielding day,
Lost in the cleave of the clasping and sweet-flesh’d day.
-- From "I Sing the Body Electric"
Root of wash’d sweet-flag! timorous pond-snipe! nest of guarded
duplicate eggs! it shall be you!
Mix’d tussled hay of head, beard, brawn, it shall be you!
Trickling sap of maple, fibre of manly wheat, it shall be you!
Sun so generous it shall be you!
Vapors lighting and shading my face it shall be you!
You sweaty brooks and dews it shall be you!
Winds whose soft-tickling genitals rub against me it shall be you!
-- From "Song of Myself"
Limitless jets of love hot and enormous? Being tickled softly by the wind's genitals??? Calling his penis a timorous pond-snipe????
If only my bad poems (that's all of them) could be bad like that. I might not be great, but I'd never stop laughing. He's endlessly satisfying to the snickering 12-year-old in me.
Also, there's something about Whitman, as about Creeley, and Ginsberg, Bukowski and Poe. It doesn't matter whether they're good or bad: somehow they get teenagers interested in poetry, and as a high-school English teacher, I'm always in their debt on that score. I think it's something generous in their poetry, that everything-and-the-kitchen-sink aesthetic that makes ghastly mistake after ghastly mistake, which makes the underlying struggles of poetry clear and attractive.
Some of them also have the benefit of having written some good poems as well, and that's the best of all.
-Dan
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