[Gail White]

Due to the shortage of lines open at the present time - and also to the contempt for Whitman displayed by some of our readers - I thought this might be an opportune moment to post my favorite Whitman poem. Granted that the old boy wrote a lot of schlock, he did some good ones too. I have to admit that I never read this one without choking up, yet its treatment of death and grief is not sentimental. It also seems appropriate reading for a time of war.

COME UP FROM THE FIELDS, FATHER

Come up from the fields, father, here's a letter from our Pete,
And come to the front door, mother, here's a letter from thy dear son.

Lo, 'tis autumn,
Lo, where the trees, deeper green, yellower and redder,
Cool and sweeten Ohio's villages with leaves fluttering in the moderate wind,
Where apples ripe in the orchards hang and grapes on the trellised vines.
(Smell you the smell of the grapes on the vines?
Smell you the buckwheat where the bees were lately buzzing?)
Above all, lo, the sky so calm, so transparent after the rain, and with wondrous clouds,
Below too, all calm, all vital and beautiful, and the farm prospers well.

Down in the fields all prospers well,
But now from the fields come father, come at the daughter's call,
And come to the entry mother, to the front door come right away.

Fast as she can she hurries, something ominous, her steps trembling,
She does not tarry to smooth her hair nor adjust her cap.

Open the envelope quickly.
O this is not our son's writing, yet his name is signed,
O a strange hand writes for our dear son, O stricken mother's soul!
All swims before her eyes, flashes with black, she catches the main words only,
Sentences broken, "gunshot wound in the breast, cavalry skirmish, taken to hospital,
At present low, but will soon be better."

Ah now the single figure to me,
Amid all teeming and wealthy Ohio with all its cities and farms,
Sickly white in the face and dull in the head, very faint,
By the jamb of a door leans.

"Grieve not so, dear mother," (the just-grown daughter speaks through her sobs,
The little sisters huddle around speechless and dismayed.)
"See, dearest mother, the letter says Pete will soon be batter."

Alas poor boy, he will never be better (nor may-be needs to better, that brave and simple soul.)
While they stand at home at the door he is dead already,
The only son is dead.

But the mother needs to be better,
She with thin form presently drest in black,
By day her meals untouched, then at night fitfully sleeping, often waking,
In the midnight waking, weeping, longing with one deep longing,
O that she might withdraw unnoticed, silent from life escape and withdraw,
To follow, to seek, to be with her dear dead son.

[Mark Allinson]

Gail, I am so glad you started this thread. Whitman is one of the world's greatest masters of poetry. His work is very powerful, sensitive and often mystical.

In my view, anyone who claims to love poetry and yet sneers at Whitman, for whatever reason, is merely advertising their lack of soul.

This is part of a much longer poem, which I would encourage readers to seek out and read in full.

BANNED POSTFrom "The Sleepers", by Walt Whitman, part 8


The sleepers are very beautiful as they lie unclothed,
They flow hand in hand over the whole earth from east to
BANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POST west as they lie unclothed,
The Asiatic and African are hand in hand, the European and
BANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POST American are hand in hand
Learn'd and unlearn'd are hand in hand, and male and
BANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POST female are hand in hand,
The bare arm of the girl crosses the bare breast of her lover,
BANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POST they press close without lust, his lips press her neck,
The father holds his grown or ungrown son in his arms with
BANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POST measureless love, and the son holds the father in his
BANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POST arms with measureless love,
The white hair of the mother shines on the white wrist of
BANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POST the daughter,
The breath of the boy goes with the breath of the man,
BANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POST friend is inarm'd by friend,
The scholar kisses the teacher and the teacher kisses the
BANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POST scholar, the wrong'd is made right,
The call of the slave is one with the master's call, and the
BANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POST master salutes the slave,
The felon steps forth from the prison, the insane becomes
BANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POST sane, the suffering of sick persons is reliev'd,
The sweatings and fevers stop, the throat that was unsound
BANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POST is sound, the lungs of the consumptive are resumed, the
BANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POST poor distress'd head is free,
The joints of the rheumatic move as smoothly as ever, and
BANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POST smoother than ever,
Stiflings and passages open, the paralyzed become supple,
The swell'd and convuls'd and congested awake to
BANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POST themselves in condition,
They pass the invigoration of the night and the chemistry of
BANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POST the night, and awake.

I too pass from the night,
I stay a while away O night, but I return to you again and
BANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POST love you.

Why should I be afraid to trust myself to you?
I am not afraid, I have been well brought forward by you,
I love the rich running day, but I do not desert her in
BANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POST whom I lay so long,
I know not how I came of you and I know not where I go
BANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POST with you, but I know I came well and shall go well.
I will stop only a time with the night, and rise betimes,
I will duly pass the day O my mother, and duly return to you.

[Roger Slater]

Mark, so glad to hear you speak my mind. Whitman has the stature of the great prophets, and long passages of Leaves of Grass should be officially added to the Bible, they speak with such authority and beauty. I think there are people around here who can only respect his work if they prove that it is actually very metrical after all, but whatever the technique, his cadences and his giant vision are monumental and often overwhelming in their greatness. I'm happy to see you haven't accepted his typecasting as an "American" poet, since he is so much more than that, and, of course, has influenced poets throughout the world. He's so great I can't even be jealous of him, since his poems are so obviously out of my league that even my highly delusional side cannot imagine writing at such a level.

[Mark Allinson]

Roger, I am also glad to hear a poet of your stature acknowledge the mastery of Whitman.

I am often heard sounding off on these boards on the superiority of metrics to FV. But I love the truly poetic no matter what form it comes in. And Whitman is a true poet. I love him dearly.

How marvellous it would have been to be present that day when he met Oscar Wilde and they hugged.

Here is a passage from Lawrence's essay on Whitman, where he is not always kind to Walt. I post it here because I think it hits on an essential feature of Whitman's philosophy, and is perhaps a reason why some cannot go as far as we do in our praise.


Whitman was the first to break the mental allegiance. He was the first to smash the old moral conception that the soul of man is something 'superior' and 'above' the flesh. Even Emerson still maintained this tiresome 'superiority' of the soul. Even Melville could not get over it. Whitman was the first heroic seer to seize the soul by the scruff of her neck and plant her down among the potsherds.
'There ! ' he said to the soul. 'Stay there!'
Stay there. Stay in the flesh. Stay in the limbs and lips and in the belly. Stay in the breast and womb. Stay there, Oh, Soul, where you belong.
Stay in the dark limbs of negroes. Stay in the body of the prostitute. Stay in the sick flesh of the syphilitic. Stay in the marsh where the calamus grows. Stay there, Soul, where you belong.
The Open Road. The great home of the Soul is the open road. Not heaven, not paradise. Not 'above'. Not even 'within'. The soul is neither 'above' nor 'within'. It is a wayfarer down the open road.
Not by meditating. Not by fasting. Not by exploring heaven after heaven, inwardly, in the manner of the great mystics. Not by exaltation. Not by ecstasy. Not by any of these ways does the soul come into her own.
Only by taking the open road.
Not through charity. Not through sacrifice. Not even through love. Not through good works. Not through these does the soul accomplish herself.
Only through the journey down the open road.
The journey itself, down the open road. Exposed to full contact. On two slow feet. Meeting whatever comes down the open road. In company with those that drift in the same measure along the same way. Towards no goal. Always the open road.
Having no known direction even. Only the soul remaining true to herself in her going.
Meeting all the other wayfarers along the road. And how? How meet them, and how pass ? With sympathy, says Whitman. Sympathy. He does not say love. He says sympathy. Feeling with. Feel with them as they feel with themselves. Catching the vibration of their soul and flesh as we pass.
It is a new great doctrine. A doctrine of life. A new great morality. A morality of actual living, not of salvation. Europe has never got beyond the morality of salvation. America to this day is deathly sick with saviourism. But Whitman, the greatest and the first and the only American teacher, was no Saviour. His morality was no morality of salvation. His was a morality of the soul living her life, not saving herself. Accepting the contact with other souls along the open way, as they lived their lives. Never trying to save them. As lief try to arrest them and throw them in gaol. The soul living her life along the incarnate mystery of the open road.

- D.H.Lawrence, "Walt Whitman"

===========

As you say, Roger, he is more than a poet. And he still speaks directly to us.


Full of Life Now


Full of life now, compact, visible,
I, forty years old the eighty-third year of the States,
To one a century hence or any number of centuries hence,
To you yet unborn these, seeking you.
When you read these I that was visible am become invisible,
Now it is you, compact, visible, realizing my poems, seeking
BANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POST me,
Fancying how happy you were if I could be with you and
BANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POST become your comrade;
Be it as if I were with you. (Be not too certain but I am now
BANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POST with you.)

[Kevin Corbett]

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).]

[Mark Allinson]

Kevin, thank you for that post.

Yes, coming from another place, it is easy to overlook such local factors in the formation of literary attitudes. Being beaten over the head, even with something intrinsically pleasant, can turn you off that thing, no doubt. I was never so beaten with Walt, whose work I discovered on my own.

I prefer formalist poetry myself, but I would never consider Whitman "revolutionary" and formalism "reactionary", although I don't doubt that many do. I think of Whitman as a nonpareil poet, unique, rather than a stylistic guide to follow. I love his work, at its best, but I have never even dreamed of trying to emulate his style.

Anyway, style is not the main reason why I like Whitman - I like him mostly for his thought, his philosophy, his vision, or whatever term you please.


I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey work of the stars,
And the pismire is equally perfect, and a grain of sand, and the egg of the wren,
And the tree-toad is a chef-d'oeuvre for the highest,
And the running blackberry would adorn the parlors of heaven,
And the narrowest hinge in my hand puts to scorn all machinery,
And the cow crunching with depress'd head surpasses any statue,
And a mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels.

I find I incorporate gneiss, coal, long-threaded moss, fruits,rains, esculent roots,
And am stucco'd with quadrupeds and birds all over,
And have distanced what is behind me for good reasons,
But call any thing back again when I desire it.

[Roger Slater]

(I think there's another version of this I like better, but this one is pretty close. Only Whitman could address his readers as "whoever you are" and then proceed to write a glorious love poem to every person who ever lived.)

To You


Whoever you are, I fear you are walking the walks of dreams,
I fear these supposed realities are to melt from under your feet and hands;
Even now, your features, joys, speech, house, trade, manners, troubles, follies, costume, crimes, dissipate away from you,
Your true Soul and Body appear before me,
They stand forth out of affairs—out of commerce, shops, law, science, work, forms, clothes, the house, medicine, print, buying, selling, eating, drinking, suffering, dying.

Whoever you are, now I place my hand upon you, that you be my poem;
I whisper with my lips close to your ear,
I have loved many women and men, but I love none better than you.

O I have been dilatory and dumb;
I should have made my way straight to you long ago;
I should have blabb’d nothing but you, I should have chanted nothing but you.

I will leave all, and come and make the hymns of you;
None have understood you, but I understand you;
None have done justice to you—you have not done justice to yourself;
None but have found you imperfect—I only find no imperfection in you;
None but would subordinate you—I only am he who will never consent to subordinate you;
I only am he who places over you no master, owner, better, God, beyond what waits intrinsically in yourself.

Painters have painted their swarming groups, and the centre figure of all;
From the head of the centre figure spreading a nimbus of gold-color’d light;
But I paint myriads of heads, but paint no head without its nimbus of gold-color’d light;
From my hand, from the brain of every man and woman it streams, effulgently flowing forever.

O I could sing such grandeurs and glories about you!
You have not known what you are—you have slumber’d upon yourself all your life;
Your eye-lids have been the same as closed most of the time;
What you have done returns already in mockeries;
(Your thrift, knowledge, prayers, if they do not return in mockeries, what is their return?)

The mockeries are not you;
Underneath them, and within them, I see you lurk;
I pursue you where none else has pursued you;
Silence, the desk, the flippant expression, the night, the accustom’d routine, if these conceal you from others, or from yourself, they do not conceal you from me;
The shaved face, the unsteady eye, the impure complexion, if these balk others, they do not balk me,
The pert apparel, the deform’d attitude, drunkenness, greed, premature death, all these I part aside.

There is no endowment in man or woman that is not tallied in you;
There is no virtue, no beauty, in man or woman, but as good is in you;
No pluck, no endurance in others, but as good is in you;
No pleasure waiting for others, but an equal pleasure waits for you.

As for me, I give nothing to any one, except I give the like carefully to you;
I sing the songs of the glory of none, not God, sooner than I sing the songs of the glory of you.

Whoever you are! claim your own at any hazard!
These shows of the east and west are tame, compared to you;
These immense meadows—these interminable rivers—you are immense and interminable as they;
These furies, elements, storms, motions of Nature, throes of apparent dissolution—you are he or she who is master or mistress over them,
Master or mistress in your own right over Nature, elements, pain, passion, dissolution.

The hopples fall from your ankles—you find an unfailing sufficiency;
Old or young, male or female, rude, low, rejected by the rest, whatever you are promulges itself;
Through birth, life, death, burial, the means are provided, nothing is scanted;
Through angers, losses, ambition, ignorance, ennui, what you are picks its way.

[Roger Slater]

This Compost


1

SOMETHING startles me where I thought I was safest;
I withdraw from the still woods I loved;
I will not go now on the pastures to walk;
I will not strip the clothes from my body to meet my lover the sea;
I will not touch my flesh to the earth, as to other flesh, to renew me.

O how can it be that the ground does not sicken?
How can you be alive, you growths of spring?
How can you furnish health, you blood of herbs, roots, orchards, grain?
Are they not continually putting distemper’d corpses within you?
Is not every continent work’d over and over with sour dead?

Where have you disposed of their carcasses?
Those drunkards and gluttons of so many generations;
Where have you drawn off all the foul liquid and meat?
I do not see any of it upon you to-day—or perhaps I am deceiv’d;
I will run a furrow with my plough—I will press my spade through the sod, and turn it up underneath;
I am sure I shall expose some of the foul meat.

2

Behold this compost! behold it well!
Perhaps every mite has once form’d part of a sick person—Yet behold!
The grass of spring covers the prairies,
The bean bursts noislessly through the mould in the garden,
The delicate spear of the onion pierces upward,
The apple-buds cluster together on the apple-branches,
The resurrection of the wheat appears with pale visage out of its graves,
The tinge awakes over the willow-tree and the mulberry-tree,
The he-birds carol mornings and evenings, while the she-birds sit on their nests,
The young of poultry break through the hatch’d eggs,
The new-born of animals appear—the calf is dropt from the cow, the colt from the mare,
Out of its little hill faithfully rise the potato’s dark green leaves,
Out of its hill rises the yellow maize-stalk—the lilacs bloom in the door-yards;
The summer growth is innocent and disdainful above all those strata of sour dead.

What chemistry!
That the winds are really not infectious,
That this is no cheat, this transparent green-wash of the sea, which is so amorous after me,
That it is safe to allow it to lick my naked body all over with its tongues,
That it will not endanger me with the fevers that have deposited themselves in it,
That all is clean forever and forever.
That the cool drink from the well tastes so good,
That blackberries are so flavorous and juicy,
That the fruits of the apple-orchard, and of the orange-orchard—that melons, grapes, peaches, plums, will none of them poison me,
That when I recline on the grass I do not catch any disease,
Though probably every spear of grass rises out of what was once a catching disease.

3

Now I am terrified at the Earth! it is that calm and patient,
It grows such sweet things out of such corruptions,
It turns harmless and stainless on its axis, with such endless successions of diseas’d corpses,
It distils such exquisite winds out of such infused fetor,
It renews with such unwitting looks, its prodigal, annual, sumptuous crops,
It gives such divine materials to men, and accepts such leavings from them at last.

[Richard Wakefield]

I like Whitman even when he's goofy and excessive and utterly full of himself. His refusal to sort and rank things is part of his power, part of his point: the multitudes he contains are all lovely and luscious. I can't help believing, at least while I'm reading him (especially aloud, very loud) that he accomplished what he set to do, which was to embody America, complete with its glory and its sordidness and all its inherent contradictions. Insofar as the American experience is one version of the larger human experience, he is universal.
Of course he inspired a lot of bad imitators, including lots of people who have never read him but only other imitators. Maybe the best way for a would-be poet to cope with Whitman is to reject him completely as a model.
Richard

[Gregory Dowling]

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