I do not know Santayana well enough to play the devil's advocate with him, rather I chanced upon this document and was surprised by its argument, which reminds me of an interview given by Christopher Hogwood some years ago to an L.A. Philharmonic announcer, who cited Ralph Vaughan Williams' remark on Stravinsky, "Too many wrong notes," to which Hogwood did not reply, in Stravinsky's words, "Wrong notes for him, right notes for me," and in that spirit I offer this extract from "The Poetry of Barbarism" (the whole essay, or nearly, may be read here ).
It was the singularity of his literary form—the challenge it threw to the conventions of verse and of language—that first gave Whitman notoriety: but this notoriety has become fame, because those incapacities and solecisms which glare at us from his pages are only the obverse of a profound inspiration and of a genuine courage. Even the idiosyncrasies of his style have a side which is not mere peversity or affectation; the order of his words, the procession of his images, reproduce the method of a rich, spontaneous, absolutely lazy fancy. In most poets such a natural order is modified by various governing motives—the thought, the metrical form, the echo of other poems in the memory. By Walt Whitman these conventional influences are resolutely banished. We find the swarms of men and objects rendered as they might strike the retina in a sort of waking dream. It is the most sincere possible confession of the lowest—I mean the most primitive—type of perception. All ancient poets are sophisticated in comparison and give proof of longer intellectual and moral training. Walt Whitman has gone back to the innocent style of Adam, when the animals filed before him one by one and he called each of them by its name.
Whitmanesque means gargantuan or, as here, "barbarian," but I wonder how many have noticed the intricate craftsmanship of his verse, which can be seen even in this Kafkaesque poem rejected from Leaves of Grass.
Not My Enemies Ever Invade Me
Not my enemies ever invade me—no harm to my pride from them I fear;
But the lovers I recklessly love—lo! how they master me!
Lo! me, ever open and helpless, bereft of my strength!
Utterly abject, grovelling on the ground before them.
Santayana also discusses Browning, and says, "Both poets had powerful imaginations, but the type of their imaginations was low." It seems to me that, outside his field, Santayana is merely an æsthete, but what is it Borges says about him, somewhere?
[This message has been edited by Christopher Mulrooney (edited December 02, 2001).]
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