[Alder Ellis]

Gregory: "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”?"

I read the whole book, doggedly, some years ago, so yeah, I must have read those guys. I don't remember them specifically, but still....

as one who has, to the best of his ability, read every poem by Whitman, I have to say -- you'd have to pay me good money to read every poem by Longfellow.

Here's a short late poem from Whitman:

A Clear Midnight

This is thy hour O soul, thy free flight into the wordless,
Away from books, away from art, the day erased, the lesson done.
Thee fully forth emerging, silent, gazing, pondering the themes thou lovest best,
Night, sleep, death and the stars.

[Gregory Dowling]

AE,

Thanks for that late poem, which I didn't know. And my compliments on your doggedness.

What I really meant with my posting was that we should be able to read both Whitman and Longfellow. But somehow when Whitman was elevated into the canon, it seemed it could only be done by kicking out Longfellow - which Whitman himself would have thought absurd. I suppose it's all part of that polarisation that is typical in American criticism and scholarship: all those divisions between palefaces and redskins, squares and beats, the cooked and the raw... And it probably goes back to Emerson's distinction between the party of memory and the party of hope. But there's no reason why one shouldn't be able to read Whitman in the morning and Longfellow in the afternoon.

Of course, what I said about the excesses of some of Whitman's minor poetry can be said about many major poets; I don't think there's anyone now who reads Wordsworth's Ecclestiastic Sonnets - which doesn't make “Michael” or “The Solitary Reaper” any less wonderful as poems.

Longfellow, obviously, is nowhere as original or stirring as Whitman; he doesn't reach those heights. However, speaking personally, I find his minor works more entertaining than Whitman's. He is, after all, always a superb craftsman, which no-one would ever claim for Whitman. (I remember that Auden said he was bored stiff by Shelley but delighted in every single poem by Wiliam Barnes, but nonetheless he knew that Shelley was a major poet and Barnes a minor one.)

I really do suggest you give Longfellow a try, even without payment; if you know him only by the usual anthology pieces (“A Psalm of Life”, “The Building of the Ship” etc.), you really don't know the best of him. He is a wonderful narrative poet and deserves to be known as such. I'm prepared to bet that unless you have some prejudice against narrative poetry, you couldn't fail to enjoy most of the works in “Tales from a Wayside Inn”, like “The Saga of King Olaf”, “The Birds of Killingworth”, The Monk of Casal-Maggiore”...

But let me end with a tribute to Whitman, which is what this thread is about, after all:

“My whole youth was filled, as with a sunrise, with the sanguine glow of Walt Whitman. He seemed to me something like a crowd turned to a giant, or like Adam the First Man. ... I did not care about whether his unmetrical poetry were a wise form or no, any more than whether a true Gospel of Jesus were scrawled on parchment or stone. ... What I saluted was a new equality, which was not a dull levelling but an enthusiastic lifting; a shouting exultation in the mere fact that men were men. Real men were greater than unreal gods; and each remained as mystic and majestic as a god, while he became as frank and as comforting as a comrade. The point can be put most compactly in one of Whitman's own phrases; he says somewhere that old artists painted crowds, in which one head a nimbus of gold-coloured light; 'but I paint hundred of heads, but paint no head without its nimbus of gold-coloured light.' “
G. K. Chesterton.


Gregory

[Mark Allinson]

Song of Myself (Part 26)


Now I will do nothing but listen,
To accrue what I hear into this song, to let sounds contribute toward it.

I hear bravuras of birds, bustle of growing wheat, gossip of flames, clack of sticks cooking my meals,
I hear the sound I love, the sound of the human voice,
I hear all sounds running together, combined, fused or following,
Sounds of the city and sounds out of the city, sounds of the day and night,
Talkative young ones to those that like them, the loud laugh of work-people at their meals,
The angry base of disjointed friendship, the faint tones of the sick,
The judge with hands tight to the desk, his pallid lips pronouncing a death-sentence,
The heave'e'yo of stevedores unlading ships by the wharves, the refrain of the anchor-lifters,
The ring of alarm-bells, the cry of fire, the whirr of swift-streaking engines and hose-carts with premonitory tinkles and color'd lights,
The steam-whistle, the solid roll of the train of approaching cars,
The slow march play'd at the head of the association marching two and two,
(They go to guard some corpse, the flag-tops are draped with black muslin.)

I hear the violoncello, ('tis the young man's heart's complaint,)
I hear the key'd cornet, it glides quickly in through my ears,
It shakes mad-sweet pangs through my belly and breast.

I hear the chorus, it is a grand opera,
Ah this indeed is music - this suits me.

A tenor large and fresh as the creation fills me,
The orbic flex of his mouth is pouring and filling me full.

I hear the train'd soprano (what work with hers is this?)
The orchestra whirls me wider than Uranus flies,
It wrenches such ardors from me I did not know I possess'd them,
It sails me, I dab with bare feet, they are lick'd by the indolent waves,
I am cut by bitter and angry hail, I lose my breath,
Steep'd amid honey'd morphine, my windpipe throttled in fakes of death,
At length let up again to feel the puzzle of puzzles,
And that we call Being.

[Michael Juster]

Well, I've got sharply divided feelings about Whitman. For a period in high school, he was a revelation and my yearbook quotation is from "Song of the Open Road." As time passed, the excesses and the misses became more grating, and I also started to resent the use of his legacy as a way to demean much of the poetry I still love. Of course, for this last charge the man was long dead, so I can't blame him personally...Still, for all the cheap shots I've taken at Whitman and my view that 80% of the work is dreck, he has his moments when he rises to greatness. Since I'm off the formalist resevation a little bit already anyway, I'll also fess up that Creeley has a similar role in my pantheon.
Except for a little bit of "Howl" I still can't stomach Ginsberg, though, even though he may be the most direct descendant of Whitman.

[Roger Slater]

I think maybe Neruda was the greatest poet to be deeply influenced by Whitman.

But Michael, Creeley???? You call yourself a formalist?

[Michael Juster]

It was The Sixties. Things happened...

[Kevin Corbett]

Creely indeed. For shame.

On a side note, I stole the line about Whitman being used as a stick to beat us. I read, I think in the Norton Anthology of something or other, that Robert Bridges said that Eliot used John Donne as a stick with which to beat Milton, and I thought it fit here nicely.

Hmm...Gingsberg...let me see if I can recall any lines...I do remember liking "1001 Fearful Words For Fidel Castro", thinking it was meant to be a joke...I also remember reading that he tried to strip himself naked in front of Congress once...


[This message has been edited by kevincorbett (edited July 04, 2005).]

[J.D. Hughes]

i'm with AE on reading every word of whitman; i'm reading him for the first time now [i tried a few years back and couldn't make it] and enjoying it immensely, though i must admit i probably won't go back and read "Song of the Broad-Axe Again." however, i will go back and read many of the others again. another one of his good ones IMO is Drum-Taps. whitman was able to comment directly on events in his time, as well as speak to ages to come. this may because of the tremendous scope of the civil war in history, but a lot of poets have tried to do the same and failed. i'm not the best versed in the poetry of the period, but the major poets that i have read [longfellow, dickenson] didn't deal with current events so to speak. i agree with mark when he said

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.

but i would add to the list his sense of history and the prescient nature of his writings.

jd

[This message has been edited by J.D. Hughes (edited July 04, 2005).]

[Kevin Corbett]

I think I failed to notice that comment you quoted, because I am, in many ways, quite the opposite: I really dislike Whitman's philosophy of life, but I can appreciate his stylistic innovations.

[Daniel Pereira]

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