[Christopher Mulrooney]

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).]

[RCL]

Santayana is dead wrong. I can think of at least six governing motives in "Song of Myself" alone. The Adamic persona, borrowed from Emerson, is his most purposeful.

------------------
Ralph

[nyctom]

What Ralph said. It certainly was good publicity--as Whitman himself knew. But dead wrong.

[Tim Murphy]

In the Kafkaesque fragment quoted by Christopher there are eight "I, me, my's" in three lines. A barbaric yawper with a gigantic ego. A ruinous influence on generations of his successors. I couldn't agree more with Santayana. Give me Emily any day.

[Christopher Mulrooney]

Yes, almost the first thing they teach you in Fourth Grade Creative Writing is "mind your I's." On the other hand, Borges famously analyzed that I of Whitman (his mind's eye, as it were) and pronounced it W.W.'s finest invention.

Then all the realtors,
Pickpockets, salesmen, and the actors performing
Official scenarios,
Turned a deaf ear, for they had contracted American dreams.

But the man who keeps a store on a lonely road,
And the housewife who knows she's dumb,
And the earth, are relieved.

All that grave weight of America
Cancelled! Like Greece and Rome.
The future in ruins!
The castles, the prisons, the cathedrals
Unbuilding, and roses
Blossoming from the stones that are not there...

Some lines from "Walt Whitman at Bear Mountain" by Louis Simpson, by way of saying Whitman was no mere composer of pretty verses, either.

The "barbaric yawp" should have told Santayana he was barking up the wrong tree. It has been suggested to me, however, that I have missed somewhere the subtlety in his backhanded praise.

Italian Music in Dakota
("The Seventeenth—the finest Regimental Band I ever heard.")

Through the soft evening air enwinding all,
Rocks, woods, fort, cannon, pacing sentries, endless wilds,
In dulcet streams, in flutes' and cornets' notes,
Electric, pensive, turbulent, artificial,
(Yet strangely fitting even here, meanings unkown before,
Subtler than ever, more harmony, as if born here, related here,
Not to the city's fresco'd rooms, not to the audience of the opera
house,
Sounds, echoes, wandering strains, as really here at home,
Somnambula's innocent love, trios with Norma's anguish,
And thy ecstatic chorus Poliuto;)
Ray'd in the limpid yellow slanting sundown,
Music, Italian music in Dakota.

While Nature, sovereign of this gnarl'd realm,
Lurking in hidden barbaric grim recesses,
Acknowledging rapport however far remov'd,
(As some old root or soil of earth its last-born flower or fruit,)
Listens well pleas'd.



[This message has been edited by Christopher Mulrooney (edited December 15, 2001).]