Poets’ Roundtable
Welcome
Ed will not be here today.
I seem to be missing my copy of The Language Poets Use by Winnifred Nowottny. This is one of my bibles and is apparently no longer in my library. If you have it, bring it back or continue using it; let me know.
News and Jabber
Magazine | August 26, 2019, Issue
Walt Whitman Isn’t America’s Greatest Poet
By Sarah Ruden
August 8, 2019 11:15 AM
Walt Whitman in Brooklyn, N.Y., September 1872 (New York Public Library)
He’s more the father of empty celebrity than of the Democratic spirit
In its May issue, The Atlantic published what may be a new acme (or nadir) of literary hagiography, “Walt Whitman’s Guide to a Thriving Democracy.” The article, by Mark Edmundson, is one of some quite vigorously spurting celebrations to mark the 200th anniversary of the poet’s birth. But Edmundson goes so far as to anoint Whitman America’s greatest poet, necessary for the country to “discover its spirit” after the Founders shaped its mind.
I fumed and fumed. Whitman is, factually, the poet whom ordinary Americans most reviled (inasmuch as they noticed him) in the days when the genre was democracy’s main artistic expression, and ignored with the most determination thereafter. One morning I even woke with the paranoid conviction that Edmundson had made his claims largely without reference to Whitman’s actual poetry.
But in looking back at the article, I found plenty of quotations: the bard delighting to be outdoors in various settings, enjoying fellatio (presumably indoors), contemplating with bliss his personal bliss over American equality, dazzled by the variety of the country’s activities: the carpenter, pilot, and printer ratcheting in alongside the lunatic being locked up and the “quadroon” girl being sold in a slave market. (He himself didn’t much like activity as such — but no matter; he had a compulsion to brazen out what he couldn’t rationally defend: He not only didn’t deny having sex with his tenant’s teenaged son, for example, but he also posed with the boy for a photo in the style of married couples’ portraits.)
But my delusion wasn’t without cause; clearly, the quotations of poetry had impressed me even less than the article writer’s own prose in the same vague and hyperbolic style, so I had simply forgotten them. Whitman’s writing is everything and nothing, a wind storm of assertion indiscernible in its parts and knowable mainly through the damage it leaves behind — in his case, to literary culture, whose essence is memory.
I’m not going to inveigh here against free verse and the relative difficulty with which its words register in the brain. In the right hands, free verse, like good prose rhetoric, is more piercingly memorable than formal verse with its sound maps, because to succeed without those requires a resounding eloquence, on the order of Stephen Spender’s “I think continually of those who were truly great,” or Robert Lowell’s “My eyes have seen what my hand did,” or Sylvia Plath’s “Her bare / Feet seem to be saying: / We have come so far, it is over.”
I have done my dutiful reading of Whitman, the American intelligentsia’s spoiled darling since the time Emerson, his champion, was a leading tastemaker, and I can remember practically nothing. If he is the nation’s greatest poet, it’s odd that he never seems to be quoted spontaneously, for the sheer powerful pleasure of it or to make an urgent point. His (likely) best-known statement, that he contradicts himself, but so what, because he “contain[s] multitudes,” has as bad a natural taste right now as it did in his era, that of the breakdown of North–South relations, the Civil War, and Reconstruction. The nation can’t operate like that, but has to arrive at a workable version of truth, one certified by its persuasiveness and beauty in prevailing memory.
Among the most popular contemporary poets, Edgar Allan Poe, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, and John Greenleaf Whittier, all but Poe (a southerner) were committed abolitionists — Whittier so committed that he called his signature on a seminal anti-slavery petition the most important thing he ever wrote. Whitman was a Free Soil man and did pay a price professionally, but the Free Soil movement was comparatively narrow and self-interested, deploring in particular the competition slaves created for the working class, which both was Whitman’s background and contained the human scenery he found most delicious: toiling young men.
He was, with vulgarity and explicitness (“baboons,” “wild brutes”) unusual in a man of letters, even in that era, a racist. Worse, he was a proto-fascist, confident that inferior peoples would be eliminated by “the law of races, history, what-not.”
Granted, he served devotedly as a comforter and factotum for the wounded in the Civil War, but his vision — that is not a lofty word in his case — of the war is dispiriting: panoramas of weird shallowness and simplicity, such as young men marching and gazing up at flags. The clunkiest popular songs took more account of what was happening, in its elements: duty, love, friendship, hatred, rage, fear, pride, piety, grief, hope, idealism, pity, longing.
Hence there seems to be no possibility for special pleading about his shortcomings as a writer. He plainly never experienced the imaginative, transcendent commonality that he never stops gushing about. He could not attach his mind to what didn’t feed his own intimate pleasures, desires, and ambitions. He effectively had no imagination, could not narrate, could not wield metaphor well, could not ever see himself with instructive objectivity or allow others to enlarge his view of the world.
He accordingly contributed next to nothing to the healing and growth of culture in the post–Civil War era. It was Whittier’s “Barefoot Boy,” “Barbara Frietchie,” and Snow-Bound, Longfellow’s Song of Hiawatha and Evangeline, and other nostalgic, patriotic, romantic, and moralistic poems that were read at firesides into the opening West and incorporated into readers for primary schools. Leaves of Grass would have fallen away had not professors like Mark Edmundson championed it.
During the 1970s, I met a woman who was over a hundred but could still recite a poem in which a bird laments to a child about her dead young, which he has “destroyed.” It reminded me of an incident that was formative for the first great American anti-slavery campaigner and defender of Native American rights, the Quaker John Woolman (1720–1772): As a boy, he killed a mother bird, realized what his cruelty meant, and killed the chicks to spare them a prolonged death by starvation. Through the activities and writings that his unforgettable impression of responsibility gave rise to in time, his inner revelation became a worthy part of the American narrative.
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Notice the contrast with Whitman’s take on a similar incident, which became the basis for “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.” The language of the poem is in fact resplendent. In one scene, a child observes a pair of nesting thrushes; later, after the female disappears, he hears the male’s song of loss. The poem is “about” Lincoln’s assassination, but, with brutal tastelessness, swoons into the speaker’s ecstasy in anticipating his own death, ecstasy like a sexual transport or a privileged intoxication. The nation’s tragedy is not considered, except briefly in the form of mass funerary spectacle. I suspect that Whitman liked crowds of humanity, and stereotyped exemplars of it, for the same reason propagandists do: The inconvenient compassion and compunction normally felt for individuals did not intrude.
Whitman, whose professional self-promotion was pretty much as relentless as his literary self-glorification — the two are almost indistinguishable — looks to me less like the father of the American spirit than the father of empty American celebrity: the Kardashians, mommy bloggers, the “creative writing” and identity-study industries, the whole mutually trampling stampede of ineffable individual specialness. Whitman, as far as he could, did not so much foster democratic mores as undermine them. Democratic tolerance, goodwill, and constructive energy struggle in the face of the Whitman dream: a publicly extolled sinecure of the private self.
This article appears as “Song for Himself” in the August 26, 2019, print edition of
National Review.
And, so you can consider him for yourself, here is the full text of “When lilacs last round the dooryard bloomed”
When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d
1
When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d,
And the great star early droop’d in the western sky in the night,
I mourn’d, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.
Ever-returning spring, trinity sure to me you bring,
Lilac blooming perennial and drooping star in the west,
And thought of him I love.
2
O powerful western fallen star!
O shades of night—O moody, tearful night!
O great star disappear’d—O the black murk that hides the star!
O cruel hands that hold me powerless—O helpless soul of me!
O harsh surrounding cloud that will not free my soul.
3
In the dooryard fronting an old farm-house near the white-wash’d palings,
Stands the lilac-bush tall-growing with heart-shaped leaves of rich green,
With many a pointed blossom rising delicate, with the perfume strong I love,
With every leaf a miracle—and from this bush in the dooryard,
With delicate-color’d blossoms and heart-shaped leaves of rich green,
A sprig with its flower I break.
4
In the swamp in secluded recesses,
A shy and hidden bird is warbling a song.
Solitary the thrush,
The hermit withdrawn to himself, avoiding the settlements,
Sings by himself a song.
Song of the bleeding throat,
Death’s outlet song of life, (for well dear brother I know,
If thou wast not granted to sing thou would’st surely die.)
5
Over the breast of the spring, the land, amid cities,
Amid lanes and through old woods, where lately the violets peep’d from the ground, spotting the gray debris,
Amid the grass in the fields each side of the lanes, passing the endless grass,
Passing the yellow-spear’d wheat, every grain from its shroud in the dark-brown fields uprisen,
Passing the apple-tree blows of white and pink in the orchards,
Carrying a corpse to where it shall rest in the grave,
Night and day journeys a coffin.
6
Coffin that passes through lanes and streets,
Through day and night with the great cloud darkening the land,
With the pomp of the inloop’d flags with the cities draped in black,
With the show of the States themselves as of crape-veil’d women standing,
With processions long and winding and the flambeaus of the night,
With the countless torches lit, with the silent sea of faces and the unbared heads,
With the waiting depot, the arriving coffin, and the sombre faces,
With dirges through the night, with the thousand voices rising strong and solemn,
With all the mournful voices of the dirges pour’d around the coffin,
The dim-lit churches and the shuddering organs—where amid these you journey,
With the tolling tolling bells’ perpetual clang,
Here, coffin that slowly passes,
I give you my sprig of lilac.
7
(Nor for you, for one alone,
Blossoms and branches green to coffins all I bring,
For fresh as the morning, thus would I chant a song for you O sane and sacred death.
All over bouquets of roses,
O death, I cover you over with roses and early lilies,
But mostly and now the lilac that blooms the first,
Copious I break, I break the sprigs from the bushes,
With loaded arms I come, pouring for you,
For you and the coffins all of you O death.)
8
O western orb sailing the heaven,
Now I know what you must have meant as a month since I walk’d,
As I walk’d in silence the transparent shadowy night,
As I saw you had something to tell as you bent to me night after night,
As you droop’d from the sky low down as if to my side, (while the other stars all look’d on,)
As we wander’d together the solemn night, (for something I know not what kept me from sleep,)
As the night advanced, and I saw on the rim of the west how full you were of woe,
As I stood on the rising ground in the breeze in the cool transparent night,
As I watch’d where you pass’d and was lost in the netherward black of the night,
As my soul in its trouble dissatisfied sank, as where you sad orb,
Concluded, dropt in the night, and was gone.
9
Sing on there in the swamp,
O singer bashful and tender, I hear your notes, I hear your call,
I hear, I come presently, I understand you,
But a moment I linger, for the lustrous star has detain’d me,
The star my departing comrade holds and detains me.
10
O how shall I warble myself for the dead one there I loved?
And how shall I deck my song for the large sweet soul that has gone?
And what shall my perfume be for the grave of him I love?
Sea-winds blown from east and west,
Blown from the Eastern sea and blown from the Western sea, till there on the prairies meeting,
These and with these and the breath of my chant,
I’ll perfume the grave of him I love.
11
O what shall I hang on the chamber walls?
And what shall the pictures be that I hang on the walls,
To adorn the burial-house of him I love?
Pictures of growing spring and farms and homes,
With the Fourth-month eve at sundown, and the gray smoke lucid and bright,
With floods of the yellow gold of the gorgeous, indolent, sinking sun, burning, expanding the air,
With the fresh sweet herbage under foot, and the pale green leaves of the trees prolific,
In the distance the flowing glaze, the breast of the river, with a wind-dapple here and there,
With ranging hills on the banks, with many a line against the sky, and shadows,
And the city at hand with dwellings so dense, and stacks of chimneys,
And all the scenes of life and the workshops, and the workmen homeward returning.
12
Lo, body and soul—this land,
My own Manhattan with spires, and the sparkling and hurrying tides, and the ships,
The varied and ample land, the South and the North in the light, Ohio’s shores and flashing Missouri,
And ever the far-spreading prairies cover’d with grass and corn.
Lo, the most excellent sun so calm and haughty,
The violet and purple morn with just-felt breezes,
The gentle soft-born measureless light,
The miracle spreading bathing all, the fulfill’d noon,
The coming eve delicious, the welcome night and the stars,
Over my cities shining all, enveloping man and land.
13
Sing on, sing on you gray-brown bird,
Sing from the swamps, the recesses, pour your chant from the bushes,
Limitless out of the dusk, out of the cedars and pines.
Sing on dearest brother, warble your reedy song,
Loud human song, with voice of uttermost woe.
O liquid and free and tender!
O wild and loose to my soul—O wondrous singer!
You only I hear—yet the star holds me, (but will soon depart,)
Yet the lilac with mastering odor holds me.
14
Now while I sat in the day and look’d forth,
In the close of the day with its light and the fields of spring, and the farmers preparing their crops,
In the large unconscious scenery of my land with its lakes and forests,
In the heavenly aerial beauty, (after the perturb’d winds and the storms,)
Under the arching heavens of the afternoon swift passing, and the voices of children and women,
The many-moving sea-tides, and I saw the ships how they sail’d,
And the summer approaching with richness, and the fields all busy with labor,
And the infinite separate houses, how they all went on, each with its meals and minutia of daily usages,
And the streets how their throbbings throbb’d, and the cities pent—lo, then and there,
Falling upon them all and among them all, enveloping me with the rest,
Appear’d the cloud, appear’d the long black trail,
And I knew death, its thought, and the sacred knowledge of death.
Then with the knowledge of death as walking one side of me,
And the thought of death close-walking the other side of me,
And I in the middle as with companions, and as holding the hands of companions,
I fled forth to the hiding receiving night that talks not,
Down to the shores of the water, the path by the swamp in the dimness,
To the solemn shadowy cedars and ghostly pines so still.
And the singer so shy to the rest receiv’d me,
The gray-brown bird I know receiv’d us comrades three,
And he sang the carol of death, and a verse for him I love.
From deep secluded recesses,
From the fragrant cedars and the ghostly pines so still,
Came the carol of the bird.
And the charm of the carol rapt me,
As I held as if by their hands my comrades in the night,
And the voice of my spirit tallied the song of the bird.
Come lovely and soothing death,
Undulate round the world, serenely arriving, arriving,
In the day, in the night, to all, to each,
Sooner or later delicate death.
Prais’d be the fathomless universe,
For life and joy, and for objects and knowledge curious,
And for love, sweet love—but praise! praise! praise!
For the sure-enwinding arms of cool-enfolding death.
Dark mother always gliding near with soft feet,
Have none chanted for thee a chant of fullest welcome?
Then I chant it for thee, I glorify thee above all,
I bring thee a song that when thou must indeed come, come unfalteringly.
Approach strong deliveress,
When it is so, when thou hast taken them I joyously sing the dead,
Lost in the loving floating ocean of thee,
Laved in the flood of thy bliss O death.
From me to thee glad serenades,
Dances for thee I propose saluting thee, adornments and feastings for thee,
And the sights of the open landscape and the high-spread sky are fitting,
And life and the fields, and the huge and thoughtful night.
The night in silence under many a star,
The ocean shore and the husky whispering wave whose voice I know,
And the soul turning to thee O vast and well-veil’d death,
And the body gratefully nestling close to thee.
Over the tree-tops I float thee a song,
Over the rising and sinking waves, over the myriad fields and the prairies wide,
Over the dense-pack’d cities all and the teeming wharves and ways,
I float this carol with joy, with joy to thee O death.
15
To the tally of my soul,
Loud and strong kept up the gray-brown bird,
With pure deliberate notes spreading filling the night.
Loud in the pines and cedars dim,
Clear in the freshness moist and the swamp-perfume,
And I with my comrades there in the night.
While my sight that was bound in my eyes unclosed,
As to long panoramas of visions.
And I saw askant the armies,
I saw as in noiseless dreams hundreds of battle-flags,
Borne through the smoke of the battles and pierc’d with missiles I saw them,
And carried hither and yon through the smoke, and torn and bloody,
And at last but a few shreds left on the staffs, (and all in silence,)
And the staffs all splinter’d and broken.
I saw battle-corpses, myriads of them,
And the white skeletons of young men, I saw them,
I saw the debris and debris of all the slain soldiers of the war,
But I saw they were not as was thought,
They themselves were fully at rest, they suffer’d not,
The living remain’d and suffer’d, the mother suffer’d,
And the wife and the child and the musing comrade suffer’d,
And the armies that remain’d suffer’d.
16
Passing the visions, passing the night,
Passing, unloosing the hold of my comrades’ hands,
Passing the song of the hermit bird and the tallying song of my soul,
Victorious song, death’s outlet song, yet varying ever-altering song,
As low and wailing, yet clear the notes, rising and falling, flooding the night,
Sadly sinking and fainting, as warning and warning, and yet again bursting with joy,
Covering the earth and filling the spread of the heaven,
As that powerful psalm in the night I heard from recesses,
Passing, I leave thee lilac with heart-shaped leaves,
I leave thee there in the door-yard, blooming, returning with spring.
I cease from my song for thee,
From my gaze on thee in the west, fronting the west, communing with thee,
O comrade lustrous with silver face in the night.
Yet each to keep and all, retrievements out of the night,
The song, the wondrous chant of the gray-brown bird,
And the tallying chant, the echo arous’d in my soul,
With the lustrous and drooping star with the countenance full of woe,
With the holders holding my hand nearing the call of the bird,
Comrades mine and I in the midst, and their memory ever to keep, for the dead I loved so well,
For the sweetest, wisest soul of all my days and lands—and this for his dear sake,
Lilac and star and bird twined with the chant of my soul,
There in the fragrant pines and the cedars dusk and dim
The Current Assignment
The current assignment is to write a poem about bread. In know Gerard and Ed have been writing. I wrote a couple which I don’t think I put in an email.
The Next Assignment
The next assignment is to write a poem about what you want to be buried with.
Other Jabber
