mamaist

an intro to Walt Whitman & human po(e)tentialities

                                                      I

When a new political or cultural figure arrives on the scene in the U.S., the mass media immediately sets out to ‘define’ him or her. Who is he? What is her life story? A case in point is Barack Obama. The day after his nomination as the Democratic Party presidential nominee, the New York Times headline read: “Defining Barack Obama.” No time was wasted in seeking to establish a narrative that would ‘fix’ who this unknown person was in our minds, if not in our lives. After all, we can rest easier once we have someone or something pegged, labeled, clearly ‘defined.’ The boundaries are set, the life-story emerges, the narrative in place. It’s easy to see where the story is going. All well and good, and easily digested, and we enjoy the illusion of moving on.

      But what of someone (anyone, Barack Obama included) who is not so easily ‘defined’? Whose complex identity makes for a challenge to our lazy assumptions? Nineteenth century American poet Walt Whitman was and to this day remains just such a challenge to readers who would define the man and his poetry. The process of ‘defining,’ according to Webster’s New World Dictionary, means “to determine or set down the boundaries of,” “to determine the nature of,” and “to state the meaning or meanings of” something. Whitman, however, who has been called variously the pioneer of ‘free-verse’, the father of modern American poetry, and the ‘Good Grey Poet,’ resists easy definition. How would we ‘define’ him as a poet? Who is Walt Whitman?

                                               II

Walt Whitman was born Walter Whitman, Jr. on May 31, 1819 in the village of West Hills, near Huntington, Long Island. He was the second of nine children born to Walter and Louisa Whitman, who were descendants of landowners and farmers. They had fallen on hard economic times and, with the then-young Walt, moved their family to Brooklyn, New York, still a small town of 7,000 people. During Whitman’s childhood in Brooklyn, the city would grow enormously in population, as well as figure prominently in the poet-to-be’s development, but later in life as a poet he would always return to his roots in the Long Island seashore.

      After a brief formal education, at the age of eleven Whitman began a series of jobs, first as an office boy, then as apprentice printer, and eventually as newspaper editor and reporter, that would continue shaping his outlook and ambitions throughout his life. A five-year stint as a schoolteacher back in Long Island convinced him to return to New York City, where he wrote a temperance novel that sold well, published conventional verse in leading literary journals, joined the fray of presidential political electioneering and campaigning, and wrote fiery newspaper editorials. Whitman’s cosmopolitan education also consisted of attending the theater (lots of Shakespeare), listening to orators of his day delivering memorable speeches and lectures-- including those of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Francis Wright, and Elias Hicks-- and frequenting the opera, where he would go to be transformed, as he described it, by the voices of the leading singers from Europe. This was a man who, in rising above the limits of his working-class origins, had set a course for himself of self-education and self-improvement that would last his whole life long.  He read enthusiastically the novels of Sir Walter Scott, the essays of New England transcendentalist Emerson, and the dramas of Shakespeare, but when mid-way through his life, sometime in his early thirties, Whitman began pouring his creative energies not into political journalism, nor into sensationalist temperance fiction but into radical ‘free verse’ poetry, he would wear his learning lightly and work to create a ‘transparent’ poetic style absent literary allusion and rooted in everyday American speech. Candor and simplicity were to be his compass points for the new direction his writing would take.

      In this period of his life Whitman traveled with his younger brother Jeff to New Orleans where, for three months, he helped edit a newspaper and experienced first-hand the institution of slavery that was at the center of growing divisions in American society. He saw public slave auctions in the southern port city which would later not only inform his anti-slavery views but also provide imagery born out of the originating paradox—a democratic republic that permitted slavery—which as poet he would seek to resolve in poetry written in notebooks he carried with him at the time:

       I am the poet of slaves,

          And of the masters of slaves

       …

       I am the poet of the body

       And I am the poet of the soul

      With these tentative new lines of verse Whitman begins to discover his own voice and poetic persona and, in effect, reinvents himself to become the poet, as he says, of both masters and slaves, the body and the soul. He understood the threat to democracy that slavery posed, but rather than decry and denounce slavery’s evils—like the pro-abolitionist writers Emerson and Thoreau, among others-- he would attempt to hold these tensions in balance and preserve the national union by sheer force of a new, highly charged poetic language. It was to be an experiment he came to call Leaves of Grass.

                                                 III

First printed in 1855, Leaves of Grass contained twelve poems. But such untamed poems they are! Like a dam bursting, like a thunderstorm breaking, like a wall coming down, the energy released in the first poem of the series, later titled ‘Song of Myself,’ marks the dramatic appearance on the world stage of an authentic, self-assured American voice:

          I Celebrate myself

          And what I assume you shall assume

          For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

      Later divided into fifty-two sections to make its unorthodox, long, loose-flowing lines more readable, ‘Song of Myself’ still stands today as arguably the greatest single poem written in modern times. If read aloud, it would take three hours. As a poem and work of art, it is inexhaustible. It introduces the theme of self-invention, of a new identity modeled for future Americans that reverberates far beyond the borders of the so-called New World. This poem, along with the other eleven poems published in the first edition, was written at a critical time in America’s history, when it was struggling to define its culture and identity against outdated European models. It was on the one hand a declaration of poetic independence, as many critics have observed. On the other hand it can also be viewed as a declaration of inter-dependence. For Whitman reaches out to the rest of the world, he recognizes America’s role as inseparable from, as part and parcel with, nations and traditions that have contributed to the making of America to the present day. Such a poem, such a book, as poet William Carlos Williams remarked, comes along once in a thousand years.  

      Like its poet, Leaves of Grass underwent many changes in the years that followed. Nine editions in all would be published, the final ‘Death-Bed’ edition appearing the year the poet died, in 1892. The extensive revisions and re-workings of the book reveal a restless artist on a unique spiritual journey, a poet not content to have his life’s work ‘defined’ as literary performance only. The book, published when the poet was 36 years old and expanded to almost 400 poems by the final edition, had a life of its own. The poet himself, a lifelong bachelor, viewed his poems as his “children,” and indeed he devoted himself to the production, promotion, and reception of his “children” during the remaining thirty-six years of his life.

      Still, exploring Whitman’s life and times-- the young, vital, turbulent era of nineteenth century America and the crisis of union and democracy to which he bore witness and famously wrote about—that form the underpinning of his poetry, is just a beginning. Situating Whitman historically, and in America’s literary tradition, is to relate Whitman’s life to the life of America in the nineteenth century, allowing one to consider a complex range of issues—literary, political, economic, sexual, social, racial—that continues to impact American (and perhaps global) society in the 21^st century.  In fact, so closely did Whitman identify his own life with that of his beloved America that to understand Whitman is, in an important way, to understand what makes America what it is, or how it has imagined (and continues to imagine) itself to be.

                                                   IV

Today, we are living in a world where stars exploding 7.5 billion light years away can, in their bright gamma-ray burst afterglows, be detected and photographed by satellites in space; where the entire human DNA genome has been successfully sequenced; where swarms of small sci-fi-like robot prototypes can physically self-assemble, even self-heal when damaged; where spacewalks by humans are almost a daily occurrence and shuttle vehicles in outer space offer ‘live’ streams of our planet Earth below; where geothermal energy sources are being tapped by multinationals… You get the picture.  How does the long-departed, 19^th century Walt Whitman fit into it, outside historical reality? Or perhaps, in light of the poetic imagination that Whitman expresses, it is better to ask: How does all this activity in the outer world keep our inner demons at bay?

      Much of the human po(e)tential movement in the 21^st century comes straight out of the 19^th century New England Transcendentalists, including Emerson, Thoreau, Alcott and, yes, (though he did not consider himself a ‘transcendentalist’) Whitman. Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass is a majestic, magical book which for its time unmuzzled the voice of the dialogue between body and soul that brings about personal transformation. This journey of the body in love with soul (the journey ‘back to nature’, some have called it) is the primal story and the traditional source of society’s energy. Like the prodigal son’s return, it is the ultimate ‘comeback.’ From this view, Freud’s prison of unconscious instinct is not pitted against human culture but instead gives rise to it. (After all, is sleep inherently evil? Is dreaming intrinsically sinful? From Whitman’s view, how can the unconscious be anything but pure and sanctified as the source of our conscious lives?)

      The culture of contemporary America, indeed of the West and all advanced technological societies including Japan, is now at a threshold. The new century is long underway. How can the dead-end at which we find ourselves be turned into, as Walt Whitman once called it, an ‘open road’? (Whitman’s open road can be seen as, among other things, his metaphor for the open-ended process of self-transformation.) What forms, cultural and artistic, are awaiting their expression in the coming generations nobody, of course, can predict. But hints and suggestions can come to us by way of the poets.                       

                                                  V

Poets are among a culture’s pathfinders—they are pioneers of the spirit-- and it is to them we go for hints at the new directions. The poet situates herself at a threshold across which new vistas can be seen. Writing poetry, as well as reading poetry, matters because words matter. Words—and certain poems—can not only be magical, they can be transforming.

      Poets can offer us visions of where we are going, not only where we have been. (Certain poets uncannily have their pulse on the future, although I agree with critic William Irwin Thompson who said, “We back into an innovation by holding on to the past.” --Imaginary Landscapes p. 145) Poets who thrive when dancing at the edges of culture can help us re-imagine our changing relationship to environments, both inner and outer, without seeking to evade history’s manufacture of death—its packaging of lives to be sold as merchandise for public consumption—but rather by seeking a way, via the sources of being, out of the impasse, out of the dead-end towards new openings onto reality, onto eternity.

      An open, democratic persona, as Whitman’s poetry demonstrates, welcomes all walks of life, but not without periodic chaos and collapse—the psychological crises Whitman also writes about, that place where, just when things seem to be coming together, they come apart. (This is modernist territory. We have learned how to navigate it practically on auto-pilot.) Somewhere in that gap between the coming together and the coming apart is found, however, what Whitman called our “highest poetic nature” --the “great poet” in us which Whitman wrote about and that was dramatically awakened in him in mid-life.

      Poets can show us, perhaps, how to live in the gap, open to process as well as to precepts, open to the process of creation itself. For any such claim to definitively filling in the gaps, like fundamentalism, or extremism, or even tradition (when fossilized) is suspect, if not life-denying. We must instead learn to live with loss and, with luck, transfigure it, as poets attempt to do, into something precious and found.  For good poetry—whatever else it is or does--transforms the language of private, canned ritual into a public, living communion (since, as someone once said, we are not deep enough on our own.)   

      But the deep awakening experience can be disorienting before we can begin the work of reorienting ourselves, before the dead-end can be turned into a ‘living end’. In the necessary chaos “the pieces that come together,” as poet Muriel Rukeyser has said, “become a self, and sing.” Let us be prepared, then—in being lost-- for whatever we find.

                                                 VI

For who was it that said: ‘Don’t rebuild. Reimagine.’? This, in any event, is what the poet Walt Whitman does. Not to rewrite history as a ‘new story’, but to view the story as being more than one of conflict and pain, but as one of reconciliation and pleasure also.

      A poet like Whitman, who glories in the physical universe in all its varied forms, accepts that what meets the inner eye is of no less value and importance than what meets the outer ‘I’. Here at the crossroads where inner and outer meet, where searching is finding, we ourselves are literally ‘living the lore’ and ‘defining’ ourselves (or shrugging off definitions) in the process. The cultural codes that bind and rule our behavior can, it turns out, be re-mixed, re-tuned to those parallel universes that have yet to be discovered and may well be still light years beyond our understanding. Poems, in other words, can be read as sacred texts because they can tell us who we are becoming; they can serve as reminders that an authentically spiritual life is possible.

      In this light a poem is a sacred story that, in connecting psyche and cosmos, can offer core lessons of unfolding discovery in each of us. For it is here at the site of the poem as a work of art and spirit —where the dynamic whole is greater than the sum of its parts—that we may be reminded, in  Whitman’s words, “That we all labor together transmitting the same charge and succession”… And that at the threshold of the text the perpetual re-gathering out of the depths, in a cycle of losses and gains, binds poet and reader together to testify that poetry is living communion.

                                               VII

Who, indeed, is Walt Whitman, then, this poet who by turns invents himself and defines himself through an expansive, diverse, inclusive view of self and otherness? There’s Whitman the secular priest who says: “I ordain myself loos’d of all limits.” There’s Whitman the advocate who says that the duty of the poet is to “cheer up slaves and horrify despots.” There’s Whitman the teacher who confides: “He most honors my style who learns under it to destroy the teacher.” There’s Whitman the orator who declaims: “I do not talk of the beginning or the end.” There’s Whitman the soldier who reminisces: “I am an old artillerist, I tell of my fort’s bombardment,/ I am there again.” There’s Whitman the rebel who incites: “My call is the call of battle, I nourish active rebellion.” There’s Whitman the nurse who reassures: “I am he bringing help for the sick as they pant on their backs.” There’s Whitman the laborer who identifies with all workers: “You workwomen and workmen of these States having your own strong and divine life.” There’s Whitman the comm- unicator who discloses his agenda: “It is time to explain myself—let us stand up.” There’s Whitman the activist who is unafraid of change: “I launch all men and women forward with me into the Unknown.” There’s Whitman the epic poet who delineates for readers a new democratic hero: “The Modern Man I sing.” There’s Whitman the representative who speaks in voices of others: “In all people I see myself, none more and not one a barleycorn less.” There’s Whitman the defender who stands for “the rights of them the others are down upon.” And on and on it could go. There are so many different Whitmans as to be dizzying.

      Also part of who Whitman is is to be found in those ‘poets to come’ who have ‘talked back’ to the poet, responding to his verse in an ongoing dialogue, one that he welcomed and encouraged: “O poets to come,” he declared. “I depend upon you!” Indeed over the past century and a half such poets as Ezra Pound, D.H. Lawrence, Carl Sandburg, Hart Crane, T.S. Eliot, Federico Garcia Lorca, Wallace Stevens, Langston Hughes, Muriel Rukeyser, William Carlos Williams, Allen Ginsberg, Pablo Neruda, Jorge Luis Borges, Louis Simpson, Galway Kinnell, Marge Piercy, Yusef Komunyaka, and Sherman Alexie (to name a few) have responded to him, inspired by his Leaves of Grass. As critic and poet Jay Parini writes in Why Poetry Matters: “Whitman is always our contemporary, always a beacon. His light beckons us to remember how we constitute a single body, physical and national. We cannot divide ourselves into “us” and “them” but should muck together in the great experience of life… In Whitman, words became deeds.”

      Whitman is more than what we --readers and critics-- say he is. If you would try to ‘define’ Whitman and begin to come to terms with what he means to you, you of course will have to read him yourself. But in each generation we can attempt to redefine the poet wherein he can take on a new life. Definition, then, in the broad sense of the word, is power. The battle over definition, as others try to define for us who Walt Whitman is, remains ongoing and never-ending. For Walt Whitman, however, these differences are causes for celebration, knowing as he did that his ‘Song of Myself’ is but one, integral note sounding in the greater songs of ourselves.

((from Kanto Gakuin University Student Guidebook, 2008)