On Whitman by Williams C. K

Author:Williams, C. K. [Williams, C. K.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4008-3433-4
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2010-11-17T16:00:00+00:00

† I can’t resist comparing a well-known passage from “Four Quartets,” a quotation from Julian of Norwich, one of Eliot’s esoteric Christian sources, to a passage of Whitman’s. Eliot, in Julian’s voice, solemnly intones:

All shall be well, and

All manner of things shall be well…

But here is that old “excrescent” Whitman in “To Think of Time”:

What will be will be well—for what is well,

To take interest is well, and not to take interest shall be well.

Others

Whitman’s influence on contemporary American poetry has been fundamental: his vision is evidenced most vividly in poets like Galway Kinnell and Allen Ginsberg, who both have acknowledged Whitman’s inspiring example. But in truth much the greater portion of significant poetry that’s been written in America in the last century manifests some aspect of Whitman’s music and of his conceptual dimensions. Much of this has been acknowledged: two entire anthologies of American poems have been published honoring Whitman, and celebrating the liberating power of his work*

And his impact hasn’t been limited to American poetry—his influence has been huge, and hugely salutary, on poets all over the world. It may well be, in fact, that his influence has been more profound in the rest of the world even than in his own country. Pablo Neruda, the most celebrated Spanish-language poet of the twentieth century, wrote an “Ode to Walt Whitman” in which he says:

And Walt did not disdain

all the gifts of the earth,

the capital’s surfeit of curves,

the purple initial of learning,

but taught me to be an americano,

& raised my eyes to books,

toward the treasure that we find

inside a kernel of wheat.

(Translated by Greg Simon)

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