Walt Whitman: The Measure of His Song by Jim; Ed; Campion Dan

Author:Jim; Ed; Campion, Dan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Holy Cow! Press

I chant the chant of dilation or pride,

We have had ducking and deprecating about enough. . . .

Whatever the reader’s response, such language permits Whitman to gain an actively useful diversity of context and tone. The toughness of his verse—what Charles Olson referred to as its muscularity, giving as instance ‘Trickle Drops’—can sustain the tensions created in its movement by these seeming disparities in diction. It is, moreover, a marked characteristic of American poetry since Whitman, and certainly of the contemporary, to have no single source for its language in the sense that it does not depend upon a ‘poetic’ or literary vocabulary. In contrast, a German friend once told me that even a novelist as committed to a commonly shared situation of life as Günter Grass could not be easily understood by the workmen whose circumstance so moved him. His language was too literary in its structures and vocabulary, not by fact of his own choice but because such language was adamantly that in which novels were to be written in German. An American may choose, as John Ashbery once did, to write a group of poems whose words come entirely from the diction of the Wall Street Journal, but it is his own necessity, not that put upon him by some rigidity of literary taste.

Comparable to this flexibility of diction in Whitman’s writing is the tone or mood in which his poems speak. It is very open, familiar, at times very casual and yet able to be, on the instant, intensive, intimate, charged with complexly diverse emotion. This manner of address invites, as it were, the person reading to ‘come into’ the activity and experience of the poems, to share with Whitman in a paradoxically unsentimental manner the actual texture and force of the emotions involved. When he speaks directly to the reader, there is an uncanny feeling of his literal presence, physically.

I have avoided discussion of Whitman’s life simply because I am not competent to add anything to the information of any simple biography, for example, Gay Wilson Allen’s Walt Whitman (Evergreen Books, London, 1961). I am charmed by some of the details got from that book. Apparently Mrs. Gilchrist, the widow of Blake’s biographer, Alexander Gilchrist, was very smitten upon reading Whitman’s poems and wrote accordingly:

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