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Adventures of Lehman

"Whitman in the Eleventth Grade" [by Davd Lehman]

Walt WhitmanThe following, part I of "Opening Shot," was written at the request of Sandy McIntosh, the brilliant and visionary publisher of Marsh Hawk Press:
<<<
In high school I read “Song of Myself” in a course in American literature that began with the poets who had three names (William Cullen Bryant, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Julia Ward Howe, John Greenleaf Whittier, James Russell Lowell, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow) and never reached the moderns who went by their initials (T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden). In that context it meant something that Whitman used no middle name and only a shortened version of his forename. I liked this fellow who was “mad for it to be in contact with me,” whether “it” stood for nature, the grass, a particular person, a brook—that was how I felt, too, in my more uninhibited moments. I liked the anthology excerpts so much I bought, with fool’s luck, a thin paperback of Leaves of Grass that called itself the “original edition,” edited by Malcolm Cowley. To this day I maintain that the 1855 edition is the greatest version of this great American poem, which Whitman revised often and not always for the better.

Back in the eleventh grade, I didn’t dislike Bryant’s “Thanatopsis.” That poem gave me something to brood on. It appealed to me as a reader. Whitman, however, appealed to the poet in me, the part of me that I wasn’t aware of until then. Whitman’s language was the first thing that drew me to him, his diction, and then his caution-to-the-winds indifference to metrical models. The language of “Thanatopsis” was not the language I spoke, whereas every leaf of “Song of Myself” announced the birth of a new language, the American language, mine.

Walt Whitman 3I loved Whitman’s extravagance. Everything about “Song of Myself” was extravagant, but perhaps most especially the self-celebrating “I” of the poem, “Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos.”

This character, “Walt Whitman,” could fancy himself the poet of the body and the poet of the soul, the poet of the woman the same as the man. He was magnificent, magnifying, and magnanimous. He refashioned the American religion in the image of one who preferred the smell of his armpits to prayer, who beheld God everywhere yet could not understand who there could be more wonderful than himself. He was the poet of common sense and the poet of immortality. He was my grandfather, and he assured me there was nothing rank in copulation. Did he contradict himself? Yes, he admitted it freely. Why not? He was large enough to contain the crowd.

Most of all I loved the end of the poem. A summing up takes place here, a reassertion of the metaphoric element that ties everything together. “I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,” he says. “If you want me again look for me under your bootsoles.” The visionary Whitman has moments of ecstatic puzzlement when any language fails him: “There is that in me. . .  I do not know what it is. . . but I know it is in me.” In this mood he names happiness as a noble theme. I loved him as much for that as for his defense of the “barbaric yawp,” the untamed dialect of the tribe. And the freedom to contradict himself.

But what chilled me about the end of the poem, what chills me to this day, is its valediction — as if indeed a friend and not a book were departing, or as if that book had a voice and all the attributes of a man, and he was saying goodbye and god speed because he was about to die and he knew it and was not afraid. At the end of “Ode to a Nightingale” (which I had not read in high school) Keats pauses and salutes the departure of his vision. At the end of “Song of Myself,” Whitman says goodbye not to the vision but to the reader. Unlike Keats, he is not plaintive or forlorn. The poem and its author have merged entirely, and the reader has emerged as a new character, “you,” who exist as if in fulfillment of a prophecy. “You” witness the withdrawal of the vision but extend it at the same time, for “you” and “I” are one (“every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you”). No period is needed at the end, because all ends are temporary, as death is a temporary condition for the poet who understands it is “lucky” to die and be reborn constantly in the form of a new reader. I was that reader, the “you” to whom he spoke when he stopped “some where waiting for you.” The knowledge that many others must feel similarly singled-out did nothing to diminish the glory.. >>>

For the rest of this essay, please click here.
https://marshhawkpress.org/david-lehman/


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I left it
on when I
left the house
for the pleasure
of coming back
ten hours later
to the greatness
of Teddy Wilson
"After You've Gone"
on the piano
in the corner
of the bedroom
as I enter
in the dark


from New and Selected Poems by David Lehman

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