Ten Greatest Poets – Walt Whitman, America’s Poet

WALT WHITMAN, AMERICA’S POET

The twentieth century has been described as America’s century. And so it is. The century began with the cresting of the imperialist powers of Europe and saw the rise of Imperial Japan, taking its newfound place as a world power after defeating the Russian navy. Emerging from rapid industrialization during the nineteenth century, the U.S. joined the ranks of the imperialists. After two world wars, the U.K. and France slowly declined to the status of middle-level powers, while the U.S. and the Soviet Union squared off in the so-called Cold War. The U.S. got the better of the ideological rivalry because of its superior economic system, and when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, it seemed as if the U.S. as the leader of the Western bloc had indeed established a new world order in which liberal democratic ideology had become normative. We know today it is not the case.

America’s rise as a world player the beginning of the last century and its continuing position today as a leading great power, are among the bases for its major ongoing influence on world culture. Hollywood is known—if not always welcomed—worldwide, for example, and English, especially American English, is the lingua franca of international business. Contemporary conditions of world culture, we might describe it as a type of cultural hegemony, logically persuade us to include at least one American poet in our list of the ten greatest.

Walt Whitman, a consummately American poet, represents an astute choice. He has been called “America’s poet” by Ezra Pound, more to the point, “He is America.” Whitman sought to encompass the breadth and height and depth, indeed, the very being of America, the enthusiastic idea of it as well as the expansive reality, in his person qua poet, and from the standpoint of the poetic imagination we could say that, strangely enough, he succeeded, or very nearly so.

Whitman celebrates America, that is, America as an existential ideal. Whitman sets forth his imaginative and poetic conception of America in his poem by the same title.

AMERICA by Walt Whitman

Centre of equal daughters, equal sons,

All, all alike endear’d, grown, ungrown, young or old,

Strong, ample, fair, enduring, capable, rich,

Perennial with the Earth, with Freedom, Law and Love,

A grand, sane, towering, seated Mother,

Chair’d in the adamant of Time.

See: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/53091/america-56d23215696b8

Whitman in this poem celebrates America consisting of people—“equal daughters, equal sons”—bound together by abstractions like “Freedom,” “Law,” “Love.” Implicitly, they are united by “Equality” and “Fraternity.”

The abstract concepts are essentially related to “Democracy,” which is a unifying motif in Whitman’s poetry. “Democracy” is a rubric encompassing Whitman’s existential ideal.

In “For You O Democracy,” Whitman exclaims, “Come, I will make the continent indissoluble, / I will make the most splendid race the sun ever shone upon. …I will plant companionship thick as trees along all the rivers of America, and along the shores of the great lakes, and all over the prairies.”

See: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/51567/for-you-o-democracy

When Whitman extols America, he is elevating an existential ideal, that is, his sanguine conception of a community of people inhabiting America, the land itself, who reify abstract ideals of democracy in their own lives. This conception is metaphysical because Whitman asserts its transcendental reality.

What’s more, the persona in Whitman’s poetry assimilates America. This claim is made multiple times, for example, in “Song of Myself,” Whitman’s signature poem:

“In all people I see myself, none more and not one a barley-corn less,

And the good or bad I say of myself I say of them.”

“I am an acme of things accomplish’d, and I an encloser of things to be.”

“I am large, I contain multitudes.”

The speaker in “Song of Myself” identifies with people, things, the entirety of psychic experience, everything, and then some more. He launches into majestic, sweeping, detailed descriptions in the first person.

“I am the mash’d fireman with breast-bone broken,

Tumbling walls buried me in their debris,

Heat and smoke I inspired, I heard the yelling shouts of my comrades,

I heard the distant click of their picks and shovels,

They have clear’d the beams away, they tenderly lift me forth.”

“I find I incorporate gneiss, coal, long-threaded moss, fruits, grains, esculent roots,

And am stucco’d with quadrupeds and birds all over,

And have distanced what is behind me for good reasons,

But call any thing back again when I desire it.”

“I hear bravuras of birds, bustle of growing wheat, gossip of flames, clack of sticks cooking my meals,

I hear the sound I love, the sound of the human voice,

I hear all sounds running together, combined, fused or following,

Sounds of the city and sounds out of the city, sounds of the day and night,

Talkative young ones to those that like them, the loud laugh of work-people at their meals,

The angry base of disjointed friendship, the faint tones of the sick,

The judge with hands tight to the desk, his pallid lips pronouncing a death-sentence,

The heave’e’yo of stevedores unlading ships by the wharves, the refrain of the anchor-lifters,

The ring of alarm-bells, the cry of fire, the whirr of swift-streaking engines and hose-carts with premonitory tinkles and color’d lights,

The steam whistle, the solid roll of the train of approaching cars,

The slow march play’d at the head of the association marching two and two,

(They go to guard some corpse, the flag-tops are draped with black muslin.)

“I hear the violoncello, (’tis the young man’s heart’s complaint,)

I hear the key’d cornet, it glides quickly in through my ears,

It shakes mad-sweet pangs through my belly and breast.”

The metaphysical being of the speaker zooms far into space.

“Speeding through space, speeding through heaven and the stars,

Speeding amid the seven satellites and the broad ring, and the diameter of eighty thousand miles,

Speeding with tail’d meteors, throwing fire-balls like the rest.”

The speaker ranges through time.

“The past and present wilt—I have fill’d them, emptied them,

And proceed to fill my next fold of the future.”

He is everywhere.

“I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,

If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.”

Whitman the poetic persona encompasses America, extending beyond it to eventually incorporate the entire universe. He is “a kosmos.”

To achieve a rolling, encyclopedic effect, Whitman frequently resorts to anaphora, as in the example below.

“Through me many long dumb voices,

Voices of the interminable generations of prisoners and slaves,

Voices of the diseas’d and despairing and of thieves and dwarfs,

Voices of cycles of preparation and accretion,

And of the threads that connect the stars, and of wombs and of the father-stuff,

And of the rights of them the others are down upon,

Of the deform’d, trivial, flat, foolish, despised,

Fog in the air, beetles rolling balls of dung.

“Through me forbidden voices,

Voices of sexes and lusts, voices veil’d and I remove the veil,

Voices indecent by me clarified and transfigur’d.”

See: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45477/song-of-myself-1892-version

Whether you love him or hate him, you can’t ignore him. All Americans at some point in their lives have to deal with Whitman’s “cosmic” conception of America. To the extent that America exerts global influence and power, the rest of the world, I suppose, is also obliged.

Pablo Neruda, Greatest Poet of the Twentieth Century:

https://poetryofgonzalinhodacosta.blogspot.com/2018/06/ten-greatest-poets-pablo-neruda.html

Walt Whitman, 1887