“THE FINAL LILT OF SONGS”
LATE WHITMAN AND THE LONG AMERICAN CENTURY
A DISSERTATION
SUBMITTED TO THE DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH
AND THE COMMITTEE ON GRADUATE STUDIES
OF STANFORD UNIVERSITY
IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS
FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
Anton Vander Zee July 2012
© 2012 by Anton Leonard Vander Zee. All Rights Reserved. Re-distributed by Stanford University under license with the author.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution- Noncommercial 3.0 United States License. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/us/
This dissertation is online at: http://purl.stanford.edu/gj525xf7096
ii I certify that I have read this dissertation and that, in my opinion, it is fully adequate in scope and quality as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.
Albert Gelpi, Co-Adviser
I certify that I have read this dissertation and that, in my opinion, it is fully adequate in scope and quality as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.
Roland Greene, Co-Adviser
I certify that I have read this dissertation and that, in my opinion, it is fully adequate in scope and quality as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.
Nicholas Jenkins
I certify that I have read this dissertation and that, in my opinion, it is fully adequate in scope and quality as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.
Robert Kaufman
Approved for the Stanford University Committee on Graduate Studies. Patricia J. Gumport, Vice Provost Graduate Education
This signature page was generated electronically upon submission of this dissertation in electronic format. An original signed hard copy of the signature page is on file in University Archives.
iii Vander Zee iv
DISSERTATION ABSTRACT
Critics have long dismissed Walt Whitman’s late poetry as a frail echo of his ambitious antebellum poems; subsequent authors often view him as a poet whose utopian political vision no longer offers a tenable model for their respective realities. In both of these cases, Whitman remains a poet in many ways lost to us. Contesting these narratives of decline and desuetude, my dissertation rescues the poet’s late work from neglect and demonstrates how Whitman, precisely in the estranging forms his late work takes, offers a charged poetic response to the post-Civil War years and plays a critically overlooked role in conceptions of subsequent poetries.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgments ...... iv
Introduction: The “Real” Walt Whitman ...... 1
Ch. 1: Allegories of Lateness: Contexts for Reading Whitman and his Influence . . . 24
Ch. 2: Late Lives, Critical Pasts, Critical Futures: Essays in Bibliography ...... 83
Ch. 3: “When Lilacs Last”: Late Whitman ...... 138
Ch. 4: Whitman’s Lateness from Modern to Contemporary ...... 200
Coda: “Cosmos, Late Blooming” ...... 292
Works Cited ...... 300
Vander Zee vi
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
For their understanding throughout a project that has taken me from Stanford and Missouri, to New York and now Charleston, South Carolina, I would like to thank my Dissertation Co-Advisors, Albert Gelpi and Roland Greene, and Committee
Members Nicholas Jenkins and Robert Kaufman. For their support and feedback—and foremost for the example of their own work—I am extraordinarily grateful.
Andrea Lunsford has modeled an uncommon care for teaching, pedagogy, and mentorship that I have learned much from. Others in the English Department have been supportive in ways large and small: special thanks to Terry Castle, Ursula Heise, Paula
Moya, Blakey Vermeule, Alex Woloch, and Judy Candell. My peers have always been there for encouragement, company, and a couch to sleep on. Particular thanks to Steffi
Dippold, Jessica Weare and Jolene Hubbs.
Beyond Stanford, I was fortunate enough to join a group of Whitman scholars at an annual International Whitman Week symposium in Tours, France. I cannot imagine a more welcoming and generous community of scholars. I would like to thank Ed
Folsom, Jay Grossman, M. Wynn Thomas, Betsy Erkkila, and Eric Athenot for making it such a remarkable experience. Though Jeffrey Pethybridge commented upon and edited much of this material, often on short notice, I extend mostly extracurricular thanks to him for his lasting friendship.
And, of course, thanks to family, too numerous to be name. Final thanks beyond words go to Emily Rosko, who has been there for every minute of it.
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INTRODUCTION
THE “REAL” WALT WHITMAN
When most honest with himself late in life, Walt Whitman thought he would be forgotten by the country that he had so decisively and desperately embraced.
Whitman would have been shocked to learn what has become of him. He has been a perpetual muse and menace to poets and novelists alike. His poetry has been given new life in over 1,000 musical settings. Mahatma Gandhi and Joseph Stalin both recited his work. Schoolchildren continue to chant “O Captain, My Captain!” even as scholars fill books with the most intrusive speculations about him. His visage helps sell hipster T-shirts in Greenwich Village, and the spectral bard himself recently made a cameo in a Levi’s ad of all places, his crackly, prophetic voice reading the late poem
“America.” The ad takes place in the Gilded Age ghost town of Braddock,
Pennsylvania and Whitman’s voice offers a soundtrack for a fantasia of stylized industrial decay designed to sell sturdy duds. Whitman—to utter the words immortal, the words inevitable—contains multitudes.
In all of these afterlives, the Whitman who has inspired most has been the young, virile Whitman in the flush of health, the Whitman of the first edition of
Leaves of Grass (1855), where he greets us in that famous frontispiece with an open shirt, a jauntily cocked hat, and a mischievous nonchalance in his eyes. In those early poems he is one of the roughs and a kosmos, a new American Adam lapping up the
Vander Zee 2 blab of the pave, tapping the love-root, sending out barbaric yawps over rooftops, and singing the body electric. We hear less about Whitman in age.
In the early 1860s, as the Civil War threatened to erode his American dream,
Whitman took on the role of wound dresser, caring tenderly for the injured and dying, bringing them gifts of candy and oranges, taking down their letters home, holding them as they died. By War’s end, Whitman had become the Good Gray Poet a moniker manufactured by one of his disciples, William Douglas O’Connor, in the
1866 pamphlet by that name. As Whitman’s reputation came under threat by what many readers considered to be the pornographic content in his poetry, O’Connor served up this image of a venerable, Homeric, white-bearded, sterling-haired, de- sexed, and sacrificial saint. Whitman in age: at once iconic and benign.
It remains stunning to think that Whitman took on the aged guise of the Good
Gray Poet already in 1866. After all, he lived for another quarter century, not dying until 1892. Whitman worked on his Leaves up to the end, excluding his final, hybrid collections of poetry and prose—November Boughs (1888) and Good-Bye my Fancy
(1891)—from the pages of Leaves of Grass proper. They were bound with the rest, but only as “annexes,” a move that aptly captures the evolving supplementary logic that in many ways defines Whitman’s late work and governs its reception. When readers do not entirely ignore Whitman’s late poetry, they tend to regard it as echo, afterthought, and a clumsy combination of effete affirmation and old-age complaint.
Perhaps this is why old Whitman stumbles clumsily through American poetry, a sign of lost potential, of what might have been, both for poetry and for America itself. We find him—increasingly in post-World War II poetry—depicted as
Vander Zee 3 humorously and often tragically out of place. Allen Ginsberg, in a particularly well- known instance of this tendency, spies Whitman in “A Supermarket in California” among the refrigerated goods in a grocery store, a “childless, lonely old grubber, poking among the meats” (59). The mood of is one of a tense and dreamy fluorescent- lit paranoia. He imagines leaving with Whitman, asking the old courage-teacher, “Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love?” The question, as Ginsberg makes clear, is absurd. “We’ll both be lonely,” he concedes. But even that melancholic common ground seems impossible as Ginsberg wonder’s in his final, quiet chant what
Whitman’s American would even look like anymore, and what the two poets could possibly share: “Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher, what America did you have when Charon quit poling his ferry and you got out on a smoking bank and stood watching the boat disappear on the black waters of Lethe?”
As the symbolic force of Whitman’s reputation lasts into the twenty-first century, he remains largely trapped in this role: a sad prophet pitched between deepening elegy and an ever-receding utopia. This static economy of influence renders the bard a canonical stranger in the very poetic century he helped to define. However compelling in its drama, however generative in its pathos, this narrative cannot contain
Whitman. There must be new ways to conceive of Whitman’s lateness, a word I use in a deliberately capacious manner to move from the material concerns of his old age and the aesthetic concerns of his late work, to more abstract effects of lasting, duration, and loss as his reputation persists—ages, one might say—across the twentieth century and beyond. The point is not to abandon elegy for utopia. Too many poets have gone that route, investing themselves too readily in ideals Whitmanian potential, whether
Vander Zee 4 political or ecstatic.1 And though Whitman has been a powerfully enabling voice for many poets who have been variously marginalized, the most successful poetries in this vein have balanced whatever the poet’s voice promises against what it never could.
Whitman cannot save us; he cannot be our hope for poetry.2 But an honest re-reading of Whitman’s late work shows how damaged and compromised he understood his vision to be. To recognize this strained vision is to bring Whitman closer, to make him a partner in our loss rather than a stranger to it. Ginsberg holds Whitman in just such a sad embrace in those words quoted above: “we’ll both be lonely.” But the gulf between them—one amplified by the forgetful waters of Lethe—abides.
Intentionally conjuring a poetic past that has eluded us, “‘The Final Lilt of
Songs’” asks what it would mean to conceive of a Whitman whose bolder chants of democratic optimism fail to suppress the disenchantment of political failure that pulses, in subtle counterpoint, underneath so much of his late work. What might we make of a Whitman whose supplementary songs fail to disguise the evolving political and cultural crises of post-Civil War America as Lincoln’s grave sacrifice gave way to the failure of Reconstruction, to the rampant corporate greed of the Gilded Age, and to the annihilation of space and the tyranny of time as the railroads carved up the countryside and portioned out the day? This would be a Whitman freed from his perpetual role as a lost best hope for American poetry; a poet not lost, but late; a poet
1 A less nuanced inheritance in which Whitman becomes a static counter of hope, progress, and recovery persists in many of the poet’s afterlives. This tradition begins with Whitman’s band of disciples, and emerges most powerfully where poetry and politics merge. One also senses this less nuanced inheritance where a certain unreflective transcendental impulse drives poetic projects. Though this strain of influence rarely dominates any given poetic school—or even any given poet’s work—this general sensibility persists in Whitman’s wake. 2 See Pearce’s essay “Whitman and our Hope for Poetry” in Historicism Once More. In Chapter 1, I argue that this more enabling strain of Whitman’s influence can be viewed along the lines of what Freud would call a normative mourning that trades a deeper engagement with Whitman’s loss for less complicated attachments that entail, in some sense, a willed ignorance of that loss.
Vander Zee 5 not of enabling affirmation, but of disability and the difficult knowledge of crisis. We find this knowledge compacted in the alternately unassuming and obscure forms that his late work takes. Rather than dwell upon the loss of possibility, therefore, I seek out the potentialities of loss across Whitman’s late work, following the shadow that work casts across what I call, recasting the title of Henry Luce’s triumphal 1941 Life editorial announcing America’s world-historical role, the long “American Century.”
Most critics take the diminished forms, circumscribed vision, and oddly conventional cast of Whitman’s late work as evidence of the poet’s failure to attain a more convincing or fitting terminus, whether that be a rarified and transcendent late style or a more grounded political response to his immediate circumstances.3 These critics quickly lose interest when the late work seems only to offer a mere echo, if not an outright reversal, of prior accomplishment. But one can choose to value Whitman’s late work precisely for its self-consciousness as failure; for its profoundly self-elegiac quality as it surveys the ruins of its own designs; and for a certain anti-compensatory, critical force that registers, through melancholic distance and veils of artifice, a deep discomfort with the status quo. Signs of this more insinuating late-Whitmanian presence have begun quietly to emerge not in the standard scholarly reflections, but in the late work of contemporary poets, some of them only recently lost to us.
On March 19, 2005, eleven days before he passed away, Robert Creeley was slated to deliver a talk at the Virginia Festival of the Book on a panel celebrating the sesquicentennial of Leaves of Grass (1855). 4 Panel participants were asked to address a perennially vexing question in Whitman scholarship: “Who Is the Real Walt
3 Chapter 2 presents a thorough bibliographic account of this bias in Whitman criticism. 4 Virginia Quarterly Review published Creeley’s talk after he passed, and the essay was also included in the posthumous On Earth (2006).
Vander Zee 6
Whitman?” Whitman himself—large and multitude-containing as he claimed to be— would have found the question difficult to answer. Is it the solitary singer or the wound dresser? The amorous lover or the Good Gray Poet? The barbaric yawper of the people en masse, or the Hegelian dialectician of the soul?
Given the long and nearly uniform critical history that has relegated
Whitman’s late work to the category of afterthought and echo, Creeley’s answer to the question posed by the panel appears both daring and disarmingly honest. Rather than concur with the myth of Whitman’s decline, the title of Creeley’s talk—“Reflections on Whitman in Age”—suggests that the real Whitman might be the late Whitman.
Perhaps this is because, as with Minerva’s owl taking flight at dusk, it is only when experiences accrue, when all the materials are gathered together, that a more comprehensive picture emerges, however belated. Yet the grammatical ambiguity of
Creeley’s title—where age might refer not to Whitman, but to Creeley’s own subject position “in age”—creates a powerful double gesture impelling a reading of the late
Whitman from the critical prospect of age itself. In this, he would seem to follow
Whitman, who, a few years before he died, wrote that: “To get the final lilt of songs...
To diagnose the shifting-delicate tints of love and pride and doubt,” the “keen faculty and entrance price” is “Old age” itself (624).5
In this study, I take Creeley’s example as both model and inspiration as I gauge the defining presence of Whitman’s lateness at the edges of modernism and postmodernism—in his own time, in ours, and in between. To this end, I offer the first extended engagement with Whitman’s critically neglected late work, and direct this
5 All quotations from Whitman’s poetry and prose, unless otherwise indicated, are to Walt Whitman: Complete Poetry and Collected Prose, identified parenthetically where necessary as CPP.
Vander Zee 7 reading towards a fresh account of his influence across the twentieth century and into our own. Whitman’s late work, I argue, presciently figures the profound sense of communal loss borne on its wake. As the final and largely forgotten articulation of a major poetic career, it uncannily embodies the composite character of a distinctly melancholic strain of American poetry, one that has persisted, in different forms, up to the present. Whitman, as the young and already cosmopolitan Ezra Pound reluctantly conceded early in his career, “is America” (WMS 112).6 He has become not simply a major national poet, but the nodal core of an imagined poetic community where conflicting feelings of national guilt and triumph, disappointment and pride, converge.7 What remains so utterly “American” about Whitman does not terminate some narrow national feeling, but forms a synecdoche for democracy, freedom, and progress, however illusory and strained those ideals appear in any given context as they last across decades of conflict, crisis, and corruption. Though I focus here on
Whitman’s continuing presence within the American poetic tradition, one could say that Whitman is the quintessential transnational poet of poetic nationality.
Roy Harvey Pearce has suggested that “the history of American poetry could be written as the continuing discovery and rediscovery of Whitman” (330). More recently in his comprehensive introduction to Walt Whitman: The Measure of His
6 Except where convention calls for the use of a standard poetic edition of a given writer’s work, or where the publication context of a given poem or essay is of particular importance, I will refer to certain pieces as they appear in the second edition of the anthology Walt Whitman: The Measure of his Song (1998), edited by Jim Perlman, Ed Folsom, and Dan Campion (identified hereafter parenthetically when necessary as WMS). 7 In an academic setting where the transnational and transgeneric have become the norm, focusing so intently on American poetry might seem too constraining, particularly for a poet whose influence seems everywhere to transcend the borders of nation and genres. As the comprehensive anthology Walt Whitman and the World (1995)—in addition to myriad focused studies on Whitman’s influence on particular national poetic cultures—demonstrates, Whitman’s poetry is truly, to borrow the bard’s words, a “Salut au Monde!” (CPP 287-297).
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Song, Ed Folsom has described that same history as a variously conflicted and celebratory “talking back” to the bard (21). This project’s revelation of a previously obscure late Whitman, then, and our efforts to hear how poets have continued to talk back to him, makes available a crucial and previously unremarked chapter of that history. Such an account has the potential fundamentally to revise how we conceive of
Whitman’s work and influence and to help us reconsider how we—as readers, poets and critics—construe and constrain authorial careers; how we struggle with eroded ideals of national belonging even as we challenge the preeminence of the national as a category of analysis; and how we engage and value the ultimate horizon of age itself in literature and in life.
Though it strives to be many things at once, at its core “‘The Final Lilt of
Songs’” relates a critical story about lateness, duration, and lasting. It is a story about the kindred anxieties of obsolescence in art and age, and about the insinuating, critical potential of authorial late works. It is a story about the formal lasting of a poet’s tropes and themes across a poetic career, and about how poets, in turn, become troped and thematized as their influence endures. It is a story about what it means to be an
American poet—indeed, a poet at all—as the vaunted Whitmanian ideals of “Form,
Union, Plan” appear increasingly distant and removed (CPP 246). It is a story, finally, about loss, about mourning and melancholy, and about the possibilities of recovery wrested not from some efficient work of mourning, but from the sheer duration and consciousness of loss.
The methodological précis provided in Chapter 1—“‘Allegories of Lateness:
Contexts for Reading Whitman and His Influence”—organizes these coincident
Vander Zee 9 narratives of loss by way of unfolding an allegorical map. This map reveals a series of conceptual strata, each layer of which contributes to the compound topography of lateness sketched above. Rather than chart out and delimit a more exclusive conceptual terrain, the story I relate via this allegorical map gains structure and dimensionality as layers accrue. Such a map intends to be less a restrictive claim on specific province of knowledge and more of a means for orienting oneself within these overlapping fields of lateness and enabling connections as the project progresses.8
In the broadest sense, this map takes advantage of the multiplicity and substitutionality inherent in the tradition of allegorical interpretation—the speaking otherwise that allegory, etymologically, encourages. More specifically, however, it draws upon and adapts a tradition of allegorical thinking and vision rooted in the work of Walter Benjamin. Reversing the romantic tendency to elevate the transcendent powers of symbol over the mechanical deficiencies of allegory, Benjamin valued the latter precisely for its critical potential. The power of allegory, Benjamin contends, resides in how it endures as a failed symbol: a symbol in time, a symbol in ruins.
Pursuing this sense of a symbol saturated by time, this chapter develops an understanding of allegory as the aging of symbol and as an implicit rejection of the illusory solutions offered by it.
This temporal sense of allegory as sheer duration sponsors the study’s broader investment in the aesthetic, psychological, historical, and material connotations of
8 This conception of mapping has been informed by Jonathan Flatley’s Affective Mapping (2008), which is, in turn, informed by Fredric Jameson’s concept of cognitive mapping. Flatley’s description of his titular term as “a map less in the sense that it establishes a territory than that it is about providing a feeling of orientation and facilitating mobility” clearly anticipates my conception of the allegorical map (6). My focus, however, is not on the affective, psychological, or cognitive (that is, the internal or subjective) but rather on the layered and compounded objective historical and cultural terrain that provides an essential background for the revisionary understanding of late Whitman—and the legacy of a distinctly late Whitman—that I present here.
Vander Zee 10 lateness. At the start, I situate Benjaminian ideas of allegory in conversation with
Theodor Adorno’s revisionary arguments about an artistic late style marked by difficulty and intransigence rather than transcendence and wisdom. Though both
Adorno’s sense of late style and Benjamin’s sense of allegorical insight project an artistic sensibility that is shatteringly new, I draw out the more haunting, regressive, and self-critical pressures that attend their respective accounts of late style and allegory. I work to recover, that is, a sense of shattering that resists the drive towards novelty, and that tries to dwell, therefore, within a sense of the shattering itself.
Theories of mourning and depressive melancholy, in both their Freudian and
Benjaminian inflections, help to make these resistant tendencies more clear even as they help to gauge the deep sense of elegy that has attended poetry across the long
American century. Beyond these core concerns with lateness, allegory, and melancholy, the overarching question of influence—viewed beyond Harold Bloom’s agonistic ratios and Walter Jackson Bate’s ego-driven drama of priority—emphasizes the sheer temporality of authorial reputation and legacy.
The more abstract concerns just noted take on a certain heft in relation to the materialities of lateness. These materialities include the history, social politics, and physiology of human aging. Thus, I turn to the field of humanistic gerontology in order to situate Whitman’s late work and that of subsequent poets within the context of drastically shifting views on age and aging—namely, its institutionalization in the wake of rapid industrialization and the perceived waning use value of age that accompanies such rapid capitalization. Age, here, often comes to be scene as a form of obsolescence, the wastage of economic development. Moving from strains on the body
Vander Zee 11 in age to those affecting the body politic, a brief overview of Gilded Age America provides a sense of the historical and cultural pressures impacting Whitman’s late work. Critics have typically understood the fallout from the Civil War—the damage and injury to the nation as a whole, and the strain this damage placed on Whitman’s poetic vision—as the central drama of Whitman’s lateness. But as Whitman continues to work and write for nearly three decades beyond this central conflict, these pressures also grow to include the failures of reconstruction, the changing conception of time and labor, rampant political corruption, massive economic uncertainty, the closing of the frontier, the continued eradication and removal of Native peoples, and the early stirrings of American imperialism. All of these changes shaped fundamental experiences of temporality and space even as they challenged liberal ideals of progress. Of all the contexts that define our sense of Whitman’s work—usually charted on a Hegelian continuum from antebellum promise, to Civil War crisis, to post-war recovery, however unsatisfactory—these concerns, both abstract and material, remain the most thinly conceived. Yet they are the most relevant to a revisionary account of Whitman’s late work and its spectral presence across the twentieth century. Given a critical climate in which Whitman’s continuing presence is often predicated upon the poet’s ability to transcend the historical pressures he faced in order to enliven the present, attention to these historical particulars, and Whitman’s reluctance or inability to transcend them, becomes particularly important.9
9 Michael Davidson, addressing a range of Whitman’s heirs, notes the irony that the poet’s historicity “lies in his ability to transcend his historical moment and reinvigorate the present. By redressing him as ‘our contemporary,’ poets have measured the failings of American political and social life and have created a space for themselves as… W’s wild children” (“When the World Strips Down and Rouges Up” 226-227).
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While the material considerations here might seem distant from the more abstract fields of lateness, I note at the end of this methodological overview how considerations of the aesthetic itself—rooted in a sense of increasing obsolescence, diminished use value, and anxious autonomy—reflect back in surprising ways upon material concerns of human aging mentioned above. Indeed, it is precisely at such moments of convergence where the layers of this allegorical map accrue that late
Whitman and his enduring presence across the long American century come most fully into view. At these intersections, ideas of influence emerge through a language of mourning; personal, poetic and political losses mingle; and late work itself becomes a locus of aesthetic and historical reflections. I hope that this map will inspire, to borrow one of Whitman’s favorite figures, a new and necessary critical vista, revealing multiple and crossing lines of prospect and retrospect that will help us see Whitman and a range of subsequent poets anew in and through the discourses of lateness that they share.
Whitman’s relationship to this methodological groundwork remains integral, and the middle chapters of “‘The Final Lilt of Songs’” comprise an embedded monograph on Whitman’s late work. Chapter 2—“Late Lives, Critical Past, and
Critical Futures: Essays in Bibliography”—joins a rich bibliographic tradition in
Whitman studies. 10 In this chapter, I offer the first complete account of what I call the dominant myth of Whitman’s decline and the subsequent and widespread neglect of
10 This bibliographic tradition begins in earnest with Gay Wilson Allen’s Walt Whitman Handbook (1946) and extends to such works as M. Jimmie Killingsworth’s The Growth of Leaves of Grass (1993). While the latter is a book length argument based in bibliography, this bibliographic tradition is reflected more broadly in the searchable Whitman bibliography, housed on the online Whitman Archive, which glosses nearly all of the critical and poetic responses to Whitman from 1838 to the present.
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Whitman in age.11 The first part of this chapter surveys the biographical construction of Whitman’s lateness from the first exhaustive, objective biographies published in
1906 through the major mid-century biographies by Gay Wilson Allen and Roger
Asselineau, and up through the important contemporary biographies of Justin Kaplan,
David Reynolds and Jerome Loving. Recovering Whitman’s late lives, one finds no single reason for the general disregard of Whitman in age. Instead, one discovers compound logics of neglect rooted in rigid aesthetic judgments and ageist assumptions, in the seemingly intractable inevitabilities of authorial canon formation, and in the various exigencies and anxieties that drive evolving academic concerns. As the many local bases for such neglect accumulate, a general lack of curiosity, and a reluctance to tell a new story about Whitman in age, predominates.
The second half of Chapter 2 relates a parallel bibliographic story in Whitman criticism beginning with F.O. Matthiessen’s seminal American Renaissance (1941) and the post-World War II work of his students Henry Nash Smith and R.W.B. Lewis.
If in Matthiessen Whitman emerges as a potent spokesman for American poetry, we sense in post-World War II criticism a more cynical relationship to the bard as he comes to figure an idealistic innocence alongside his more chastened, world-weary canonical peers Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville whose sensibilities more fully reflected the critical climate at the time. Whitman’s utopian vision appeared at once too simple and capacious to grasp the finer complexities of modernity. Without the chronological necessity and the scope of a complete life that binds biography, the
11 I call the common account of Whitman’s decline a myth not because it is categorically incorrect— Whitman’s late work, if you are looking for evidence of the explosive and influential as the early work, is certainly not strong in that sense—but because it obscures other forces at play in Whitman’s late work.
Vander Zee 14 occasional engagements with Whitman in academic criticism are routinely more abrupt, almost perfunctory. Whitman did become available in new and exciting ways after the heyday of the New Criticism as deconstructionist and linguistic studies of the poet began to emerge, and as scholars focused more intently on cultural critique began to situate Whitman’s work in the context of gender, race, sex, and class. But Whitman in age remained obscure, just as ageism, as a category of prejudice, remained—and has continued to remain—the most overlooked -ism in academic and cultural discourse alike.12 In the face of such widespread neglect, it is important to bring to light, and to reflect upon, those critics that have more earnestly worked to address Whitman in age.
Gathering these disparate insights together forms the final task of this chapter as I sketch the contours of a conversation that my own account of Whitman’s lateness both joins and, quite drastically, extends.
Chapter 3—“‘When Lilacs Last’: Late Whitman”— traces the rhetorical and poetic construction of age in Whitman’s own work, and in the early, often hagiographic work produced by a steadily growing band of what we now call, as a reflection of their religious reverence for the bard, his disciples. I begin by telling the story of Whitman’s own coming of old age in the early poetry, noting how age enters his work variously as a durable image of the Republic itself, as a vague romantic abstraction, and as a mortal—and even moral—threat. This account culminates in
Whitman’s first and lasting embrace of age in the compound image where the Good
Gray Poet meets the Wound Dresser. Next, I explore how Whitman’s slowly evolving conception of his own late authorship occurs alongside the emergence—the invention,
12 In his preface to Ageism: Stereotyping and Prejudice against Older Persons (2004), Todd D. Nelson recounts the gradual realization of this fact over the past three decades of sociological research (ix).
Vander Zee 15 really—of authorial late style in literary and cultural criticism. Here, Whitman’s transatlantic correspondence with Edward Dowden, the renowned Shakespearean scholar who pioneered late-style critique by applying ideas of romantic organicism to the growth of poetic careers, comes to the fore. Recovering these interactions, some of which explicitly engage that status of Whitman’s own late work, reveals the burgeoning literary and cultural pressures affecting Whitman’s strained attempts to carve out a meaningful late style even as he suffered the indignities that quietly inflect his late work: namely, the debilities of age, the disintegrating dream of his America, a diminished hope in progress, and the general demotion of old age itself in a rapidly modernizing culture.
In order to better gauge how the material and psychic deficits of age affected
Whitman’s poetry, I visit him during his final three years in Camden, New Jersey. The best place to go for information about these years remains the nine-volume compilation of conversations, letters, and anecdotes that carries the unassuming title
With Walt Whitman in Camden, the last volume of which was published in 1996.
Horace Traubel, Whitman’s principal and most enthusiastic disciple, dutifully compiled the material from his almost daily conversations with the poet. If we can call the fruits of Traubel’s singular act of attention and devotion a biography, it remains the longest ever written on an American figure. With Walt Whitman, a necessary companion to the late work, contains much that we see in the Whitman’s final poetic efforts. An effortful optimism, for example, seems always to rise above a persistent backbeat of doubt and complaint. I argue, however, that the resistant force impacted in
Whitman’s late poetry appears suggestively, as well, in a number of anecdotes buried
Vander Zee 16 in With Walt Whitman, providing a key to the former’s decipherment. This document, along with other late prose writings, reveals a poet profoundly aware of the complex status of his own lateness as he subtly draws out the insinuating connections between his physical maladies, his poetic corpus, and the corrupted body politic in the years after the Civil War.
After laying this groundwork, I arrive at the attenuated forms of Whitman’s neglected post-Civil War work. Focusing primarily on the very late poetry that he included in two “annexes” to what Whitman termed the “Death-bed Edition” of
Leaves of Grass (1891-92), I read these works not as the final flowering of a poetic career, but, looking back to the methodological précis in Chapter 1, as its self- conscious lasting into ruins. Critics routinely ignore these poems, casting them aside either as mere echoes of the unifying vision that courses through antebellum works such as “Song of Myself” (1855), or as weak repetitions of the master-trope of crisis and recovery evident in poems such as “As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life” (1860).
Contesting this view, I restore the socio-political relevance of the late poetry, reading it as a complex embodiment of political and social failures that festered in the wake of the Civil War as Whitman saw his hopeful republic embarrassed by the failure of
Reconstruction, weakened in the face of Gilded Age corporate greed, and sullied by emerging signs of imperial corruption. While scholars and biographers have increasingly described these years for us in more detail—noting in particular
Whitman’s complex and surprisingly conservative relationship to questions of race and capitalism—none have productively or deeply read the very late work against this backdrop.
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Testing the ways in which Whitman’s late work inhabits what Benjamin called an allegorical way of seeing, this chapter traces key Whitmanian tropes from their early emergence through their charged return in the late work. In this chapter’s paradigmatic example, I turn to Whitman’s famous elegy for Lincoln, “When Lilacs
Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” (1865). There, lilacs arrive as a potent symbolic force of consolation as they bear the weight not only of Lincoln’s tragic death, but of the deaths of all those who died in the Civil War—the “debris and debris of all the slain soldiers of the war,” to borrow Whitman’s heavy words (466). Rather than judge the relative success of Whitman’s efforts in this single poem, however, I follow the elegiac floral topos across Whitman’s career as lilacs reappear in the early post-war poems “A Warble for Lilac Time” and “This Compost,” and then as they persist in much later poems such as “Out of May’s Shows Selected” and “Mirages.” Situating these works within their respective post-war moments, I ask what happens when lilacs last beyond the cedars dusk and dim of the Lincoln elegy, when confident symbol turns mournful, questioning allegory. While following the fading force of Whitman’s lilacs remains this chapter’s argumentative centerpiece, I uncover multiple episodes of allegorical lasting that reveal Whitman’s complex political and psychic disposition in age.
Expanding the single-author focus that predominates up to this point, Chapter
4—“Whitman’s Lateness from Modern to Contemporary”—moves toward a broad engagement with twentieth- and twenty-first-century poetry as it moves in and through a notably elegiac economy of Whitman’s influence. As I proceed from Whitman’s late poetry to overlooked intensities of Whitman’s influence, the lasting of the symbolic
Vander Zee 18 floral topos across Whitman’s career forms an allegory for his influence across the long American century. What happens, I ask once again, when lilacs last? When the symbolic monolith of Whitman himself as the quintessential poet of American crisis and recovery endures across the long American century? Lilacs, here, figure a broad range of political and personal connections with Whitman, but perhaps most remarkable is the way in which lilacs themselves persist across the century’s poetry, a symbol persisting in time and deepening into allegory.
As I noted above, whereas many critics follow Whitman’s apparent lead, identifying in his late work an example of successful mourning marked by resolution, however attenuated, of personal and political losses, I uncover a persistent state of crisis in Whitman’s post-war work, an inability or reluctance to invest fully in ideals of progress, whether personal, spiritual, or national. While this inability to mourn successfully might signal a kind of pathology obstructing the normative work of mourning for thinkers such as Freud, I read Whitman’s late work and influence in light of the melancholic, allegorical distance that Benjamin imbues with such critical force.
The tension between successful mourning and chronic melancholia that persists in
Whitman’s late poetry often appears quite aptly to figure the dominant strains of modernist and postmodernist Whitmanian inheritance, respectively. But rather than ascribe some consistent value to either the successful work of mourning or the persistence of melancholic reflection, I focus on the dialectic within melancholic postmodernism itself pulled between a depressive, constraining and passive relationship with the past—what Benjamin termed left-wing melancholy—and the
Vander Zee 19 possibilities of a more intentional and actionable melancholic orientation empowered by knowledge of what, precisely, has been lost.13
I begin this chapter by briefly rehearsing how key modernist poets managed the deep sense of loss that marks modernity by directing their old attachments towards a new language, and new solutions, that might answer or correct what William Carlos
Williams called Whitman’s “magnificent failure” (Selected Letters 135). For poets such as Williams, Ezra Pound and Hart Crane, eager to embark on their own quest after a coherent splendor, Whitman becomes a static, if often fraught, symbol of formal iconoclasm, naïve hope, and ecstatic nationalism. Though the modernists’ success in mourning Whitman appears, in the end, more illusory than actual, they prefigure, in their own late work, postmodern poetry’s chronically melancholic response to the American bard. Less noted than it might be in accounts of Whitman’s influence, the modernist’s dismissal of this major precursor—however conflicted and qualified at certain times and by certain figures—created a deep chasm between the bard and those who would take his proverbial hand. In the post-World War II years, this distance became a sturdy melancholic trope. Poets began planting Whitman’s lilacs throughout their work as they constituted their relationship to the bard in and through the tradition of elegy. Indeed, Whitman’s lilacs, along with images of the aged poet himself, turn up over and again in these poems: twined elegiac and ghostly presences that mark some unrecoverable loss. Noting the deleterious effects of this lasting Whitmanian melancholy in the post-World War II era, I go on to argue that this profound distance also makes available an eventual recognition of Whitman not as a
13 Flatley’s conception of a “distinctly modern antidepressive melancholia” (3) informs my own efforts to locate what I will later call a constructive, centrist melancholia.
Vander Zee 20 lost poet speaking for a lost America—a “Glorious mistake” in Robert Duncan’s phrase—but as a partner in historical and personal loss (Opening of the Field 57). In that sense, this chapter is about blindness on the verge of insight as the poets I discuss reproduce the economy of ineluctable loss that we see in the late Whitman, thereby mirroring, however obscurely, Whitman’s allegorical lateness in their own sustained melancholy. The work I survey here—from Ginsberg and Spicer to Duncan and
Palmer—forms a literal and literary anthology of lilacs as Whitman becomes the object of a deep elegiac mood.14
“‘The Final Lilt of Songs’” is a critical story about missing Whitman in a double sense where the bard is at once mourned and misrecognized by critics and poets alike. Poets in particular have mourned that in their own time, Whitman’s sense of hope, optimism, and boundless freedom can only seem naïve and illusory. As my recovery of a more ideologically and formally complex late Whitman demonstrates, however, many poets willfully misrecognized Whitman as a poet of optimism and progress as a way to stage and frame their sense of loss. But this very misprision powerfully echoes the sense of loss and doubt that permeates Whitman’s work. Their sense of loss, that is, recalls Whitman’s own as the bard himself comes allegorically to embody the waning symbolic force that we witness in his lilacs. Thus, a misreading becomes a ciphered recognition of a different sort, emerging in and through an melancholic impulse that hearkens back to a truer sense of what Whitman’s work, in its final form, embodies.
14 I admit what seems a marked gender bias in this chapter as I survey the work of a mostly male cohort of poets. Indeed, one could write an essay on the reasons why the distinct Whitmanian legacy that I trace tends to be dominated by male poets. In future iterations of Chapter 4, however, I intend to show how this particular legacy includes many female voices, including the work of Adrienne Rich, Jorie Graham, and Juliana Spahr.
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I conclude the final chapter by focusing on two recent and important revisions to the static script that has so profoundly informed Whitman’s influence. Here, I turn to Robert Creeley’s and C.K. Williams’s pointed engagement with Whitman in age, particularly as it intensifies in his their own late work. A closer look at Creeley’s evolving relationship with Whitman as it deepens in age shows that the binary extremes of mourning and melancholia, modernism and postmodernism, are, in the end, too artificially constraining. Williams, alternately, presents an image of Whitman not as a poet who transcended his historical particulars, but whose lateness contains the ruinous particulars of the long American century. If bearing the melancholic weight of Whitman’s influence becomes a merely comfortable pose for many of their peers, Creeley and Williams exceed these limitations, challenging the static economy of Whitman’s influence by recovering and reflecting most fully the precise and insinuating energies of Whitman’s late work. In this way, both poets begin to remove
Whitman from his role as a lost best hope for American poetry as the knowledge of loss impacted in Whitman’s late work comes obliquely into view.
In a Whitmanian lyric called “Burst of Leaves” included in her final book of poems The Red Gaze (2005), Barbara Guest renders explicit Creeley’s and Williams’s largely implicit, often straining efforts to move beyond a more limiting Whitmanian melancholy towards some new prospect, some new way of seeing. Working her way out of this resigned Whitmanian orientation toward a more engaged response, she begins: “Perhaps you are hiding, perhaps you have decided not to reveal / your singular presence” (496). Singing, at first, that familiar song of loss, she writes from the vantage of “A disappointed generation” whose “words collapse around us / Like
Vander Zee 22 the one who jumped into the sea. But the seas disappoint us, also.” What would seem a defeated poetic ruin—a quiet elegy for a Whitman whose poetic imaginings in “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” heard in the low delicious words of the sea repetitions of death at once soothing and startling, and an even quieter elegy for our most
Whitmanian modernist Hart Crane who took his final, despairing literal leap into the ocean—makes a crucial turn in the final line as Guest demands something more, something truer: “we are ready for a new orientation.”
At the end of “‘The Final Lilt of Songs’” I exploit the artful multiplicity of my guiding concern that took me from late Whitman to Whitman’s lateness. In a brief coda, “‘Cosmos, Late Blooming,’” I arrive most fully at Whitman lately, seeking in relation to what I call the poetic ultracontemporary the “new orientation” that Guest presciently calls for. Even as many poets continue to renew their deeply, and often constraining melancholic ties to the loss of Whitman, D.A. Powell, the poet I turn to in this coda, discards the cliché rendering of Whitman as an emblem of loss. Instead,
Powell repurpose the forms and themes that emerge in and through his lateness to address pressing personal and political crises, granting his influence a new intensity in the twenty-first century as he point to what he might call, in the title of a poem from
Chronic (2009), “Cosmo, Late Blooming.” Powell has yet to enter a period of late writing. Where the previous chapter terminates with a focus on the end of two major poetic careers, the coda takes on what we might call the epistemic knowledge of lateness, showing that lateness deals not only with literal age attained, but with a prospect, a vista, a way of knowing and seeing that can be felt, learned, and inhabited.
Thus, at the end of a certain strain of Whitmanian inheritance marked by an often
Vander Zee 23 debilitating melancholy, I reveal a deliberate renewal, a deliberate versus, that works against the grain of a more reactionary melancholy to return to a core sense of poetry as a making and building, even—and perhaps most importantly—within and alongside persistent loss. In that sense, the answer lies not in extremes either of crisis or recovery, but in a deepening knowledge of loss. That which is shatteringly new, we might say, emerges most powerfully out of a fully realized sense of what has been shattered.
“‘The Final Lilt of Songs’” seeks to make Whitman’s lateness and the knowledge it holds available in a new way for critics and poets alike. As we approach the twilight years of the long American century—a time emerging from the Gilded
Age and slouching uneasily into the present—I show that in missing Whitman so deeply, we have begun to find him once again. It is time to look back across that scarred allegorical landscape of the long American century to seek a new knowledge in and through Whitman’s lateness, just as Whitman peers at us through the ruins of his own late work.
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CHAPTER 1
ALLEGORIES OF LATENESS:
CONTEXTS FOR READING WALT WHITMAN AND HIS INFLUENCE
In “Out of May’s Shows Selected”—first published in the New York Herald on
May 10, 1888, four years before his passing—Whitman offers an apparently untroubled and timely spring song. Critics have tended to read this poem as a blithe expression showing all the faith, if none of the force, of his earlier work. Working against this critical common sense, I want to suggest that “Out of May’s Shows
Selected” is poem we do not yet know how to read, or that we have not yet attempted to read in earnest, being constrained by career narratives, by overarching conceptions of late work, and by the myth of Whitman’s poetic decline.
A more attentive reading reveals a poem that exhibits, writ small, the antinomies of Whitman’s late style, pitched between visions of a healing spring and a deadening stasis. In that sense, it embodies, in its movement and structure, that which is most disarming and difficult in Whitman’s late work. The poem arrives in five clipped snapshots of spring:
Apple orchards, the trees all cover’d with blossoms; Wheat fields carpeted far and near in vital emerald green; The eternal, exhaustless freshness of each early morning; The yellow, golden, transparent haze of the warm afternoon sun; The aspiring lilac bushes with profuse purple or white flowers. (CPP 617)
Whitman’s spring here is not ostensibly the cruelest season. But for all its verdant profusions, I am reluctant to see what critic M. Wynn Thomas, in an important early
Vander Zee 25 survey of Whitman’s late work that has more recently been extended and republished, describes as “an Adamic quality, a purity of wonder… [a] world grown miraculously young again” (9). Nor would I suggest a clear taxonomic affinity, as John E.
Schwiebert does, with the host of shorter, often nature-based poems that suggest a proleptic, if benign, imagism (37-53).
Reading the poem retrospectively from the perspective of modernism in such a way at least normalizes it in relation to a broader literary history. In this case, “Out of
May’s Shows Selected” seems at first to achieve the kind of proto-imagistic quality.
Like Ezra Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro,” Whitman’s poem is brief, image-based, and it lacks the verbs and the present-participial phrases that propel so much of the bard’s earlier work. Furthermore, the first two lines do have a force of clarity and directness as the observed objects presented at the start—the apple orchards, the wheat fields—attain a sequential and rhythmic priority before each line falls gradually into an unforced iambic lilt. But further affinities are difficult to find. Already in line three, the poem becomes willfully imprecise. We move from specifically observed and almost painterly scenes early in the poem to a temporally variable image of “each early morning” in line three, followed by an abrupt shift to the “afternoon sun” in line four. The third line’s investment in abundance with its “eternal, exhaustless freshness” grows repetitive and clotted, an effect echoed in the fourth line’s indecisive “yellow, golden, transparent haze.” The rhythm in line three seems to aspire neither to the beat of a metronome nor to the musical phrase, accommodating instead the Anglo-Saxon rhythms of an alliterative line coursing through “eternal” and “exhaustless,” “each”
Vander Zee 26 and “early”—a metrical effect that marks this line’s distance, measured by what one might call deep prosodic time, from the fine iambic modulation in the first two lines.
“Out of May’s Shows Selected,” it seems, calls for a different kind of attention, a critical ear willing to hear that what remains utterly desolate in this poem arrives not in a heavy music of despondency, but pulses instead in subtle counterpoint underneath the poem’s dulcet tones. From the inverted syntax of the title, through the eclipsing of particular vision in the poem’s demoted catalogue, and culminating in the freighted re-emergence of Whitman’s lilacs, this poem offers a glimpse of the alienated and revisionary force that forms a resistant sub-section of Whitman’s late work even as it seems a contented rehearsal of an old optimism ever faithful, ever renewed.
The poem’s telling formal markers amplify the degree to which the poet seems to absent himself from the scene, a sense signaled already by the movement noted above from what seems at first to be temporally specific, rooted images in the first two lines to the abstract prospect of each morning mellowing in that vague afternoon haze.
This lack of specificity continues amidst what would otherwise seem to be a return to a more momentous vision as Whitman reprises his lilacs, long a symbol for regeneration and political reconciliation from the early “There Was a Child went
Forth,” through his Lincoln elegy “When Lilacs Last in the Door-yard Bloom’d,” and beyond. Indeed, something as slightly odd as Whitman’s “purple or”—instead of purple and—“white flowers,” announces the poem’s conscious fiction of observation, revealing the extent to which lilacs themselves are in some sense absent or unrealized.
Ed Folsom’s casting of Whitman in his Walt Whitman’s Native Representations as
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“the poet of the grand conjunction, the singer of ‘and,’” no longer seems tenable for the poet’s late work (ix). What does it mean, then, to claim Whitman not as the poet of the fluid, additive operator of his expansive, organic catalogues, but as the poet as something as unsure and fickle as or?
An indecisive operator, Whitman’s or refuses a cumulative progressive vision, inviting us instead to look askance, to see otherwise. The strangeness of Whitman’s formulation here invites a certain curiosity—etymologically, a care—in relation to the knowledge that his late work holds and to the world it reflects. In Chapter 3, I will return to describe how this poem, among others, demands that we revise our understanding of Whitman in age. In Chapters 4, I will suggest how this new sense of late Whitman leads us see his influence otherwise as well. But first, I turn to explore the layered and diffuse concept of lateness itself, a more thorough account of which will help chart our movement from ideas of late work to the psychology of loss, and from the aesthetic and material concerns of Whitman’s old age to the historical effects of lasting and duration as his influence persists across the twentieth century and beyond.
The sections that follow are, admittedly, disjointed—perhaps necessarily so. If the allegorical map I describe above remains elegant enough in its conception, its actual unfolding partakes in the essential inelegance at the heart of allegory as one conceptual plane imperfectly overlies another. It is only in the poetry itself, explored in subsequent chapters, that these various layers of meaning come more clearly into alignment as individual poems constellate the various significations of lateness.
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Beyond Style: What Lateness Knows
As a personal, cultural and historical idea, lateness carries an uncommon emotional charge. This is due, perhaps, to its wide-ranging idiomatic connotations, shuttling between the mundane and the momentous: we can be late for a meeting, or late of this world; a late hour or season seems utterly ordinary, but the fin-de-siècle malaise of the Victorian twilight marks an epoch. Registering this diffuse sense of lateness, critics and artists alike have identified late authorship as a heightened arena of artistic production. This heightening, however, need not reflect only the values of serenity, wisdom, and reconciliation that accompany an inviolable and sheltering inwardness. Though these have become clichés of late style, critics have long pursued an intensity of an altogether different order.
In his classic essay “The Artist Grows Old,” the British art historian Kenneth
Clark sees in artistic late styles “a sense of isolation, a feeling of holy rage” which leads out to a “transcendental pessimism” (174). Edward Said, identifying a similarly charged negativity cast—though it is a negativity cast in aesthetic rather than existential terms—looks further back to Theodor Adorno’s engagement with
Beethoven’s late style. The kind of late style Said is drawn to offers only
“intransigence, difficulty, unresolved tensions… a nonharmonious, nonserene tension”
(7). He grants late works, in terms that pointedly echo Kant’s famous definition of beauty as harboring a purposiveness without purpose, “a sort of deliberately unproductive productiveness going against.” Where more optimistic accounts of late authorship—and even Clark’s holy rage—lean heavily on a transcendence both of self and world, Said’s remains grounded in sheer temporal duration. “Lateness,” he writes,
Vander Zee 29
“is the idea of surviving beyond what is acceptable and normal…. Lateness includes the idea that one cannot really go beyond lateness at all, cannot transcend or lift oneself out of lateness, but can only deepen lateness” (13).
Though the above approaches tend towards very different ends, they each uphold lateness as a compound and rarified category of artistic production. Lateness is monumental, whether it fronts a splendid façade as in classic late-style critique, or lies in a catastrophe of ruins as Clark and Said, to different ends, suggest. But once we have overcome its very real pathos, the mere idea of late style too often reveals a worn critical agenda clinging to an almost exclusively male canon of masterworks.15 As
Gordon McMullan argues in his broad historical overview of the concept, “late style is perhaps the last of the great overarching critical ideas to be brought before the jury of theoretical or posttheoretical skepticism, as a sub-category of, but nonetheless distinct from, the Romantic concept of Genius” (16). For such critics, approaches to the arts under the rubric of late style err in assuming that lateness carries by default some transhistorical significance, as though it were a thing universal, natural. Understood thus, whether an artist’s late style is serene or irascible, reconciled or unresolved, the concept itself attains an air of finality, distinction, and a specious ontological and aesthetic essence that subjectivist criticism fails to see beyond.16
15 For the most recent entries in this durable genre of late-style critique, see Helen Vendler’s Last Books, Last Looks (2010) and Nicholas Delbanco’s Lastingness: The Art of Old Age (2012). Important exceptions to this tendency are often intentional reactions against a vein of criticism that relies on a relatively exclusive array of masterworks by men. See, for example, the excellent essays included in Kathleen Woodward’s Figuring Age: Women, Bodies, Generations (1999), which contributes to a burgeoning age studies that seeks to combat the (largely historical and cultural) oversight of traditional late-style criticism. See also Sylvia Henneberg’s The Creative Crone (2010), which reflects on the late work of Adrienne Rich and May Sarton. 16 Karen Painter, in her introduction to Late Thoughts: Reflections on Artists and Composers at work (2006), reflects this movement from dedicated studies of late authorship to a more metacritical interrogation of the phenomenon itself. “The guiding interest,” she argues, “is in the discourses on
Vander Zee 30
We have plenty of reasons to join this skeptical jury. Indeed, why get caught up on certain concepts and their claims on us when we can simply historicize them, discarding, in this case, the impressionistic readings that late-style criticism seems so often to inspire? After all, where such weighty leading concepts do not obscure with their prescriptive logic, they threaten to render the literary object itself faintly visible through layers of critical artifice. Given my objectives in later chapters, this broadly skeptical approach seems tempting indeed. Approaches to Whitman’s late work, after all, have mostly obscured its highly individuated style, drained the poetry of its socio- political relevance, and forced the late work feebly to crown, rather than to question or contradict, the growth of a poetic career.
Well-heeded values of critical skepticism notwithstanding, ideas of lateness continue to hold us in ways that cannot be historicized away. Granted, such ideas can be grossly misapplied. To read the late works of Shakespeare through romantic notions of the organic growth of a literary career without recognizing the anachronism, for example, is to commit oneself to misreading. But what happens when we read
Whitman’s work within and against those same romantic imaginings? In such cases, ideas of late style are not anachronistically applied; rather, they are part of the literary and cultural terrain on which a poet charts her or his career. In this latter case, seeking shelter in some safe critical remove afforded by post-theoretical skepticism only
lateness, rather than lateness itself. Lateness… is a concept more relevant to the reception of art than to its production” (7). As we also see in McMullan, there is a curious division between the discourse after an artist has passed and the discourses current while an artist is engaged in her or his own late period. By disallowing an artistic late style from reflecting, consciously or not, a given era’s varied conceptions of lateness in art and life, casting such issues to the disembodied futurity of “discourse,” Painter and others reaffirm the sense of “late style” outside of time—the very marker of romantic discourse she, along with other revisionist critics, would seek to move beyond. Nicholas Halmi’s The Genealogy of the Romantic Symbol (2008) does much to redress this all-too-common oversight of putatively historicizing criticism.
Vander Zee 31 prevents one from a deeper historical understanding. Indeed, it remains the great irony of such historicizing critical efforts that they often lead to a very thin conception of the historicity of the very works they seek to demystify.17 Getting over the so-called mythology of lateness in the case of Whitman and subsequent poets, then, would itself be a historically inaccurate way of reading. No mere relic of romanticism’s dream of organic unity, ideas of late work, in their post-romantic afterlives, have become part of the fundamental grammar of human and literary experience. Such ideas are not merely so many tools used to generate ideas about a text, but in many cases an enabling condition of that text.18 But any approach to late work must be flexible; indeed, such a
17 Later in his study, McMullan notes that late style is often a “critical and artistic wish-fulfillment” in which there may be, in addition to the strong arm of the critic, some “complicity on the part of the artist, consciously producing work that fulfills the criteria for the attribution of a late style” (190). Certainly, one can more cynically manipulate the discursive regime of late style, but more often than not it takes the form of a certain cultural climate, something in which the author exists but of which the author may not always be entirely conscious. Furthermore, though McMullan offers a useful overview of the myth of late-style criticism and the truth it can, at times, obscure, he does not offer a positive account of how we might continue to work within the category of late work. Though I would choose different terms, I would argue that it is precisely in a through a deeper understanding of the tensions and constraints that underlie these complex acts of “critical and artistic wish-fulfillment” that one must approach late work. For McMullan this remains a qualification that needs to be made; for the present argument, it is the core concern of any revisionary late-style critique. 18 This point warrants some further attention in the context of contemporary criticism in part because it seems to be a symptom of a larger critical trend. Virginia Jackson’s Dickinson’s Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading (2005) offers a version of this argument, where the ideology of lyric, for her, echoes McMullan’s ideology of authorial late style. Ideas of lyric themselves, Jackson argues, obscure who Dickinson really was, and what Dickinson actually wrote. However valid her argument that post- Dickinsonian ideas of lyric largely govern the poet’s reception in both popular and critical terms, her position harbors a similar reluctance to accept the degree to which Dickinson—in a post-Millian, post- romantic world where the ideology of lyric solitude was firmly in place—was herself a product of such idealization, no matter how much marginal evidence we can find to the contrary. Indeed, conceptions of materiality that Jackson uses as a counterweight to airier idealizations of lyric would be much more foreign to Dickinson. Just as an artist’s reception in time cannot be fully scrubbed clean of the critical ideas that cling it, artistic production itself does not occur outside of its own historically specific constellation of informing ideals. To un-write Dickinson’s relationship to lyric would not only be to un- write much of the poetry and criticism in its wake—it would be to obscure the cultural pressures pressing in on Dickinson’s own severely private world, what we might even think of as her own remarkably lyric existence sequestered, as it was, and at a distinct remove from the more dominant happenings in the world. Jackson argues that we don’t know what Dickinson wrote, and that Dickinson’s original intention is extraordinarily difficult to discern through the haze of reception. This, after Jackson’s masterful argument, might seem obvious. But it also instantiates its own idealization: this notion, which Jackson both resists and yet harnesses for its pathos, that we could return to some material emblem of original intention somehow sealed off from the idealization of lyric.
Vander Zee 32 category of inquiry needs to be continually open to rethinking and revision in light of broader cultural significations of lateness in art and life. Our conception of late style must be additive and supple rather than restrictive.
Once we forfeit our post-romantic skepticism, a positive account of lateness becomes both more necessary and more difficult. We need to hone our ways of addressing artistic late styles by admitting the affective force and universal pull of lateness without universalizing its particular effects. Such an approach requires that we view authorial late work through the mutually inflecting and highly particular aesthetic, social, and historical vectors of aging, constructing an allegorical map that situates a given author’s relation to this compound terrain of lateness. Furthermore, it requires that we address the more pernicious elision of the cultural and historical determinants of late work.
Though the relatively young fields of humanistic gerontology and age studies have drastically expanded the interpretive possibilities of late-style criticism, few studies seem interested in holding the numerous significations of aging together at once. Where their focus does shift to literature, these broadly interdisciplinary efforts tend to view aging as a subject or motif rather than as a condition of the writing itself.
They therefore tend to forego rigorous formal attention in pursuit of sociological, psychological, or historical lessons and illustrations. In short, where traditional late- style criticism tends to stylize and rarify lateness, these revisionary efforts merely thematize it. Both broad approaches, however, miss the middle ground composed of the vital and varied mediating presence of embodied aesthetic practice that complicates sociological determinants and contradicts overarching styles. It is that
Vander Zee 33 middle ground that I work to reclaim in what follows. By expanding the terrain of late- style critique here, I aim to articulate a more productive and flexible interpretive approach revealing the referential formal capacity that traditional accounts of style as a signature of age too often obscure.
One might recast this broader critical move in the form of a simple question: what does lateness know? To ask what certain late works see and know from the vantage of lateness grants them a certain epistemic privilege that is too often and too easily overlooked. This standpoint does not presume a timeless gnosis, but inhabits instead a space of formal-historical knowing, a space that can alter radically from poem to poem, from artist to artist. In his 1931 essay on Beethoven’s late style,
Adorno was uncharacteristically direct and unequivocal about the historical knowledge late work holds, announcing that the most accomplished late works “show more traces of history than of growth” (564). He is equally unambiguous about the formal attention required when approaching late work, contending that “the only way to arrive at a revision of the dominant view of late style would be by means of the technical analysis of the works under consideration” (565). Urging a closer consideration of the techniques and forms of individual works, Adorno identifies a key path into any study of late style—one that is descriptive rather than prescriptive, one that seriously seeks to recover what lateness knows.
As we move, in later chapters, from these broader terrains of lateness to engage late works themselves, it seems more fitting to discuss an author’s late form rather than style. Adorno himself seems to deploy the language of style more as a provocation to set up his critique of the dominant organicist conception of late style, a
Vander Zee 34 critique that arrives already in the essay’s first line as he subjects the titular concept and its dominant figure to decay: “The maturity of the late works of significant artists,” Adorno writes, “does not resemble the kind one finds in fruit” (564). Ripeness is precisely not all; the fruits of Adorno’s late style are “furrowed, even ravaged,” and do not cater to “mere delectation.” The dominant pun here involves matters of aesthetic taste, of course. Late works are indigestible for those seeking the merely culinary pleasures of art. But there is, unmistakably, something of the physiognomy of age in the image of that furrowed and ravaged fruit.
The language of late form, then, distinguishes itself from accounts of authorial late works that emphasize ease and some inevitable sense of positive growth. It must be admitted, however, that this progressive sense of late style grounds even Adorno’s revisionary account. Though Adornian ideas late style as they arrive in his Beethoven essay might admit, in fragmentary fits and starts, certain unaccountable repetitions, unjustified musical embellishments, and a pronounced parroting of convention, a truly radical late style anticipates—must itself be—the new. It is precisely this propulsive inevitability of aesthetic progress that constantly seeks to expand our conceptual register onwards and outwards that marks Adornian late style despite its propensity to value a certain enduring incommensurability. It is also this recourse to the shatteringly new, I would contend, that can obscure the quieter and more insinuating powers that late form holds. Late Whitman—not to mention the unprecedented and ever-increasing ranks of poets practicing today that will see their careers drift into their eighth, ninth, and tenth decades—require a critical model for reading their poetic production that moves beyond a sense of patronizing serenity and wisdom that mark traditional late-
Vander Zee 35 style critique, and beyond, as well, what can seem to be the ageist assumptions of relentless novelty that mark Adorno’s revisionist late style. For the present project’s approach to authorial late work, the goal is not only be to make it new, finding value in late works from the comfortable retrospect of what has come later; it is to find the newness there, in the materials that have accrued, in the furrowed and ravaged surfaces of form.
This emphasis on late form over late style reflects the semantic weight of form itself, a key poetic counter that has played a central role in Anglo-American poetry and poetics at least since Whitman.19 Indeed, if the history of American poetry could be read in part as the history of Whitman’s reception, an essential part of that history would involve tracing the evolving semantics of form through Whitman and beyond.
This story begins with Whitman’s defiant question midway through “Song of Myself”:
“To be in any form, what is that? […] Mine is no callous shell” (CPP 611). In its apparent hubris, Whitman’s rhetorical question here haughtily dispenses with the trappings of traditional metrics. But read more earnestly—and listening for the deep pathos buried in the question’s faint echo of Hamlet—we can hear Whitman asking the most fundamental questions of American poetics across the twentieth-century and beyond: what does it mean to be in any form? And what ideas or fictions of form justify formal acts once they are removed from a more stable metrical tradition?20 This is a question that not only each poet must ask of himself or herself, but that each poem asks over and again. To move from style to form, then, is to shift our focus from ideals
19 I make this argument with specific reference to the poetic line in my introduction to A Broken Thing: Poets on the Line (2011). 20 I borrow the phrase “fictions of form” from Stephen Cushman’s Fictions of Form in American Poetry (1993).
Vander Zee 36 of lateness to ideas of lateness, from a constraining ideology to late form’s diverse and inassimilable instances. If late style presents an explanatory paradigm, then late form counters with multiplying an explanatory problems. Such a move, forfeiting that brand of post-theoretical skepticism discussed above, accepts the historically specific ideas regarding what counts as a viable late style. But it also measures those broader pressures against individual poetic formations that have the capacity alternately and often simultaneously to reflect, resist, and adapt those conditions. Late form, then, returns lateness to the poet and to history. Or, to put it another way: late form haunts what a given style assumes.
No critic has done more to elucidate this haunting work of form than Adorno.
No matter how much Adorno blends his aesthetics with eschatology, one cannot cast him aside with the host of others whose unquestioning transhistoricity emerges undisguised and unqualified.21 Adorno helps us see how the supposedly naïve forms of artistic or scholarly late-style thought that revisionist critics interrogate are, in certain cases, motivated departures where form does not transcend history, but makes it available on a different plane of engagement and critique. Any adequate account of the subject must attend to these myriad hauntings, to the persistence, in shadowed form, of that which has passed or that which has been passed over. Lateness, as Emily
Dickinson wrote of art more generally, is a house that wants to be haunted.
In order to give a finer point to the guiding rubric of late form, I focus in what follows on how ideas of allegory help to bring the formal energies of that haunting to life. In its most basic sense, allegory is a value-free figure, a purely descriptive term
21 McMullan, it should be said, reluctantly admits the degree to which Adorno “haunts” his interrogation of late style precisely because he force him to “acknowledge the critical value of the very phenomenon one is questioning” (61).
Vander Zee 37 used to address what happens when a clear relationship exists between an image or set of images and certain ideas or propositions. Allegory is often defined as a sustained or extended metaphor, a figurative elaboration in and through the poetic space of a sentence, a stanza, or an entire narrative. It is, etymologically, a speaking otherwise.
Discussions of allegory, however, have not remained value-free. Sensible quibbles over how to patrol the generic borders of allegory have been overtaken by arguments concerning how and why we might value allegory as a mode of literary expression and also as a way of addressing our literal experience.22 Coleridge, following Goethe’s lead, influentially elevated symbol above allegory as romantics in general elevated the organic, unifying, mystical and intuitive force of the imagination over the mere mechanical and constructive competence of fancy.23 Symbols were thought to embody universal principles, while allegories merely pointed to them. Symbols were divine, allegories, didactic.
Without fundamentally altering the romantic conceptions of symbol and allegory, Benjamin reversed Coleridge’s valuation of their relative merits. He recognized allegory precisely for its elaborate annotation of its own status as a failed symbol—a symbol, to borrow one of his favorite metaphors, in ruins. Describing how, in the German Trauerspiel or mourning-play, history enters the drama via the literal staging of ruins, Benjamin makes the broader point that “in the ruin, history has physically merged into the setting. And in this guise, history does not assume the form
22 See, among many others, Fletcher, MacQueen, Quilligan and Teskey for what one might call allegory-as-genre criticism. The amount of criticism produced in the wake of Coleridge’s revisionary sense of allegory, and Benjamin and, later, Paul de Man’s alternative valuations, is too varied to note succinctly. For a helpful overview of the differences between de Man and Benjamin in relation to Coleridge’s ideas of symbol and allegory, see Wilkens, Hansen, and Kelley 249-278. 23 Coleridge’s most thorough account of the symbol-allegory distinction arrives in The Statesman’s Manual in Vol. 6 of The Collected Works 28-31.
Vander Zee 38 of the process of an eternal life so much as that of irresistible decay…. Allegories are, in the realm of thoughts, what ruins are in the realm of things” (178). In his fragmentary and encyclopedic Arcades Project, Benjamin would later write that in
Baudelaire’s poetry, “allegory holds fast to the ruins” (329). Rather than view nature and history as a mutually constitutive and affirming unity pushing towards inevitable progress, Benjamin sees nature and history as a self-interrogating dialectic. The ruin, where crumbling illusions of historical progress are most fully exposed, is Benjamin’s preferred illustration for this dialectical tension. And allegory, which exposes the processes that enable fictions of progress, offered Benjamin away to translate the lessons of this literal relic into the language of literary form.
Thus, throughout Benjamin’s work, allegory is a figure of melancholic loss in light of particular social and historical realities. But allegory simultaneously inhabits a critical way of seeing, a way of standing witness to what has been lost. Where classic definitions of allegory work to define its operations with a formal or poetic space, I emphasize for my own purposes how Benjamin, at times, views this extension in temporal terms as sheer duration. Allegory thus becomes the aging of the symbolic, and an implicit rejection of the solutions offered by it. Rather than value how a symbol might unify disparate elements into a seamless whole, he chose to value the formal distance that allegory recognizes between subject and object, language and experience, present and past. My earlier emphasis on lateness as a charged epistemic vantage, then, echoes this kind of recognition, what Benjamin often casts as an allegorical way of seeing or perceiving.24
24 For more on the significance of Benjamin’s repeated sense of allegory as “a focal point from which to look out on things,” see Cowan 112.
Vander Zee 39
While Benjamin addresses his conception of allegory toward a general experience of time, Adorno subtly recasts Benajaminian ideas of allegory as a special province of late work itself. This borrowing becomes evident already in the first sentence of his early, compact Beethoven essay where Adorno, by way of introduction, serves up that image, quoted above, of a distinctly organic ruin or ravaged and furrowed fruit. If one symbol of consummate late style is that of ripe, mature fruit, Adorno’s corrective image succinctly illustrates the temporal dimension of a symbol’s lasting into allegory: not its ripening, but its rotting.
The allegorical qualities of lateness appear more explicitly throughout
Adorno’s scattered notes on late writing. In posthumously collected writings on
Beethoven, Adorno mobilizes the concept of allegory to argue that “a theory of the very late Beethoven must start from the decisive boundary dividing it from the earlier work—the fact that in it nothing is immediate, everything is refracted, significant, withdrawn…. The real problem is to resolve this allegorical element” (Philosophy of
New Music 136). Expanding on this allegorical element, and opposing it to the unity of the symbol, he later writes how commentaries on Beethoven’s late works seem to miss the mark. “One must start from the ‘allegorical,’ and in an important sense fractured, nature of these pieces,” he contends, “from the fact that they dispense with unity of sensuous appearance and content, whatever that may be” (158).25
25 In another interesting echo of Benjamin’s notions of allegory in his discussion of the conclusion to the Piano Sonata op. 22, Adorno writes that “perhaps the last notes contain the ‘key’ to the late style as mediated, in the precise sense that here each individual part stands not for itself but as a representative of its type, its category, a situation which indeed come very close to the allegorical. Here, only types are invented, everything singular being set down as a sign for them; and, conversely, the force of each individual element lies in the fact that it is replete with its type, is no longer itself. Everything individual is both shrunken and saturated with the ideal unity of its species” (159).
Vander Zee 40
Benjamin’s revisionary sense of allegory, then, provides a conceptual vocabulary for Adorno’s exploration of artistic late style. At the end of his essay on the late Beethoven, these mutually inflecting senses of individual and epochal lateness appear by way of a coded homage to Benjamin. “In the history of art,” Adorno concludes, “late works are the catastrophes” (566). Catastrophe—‘ruin’ in the
Greek—deftly invokes Benjamin’s favored trope for the allegorical. As if in dialogue with Adorno, Benjamin would echo these ruins once again in his indelible image of the Angel of History—a figure in a constant state of retrospect and therefore a figure for this more difficult lateness. With its back towards the illusory promise of a progressive future, the angel views the wreckage of time as a “single catastrophe”
(Illuminations 257). Noting that catastrophe etymologically denotes a broken strophe, we might think of late works as formally broken and fractured. Lateness and allegory meet in the ruin-as-poem—that broken thing—an emblem of historical loss.
Insofar as it denies this deep sense of loss, the logic of traditional late-style critique is fundamentally compensatory. An artist’s final work marks a passage beyond the cares of the world, a romantic transcendence of worldly things as the artist enters a new creative space unconstrained, as it were, by convention, by the body, by history. Such a mythic and universal force compensates, among other things, for the impending reality of death. In this traditional sense, late works sail en masse to some mythical Byzantium—an artifice, to borrow Yeats’s apt phrasing, of eternity.
Adornian revisionary ideas of late style, where the artist does not transcend history but embodies it, work against the grain of traditional late-style critique’s compensatory logic. And this anti-compensatory disposition emerging from Adorno’s intense
Vander Zee 41 engagement with late Beethoven presciently anticipates the constellation of ideas that would come to typify Adornian aesthetics more generally: a charged autonomy, a refusal of transcendence, a rarified commitment to aesthetic form placed under extreme historical pressure, and the sense in which art is inevitably late, inevitably elegiac. Even as Adorno’s revisionary late-style critique quite clearly reserves its attention for works that are shatteringly new and duly rarified in their own way—how
Beethoven anticipates Schoenberg’s musical modernism, to use his primary example—one senses throughout Adorno’s writing on aesthetics that novelty is often itself an illusion: there is no inevitable novelty that a select group of late artists proleptically embody, but there are countless new ways of longing for such novelty.26
Just as Adorno seems more concerned with philosophical aesthetics and the historical inflections of late style than with literal age, Benjamin’s more abstract ruminations on temporality, ruins, and retrospect seem, at first glance, to have little explicit interest in the physiology of lateness. But literal age does emerge quietly as a theme. It emerges, for example, in an aphoristic aside in his Arcades Project when
Benjamin discusses certain famous images of Baudelaire: “It can be seen from the portraits,” he notes, “that Baudelaire’s physiognomy very early showed the marks of old age” (365). Here, Benjamin suggests the degree to which the face of age, furrowed and ravaged by history, itself might become a powerful figure for allegorical, melancholic insight. Benjamin’s work on allegory, though it never explicitly takes up the question of artistic late style, seems everywhere consumed by a broader, socio- historical sense of lateness. Lateness, thus understood, signifies beyond any isolated
26 Said has argued this point most convincingly in his essay “Adorno as Lateness Itself,” and he seems, as well, to draw out the more regressive, reflective energies of lateness that qualify this drive for novelty as well.
Vander Zee 42 instance of late work, becoming not age-bound but a mode of critical-historical retrospect. Together, Adorno and Benjamin articulate an anti-compensatory lateness grounded in a distinctly allegorical insight: a charged, exilic, anti-progressive, and elegiac backward glace. Such ideas identify a difficult reality for which there is no compensation save for knowledge; no knowledge worth attaining if not based in an honest appraisal, wrested from the deep structures of art and life, of that which has been lost; and no appraisals so honest as those that yield, in the end, to something like happiness, like pleasure. “Happiness,” Benjamin confirms, “is founded on the very despair and desolation which were ours” (479). “Negation,” Adorno echoes decades later in his Aesthetic Theory, “may reverse into pleasure, not into affirmation” (51).
Recalling the traditional romantic associations of allegory with mere fancy, these might be considered the serious entertainments of allegory.
The present section moved from traditional ideas of a disembodied and transcendent late style to their revisionary afterlives emphasizing the materiality and intransigence of late form; the next one moves from the compensatory and progressive work of mourning to the more reflective melancholic disposition that Benjamin imbues with such critical, allegorical force.
Mourning Becomes Allegorical: Melancholy in Freud to Benjamin
“Lateness,” Michael Wood writes in his introduction to Edward Said’s posthumous On Late Style (2006), “doesn’t name a single relation to time, but it always brings time in its wake. It is a way of remembering time, whether it is missed or met or gone” (xi). In Wood’s poignant phrasing, even the possibility of contact and
Vander Zee 43 realization joins the broader temper of loss held closely by the past tense of “met.”
Lateness, here, names a process through which loss grows visible in time. Such a temporal understanding of loss seems counterintuitive. We tell our loved ones and friends, in the platitudes that emerge in the face of loss, that one will get over it in time. Indeed, the common sense of mourning as a working through and beyond that
Sigmund Freud canonized in his classic 1917 essay on “Mourning and Melancholy” speaks to loss as something resolved through time. To invoke the inevitable cliché: time heals all wounds.
Admittedly well-traversed critical ground, Freud’s classic essay remains unavoidable insofar as his classic mourning theory has become a dominant paradigm in our broader cultural understanding of loss across the twentieth century. This is perhaps due to the way in which it both parallels and motivates a central tension grounding modernism and its afterlives, a tension between what modernity promises and what modernization itself revokes or denies. The successful work of mourning that Freud urges echoes progressive enlightenment ideals by suggesting an inevitable teleological movement beyond whose other can only be a self-reflexive melancholy unable to parry the blows of rapid modernization. Because it so closely echoes this broader drama of modernism, Freud’s difficult essay remains the dominant revisionary ground for later thinking about loss in a wide range of contexts from the psychological and cultural, to the historical and political.
Reconsiderations, revisions, and applications of Freud’s mourning theory have been particularly persistent in post-9/11 literary and cultural studies.27 But rather than
27 See, most recently, Tammy Clewell’s Mourning, Modernism, and Postmodernism (2009) and Seth Moglen’s Mourning Modernity (2007). For an excellent account that is deeply invested in Freud
Vander Zee 44 qualify, adapt, or harness the generative force of Freud’s binary conception of loss by locating a clear moral or ethical mandate in either the compensatory or anti- compensatory strains of Freud’s dominant terms, I take a closer look at Freud’s account, noting in particular its marked resistance to the temporality and conscious topography of melancholic loss. While this resistance forecloses upon the broader historical and political resonance of loss—of what loss might know—the subtle complications Freud introduced into his mourning theory anticipate and help frame
Benjamin’s revisionary work on melancholy and allegory. To move from Freud to
Benjamin, then, is to move from mourning to melancholy, from loss to lateness, from the histrionics of the Freudian psyche to historicity itself. Melancholy, then, becomes not the pathological opposite but the shadow-side of supposedly successful mourning, its temporally dense and layered other-speaking. Or, to put it slightly differently, mourning becomes allegorical, a way—recalling Michael Wood’s words above—of remembering time.
In “Mourning and Melancholy,” Freud attempts neatly to distinguish between his titular responses to loss. The basic story here hardly needs repeating. Mourning denotes one’s ability consciously to detach the libido’s finite resources from the lost object, directing those energies towards new connections and possibilities. In melancholia, this crucial movement regresses, turning inwards towards the ego.
Bound within the unconscious, melancholy betrays a morbid pathology exhibiting narcissism, ambivalence, and, potentially, self-violence. If this binary understanding
mourning theory, but attentive as well to the anti-depressive, actionable melancholic potential evident in the work of thinkers such as Benjamin, see Jonathan Flatley’s Affective Mapping (2008). For a broader range of views, see the essays in two key edited collections: Mourning and Modernism (2007), edited by Patricia Rae; and Loss: The Politics of Mourning (2002) edited by David Eng, David Kazanjian, and Judith Butler.
Vander Zee 45 of loss remains the most durable accomplishment of Freud’s essay, it is also the most consistently contested, and not just in the myriad post-Freudian revisions of his schema. Already in Freud’s early mourning theory, a certain hesitance, coupled with a surprisingly textured account of pathological melancholy, initiates this contrary work.
The essay’s marked equivocations betray a deep sense of epistemic impediment shared by analyst and patient alike. “We must make a certain prefatory warning against too great expectations of the result,” Freud cautions already in the second sentence of his essay (164). “Even in descriptive psychiatry,” he continues,
“the definition of melancholia is uncertain.” Though Freud continues to pursue a descriptive anatomy of melancholy, he admits that the condition “confronts us with yet other problems, the answer to which in part eludes us.” Such uncertainty punctuates
“Mourning and Melancholy” throughout. Insofar as Freud’s own account seems shadowed by an inability to understand what draws one into melancholy and what might draw one out of it, he echoes the melancholic disposition itself when he writes that the patient “knows whom he has lost but not what he has lost in them” (166).
Patient and analyst alike remain in the dark as the fact of loss remains utterly clear, its significance continually obscured.
This epistemic deficit on the part of the melancholic individual, at least, could be explained by what Freud sees as the largely unconscious mechanisms at play in such responses to loss. But it becomes increasingly clear in Freud’s account that the real difficulty involves the sheer complexity of melancholic attachments. In a well known move early in the essay, Freud describes the varieties of loss that both inhabit and exceed the singular: “Mourning is regularly the reaction to the loss of a loved
Vander Zee 46 person, or to the loss of some abstraction which has taken the place of one, such as fatherland, liberty, an ideal, and so on” (164). Freud’s casual and so on gestures toward the seeming endlessness of elegy in the twentieth century, and also toward its compounding and complicating forms. In the case of both mourning and melancholy one is multiply bound to a loss. If one’s ties to loss, Freud writes, were not
“strengthened by a thousand links,” neither mourning nor melancholy would result
(177). Yet he senses that there is something more to melancholy: more content, more conflict, more ambivalence. Freud admits that “the exciting causes of melancholia are of a much wider range than those of grief, which is for the most part occasioned only by a real loss of the object, by its death.” In melancholia, it is not merely “a thousand links,” but “countless single conflicts in which love and hate wrestle together.” It seems clear here that the sheer volume of these self-combating operations, and not simply some clinical pathology, blocks the work of mourning; thus, the clinical distinction between successful mourning and pathological melancholia grows obscure.
These cumulative, intersectional, and expansive forces of loss inform what one critic aptly terms “symbolic loss.”28 Because the affective relationship to what symbols contain often remains at once self-evident and ineffable, such forms of loss naturally resist easy resolution and timely healing. It is, finally, a matter of the degree and complexity of loss that together form a more profound constellation of feeling that cannot simply be gotten beyond.
Melancholy thus disrupts the predictable temporality of normal mourning, opening up the complicating and exacerbating realities of time as though it were the
28 Peter Homans deploys this phrase in the title and throughout his book, Symbolic Loss: The Ambiguity of Mourning and Memory at Century’s End (2000).
Vander Zee 47 opening of a wound. Furthermore, the sheer multiplicity and duration of loss further complicates the neatly segregated operations of mourning and melancholy within the conscious and unconscious realms respectively. This complication significantly affects what I term the epistemology of loss. Early in the essay, Freud states, with only slight equivocation, “that melancholia is in some way related to an unconscious loss of a love-object, in contradistinction to mourning, in which there is nothing unconscious about loss” (166). By the end of the essay, however, it seems that once the crucial turning inwards that defines melancholy occurs, the process can enter consciousness.
After describing the intensely combined operation of losses that blocks the normal work of mourning, Freud writes of melancholy that its unresolved ambivalence
“remains excluded from consciousness, until the outcome characteristic of melancholia sets in”—that outcome being the libidinal energy’s abandonment of the lost object as it turns on the ego itself.
This apparent epistemological confusion within Freud’s early text concerning how and when melancholia becomes a conscious operation arrives directly before the most oddly pathetic line in Freud’s predominantly clinical treatment of loss: “So by taking flight into the ego,” Freud writes, “love escapes extinction” (178). Once this process of introjection has occurred, Freud repeats once again that, at this stage, “the process can become conscious.” But just when Freud makes melancholy a thing of conscious reflection, he denies its significance or value to either the analyst or the patient. “That which consciousness is aware of in the work of melancholia,” Freud asserts with none of his characteristic hedging, “is thus not the essential part of it, nor is it even the part which we may credit with an influence in bringing the suffering to
Vander Zee 48 an end.” To consider a conscious melancholy as a psychological locus where loss might be worked through would break down the very clear distinction that Freud strives to instantiate between mourning and melancholy, between the normal and the pathological. Freud’s own motivated withdrawal from that heavy line about love and extinction, however, remains unconvincing.
The key words customarily rendered as “escape” and “extinction” (or
“annihilation”) in Freud’s aphoristic aside, here, are the German entzogen and
Aufhebung, respectively. In her deft gloss on this translation in The Psychic Life of
Power (1997), Judith Butler notes that entzogen has been translated as “withdraw” in this context—a sense that more accurately captures the melancholic action where one that keeps loss within rather than directing it outwards. The choice of “annihilation” for Aufhebung, however, seems particularly tone-deaf insofar as it flattens the much subtler Hegelian resonance of the word. Butler explains:
Here it is not a question of love ‘escaping an extinction’ mandated from elsewhere; rather, love itself withdraws or takes away the destruction of the object, takes it on as its own destructiveness. Instead of breaking with the object, or transforming the object through mourning, this Aufhebung—the active, negating, and transformative movement—is taken into the ego. The ‘flight’ of love into the ego is this effort to squirrel the Aufhebung away inside… to institute an internal topography in which the ambivalence might find an altered articulation. (176)
Freud himself resists this dynamic coincidence of an active consciousness coupled with withdrawal, even as he creates such a powerful figure—that intense inward flight—for it. The combination of inwardness, consciousness, and duration signals the perpetually renewed work of melancholy within the individual. Melancholy, a form of lateness, becomes a remembering of loss, a knowing of loss, a holding-close of loss.
The mixed metaphor in the passage above where time becomes a kind of “topography”
Vander Zee 49 helps one imagine the opening expanse of time in melancholia, and what that opening- up makes available. To squirrel or secret away that Aufhebung, as Butler suggest, is to take the very mechanism of dialectical progress within the self, where it becomes an engine for personal change and renewal rather than historical blindness and fantasy cast into some unknown but necessarily reparative future. Such a scheme elegantly hides futurity within the self.
Freud would continue to revise his mourning theory, gradually admitting the degree to which one’s attachment to loss contributes to the ego’s formation. When we arrive at his The Ego and the Id (1923), for example, written in part under the intense melancholic pressures he felt in the aftermath of his grandson’s death, he writes that
“the character of the ego is a precipitate of abandoned object cathexis and that it contains the history of those object choices” (29). Because Freud appears to provide an explicit figure for the incorporation or introjection of loss, critics have turned to this sentiment to suggest an evolution in Freud’s mourning theory. Rather than complete detachment, Freud seems to suggest some essential remains of loss. But Freud, one must note, clings to the language of abandonment here. Furthermore, the scientific metaphor of precipitation speaks less to the suspended residue of loss (“suspension” here being both the proper scientific term and also the most aesthetically suggestive), and much more to its sedimentation and segregation. Indeed, the chemical process of precipitation is one in which a substance, once in a state of suspension, fully separates.
The resulting sedimentation is not a mark of conscious knowledge, then, so much as it indicates some abandoned sediment of loss persisting in the unconscious. Freud here has found a suitable home for loss, one whose test-tube metaphor is clinical rather than
Vander Zee 50 emotional, one barred, once again, from consciousness. The normative work of mourning persists in Freud, then, persists through these qualifications. In his consistent return to ideals of normative mourning, we sense Freud’s strong resistance to the temporality and conscious topography of melancholic loss, to what melancholy might know. Normative mourning takes for granted modernity’s faith in progressive teleology, in the sense that there is some inevitable and unimpeachable historical and human progress. To refuse normative mourning is, in a sense, to be left behind, locked in that sustained backwards glance. It is to absent oneself from this narrative of progress. For thinkers such as Benjamin, for whom these ideals of progress appear as the dominant and most damaging myth of modernity, this normative work signals an evasion of reality. Reality—and, ultimately, repair—for Benjamin lies precisely in the backwards, melancholic glance. To put this another way, melancholy, for Benjamin, is not something to be talked away or worked through via the psychoanalytic process; it is, rather, part of the fundamental grammar of one’s historicity, even if its legibility is always under pressure, always in need of interpretation.
While it remains useful to note such broad distinctions between Freud and
Benjamin, I do not bring these two figures together for contrastive purposes alone.
Noting certain similarities keeps one from an uncritical investment in Benjamin’s melancholic disposition even as it rescues whatever insight one can glean from
Freud’s melancholic sediment and from that bit of Aufhebung he subtly secrets away.
In addition to sharing a sense of melancholy’s narrative structure, both thinkers warned against its regressive and damaging tendencies in ways that go beyond reflecting the ingrained historical sense of melancholy as inherently passive and
Vander Zee 51 depressive. We see this, for example, in Benjamin’s warnings against a certain left- wing melancholy, and in his later conception of an indolent accedia that blocks a more authentic engagement with the past (Illuminations 256). In Freud, this danger emerges in melancholia’s inevitable movement towards rage and even suicide, a movement that he would cast in more pessimistic and culturally pervasive terms in his theory of the death drive. Benjamin thus emerges from this comparative relationship as more of a careful melancholic centrist than he is often perceived to be.
For both Freud and Benjamin melancholy emerges when a sturdy relation between self and world falls out of alignment as some loss or change threatens or disrupts the cultural scripts by which one lives. Melancholy thus casts one into a distinctly allegorical landscape wherein one’s deeply engrained sense of self—rooted in the past, in habit—persists, through loss, alongside and against the sudden shock of a new and uncertain existence. To think of Freud’s schema in narrative terms, he appears to urge the mourner to come up with a new story, a new attachment, rather than continue to live according to the lost or losing script of a prior attachment. As memories are summoned and scrutinized so that they might be detached from the libido, “deference for reality,” Freud writes in “Mourning and Melancholia,” “gains the day” (166).
Such deference for reality holds a very different meaning for Benjamin. The founding moment of loss for him lies beyond the individual, emerging not from profound rifts in the fabric of an individual life, but from broader paradigm shifts that can make an entire era appear somehow out of joint. In such cases, the general mood of melancholy saturates an era (and, more to the point for Benjamin, its art) long
Vander Zee 52 before it moves toward a more complete recognition of loss. Such a markedly passive melancholic disposition does not, by default, achieve the force of resistance or critique. Rather, it takes a certain allegorical way of seeing to transform melancholy’s damaged and ruined vista into a kind of insight that works towards a provisional and non-illusory realignment of that which has fallen to it.
In The Origin of German Tragic Drama, for example, Benjamin sees in the
Trauerspiel or baroque mourning play evidence of a fundamental misalignment of cultural power structures as a burgeoning secular impulse began to pull away from an ingrained religious sensibility. The resulting gap created a climate, Benjamin argues, in which “men were denied all real means of direct expression” (79). Baroque dramatists, according to Benjamin, implicitly registered and responded to the distance between the discursive planes of the religious and the secular via a range of allegorical strategies: the staging of ruins, for example, cast these grounding tensions allegorically upon the clashing dialectic of history and nature, progress and decay; the Trauerspiel’s manufactured entrance of the dues ex machina presented a specter of salvation that had become lost to the burgeoning secular worldview; and what Benjamin describes as a “constantly convulsed” language found “word, syllable and sound… emancipated from the context of traditional meaning,” allowing them to be “flaunted as objects which can be exploited for allegorical purposes” (207). The denial of direct expression that constrains the world of reality for Benjamin in turn enables the deep reserves of allegorical expression, its crucial speaking otherwise. Baroque allegory, in short, allowed Benjamin to develop this keen sense of what has much more recently been
Vander Zee 53 described by critics as historical-formalism, where reading for form becomes a powerful way of reading hidden or disguised cultural and historical meanings.29
Whereas Baroque allegory emerged in an era torn neatly in two, it appears very differently in the nineteenth century, an era that Benjamin considered to be a distinctly non-allegorical. Numerous cultural developments—the New Science, imperial expansion, burgeoning capitalism—had emerged to bridge the increasingly recognizable gap between the secular and the religious that Benjamin identifies in the
Baroque era. But it was the questionable synthesis provided foremost by the commodity that made allegorical insight all the more difficult and all the more necessary for a figure such as Baudelaire. The structure of the commodity, in its ability to relate disparate objects via the sheer mechanism of monetary exchange, provided a transparent structure of relationships that, for Benjamin, cast an anti- allegorical spell on the era whose reflective space was constantly receding, reducing one’s means to insulate oneself against the shock experience of modernization.
Baudelaire was unique both in recognizing this inauthentic synthesis that the commodity came to provide, and in his desire to corrode or disintegrate this synthesis.
“Baudelaire as allegorist was entirely isolated,” he writes. “He sought to recall the experience of the commodity to an allegorical experience” (466). It is, of course,
Benjamin as much as Baudelaire doing that crucial summoning work, here, reviving the allegorical to reclaim a melancholic distance that might open some reflective space that was otherwise continually being foreclosed upon. Though Baudelaire becomes a key figure in this reclamation, one might say that for Benjamin, criticism tout cort is
29 For an extremely thorough account of what has been called the “new formalism” in literary studies, see Marjorie Levinson’s review essay on this new disciplinary formation. Her extraordinarily thorough bibliography is particularly useful. I address other works in this area later in the chapter.
Vander Zee 54 an act of reclaiming the allegorical from what would seek to foreclose upon its essential recognition of time, history and distance. The best criticism, that is, works towards an active critical defamiliarization of answers that are too easy, syntheses that seem ready-made.
This intentional summoning of the unfamiliar—tied, here to this effort to recover reflective experience even if that means rendering the present as a collection of fragments—speaks to a kind of allegorical-melancholic action. This idea of melancholic activity plays upon the now-obsolete verbal sense that Robert Burton gave melancholy when he wrote, in his Anatomy, that “they get their knowledge by books, I mine by melancholizing” (22). Burton’s elegant elision of the acquisitive verb to get reveals the verbal energy hidden in the possessive: not my own, but to mine.
This suggests a digging, a sorting through fragments and ruin, which is the essential action that melancholy calls for if it is to become not passive, but actionable. Thus, if melancholy names a certain disposition, a certain way of being in relation to loss, allegory provides a constructive impulse through which one might recognize and, more importantly, figure loss. Whereas what we might call the transcendent symbolics of Freud’s mourning theory cast loss into some futurity of necessary recovery,
Benjamin’s sustained allegorical vision seeks a non-illusory realignment of these disparate strands of existence where one begins to see points of contact and connection whose end result is a reflective knowledge of loss secured through a process of difficult, often strained recovery.
Melancholic vision itself, however, does not inherently bend towards the allegorical. It wants only to persist within loss. Melancholy, then, threatens to work a
Vander Zee 55 dangerous seduction—one that a growing body of work has been drawn to in its valuation of a kind of pure melancholic disposition.30 In her afterword to the seminal collection Loss: The Politics of Mourning, Judith Butler voices the central paradox suggested by the way critics have chosen to value a more intransigent melancholia over the work of mourning. In melancholia, she argues, the origins of loss often remain unclear:
Somewhere, sometime, something was lost, but no story can be told about it... no memory can retrieve it; a fractured horizon looms in which to make one’s way as a spectral agency, one for whom a full ‘recovery’ is impossible, one for whom the irrecoverable becomes, paradoxically, the condition of a new political agency. (468)
There is something deeply appealing about the pathos of community formed, in
Butler’s reading, in and through irrecoverable loss. But to what extent can not knowing ground a healthy response to loss? It is precisely this more debilitating sense of melancholy—where not merely the fact of loss, but the epistemic impossibility of overcoming it, forms the necessary foundation of community—that Benjamin cautions against throughout his work.
Early in his career, this cautionary tale blends the metaphysics of redemption with the mechanics of allegory as Benjamin conjures a mystical reversal that can transform—to borrow his famous, concluding analogy in The Origin of German
Tragic Drama—the “bleak confusion of Golgotha” into an “allegory of resurrection”
(233). Early in Origin, Benjamin succinctly articulates the core truth of allegory that
30 Critics such as Jahan Ramazani and Judith Butler have become spokespersons for this melancholic vision: the former valuing the anti-compensatory and resistant energies of elegy in particular; the latter extending literary and cultural analyses of loss beyond the elegy proper. Ramazani chooses to move more explicitly contra Freud, and his approach to elegy largely abandons any redemptive impulse within it, focusing instead on a the inconsolable rage at the heart of what he calls the twentieth century’s proclivity for anti-elegiac elegy. Butler moves more explicitly toward Benjamin in seeking an alternative that is not merely contrary, but community-forming.
Vander Zee 56 enables this reversal. Under the allegorical gaze, he writes, “Any person, any object, any relationship can mean absolutely anything else” (175). A radical realization of the allegory’s arbitrary and purely formal action, such an understanding threatens to eviscerate all objects under consideration, shattering reality into a heap of fragments.
But allegory also makes available, for Benjamin, a committed and potentially redemptive opportunity to think otherwise. And it is through this intentionally allegorical impulse that such “devalued” objects might be ultimately “elevated.”
The task of Origin, at its conclusion, is to rescue this metaphysical, redemptive potential proffered by allegory. In his study’s final pages, Benjamin writes potently of the redemptive allegorical impulse wrested from melancholic depths marked by
“vainglory,” and “self-delusion,” and of that which is “the most fragmented, the most defunct, the most dispersed.” But at precisely this point where it works towards its natural end in self-extinction, allegory’s transformative powers emerge in a way that necessarily transforms the allegorical and the melancholic alike:
Allegory, of course, thereby loses everything that was most peculiar to it: the secret, privileged knowledge, the arbitrary rule of the realm of dead objects, the supposed infinity of a world without hope. All this vanishes with this one about turn, in which the immersion of allegory has to clear away the final phantasmagoria of the objective and, left entirely to its own devices, re- discovers itself. (232)
In and through melancholic allegory, we awaken at once to ourselves and to loss. In this crucial versus, the allegorical impulse enters the scene of the deepening catastrophe inhibiting melancholic reflection, marking an intentional effort to begin again, to forge a new articulation of one’s relationship to loss: not so much to move beyond it, as Freud would have it, but to move in and through it, to be bound to it.
Thus, we move from melancholic emersion to something else entirely where,
Vander Zee 57
Benjamin continues, “these allegories fill out and deny the void in which they are represented, just as, ultimately, the intention does not faithfully rest in the contemplation of bones, but faithlessly leaps forward to the idea of resurrection”
(233). Though the messianic strain here has frustrated many critics seeking a less mystified appraisal of allegory’s critical force, it is important to note how even as
Benjamin suggests a mystical departure, he simultaneously revokes it: not resurrection, but the idea of resurrection; not Aufhebung, thinking back to Butler’s gloss on Freud, but its recursive secreting away as allegories both fill out and deny the ominous void left by melancholy’s pure attachment to loss.
Despite its notable tempering, Benjamin’s rectification of melancholy in and through allegory in his Origin remains elusive. A little over a decade later, however,
Benjamin would articulate more clearly the pernicious effects of melancholic emersion, turning from the rarified realm of these initial reflections on allegory to a more grounded articulation of what melancholy might endanger when art meets politics. In a brief 1931 review under the title “Left-Wing Melancholy,” Benjamin savages the poet Erich Kästner, a proponent of the “New Objectivity” in Germany.
Kästner wrote what one might think of as sturdily left-wing, sympathetic poems casting an objective eye on the disadvantaged. But something in Kästner’s melancholic gaze struck Benjamin as conservative, even regressive. His earnest empathy appears trite, and though the poet appears “dissatisfied, indeed heavy hearted,” this “heaviness of heart,” for Benjamin, “derives from routine” (305-6). The problem is not the empathetic orientation towards the past, but rather the way that this attachment has become itself the object of attention, obscuring a more earnest
Vander Zee 58 engagement with historical and political processes. “This left-wing radicalism,”
Benjamin contends, “is precisely the attitude to which there is no longer in general any corresponding political action. It is to the left not of this or that tendency, but simply to the left of what is in generally possible” (306).
Here, Benjamin would seem to caution against that kind of deepening melancholic attachment whose very denial of recovery, recalling Butler’s account above, has become, for some, the essential hollowed-out core of community itself.
Though his critique takes a more political shape here, Benjamin summons profound visions of spiritual decay: “What then does the spiritual elite discover as it begins to take stock of its feelings? Those feelings themselves?” Benjamin asks. “They have long since been remaindered. What is left is the empty spaces where, in dusty heart- shaped velvet trays, the feelings—nature and love, enthusiasm and humility—once rested. Now the hollow forms are absentmindedly caressed” (305). Earnest political versifying withers, under Benjamin’s withering critique, as elegy’s true object becomes the elegiac impulse itself, now commodified, emptied of meaning, absently caressed.
As Benjamin unfolds his critique here, he refers to this melancholic attachment as a kind of “tortured stupidity,” a clowning of despair” and concludes with a more caustic scatological assault on such work which, he concludes, betrays a kind of melancholic constipation whose exertions do not “improve the air” (306). This kind of rhetorical point-scoring weakens Benjamin’s important point about the dangerous, binding force of melancholic attachment. For the left-wing melancholic, loss is mistaken for transcendence; ritual commitment to lost possibility for progressive
Vander Zee 59 engagement. But by warning of melancholy’s very real excesses as it recedes into its negativistic quiet, Benjamin demonstrates the necessity of reclaiming that crucial middle ground in which not attachment to loss, but a dedication to provisional, non- illusory realignment remains key. Political philosopher Wendy Brown, meditating on the persistent dangers of such left-melancholy in contemporary, American-left politics, echoes and extends Benjamin’s insights when she writes that what remains most troubling is the advent of left orientation in the new millennium that has become
“more attached to its impossibility than to its potential fruitfulness,” one that is “most at home dwelling not in hopefulness but in its own marginality and failure” (464). In the depths of melancholic immersion, we require the allegorical impulse to speak and think otherwise.
Benjamin’s careful valuation of the melancholic vision, in the end, honors
Freud’s key distinctions and helps us think more carefully about the complex work of melancholy and the various ends toward which it works. It also reminds us of that crucial secreting away of Aufhebung that Freud so suggestively lays out even as he revokes it. It is a deepening, not a deadening, of the melancholic vision that allegory activates. In his Arcades Project, Benjamin carves out this crucial middle ground once more when he writes that “overcoming the concept of ‘progress’ and overcoming the concept of ‘period of decline’ are two sides of one and the same thing” (460). Both extremes end up forcing an ironically conservative and self-defeating stance. What distinguishes this more centrist vision from those who would value a kind of pure melancholia of irrecoverable loss is a sense of what loss knows, and what we might know through loss. This is precisely the kind of historical materialism that Benjamin
Vander Zee 60 pursues, one that has as its goal “not progress,” but “actualization” (460). What is the origin of loss? What binds one to it? What broader determining cultural scripts, institutional structures, and historical processes have sponsored this loss? And finally, how can a community—not one committed to loss itself, but to the knowledge that loss holds—make grief actionable?
These are questions, I argue, that we must ask in Whitman’s wake so that critics and poets alike might redefine their relationship to this foundational American poet. The two dominant strains of Whitmainian influence remain torn between utopia and elegy: the former, triumphant and enabling, translates Whitman’s optimism to new attachments; the latter is more committed to a melancholic attachment to the loss of
Whitman itself. These two strains leave open a broad middle ground where
Benjamin’s constructive, centrist melancholia emerges as a useful tool for reconceiving his work and influence. In the case of Whitman, this means that we need to know, to inhabit, the loss of Whitman: not to dwell in some melancholic political unconscious after Whitman, but to bring his loss to knowledge, and to discover how our loss is figured, allegorically, in his loss.
To understand the elegiac temper of the long American century is to see its structure as fundamentally melancholic in a double sense as both problem and possibility. An allegorical reading of Whitman’s late work and influence will help us to move beyond the melancholic orientation of a certain strain of American poetry, one committed more to the loss of Whitman, or his illusory recovery, than to the possibilities that persist in and through his loss. If the melancholic individual knows the figure or ideal that has been lost, but not necessarily what was lost in that figure, I
Vander Zee 61 want to suggest that the true work of melancholy asks not only what was lost in that object, but what that object itself has lost. “‘The Final Lilt of Songs’” is, in one importance sense, about the degree to which a clearer picture of the composite character of American poetry emerges in and through an understanding of Whitman’s allegorical presence attained through a reappraisal of his late work. This signals a new orientation both in Whitman studies and twentieth-century poetics more generally as I exhume an affirmative genealogy of loss even as I expose its more debilitating strains.
Late Whitman becomes a quiet counter-monument to his own iconic body of work, something that troubles a more facile commemoration.
Benjamin gave little attention to Walt Whitman across his work; he mentions the bard casually just a few times. In “Central Park”—a series of fragments collating and extending much of the material on Baudelaire that Benjamin projected for his evolving Arcades Project—Benjamin offers one such apparently casual reflection.
“That Baudelaire was hostile to progress was an indispensible condition of his being able to cope with Paris in his poetry,” Benjamin writes. “Compared to his, later city poetry must be accounted feeble, and not least where it sees the city as the seat of progress. But Walt Whitman? (185). He chooses not to pursue the point—and the question itself does not appear in this fragment’s recasting in the Arcades Project.
What can we make of this?
It is too easy to view Whitman as the progressive and hopeful other to
Baudelaire’s melancholic spleen, and Benjamin’s question resists this facile move.
Indeed, his question seems to except the bard from those poets who must appear necessarily feeble alongside Baudelaire, suggesting a reading of Whitman that he
Vander Zee 62 never chose to undertake himself, and that later critics have also failed to undertake.
Though interesting enough in their own right, these surface similarities between
Baudelaire and Whitman mask the deeper issue that Benjamin’s question presses: what would an allegorical reading of Whitman look like? What would it mean to approach his late work in particular as forms of estrangement and melancholic distance that annotate his own losses even as they anticipate ours? Benjamin’s approach to Baudelaire not only traced the attrition of his idealistic correspondences as they grated against the corrosive force of spleen, but it also sought to make what emerged from that attrition legible, to bring it, to borrow one of his key phrases, into the now of its recognizability. But, we should ask alongside Benjamin, what about
Walt Whitman? What kind of allegorical insight does it hold?
Before we follow up with Benjamin’s suggestive question here by turning to the poetry Whitman wrote during his final decades, I offer a brief historical gloss on the long American century, particularly as it emerged in Whitman’s late years—a move that learns from another of Benjamin’s pointed suggestions. “The contemporary who learns from books of history to recognize how long his present misery has been in preparation,” he writes, “acquires thereby a high opinion of his own powers. A history that provides this kind of instruction does not cause him sorrow, but arms him” (481).
Seeking after what grounds one’s historicity evinces a “pure curiosité,” a care, that for
Benjamin not only arises from sorrow, but deepens it. It is precisely this deepening of allegorical vision—an exploration of sorrow rather than a comfortably assumption of it—that points the way out. Benjamin’s ethics of a melancholic curiosity mirrors
Whitman’s own in his poem “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.” There, Whitman addresses
Vander Zee 63 readers hence in one of the poem’s most startling moments of transhistorical recognition: “how curious you are to me! / On the ferry boats, the hundreds and hundreds that cross, returning home, are more curious to me than you suppose; / And you that shall cross from shore to shore years hence, are more to me, and more in my meditations, than you might suppose” (CPP 308). It is time we turn this curious gaze back to Whitman and the historicity of his own lateness.
Allegories of Age: The Long “American Century”
On February 17, 1941, Henry Luce—the founder of Fortune, Time and Life magazines—published an editorial that brashly proclaimed America’s preeminent role as the world’s dominant superpower. The twentieth century was, as the Life essay’s title unequivocally announced, “The American Century.” The essay’s more focused, though no less momentous, goal was to argue for U.S. intervention in the quickly escalating war in Europe. Though his essay did not accomplish this objective—the
Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor 11 months later proved more convincing—Luce did succeed in laying crucial ideological groundwork for a more robust U.S. foreign policy that sponsored its future interventions in Korea and Vietnam, and, later, in Iraq and Afghanistan. As he worked to define a broader, international horizon for he U.S. involvement in the world, he lamented what he called the failure of democracy under
Franklin D. Roosevelt’s policies, which he thought narrow both in their materialism and self-reliant nationalism. He argued instead that the U.S. should extend the ideals of democracy toward a more “vital international economy” and a more viable
“international moral order” (64). The monumental work of Luce’s essay, then, directs
Vander Zee 64 the force of America’s deep romantic and exceptional nationalism toward an equally idealistic sense of America’s burgeoning, necessary, and unavoidable international role. Reprinted in the Washington Post, the Reader’s Digest, and elsewhere, this piece of proto-Cold-War spin proved enormously influential.
Disguising the degree to which he was actually advocating for a form of
American imperialism rooted in the centuries-old notion of American exceptionalism,
Luce proffered the durable image of America as the “Good Samaritan of the entire world” (65). What was in many ways an extension of the kind of manifest destiny that sponsored America’s continental territorial expansion from 1815 to 1860 became, in
Luce’s artful recasting of the phrase, America’s “manifest duty.” And what did this
“duty” entail? In sentiments that seem utterly contemporary, Luce wrote of the need to make the world “safe for freedom.” And though American was not yet involved in the war raging in Europe and elsewhere, he set the terms for perpetual war rooted in the defense of abstract principles that appear as mysterious as they are necessary: “we are in a war to defend,” he writes, “and even to promote, encourage and incite, so-called democratic principles throughout the world” (62). America, he continues, must be a
“powerhouse from which the ideals spread throughout the world and do their mysterious work of lifting the life of mankind from the levels of beasts to what the
Psalmists called a little lower than angels.” Though Luce’s essay offers a clear set of principles to guide the nation’s future, a deep tension—between destiny and duty, between mysterious ideals and the mechanisms of nation building—courses beneath the surface of this otherwise triumphal declaration.
Vander Zee 65
Luce’s essay, insofar as it provides both the rhetoric and the roadmap for a robust U.S. foreign policy, has often been considered an epoch-making argument.
While I don’t entirely dispute this fact, I choose, in adapting the title of his famous essay, to locate his argument as a key coordinate lodged in the literal and figurative center of what I name the long American century. That is, Luce’s argument does not so much mark the start of an era, as it does embody the cyclical return of many conflicting energies—economic, political, social—that have their roots in Whitman’s post-Civil War America.
To claim this as Whitman’s post-Civil War America might seem odd. When we conjure the bard of our Whitmanian imaginary, we think of the miracle of his first edition of Leaves of Grass (1855), of the electric hope and optimism for self and nation alike that he both embodies and projects. It often seems that Whitman might be our last great ante-bellum poet. Precisely because Whitman has assumed such a preeminent role as the poet of America, later poets have had difficulty, as the long
American century wore on, relating to his at times mystical sense of national optimism. But the years after the Civil War—an era often referred to as the Gilded
Age—permanently changed the trajectory of Whitman’s work and influence in ways that “‘The Final Lilt of Songs’” hopes to make clear. Late Whitman, poised at the start of the Gilded Age, is a poet already filled with elegiac longing for a country he felt was slipping from his grasp. The political, cultural, and economic travesties that mark the era strained Whitman’s illusion of a righteous American republic to the point of rupture. To tell the different story of influence that I unfold here—the influence of a
Vander Zee 66 distinctly late Whitman—we must begin from an understanding of the historical pressures that comprised his later years.
The Gilded Age was a particularly freighted term for Mark Twain, who coined it in his 1873 novel of that name. He intended multiple puns: guilt, gilding, the robber baron Jay Gould. In the republic of letters, marking the start of the Gilded Age at 1873 seems very fitting. One could as readily choose Whitman’s Democratic Vistas (1871), an essay whose straining after some transcendent salvation inherent in America barely disguises its author’s disgust with post-war American culture. The poet as divine literatus here presides over an America whose future is “in certain respects as dark as it is vast” as “democracy grows rankly up the thickest noxious, deadliest plants and fruits of all” (CPP 1014). Never, Whitman writes earlier in the essay, was there a time so hollow, so unbelieving, so unfit for its own lofty ideals. These developments in
Gilded Age America are coeval with Whitman’s late work, and the extent to which
Whitman reacted against them has been routinely overlooked. In Democratic Vistas
Whitman’s political anxieties transform themselves into Hegelian vision of inevitable progress, thus turning this Jeramiad into a political doxology. But in the final two decades of his life, this gesture of hopeful renewal or transcendence itself seems like so much effortful gilding on a deep discontent that persists across his late work.
For all of these reasons, I turn to the Gilded Age as to a beginning.31 The years after the Civil War were indeed full of innovation and growth and excitement.
America’s burgeoning industrial spring—celebrated at the 1876 centennial celebration—boasted America’s ascendance in both science and engineering. This was
31 For excellent overviews of this era that greatly inform and enable my own account here see Cashman, Lears, Richardson, and Beatty. My condensed historical gloss here owes much to their work.
Vander Zee 67 also the era of Thomas Alva Edison and Alexander Graham Bell, two inventors who redefined space on scales small and large: their inventions filled rooms with light and sound, and they massively improved trans-continental communication by radically altering telegraph technology and introducing the world to telephony. Reminding us of the sheer material weight of innovation, rail lines came to score the country, increasing nearly fivefold between 1865 and 1890. The population also more than doubled between the end of the Civil War and the end of the century, fueling massive industrial growth. By 1890, American had gone from a second-rate industrial power in the Civil
War years to an astonishing industrial super-power with a manufacturing capacity nearly commensurate with Britain, France and German combined.
In terms of political development, the Reconstruction Amendments, ratified between 1865 and 1870, abolished slavery (the Thirteenth), guaranteed due process and equal protection under the low (the Fourteenth), and extended voting rights to all men, regardless of race (the Fifteenth). New attitudes toward government emerged as well; Lincoln’s introduction of national taxes for the first time during the Civil War lead to much broader political participation, as people of all classes realized their stake in national politics. This time also saw the rise of a potent middle-class ideology, based in a belief in self-improvement and economic possibility, even if what we typically understand as a comfortable middle class—a white-collar job, a mortgage, some college—didn’t fully emerge until just after World War II.32 Immigrant populations, who contributed to enormous population growth during the Gilded Age, infused American culture with a diversity of experience, fuelling economic growth just as they had fortified the ranks of the Union army during the Civil War.
32 See Richardson 1-8.
Vander Zee 68
All of this bespeaks what historian Jackson Lears identifies as “a widespread yearning for regeneration—for rebirth variously spiritual, moral, and physical” that suffused the public sphere, becoming a grounding myth for the century ahead (1). This distinct historical yearning for progress could be traced back to the trope of conversion and renewal that saturated the largely Protestant ideology of colonial America, but it also has its roots in the more secular religion of self-definition and self-reliance that defined the hubris of national and personal autonomy from the Revolution through
Emerson. Significantly, this rebirth was not only yearned for, but realized on multiple levels in Gilded Age America. But even though these beginnings represent great accomplishment and progress—ones that Whitman harnessed as so much fodder for song—they also obscure a festering and rankling within U.S. culture. In this sense I turn to this beginning not only to note its innovations and accomplishments, but to uncover the degree to which it was the catalyst for a host of social ills and corruption that give the Gilded Age its name, and in which we might discover something for contemporary history as well. One must, thinking back to Benjamin’s work on
Baudelaire, summon the allegorical in an era that had found so many ways to collapse and contract distance, time, and space.
One might begin by noting that the powerful myth of rebirth emerged most pointedly in relation to, and as a justification for, the enormous losses of the Civil
War.33 In the name of Union, the war became righteous, sanctified. Thus, while my focus is on the origins of an epoch, this selective historical overview traces the unique pressures of lateness that suffuse the Gilded Age. Nearly every aspect of the thumbnail history sketched above has a shadow side. Burgeoning industry led to unregulated
33 See Lears 4-12.
Vander Zee 69 robber barons. Manifest Destiny transformed into a global economic and military imperialism when American, in 1890, reached the Pacific Ocean and had corralled all within its two sprawling coasts. Indeed, the expansion of naval forces was justified to protect rapidly expanding international trade, but that strength translated directly into explicit imperial intervention in the Philippines at the end of the nineteenth century. In terms of political progress, accomplishments of the Reconstruction Amendments were sullied by the failure of Reconstruction as the hopeful rebirth of a nation found a sinister and debased echo in the burgeoning ideology of southern Redeemers as Jim
Crow laws left former slaves largely unrepresented. The railroads increased mobility and fueled economic growth, but they also—to borrow a railroad term whose initial honorific and triumphal deployment now seems hopelessly elegiac—annihilated space. Picking up on these elegiac strains, one thinks of the mass extermination of the buffalo whose massive herds impeded travel, and whose eradication also enabled a higher-order displacement of Native populations by removing a crucial resource.
Furthermore, the railroad fundamentally changed one’s relationship to time itself.
Lateness took on a strange new meaning. In his influential American Nervousness: Its
Causes and Consequences (1883), George Miller Beard devotes much energy to detailing the unique temporal anxiety caused by steam-powered modern civilization, of which the railroads were the most ubiquitous sign.34 One can make too much of this change, but the institution of time subjected natural, subjective or local patterns of behavior to foreign control in a way that would presage the institutionalization of age itself. That is, the institutionalization of time paved the way for the institutionalization of industry as well as the institutionalization of age itself.
34 See Beatty 27-53.
Vander Zee 70
In the early years of the Republic, the aged were, in general, revered. “Our predecessors,” argues W. Andrew Achenbaum in his Old Age in the New Land (1981),
“would have been surprised to learn that the elderly as a group would be described one day as roleless and unproductive persons who inevitably and willingly disengage from active life” (9). Concepts such as retirement or what gerontologists today call the multiple role exits that punctuate the end of a life simply did not apply. According to
Achenbaum, records from the colonial period indicate that age—reflected in public architecture, property inheritance, civic engagement, and even family portraiture— occupied a seat of power in a hierarchically organized society. A youthful republic struggling to find its footing required the cumulative effort of all peoples, and the experience and knowledge that attend age were highly valued commodities.
Longevity, moreover, was a national security issue. At the start of the Republic,
Achenbaum notes, longevity tables offered statistical evidence for America’s viability; its ability to support a growing population demonstrated both a land’s natural bounty and a peoples’ formidable resolve.
But even as the Republic required the active participation of all its members for survival, the very ideals of equality and liberty that led America to sever ties with the old world permitted questions about hierarchy in other spheres to enter. “The growth of a spirit of social atomism,” David Fischer argues in his own study of the history of age and ageing in America, “snapped the ties of obligation between generations as well as between classes” (109). Needless to say, the republican conceit of a youthful son rebelling against an overbearing parent inevitably resonated on the level of communal and familial organizational structures. The veneration of age that
Vander Zee 71 formed such an important part of American culture in pre-Revolutionary times, of course, by no means disappeared. But as the socio-cultural structures that made such high consideration of age began to erode and evolve, veneration took on a decidedly romantic tinge. It is as though this sturdy veneration itself began to age, outgrowing its roots in republican culture and becoming a part of a romantic fancy. No longer a crucial part of the corporate body of America, age became differentiated and distinguished for its unique assets as well its private sorrows.35
In a manner that mirrors the traditional romantic and organic conceptions of artistic careers emerging finally into a rarified late style, age is seen as transcending worldly matters, a mere supplement or coda. By emphasizing both its particular trials and its inherent wisdom, writers of the pre-Civil War period, Achenbaum writes,
“conceptually segregated” the aged, and thereby “unwittingly helped to undermine their own exultation of the elderly’s usefulness” (37). At the same time, medical advances enabled a clearer understanding of the ailments that affect the aged, making their plight biologically particular. Thus, a medicalized bourgeois morality emerged, which, according to Thomas Cole, “demand[ed] relentless control over one’s body and physical energy and view[ed] physical decline and disease essentially as failure or sin”
(125). Whitman’s obsession with a healthy body, though often daring in its vivid and explicit celebrations, very much fell in line with this trend as we can see in Whitman’s
35 Describing this complicated shift between the republican and romantic valuations of aging, Achenbaum writes that “implicit in the earlier respect for old age had been the idea that old people were more similar to other age groups than they were different. In the romantic period, it was the dissimilarities in the assets and liability of every stage of life that made each age group seem important. Believing that certain characteristic of old age made the elderly special, such writers emphasized the ways in which the old contrasted with other people and idealized them because of their distinctiveness” (28).
Vander Zee 72 hopeful emblem of octogenarian endurance.36 Such morality, for Cole, exposes a society “committed to the limitless accumulation of individual health and wealth”—a kind of manifest destiny of mind and body as much as geography (125). Urbanization, bureaucratization, and industrialization in the post-Civil-War years provided a new impetus for ideals of efficiency and productivity that rendered age increasingly obsolescent. Recalling Said’s definition of lateness, age became something that had survived beyond what was normal and acceptable—at least to a new world order.
In the twentieth century, the story of age is very much the story of its objectification and institutionalization. The new field of gerontology emerged to study what had become a massive societal concern—a matter of good government and policy. If new solutions were the order of the day across the last century with the passage of the Social Security Act in 1935 and the creation of Medicare in 1965, new problems were more often than not the result. Thus, if the twentieth century saw the arrival of the first major social programs intended to provide for the aged, it also saw the definition of ageism and the difficult realities of a profit-driven system of mass institutionalization that makes our cultural idealizing and sentimentalizing of age seem like so much wishful thinking.
In many ways—think of the military-industrial complex, rampant deregulation or markets, insider trading, the many forms of institutional disenfranchisement that persisted well beyond the failures of reconstruction, even modern conceptions of time itself—U.S. culture is a poor product of the Gilded Age, its citizens and aliens alike reluctant scions of the long American century. In this sense, the subtitle of Twain’s
36 For work that engages Whitman’s interest in medical science, pseudo-science, and the healthy body in general, see Aspiz; Davis; Scholnick; Erkkila 317.
Vander Zee 73 novel is perhaps even more pertinent than the title proper: The Gilded Age: A Tale of
Today. The long American century names a broad geography of political discontent, strained nationalism, and social unrest that has persisted, through cycles of excess and restraint, up to the present moment. Whitman has been curiously suspended from this unfolding history.
Beyond the New: Notes toward a Late Formalism
In the arena of poetry and poetics over the last century, no idea has been more generative, variable, and contentious than the idea of form. Form, in its many ulterior projections, might be an engine for certain ideals of progress—political, ethical, or otherwise. For some, it touches upon the most fundamental epistemological and ontological questions. One finds it caught up in theories of language, and in the very beginnings and endings of things. Remarkably, form has become an aesthetic, sociopolitical, and, at times, metaphysical variable even as it remains deeply invested in the minutia of rhythm and metrics, rhyme and sound. This range suggests a certain conceptual congestion and a certain lack of critical consensus regarding ideas of form.
But this lack of consensus also reflects what the poetry of the last century—and even more so, of our own—is, in some elemental way, about.
We might think of the proliferating critical formalisms—and anti- formalisms—that have marked our critical past as a product of this extraordinary aesthetic investment in ideas of form. Just in the last decade, much work has been done in historical poetics and historical prosody, ideas of strategic and tactical formalism; we’ve seen edited collections and special journal issues on new and
Vander Zee 74 historical formalisms, and arguments about activist formalisms and aesthetic formalisms. We hear of the persistence of form, and what one critic has called, in a phrase that resonates particularly strongly today, the “occupation of form.”37 This last phrase is perhaps more apt now then when it was originally articulated in 2008: the re- purposing of “occupy” as a word that represents the economic interests of the 99% rather than those of the 1%, here, mirrors a more activist return to, and defense of, form and the aesthetic, wrested from the hands of, we like to think, a more conservative and politically reactionary occupation of the aesthetic.
To take the pulse of our current critical moment, we might look to the dozen panels listed on the program for MLA 2012 that have taken up this formal preoccupation as well with titles such as “Gender and Medieval Literary Form,”
“Postcolonial Studies and Literary Form,” “Forming Histories and Historicizing
Forms,” “Transpacific Formalisms.” There was a panel on that old chestnut, “Form and Ideology,” and even a roundtable taking on the quixotic task of “Defining Form.”
The question of form is ubiquitous even as our efforts at holding it within a definition seem doomed—however dynamically—from the start.
This seems like a fitting admission, especially when we reflect on the role a putatively new formalism might play in the context of American literature from
Whitman onward. Marjorie Levinson, in her oft-cited review-essay that tries to collate the diverse and divergent energies of this new direction, writes that “New Formalist work tends to concentrate in the areas of Early Modern and Romantic period study both for tactical reasons (these are the disciplinary sectors where new historicism arose) as well as for the substantive reasons behind that fact” (562). Here, she cites a
37 See Palumbo-Liu.
Vander Zee 75 number of reasons as to why a New Formalism is rooted in these earlier periods— canonical prestige, for example, or the prominence of the lyric and poetry in general that marks these periods. Though Levinson does not explicitly address the lack of attention to New Formalism in the context of modern and contemporary literature, we might extrapolate from her comments that perhaps the canon is too much in flux, or that other forms of writing have increasingly displaced lyric from its privileged perch, or that the New Formalism is mostly just a response to the New Historicism, and that as critics of more recent literary production, those focusing on American literature after the Civil War don’t really have a horse in the race.
But I would argue that the New Formalism is not as visible in the context of twentieth-century modern and contemporary literature because of its utter ubiquity.
Furthermore, there is significant and unavoidable commerce in the twentieth century between increasingly institutional literary output and institutional critical reflection.
One might consider how influential Eliot’s ideas were for the New Criticism, or how many so-called new critics actually wrote so many so-called New Critical lyrics, fulfilling, in some strange way, Wordsworth’s injunction that the poet must create the taste by which they are to be enjoyed. Further on in the century, we might look to how the Language poets took poststructuralist principles into their own poetic practice. Or, closer to the present, how ideas and ideals of hybridity rooted in identity politics have found their way into a more broadly critical and aesthetic hybridity reflected in the recent poetry anthology from Norton, American Hybrid (2009) or in the proclivity for nationalisms that are transed, genres that are multied, and disciplines that have been intered (it is hard not to let the stress slip to “interred”).
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To speak of a New Formalism in the context of twentieth-century American literature, then, is somewhat redundant. Form has been not an “unavoidable moment” in literary and cultural criticism, as Ellen Rooney has suggested, but its enabling—and lasting—fact affirmed again and again in our literature and criticism (26). One presumably does not need the disciplinary framework of a New Formalism because all of our conversations—with the now-waning exception of cultural study’s justified hostility to various formalisms—have been about form. This focus has been a default reaction to the dynamically vague and contested meanings of form itself, as well as the various programs it finds itself wrapped up in. There is little new about our formalism.
How might our current critical moment, then, be described precisely, if quietly, as one of late formalism? Rather than suggest a moment of novelty and renewal, to speak of late formalism more accurately reflects the complex ways in which critics keep coming back—at turns belatedly, earnestly, combatively, and skeptically—to questions of form as the conceptual nexus around which they arrange their various antagonisms and aspirations for both word and world. It also captures what I feel is the elegiac orientation that marks many of these so-called new formalisms. Many, for example, explicitly lament the loss of the literary. Though Rooney, for example, resists a certain nostalgia that clings to the New Formalism, she writes that: “To read past or through this formal work is not to misread but to dismiss reading as such” (45).
Herbert Tucker, in his response to Caroline Levine’s essay on “Strategic Formalism,” writes that a “review of the habits of literary analysis that have prevailed during the last academic generation or so reveals widespread atrophy of a disused set of critical skills in whose revival—I almost said survival—a self-interested literary studies
Vander Zee 77 would do well to get actively involved” (86). While we should be wary of getting lost in our literate nostalgias, we should also recognize such impulses as they arise. Many critics who have joined this conversation explicitly or implicitly betray a range of anxieties regarding the survival of the humanities, the fate of reading, the waning status of the literary within literary studies, and the fading social role of literary critics. Alongside these professional and formal anxieties, a “new” formalism, with whatever momentum such a phrase hopes to conjure, seems like wishful thinking.
Perhaps it is best to invest in the grounds of lateness itself, to a care for form. Why not think of crisis and formalism together rather than rhetorically circumvent it into some unfolding futurity, some horizonal promise, of critical discourse?
Such a late formalism operates by way of echo and accumulation. It sees form, after Benjamin, as living ruins, and therefore as inherently historical: a storehouse of formal-historical knowing. In this sense, what I call a late formalism recognizes a melancholic orientation, one that returns not to what form can do in the context of a critical program, but what form has known all along, often behind our backs. Late formalism speaks to a deep retrospect, to a sense of form saturated by time and duration.
I indulge, here, with some reservation, and at the end of an already extended methodological précis, in that durable critical past time of theoretical naval-gazing.
But this late digression into critical reflexivity has at least been instructive for its lack of payoff. The strongest theoretical commitments of the past century—structuralism,
Marxism, psychoanalytic criticism, deconstruction, ideology critique, New
Historicism, and so on—came with real teeth: they devour their textual and cultural
Vander Zee 78 subjects; they incorporate them into the body of method and theory. Such theories show the way; texts merely exemplify, or subvert, on cue. But what has been called the New Formalism, and what I recast as a distinctly late formalism, barely nibbles; it has arrived too late to the critical banquet. It is entirely consumed by its examples, unashamed by its myriad contradictions and inconsistencies. It is available to us in its many instances, but nowhere codified. Late formalism, that is, returns us to the wayward, errant, idiosyncratic, private, pedagogical, affective, boring, frustrating, invigorating, work of reading itself.
In her Uses of Literature (2011), Rita Felski recently wrote that “to define literature as ideology is to have decided ahead of time that literary works can be objects of knowledge but never sources of knowledge. It is to rule out of court the eventuality that a literary text could know as much, or more, than a theory” (7). A late formalism is rooted in precisely this sense that form might know more than our theories of it.38 And forms know precisely in and through their participation in time, in history. “Forms,” as Martin and Levin note in their introduction to a recent special issue of Victorian Poetry on prosody, “accrue cultural meaning over time, and understanding form as something that is dynamic and changing allows for a more nuanced reading of the poem at the moments of composition, [and] the moments of reception” (156). Such a statement rings truer every year as forms do that crucial work of accruing.
This methodological overview began by critiquing the traditional model of late style criticism that sees late works as so many departures from worldly engagement
38 Michael Wood, in Literature and the Taste for Knowledge (2005) pursues this question of what and how art and literature might know as well (1-13).
Vander Zee 79 and from the bindings of biography. Such works, the story goes, achieve a compensatory vision of the harmonious, if at times difficult, autonomy of late work itself. In the previous section, we witnessed this story reflected in the material and historical movement from a communitarian view of age, to a realization of age’s particular plights, to a demotion of age as detached and disengaged—an obsolescence increasingly controlled and legislated, but one that culture grants the consolations of serenity and wisdom nonetheless. These two stories reflect one another in surprising ways: the former’s termination in an elevated autonomy seems to mask a certain obsolescence rooted in art’s disengagement from the world, even as the latter’s eventual demotion and obsolescence mocks the supposed autonomy of retirement and age. Remarkably, these overlapping critical and historical patterns of lateness uncannily figure the problems, possibilities and ideologies associated with various versions of aesthetic formalism in general. Moreover, the institutionalization of age and its separation from culture performs a startling personification of the fate of literary study in the twentieth century: its migration from Main Street to the museum, and from popular culture to the literature classroom.
If the works that authors produce during their later years often appear self- consciously obsolete in their movement toward repetition and echo, they might instead be understood—keeping in mind Kant’s aesthetic ideal of purposefulness without a purpose—in terms of a charged purposelessness. Edward Said, as discussed earlier, echoes these Kantian terms when he describes lateness as a certain “unproductive productiveness going against” (7). In her essay “On the Art of the Future,” Susan
Stewart endorses this Kantian ideal while suggesting a way to think beyond it by
Vander Zee 80 tracing it back to its motivating ground. “So let’s follow Kant in saying that art is a practice for its own sake,” she writes, adding crucially: “and then ask what a practice for its own sake might be for” (16). In the subsequent chapters, extending Stewart’s move beyond Kant’s aesthetic imperative to Whitman’s own late work, I ask what purpose the apparent purposelessness of Whitman’s late work might serve in its formal reflection of history and in its allegorical embodiment of loss.
This connection between lateness, crisis, and ideas of aesthetic autonomy, if it seems only tenuously realized in the American context, appears more clearly in post-
World War II Germany where a resurgence of interest in late-style thought occurred in conjunction with a quietist formalism whose motivating force was not an elitist belief in aesthetic autonomy per se, but a dire need to variously transcend, negate, or somehow see beyond the unprecedented mass violence of very recent history.39
Lateness, in that context, is a figurative form of self-imposed exile. For German thinkers who were forced to flee Hitler’s regime, however, this investment in late style may be a choice informed by their literal exile as well. An exilic lateness is a departure sometimes chosen, but often coerced—an epistemic standpoint achieved at great psychic pain, a way of knowing whose formal distinction carries the inevitable traces and scars of history.40 Late formalism, then, is not formalism in extremis, but the point
39 On the resurgence of late-style criticism in post-War Germany, see Painter 12. For an overview of these developments in Germany see Zimmermann. 40 In this context, McMullan’s critique of late-style thought in general—and his condescension toward a figure like Erich Neumann in particular—reveals a remarkable numbness to history despite its historicist posturing. Neumann was a famous Jungian protégé and pioneer German depth psychologist who was very much invested in notions of lateness. McMullan writes of Neumann’s “frankly mystical” understanding of lateness, and derides his notion of late work’s “secret alchemy” (34). “Context,” McMullan writes of Neumann’s work “is entirely secondary, is in a sense simply left behind.” Neumann is a sort of straw man for McMullan, a practitioner of the soft science of depth psychology whose hyperbolic notions of a transcendent and archetypical late style should be enough to reform the slew of subjectivist critics who continue to pontificate about the Late Styles of Great Artists. Nowhere
Vander Zee 81 of form’s return as it becomes a crucial nexus for thinking form and history together.
In this sense, late formalism ironically looks back to the origins of aesthetic autonomy, which, as Michael Kelly has shown, historically took hold only after Enlightenment thought urged a revolutionary rethinking of politics as independent from religious edict or monarchical control. Indeed, autonomy is a political concept as much as it is an aesthetic concept, making their distinct histories mutually informing and mutually dependant. “Autonomy,” Kelly succinctly observes, “unites art and politics” (228). If the story of aesthetics in general and of literary criticism in particular has been about finding ways to forget this fraught and integral relationship, then late formalism is a particularly charged arena in which they might finally be viewed again in concert. I read the New Formalism, then, as only a sign or symptom of a deeper cultural lateness. And that is precisely what this methodological précis—and the project as a whole—recognizes: the need to think of lateness as a kind of formalism, or formalism as a kind of lateness while specifying the distinct contexts in which that condition comes to life as well as the technical means of its arrival.
The critical late formalism I propose attends to an allegorical other speaking whose veiled referent is the experience of history itself. As Benjamin wrote to a friend in 1923: “the same forces that become explosively and extensively temporal in the world of revelation (and this is what history is) appear concentrated in the silent world
(and this is the world of nature and of works of art)” (224). Turning to this silent do we get a sense that Neumann’s escape from Germany in 1933—a piece of biography that McMullan either does not know or does not care to consider—and his emigration to Israel inflects his intellectual desire to theorize a certain formal transcendence of history. Neumann’s way of dealing with exile and violence may be subject to critique, but it is not at all naïve. Neumann’s case is instructive because even in the most rarified ideas concerning artistic late styles, context is not simply left behind, as McMullan suggests; rather, it shows the rending of person from context. To ignore the historical pressures behind certain kinds of formalism itself betrays curious ahoricity that McMullan otherwise refutes. This sense of late style as an exilic realm saturates Said’s final book on the subject as well.
Vander Zee 82 world, I begin by approaching Whitman’s late work with this charged sense of its formal ruins. An aging Whitman took much the same view of himself. In the summer of 1889, a few years before he passed, Whitman sat above his littered bedroom, which was literally carpeted with books and articles, but mostly with the disjecta membra of his own work. “I live here in a ruin of debris,” he exclaimed to his secretary Horace
Traubel, “a ruin of ruins” (WWC 5: 435).41 Recognizing this allegorical lasting offers an initial glimpse of the difficult and alienated late forms that punctuate Whitman’s late work. In the work of subsequent poets, the situation is more complicated. If there is a specific symbolic force that wilts there, it is Whitman himself and his evolving
Leaves of Grass: what they stood for culturally and politically, what they might mean now.
41 Quotes from With Walt Whitman in Camden book will be indicated, when necessary, by WWC in the parenthetical reference.
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CHAPTER 2
LATE LIVES, CRITICAL PASTS, CRITICAL FUTURES:
ESSAYS IN BIBLIOGRAPHY
Throughout his life, Whitman courted “faint clews” and “indirections (CPP
171), was obsessed with riddles and ciphers, hieroglyphs and cryptograms. Though I do not presume to have cracked some code buried deep within the “Death-bed
Edition” of Leaves of Grass (1891-92), the message divined through an electronically generated, frequency-based, word-cloud visualization of this landmark text should give us pause. Subtracting the pronouns, conjunctions, and auxiliaries, we arrive at the curiously imploring apostrophe: “o see old life.” If we do not hear in this imperative
Whitman’s voice from the grave—something like an electronic echo of King Hamlet’s haunting “remember me”—this quantitative coincidence should at least serve as an invitation to think otherwise about Whitman’s routinely neglected late work.
Neglect is a charged word in this context, a word we most often use in relation not to self-sufficient persons or things, but persons or things in need of certain care.
Though Whitman loved to tell of his own professional neglect as a way to garner personal sympathy and financial support, the poet enjoyed increasing, if modest, fame towards the end of his career. His transatlantic connections were particularly validating for him. A note from Tennyson in his pocket in the post-Civil War years quickly supplanted memory of Emerson’s early missive greeting the bard at the start
Vander Zee 84 of a great career. And Whitman received extraordinary care from the growing cohort of professed Whitmanians that surrounded the poet in age. William Douglass
O’Connor and John Burroughs, having met Whitman during his days in Washington
D.C. during the Civil War, along with Maurice Bucke, whom he met in the early
1870s, were foremost among them. The recorded evidence of Whitman’s post-war years—collected in a handful of authorized, often co-written biographical pieces, copious correspondence and notebooks, Whitman’s own significant autobiographical jottings, and, during the final four years, Horace Traubel’s nine-volume With Walt
Whitman in Camden—astounds. Whitman’s disciples did their best to render
Whitman’s old age not only exceptional, but exceptionally documented. Neglect, then, might seem a strange word to use in this particular context. But exceptionalism, as art historian Philip Sohn reminds us in his recent book on artists in old age, “is the masked twin of gerontophobia”—exceptionalism here defined as “the twin of denial and hope that tries to rescue old artists from a conventionally predicated decline” (26).
And as we will see in what follows, it was in some ways the extreme enthusiasm of the disciples—their tendency to claim Whitman not only as a poet but a prophet—that encouraged early biographers and critics to distance themselves from the late work.
The benevolent neglect of the disciples, then, only encouraged the benign neglect old
Walt has received ever since.
This project tracks multiple forms of lasting and duration: of influence, of literary tropes, of human lives. To these, I add the evolution of biographical and critical reflections on Whitman’s late work. While Chapter 4 takes very seriously Roy
Harvey Pearce’s suggestion that one can tell compelling and new stories about
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American poetry by identifying unremarked strains of Whitman’s influence, the present chapter emerges from the late, preeminent Whitman biographer and scholar
Gay Wilson Allen’s suggestion, which he makes in a bibliographic essay of his own in
The New Walt Whitman Handbook (1975), that “to tell the story of [Whitman’s] biographical growth is also to tell much of the story of the growth of modern literature and thought” (2). Enlarging this story of growth to include critical reflection on the poet, Allen continues: “What critics and biographers have thought of Walt Whitman, and the theories on which they have based their interpretations of him, is fully as important as the literal facts of his life.” Allen, whose 1955 biography of Whitman has gone through one significant revision and a number of editions, might overstate slightly when it comes to the relative importance of criticism and biography. But tracking the growth of the late Whitman in what biographers, in a bid for verisimilitude and singularity, like to call a life does serve an important purpose here, one not to be tucked away in the footnotes where the logic governing this neglect remains easily avoided.
Making Whitman’s lateness more visible first requires an account of its erasure, because how particular aspects of Whitman’s life and work are revealed to— and concealed from—the general reader and scholar alike in many ways shapes subsequent critical work. While that critical work might not be as important as the literal facts of a life, as Allen suggests, it does both condition and create the possible
Whitmans that later poets and other creative artists have at their disposal. Biography, in this sense, is destiny. “If definite trends are discovered in the evolution of these biographies,” Allen suggests in the aforementioned essay, “perhaps future stages of
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Whitman scholarship may be anticipated—even aided and hastened” (2). It is my hope that the present essays in bibliography, while they could not possibly be exhaustive, will at least hasten a more reflective and informed conversation about Whitman’s lateness that has been a long time coming.
Biographical Constructions of Whitman in Age from Binns to Loving
The atmosphere of thick veneration that surrounded Whitman in age did not inspire a thorough reckoning of Whitman’s late work when the first generation of properly critical biographers emerged. It should be noted that the work of commemoration that began already with Whitman’s early disciples (whose work I discuss in more detail in Chapter 3) persisted well into the first half of the twentieth century. The disciples who survived Whitman carried on his reputation: Traubel’s magazine The Conservator, which ran from 1890 to 1919, carried hundreds of
Whitman-related defenses and reflections as well as advertisements for all manner of
Whitmania. Traubel also began publishing his casual conversations with Whitman in
With Walt Whitman in Camden in 1906, releasing three volumes before he passed and leaving six more in shorthand. Maurice Bucke published Cosmic Consciousness in
1901, a kind of new-age tome that includes Whitman amongst a list of spiritual savants, ranked alongside Buddha and Jesus Christ. Burroughs, along with later disciples such as William Sloan Kennedy, Edward Carpenter, Thomas Harned and many others continued this strain of criticism. Rarely is Whitman’s literary reputation questioned, much less the fitness of his late work challenged.
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To be sure, Traubel’s account of an everyday Whitman could not help but reveal Whitman’s occasional crankiness, and Carpenter was similarly candid about how testy and crafty the elder Whitman could be. But in general, Whitman was so closely identified with his Leaves that to divorce the man from the work was a kind of sacrilege. The great man entails the great work, and vice-versa. As Harned, Traubel and Bucke write in their introduction to their ambitious ten-volume edition of
Whitman’s Complete Writings (1902), “so much of Whitman’s real biography is auto.
You resort to his text anywhere, prose or verse, and you find the man” (lxviii).
Collapsing Whitman into his work constrained early views of the late work not because that work does not have significant autobiographical value, but because the specific autobiographical constraints placed on the late work did not permit the more diverse and contrary energies of Whitman’s lateness to come forward. In a statement that reveals a rigorous program of spiritual growth transcending temporal concerns that the late work was held to, the editors of the Complete Writings inform the reader that “the mere dates which fix his poems into a calendar are, after all, of slight significance. It is for their spiritual sequence and periodicity that their author was most concerned. And no loyal historian would substitute a reduced standard” (lxviii).
Biographers of the future must cringe at such a statement.
Even as this work of commemoration persisted into the twentieth century, an era of more exhaustive biography and critical reflection began to emerge with the work of Henry Binns, an Englishman credited with writing the first complete life from an outsider’s perspective, and that of American scholar Bliss Perry. Binns’s 1905 biography largely reaffirms the general arc of Whitman’s life in which the poet passes
Vander Zee 88 through the twin crises of politics and physiology: first the Civil War, and then his severe stroke in 1873 followed closely by the death of his beloved mother. The first crisis was resolved through Whitman’s own patriotic action and sacrifice during the
Civil War as Whitman became the dresser of national wounds; the second was resolved through the previous crisis’s apotheosis, which Whitman achieves in
“Passage to India” and in various prefatory materials from the early 1870s that makes clear his burgeoning spiritual direction. Binns does offer a slight qualification to the quality of the post-Civil War poetry, noting that “with few exceptions” the works are
“somewhat less inevitable and procreative than those of the earlier period. They are not less interesting, but they are less elemental” (245). Binns’s account of Whitman’s bodily crisis in 1873 has a special dramatic flare, however, that trumps the weakness of the late work with the strength of personal biography. Thus, we see the biographer establish a dark night of the poetic body out of which a purified soul might emerge:
“neither living nor dying,” Binns writes “through the sad, dark days of long, protracted illness and solitude, of physical debility and mental bewilderment—as it were, through year-long dream-gropings—he waited” (249). Such passages align Binns with later biographers, many of them foreigners as well, who tended to romanticize certain aspects of Whitman’s life—even his gravest illnesses—marring the objectivity of their projects. In light of such romantic reflections, nothing seems to stick to Whitman. For
Binns, the work from the early 1870s—“Passage to India,” “Song of the Redwood,” and “Song of the Universal”—proves Whitman’s final ascent, capped with his
Western jaunt in 1879 and his pastoral retreat at Timber Creek where he spent weeks at a time during the early 1880s. No more is said about the quality of the late work
Vander Zee 89 aside from its persistence and faith. “The poems of the new collection are all brief and many of them descriptive,” he writes of the poems in “Sands at Seventy” the first annex to Leaves (1891-2). “For the rest, they are mainly the assertions of a jocund heart, defying the ice-cold, frost-bound winter of old age, and waiting for the sure- following spring” (330). The work—none of it described in detail—dissipates into
“endless vistas of eternal purpose.” The contrary binaries of age—the bard is sleepless and suffering, yet cheery and blithe—do not trouble the biographer’s romantic sense of Whitman’s late years, but become instead some thoughtless attribute of achieved old age. Even in age, it seems, Whitman is made to contradict himself.
Binns seems to have trouble dislodging proper objective biography from the trappings of hagiography, but one does see him pulling away at times. Near the end of his biography, he notes Whitman’s confession to fellow Englishman J.W. Wallace in the autumn of 1891. “I used to feel that I was to irradiate or emanate buoyancy and health… to live to the reputation I had,” Whitman confides, “or to my own idea of what my program should be.” Instead, he felt the need to “give out and express what I really was” (338). Whitman, of course, kept his “real Me” perpetually veiled (CPP
395), but this deliberate abandonment of a certain Whitman pose—or the possibility that it was all just a pose—strikes Binns as particularly momentous. Whitman, here, begins to shed the myths surrounding him, even as his disciples plotted his canonization. Even if Binns’s own attention to the late work only reconfirms a kind of soul-craft that mere mortals could never quite grasp, his sense of the purposeful construction of Whitman’s lateness will prove a prescient and, in relation to the disciples, distinguishing aspect of this early biography.
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Where Binns seems to have more difficulty extricating himself from the devotional morass—he was perhaps a sort of belated disciple, having written Whitman a Master Letter two decades earlier at the age of 18—Bliss Perry, in Walt Whitman:
His Life and Work (1906), makes a much cleaner break. Perhaps his proximity to the scene and his academic pedigree—he was a Princeton Professor at the time he wrote this first scholarly life—necessitated this marked weariness in relation to the disciples.
Perry, it must be admitted, still idealizes Whitman in age. It seemed to be a requirement at this time that one could not revisit Whitman in Camden without noting, amidst the scatter of papers and books in his low-ceilinged, second-story room a face that “grew more delicately molded each year under the refining, spiritualizing touch of time,” or the “glistening white hair” adorning that “wonderful domed head,” which appeared to “take on a dignity and beauty as of some heroic, vanished epoch” (247-
48). Despite the generous iconography here, Perry did not feel he had to support the
“undiscriminating eulogy” of the “Whitman Militants” (236-37), those disciples that he later snidely cast off as so many hot little prophet[s] (286).
More unequivocally than Binns, Perry articulates a story of poetic decline that the disciples would never have condoned. “His departure from Washington in 1873,”
Perry admits, “marked the end of an epoch” (211). He continues, in a diminishment of the late work that would soon become the norm: though the bard “was still to write a few poems… the work to which he owes his fame was done” (212). What remains? If
Whitman was to become a mere “picturesque object of literary pilgrimages,” it is not his fault, Perry later assures, for few could “have passed unharmed through a Camden apotheosis” (263). Perry, here, inaugurates the antagonistic relationship with
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Whitman’s disciples that would be the norm in Whitman biography through the 1950s and beyond. In this spirit, the biographer judiciously concludes by discarding the many myths surrounding the poet, among which he includes the “wild buffalo strength myth, the ‘superman’ myth, and many others” (291). In their place, and discarding the stale, romanticized binaries of age offered by Binns, he writes that we have
“something very much better: a man earthy, incoherent, arrogant, but elemental and alive.” Intended as a comment on Whitman’s life and work in general, what it might mean for the late work in particular remains untold.
The next major Whitman biography emerged along with a handful of others in
1926. Emory Holloway’s Pulitzer-prize winning biography Whitman: An
Interpretation in Narrative ushers in a new era in Whitman biography because of the vast archival material at his disposal, much of which had been collated and published by Holloway himself during the previous decade. Rather than begin with apocryphal stories of Whitman’s perfect breeding and family background (stories that Whitman himself fabricated via the early, collaborative biographies of his disciples) Holloway opens with a decidedly less romantic sense of Whitman the journalist. His
“interpretation in narrative,” as his strange subtitle suggests, introduces a kind of speculative realism into Whitman biography as writers worked to reclaim the early years for which there is little documentation, years that Whitman himself chose to leave largely unwritten. From this point forward in Whitman biography, what
Emerson called the long foreground that he thought necessarily preceded the 1855
Leaves becomes nothing short of a critical obsession. Precisely because this was period of time in which the disciples were not present, the early years became a new
Vander Zee 92 frontier in Whitman biography. When Gay Wilson Allen remarks rather coldly in his own biography three decades later that Traubel would not have understood this earlier
Whitman, we get some sense how territorial the work of biography could be. Thus, the early years become as much a charting out of the new ground as an escape from
Whitman’s lateness, which was so tightly scripted, so well attended.
Despite this swerve towards the early Whitman, Holloway does deserve credit for the degree to which he tries to re-imagine the particular cultural context of
Whitman’s lateness. Binns and Perry wrote during the height of the Progressive Era and largely ignored the complex cultural context in which Whitman wrote. Holloway, however, composed his biography in the wake of World War I and in midst of his own very gilded 1920s America, a time that must have seemed to resemble unlike
Whitman’s post-war years:
The years of disillusionment which quickly follow even a successful ‘idealistic’ war are peculiarly trying to the idealist. The illusion of progress has so quickly passed into the reality of stupid reaction wherewith pigmy politicians, no longer led by a great statesman or accentuated by the fear and pride of war, seem determined to compensate themselves for the unwonted heroism which the national emergency called forth. In morale as in materials, war is always a mortgage on the future; and those who lack the imagination to dwell in that future are first to foreclose the mortgage. (240)
Though he powerfully captures these twin moments of post-war disillusionment
(Whitman’s and his own) he does not allow that disillusionment to follow Whitman and therefore overestimates the degree to which Democratic Vistas—which includes some of the most caustic, socially disillusioned passages in nineteenth-century literature—marks a lasting “triumph of faith over despair” (241). Still, the sense that
Whitman’s optimism was earned—“his was no cheap optimism,” Holloway tells us—
Vander Zee 93 does mark an important shift in the overall approach to Whitman’s late work. If
Whitman’s late optimism was effortful and intentional—perhaps even incoherent, as
Perry suggested—and not simply an inevitable marker of spiritual growth, then it follows that the late work should bear the marks of such straining, something
Holloway hints at, even if he does not quite follow through: “When we turn to read the verse he was writing at this time, we are impressed anew with the fact that we have a different Whitman,” he writes. “Here is no longer the youthful feeling of immortality born of high animal spirits, not even the agonized realism of the war-time verse; here is the aspiration of the pioneer soul, taught by frustrated human hopes, if not disgust, yet a certain despair of realizing itself through union with another in this life” (244-
245). It is such a careful observation: here is Whitman damaged, almost haunted, despite his optimism and faith. Holloway writes that “[t]he mystic survives in him,” a shadowed optimism that appears as a sort of spectral lingering persisting alongside that quiet realization of despair.
But in writing such things, Holloway is talking about the man, not the poet.
And this sense of crisis serves only as a prop for Whitman’s miraculous recovery. For
Holloway, the crucial poems of the early 70s—“Passage to India” and “the Prayer of
Columbus”—show a “dauntless confidence… an absolute faith,” and they form, for the biographer, the real “swan song… For, though he is to live and write for twenty years more, a great affliction will soon touch body and mind; the rest will be long afternoon” (252). So ignored is Whitman’s late work, cast into a long afternoon, that his immediate post-war work—closer to the first edition of Leaves than the last— comes to take the place of lateness. In the wake of Whitman’s stroke and his mother’s
Vander Zee 94 unexpected death in 1873, Holloway writes that “the great hours of Whitman’s labor and love have come and gone. No more will the weak and wounded lean upon his body for strength. The time has come for him to be old—at fifty-four. Nor from that
‘wounded brain’ will his fancy again set sail for the daring passage to India” (268).
The final 15 years of Whitman’s life get about a page apiece as the annual Lincoln lectures give way to a growing and enthusiastic cohort of disciples, and finally the last years punctuated by birthday bashes for the old bard and Traubel’s pestering
Boswellian presence. Much of the late life is given over to bibliographic information as Whitman continues to repackage and release numerous editions of Leaves and other work at a remarkable rate—editorial tinkering that, for so many early biographers, took the place of his early genius. The poems published in the annexes receive no concentrated attention, though he does end with a brief reflection on the extreme belatedness of Whitman’s “Good-bye my Fancy,” the concluding poem to the second, and final, annex to the Death-bed Edition: “On March 26th he passed away,” Holloway writes, “to join his Fancy,” which had apparently fled nearly two decades earlier
(314).
As biographies become more critical of the poet, they tend to retreat further and faster from the late work. The Englishman John Bailey’s Walt Whitman, published the same year as Holloway’s biography, does not varnish his view of the late work.
Of the “Sands at Seventy” cluster and Good-Bye my Fancy he writes: “in all these there is little that is new and still less that can rank among the work by which he will live. The man remains the same and the artist has learnt nothing” (189). The theatrical
“yawns of indifference, boredom or contempt” that Bailey glibly brings to Whitman’s
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“final scraps”—more like “merest prose cut into lengths and printed as verse”—reveal the uncharitable image of late Whitman that would come to predominate in Whitman biography and criticism alike. Once stripped of spiritual trappings, and once faith in union and progress itself begins to lose the allure it once had, late Whitman becomes a far less compelling figure.
After a spate of biographies in America and abroad during the 1930s,42 Henry
Seidel Canby’s Walt Whitman: An American (1943) emerges as a major advancement in cultural biography, anticipating David Reynolds’s landmark Walt Whitman’s
America over 50 years later. Beginning with the problematic of biography itself,
Canby’s tome bears a fitting self-consciousness as to what can possibly be added to the accrued truths and myths of Whitman. It is still hard to break away from the world of the disciples, to think of Whitman as something other than, to borrow Canby’s words, “an old man, paralyzed, sitting in an untidy room among drifts of letters and manuscripts, scratching out with his cane documents of long-dead controversies and tributes to his genius, in order to help his disciples build up a legend of greatness in which the plain facts of an uneventful life would be obscured or forgotten” (2). In order to resolve this dilemma Canby expresses his desire to give the biography of a life, the facts of which “are not to be found in unrevealed scraps of personal experience, but in the unique history of the eclectic America in which he matured, an
America charged with spiritual idealism, double-charged with intellectual and physical
42 Additional biographies published in this period include Newton Arvin’s Whitman (1938), more a critical study of Whitman’s accommodation of socialist ideals than a proper biography; Edgar Lee Masters’s Whitman (1937), geared more for a popular audience; and the Danish biographer Frederik Schyberg’s Walt Whitman (1933), a work, like most foreign biographies, that appears less dismissive of the late work perhaps because its more objective and less territorial relationship to the work of the disciples.
Vander Zee 96 energy” (3). Placing Whitman more fully in his cultural context, Canby recognizes the degree to which “the great poems of love and democracy which Whitman was also writing from the latter fifties onward were drawn (in a kind of Hegelian synthesis of opposites) from a confidence which transcended, but also and certainly included, the experience of complete disillusion” (170). The emphasis on what we might call the haunting Hegelian remainder here presents a powerful interpretive model for
Whitman’s lasting, as it also makes room for the breakdown of that synthesis in the negative dialectical energy impacted in the later works.
Even as Canby suggests these new resonances in Whitman’s later work, however, he nevertheless presents a picture of Whitman in age that collates past prejudice against the late work while providing a roadmap for future neglect. “From
1875 on,” Canby writes, “all that is significant in Whitman’s writing is referential to or repetitive of the earlier ‘Leaves.’ His poems are only a filling in of the chinks of his life work, or are captions for what has been done before” (285). The more optimistic poems of this period show a “stiffening and flattening of his so flexible mind…. His personal story as a seer and poet is nearly finished” (287). What’s left for Canby? Just some “mopping up” (292)—a metaphor, deployed more than once, into which his own reflections on the late work take on a certain stiffening and flattening.
But Canby, for all his unreflective dismissal of the late work, still finds some essential, confounding contrast in Whitman’s lateness—something he sees especially in the visual traces Whitman left behind: “There is an important symbolic record of these years in the many photographs of the aging poet,” he writes, “some magnificent, leonine, with a slow-burning vitality, though in others and especially the profile views,
Vander Zee 97 where the beard does not much conceal the features, he looks like a worn old man nearly burnt out.” (292). He notes in particular the absurd picture of the artificial butterfly that Whitman posed with on the frontispiece for the 1881 edition of Leaves— a staging of organic pastoralism and union with nature that ended up being a ruse:
Whitman had strapped to his finger a cardboard butterfly with an Easter message of clanging rhymes between its wings. Canby seems at once dismissive of and drawn to the strangeness of Whitman’s lateness evident in such pictures. Taking his sense of the contrasting energies of lateness beyond the iconography of age, Canby writes that
“Walt was both the powerful rememberer and interpreter of himself and his times, and the worn-out, weary, vivid, defeated, yet still hopeful artist, depending upon when you saw him” (352). Though Canby commits less than 10 pages of his biography to
Whitman’s last decade, the contrastive visual record he alludes to here speaks volumes. It is precisely that strangeness that must be recovered rather than dismissed.
Concluding his biography, Canby aptly casts this symbolic Walt into distinctly allegorical futures when he writes: “Thus departed the symbolic man of the nineteenth century…. Centuries do not die, they live on in their consequences. And so it was to be with him” (352). Thus late Whitman gives way to the long American century.
By the time Gay Wilson Allen published his still-authoritative The Solitary
Singer (1955), Whitman biography had fully matured beyond the early hagiographic studies of Whitman’s disciples to more exhaustive accounts offered without the benefit of significant archival materials in biographers prior to Holloway, to the substantially researched critical biography more in tune with recreating the actual contours of Whitman’s world. In Allen’s biography—the first post-World War II
Vander Zee 98 biography—one senses increasing fatigue in light of Whitman’s rigorous economy of progress. Since the First World War, biographers had been toiling away in what must have seemed an extended post-war punctuated by minor hopes and momentous depressions. For Allen, writing in what Robert Lowell called the tranquilized ’50s, the economic expansion and commodification of culture must have seemed an echo of the massive industrialization, monopolization and institutionalization that followed in the wake of the Civil War, just as the ’20s had echoed this prior age for Holloway.
Already in Whitman’s poetry of the early ’70s, Allen grows critical of the poet’s work, finding only a “reworking of old themes and ideas” (443). Moreover, he finds
Whitman’s use of symbolism to be somewhat “mixed and trite.”
In addition to these aesthetic deficiencies, after two major wars there is a tendency to view Whitman’s vague sense of spiritualized, inevitably progressive democracy with a wary skepticism: “There, too, as in many of his former poems, he regarded the Unites States as a culmination of past civilizations,” Allen writes of
“Passage to India,” “and prophesied that the nation would surpass them all and eventually achieve the ‘destinies of the Soul,’ whatever those were” (443). If Allen remains wary of Whitman’s spiritualizing tendencies in the late work, he generally takes the poet at his word when the bard, already in the early ’70s, declared Leaves at a terminus, and everything else “surplussage forming after that Volume.” Thus, rather than track Whitman’s self-deification, Allen tracks his doubts: “Whitman seems not only to have forgotten but to feel now that he had written himself out. This was probably the result of his physical decline. The ideas were no longer bubbling to the surface; his emotions had cooled, and the images had lost their freshness. Yet out of
Vander Zee 99 habit he must keep on” (443). Of Whitman’s trip out west in the fall of ’79, Allen relates the poet’s thrilled excitement, his sense of growth, but declares this a mere illusion: “Everything he saw merely confirmed the ideas and theories which he had been expressing in his poems since 1855” (488). Allen, when he addresses the late work, leans heavily upon Whitman’s own doubts on the topic, drawn to the poet’s late humility. Subsequent critics, it seems, have not appreciated the exhaustion, verging at times even on cynicism, in Allen’s canonical account of the late work.
This exhaustion surfaces as well in Allen’s depiction of the disciples.
Reflecting on the final four years of the poet’s life, Allen relates that they “have been so minutely recorded by Horace Traubel that it would be almost impossible to find anything new for a biographer to tell” (531). He applauds Traubel’s zeal, but he writes that With Walt Whitman in Camden is “actually—and unintentionally—one of the cruelest [acts of biography] in literary history,” his record “banal” and “repetitious.”
Allen casts Whitman very much as the reluctant prophet in his later years, resistant to disciples that were always “laying it on too thick,” as Whitman himself liked to say
(534). Once the stuff of spirituality fades, Allen is left with the bathos of old age, a supplement more dull than dangerous in any charged Derridean sense. In his Walt
Whitman Handbook (1944) a decade earlier, Allen would write of the poems included in the final annexes that they “scarcely need discussion. They seem to be mainly fragments from unpublished manuscripts.” They form “stray thoughts and echoes” from earlier, stronger work (155). The story didn’t change in his biography, as we have seen, nor would his judgment alter in his revised New Walt Whitman Handbook published in 1975.
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Allen’s 1955 biography was not alone in writing the life of Whitman in the early post-World War II era. A year earlier in France, Roger Asselineau had published his L’Evolution de Walt Whitman (1954), a massive, two-part critical biography that was published in the Unites States as two separate volumes in 1960 and 1962, and recently reissued as a single volume through the University of Iowa Press’s Whitman
Series, a testament to that biography’s lasting importance. Writing in a very different post-war context, and harboring what has always seemed the bolder, more optimistic inheritance that seems the mark of Whitman’s international reputation, Asselineau reads the work from the 1870s as a supreme act of poetic and personal recovery issuing from the “Heroic Invalid.” Still, the late work produced during the period of decline that inevitably followed such heroism is largely cast aside: “‘Sands at Seventy’ contained only one important poem,” he writes (1: 259). But the weakened Whitman remained consistent: “The remarkable thing is that the tired, paralyzed, old man renounced no part of the message of his youth and, in spite of illness and suffering, continued to celebrate the joy of living.” The notion that Whitman’s lateness has nothing left to work through, that it is generally untroubled and unchanged in its diminutive disposition, has been one of the most persistently damaging understanding of the late work even when it would seem to place that work on the rarified pedestal of age. Writing of the second annex to Leaves, Asselineau writes in language heavy with diminutive modifiers: “this thin volume… contained only thirty-one poems, all very short, in which Whitman hardly did more than take up again, with less energy, some of the themes he had treated earlier” (I: 265, my emphasis).
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The real accomplishment of Asselineau’s biography comes not in terms of its biographical content, but its organization. While the first volume is more traditionally chronological in its approach to the life, the second offers a less linear reflection on
Whitman’s poetry divided into sections such as “Ethics,” “Aesthetics” and Prosody.”
This organizational schema allows certain anomalous intensities to emerge from the general narrative of decline. Though Asselineau continues to limit Whitman to a rigid regiment of faith and union, for example, he writes convincingly of how Whitman
“became increasingly mindful of form” (2: 255), as is evidenced in his scrupulous revisions which reveal a sense of music, timing, and metrical prosody that were largely missing in the early work. And though Asselineau speaks of a Whitman who
“could only repeat weakly what he had formerly proclaimed in a stentorian voice” (2:
255), he also combats those diminutive modifiers noted above with a sense verging on the superlative when it comes to the general music of his verse: “he slowly became a more and more conscious artist,” Asselineau suggests, “a more and more subtle craftsman, more and more master of himself and his means of expression” (2: 252).
Despite these bold suggestions, the evolutionary paradigm of the first part of his study, dominated by the now-ingrained thesis of decline, leaves him little room to ask how
Whitman’s increasing preoccupation with form, so intriguing to the French critic, reflected a productively different poet—and a profoundly different world.
After Asselineau’s account, the era of major Whitman biography wanted for a time. A revised edition of Allen’s biography did emerge in 1967, but it had little new to offer regarding Whitman’s late work. Perhaps ceding ground to the renewed presence of Allen’s exhaustive and authoritative life, a number of biographers chose to
Vander Zee 102 tell more partial tales. After Allen’s revision, we enter something of a long afternoon, recalling Holloway’s phrase, of Whitman biography. A trio of psychobiographies from the late ’60s through the early ’80s are variously dismissive and outright antagonistic in their approach to the late work. E.H. Miller’s Walt Whitman’s Poetry: A
Psychological Journey (1969), for example, finds the career over by the time Whitman writes “Passage to India”: “The muted eroticism of ‘Passage to India,” Miller writes,
“reveals as graphically as anything else Whitman’s loss of confidence in the sensuous life and the withering of his artistic powers” (214). Relying heavily on Freudian psycho-sexual dynamics, he finds that “the tension which lay behind his greatest poetry had worked themselves out partly because of compulsive artistic repetition. The child that ‘went forth’ had found a mother and, more important, a father.” Continuing in this vein, he notes that “there were no more variations to be played upon his themes, for the tension expressed in the themes were now quiescent. Without tension there is not need to seek sublimation in art…. [P]ersonal serenity, unfortunately, seem to produce a flaccid art” (221). Stephen A. Black’s Whitman’s Journeys into Chaos: A
Psychoanalytic Study of the Poetic Process (1975) concludes prematurely with the
Lincoln elegy, dismissing the remaining career as lacking in whatever productive tension existed prior: “the events immediately after the war,” he writes, “ended
Whitman’s ability to continue in his poetry the dynamic creation of a mythic vision.
The work that remained for Whitman’s last twenty-seven years was the consolidation of his public identity as America’s self-appointed poet laureate” (244). David
Cavitch’s My Soul and I (1985), the third entry in this string of psychobiographies, similarly concentrates on the early work, but is even more explicitly dismissive of
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Whitman’s poetry after the second edition: “With the exception of a handful of good poems written after 1859, Whitman only added voluminous fat to Leaves of Grass during the remaining thirty-two years of his writing career, by writing poems that sound like imitations of himself” (xiv).
Other partial biographies during these decades include Joseph Jay Rubin’s The
Historic Whitman (1973), which covers the life of Whitman prior to 1855 with an emphasis on the journalism. Paul Zweig’s Walt Whitman: The Making of the Poet
(1983) terminates, as does Black’s psychobiography, with Whitman’s Lincoln elegy
“When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” never attempting anything like an account of the final 25 years of the poet’s Whitman’s life. “After Lilacs,” Zweig concludes, “there was not silence but sporadic effort, sparse and diminished… his great work was done” (345). Phillip Callow’s From Noon to Starry Night: A Life of
Walt Whitman (1992) is similarly truncated, giving less than ten pages to the final ten years and ominously naming his final chapter, covering the entire post-war period,
“The Descent.” More recently, Gary Schmidgall’s Walt Whitman: A Gay Life (1997) mines Traubel’s copious Boswellian jottings for veiled evidences of Whitman’s “gay fraternity,” though his interest in Whitman, as he explains by way of introduction, largely terminates at the end of the Civil War, and focuses, naturally, around the late
50s during the genesis and publication of the Calamus poems. Schmidgall’s book, admirable for its dedicated focus on this countercultural aspect of Whitman’s life, nevertheless joins a longstanding precedent of studies interested in Whitman and sexuality that inadvertently obscure another neglected Whitman: Whitman in age.
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Amidst these minor lives, Justin Kaplan’s Walt Whitman: A Life (1980) emerges as the first significant and exhaustive biography after Allen’s revised edition of his Solitary Singer in the mid ’60s, and the first to alter radically how the late life might be revealed anew. The biography proper ends with a chapter that takes us from end of the Civil War, through the poems of the 70s, and to a final meditation on the prose work Specimen Days. He does not deny that Whitman’s work declined in age, but he has a more reverential way of saying so: “Lilacs,” he writes, is “also an unconscious farewell to the creative powers of an elderly, literary gentleman” who had said he expected to “range along the high plateau of my life & capacity for a few years now, & then swiftly descend” (308). Whitman as self-elegist, we must admit, seems more compelling than Whitman as a merely failing artist. By not following Walt through his long afternoon at the biography’s conclusion, Kaplan grants Whitman a slightly swifter poetic descent. “When he placed on Lincoln’s coffin his symbolic sprig of lilac in flower,” Kaplan writes, “he looked ahead to his own tomb in Harleigh
Cemetery” (309).
Kaplan ends his biography at Timber Creek, the farm of his young friend
Harry Stafford where he summered and visited occasionally in the mid late 70s. Thus, he ends at a moment of rejuvenation and, compared to the devastating year of 1873, recovering health. “Like Adam, in this wild garden that he called Timber Creek,”
Kaplan writes, “Whitman, gaining back strength and spirit, looked at his nature as if for the first time” (267). In an organizational move unique to Whitman biography, the late years that would normally be the final chapters make their way to the front of the book, where Kaplan is released from making excuses about the quality of the verse.
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And rather than present this time of life as one of decline and desuetude, he uses it to build up the fundamental mystery of the poet. It is a fascinating choice. By doing so, he avoids the persistent hinge-moments and that always happen in Whitman biography: some time between the Civil War and Whitman’s passing, there is the perfunctory statement of inevitable decline. When one begins with the period of so- called echo and repetition, it no longer has the triumphant sounding board of “Song of
Myself” and the earlier work to contend with. The late years come to life unburdened at the start of this biography in a way that they never do when they are presented as an inevitable and long decline.
That said, the first two chapters themselves give little indication that Whitman even wrote poems after 1876. The late work is not cited—even for its autobiographical value. What Kaplan puts in place of the late work is a careful cultivation of mystery.
He presents an image of Whitman as a place holder for the biographer himself,
“stir[ring] his archive with the crook of his crane” (16). Late in life, Kaplan writes,
“the relics of personal history floated to the surface”—the letter from Emerson, for example, or small evidences of poetic beginnings. But Kaplan wrests something even more strange from this nostalgia: “there were hints that a less robust spirit had once prevailed,” he writes, “a spirit covert, hesitant, perturbed, lonely, and always unrequited.” (17). He recalls Whitman’s statement to his first biographer Maurice
Bucke that “I am by no means the benevolent, equable, happy creature you portray”
(17). He also notes that Carpenter senses a certain “remoteness and inaccessibility” about the poet. Kaplan seems drawn to Carpenter, who sensed that behind every line of Leaves of Grass lies something hidden, or, in Carpenter’s words once again,
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“concealed, studiedly concealed; some passages left purposely obscure…. I think there are truths which it is necessary to envelope or wrap up” (18). Kaplan concludes the late life somewhat anomalously with words from the 1860 poem “Facing West from
California’s Shores,” taking it as a talisman of Whitman’s lateness, and a statement of biography’s fundamentally elusive, mysterious object: “But where is what I started for, so long ago?” Whitman plaintively asks, “and why is it yet unfound?” (CPP 267).
Late Whitman lives here as I think he should live today: as a question, as something unknown and even mysterious—perhaps even to himself. By placing Whitman’s lateness first, the biographer releases himself from the default condescension that attends so many biographers of Whitman in age, especially after Allen. Kaplan, however unwittingly, presents a quiet provocation: why not begin with Whitman’s lateness?
Though the Gilded Age context of Whitman’s life after the Civil War were suggested already in Holloway and alluded to more fully in Canby and Allen, not until
David S. Reynolds’s cultural biography Walt Whitman’s America (1995) do we gain not only of a firmer grounding for Whitman’s lateness, but a motivation for it: it resides in America’s own lateness. Reynolds sees Whitman largely conceding to the disillusionment of the post-war years: “industrialization and growth of centralized power structures brought new challenges for the poet intent on social salvation…. His rise from rebellious individualist to Good Gray Poet was played out against the background of the rise of corporate capitalism and institutional organizations” (447,
450). While Reynolds does a superb job of unfolding this cultural context, he is less adept at productively relating the poetry to it. “Although he believed more ardently
Vander Zee 107 than ever that America would be ultimately redeemed only through poetry,” he writes,
“most of the poetry he writes after the war were brief vignettes or thoughts, as though his imagination had surrendered its all-encompassing posture on behalf of writing for the occasion” (450). Reynolds recognizes Whitman’s bitter disappointment as he came to understand the Civil War’s inability to purify the cultural and political air in
America. Noting Whitman’s increasingly theatrical and conventional tendencies in his later years, Reynolds relates these traits to a more thickly mediated culture. This more mediated culture reflected and in some ways encouraged a change in Whitman’s poetics as the intimacy of public life ceded ground to a culture of the spectacle.
Though very alive to the ways in which these broad cultural changes shaped the poetry, Reynolds is less interested in exploring the ways that the poetry not only accommodated these conditions, but also responded to them. Thus, in the end, the common refrain—touched here lightly with a disgust—of Whitman’s lateness persists:
“The new poems were little more than bits written about specific scenes or occasions…. he was now beyond even thinking about writing a sweeping, cohesive poem about America. His role combined nostalgic storyteller, the benign nature poet, and the wallower in self pity” (565). Everything becomes simplified in what Reynolds terms the homogenized optimism of positive thinking that infected Whitman’s late work.
Allen’s cynicism in relation to the late Whitman here turns into the later biographer’s disgust. What bothers Reynolds beyond any aesthetic failure, and perhaps leaves him uninterested in pursuing the late work more deeply, is the way
Whitman apparently concedes to the cultural forces around him. Reynolds is
Vander Zee 108 constantly, and rightly, perturbed by Whitman’s fawning over capitalists such as
Andrew Carnegie, who attended one of his famous Lincoln lectures and gave him
$300 to boot; his not-so-subtle racism; his non-committal, beyond-party politics. As
Whitman entered the age of institutionalization, Whitman himself, in short, became an institution. However unflattering these images of Whitman’s post-war years, they form the crucial background of Whitman’s lateness where his ideals become almost unrecognizable at times. Rather than recover the late work’s more resistant energies, however, Reynolds’s is content to bury the late work with the overly accommodating
Good Gray Poet.
No subsequent Whitman biography has emerged that would challenge the common sense of Whitman in age. Jerome Loving’s Walt Whitman: Song of Himself
(2000), which is judicious almost to a fault, does lavish significant attention on
Whitman’s later years. But this has more to do with an extraordinarily detailed and less territorial accounting of Whitman’s disciples, more thorough work in Whitman bibliography, and new information about the Lincoln lectures that Whitman delivered in the 1880s. Despite the evidence of Whitman as a very conscious artist that we see in
Asselineau’s assiduous attention to Whitman’s revisions, Loving writes that
“Whitman’s art was seldom ‘deliberate.’ (476). In the late work, Loving writes,
Whitman “is packing his literary bags for eternity” in final poems “filled with… anticipation of his own impending death.” Constricting the emotional and intellectual range of Whitman’s late poetry, Loving writes that their “tone is wonderment instead of fear.” Condescendingly, he isolates “two gems” from the literary dross. Loving fills
Vander Zee 109 out the standard accounts of Whitman in age in admirable detail, but offers little new interpretive ground.
Perhaps it is unjust to demand of biography the kind of sustained critical attention that the late work requires. But the persistent biographical narrative of
Whitman’s decline has played some part in withholding Whitman’s late work from the kinds of reading that might give it new life. In his essay on “Whitman and the
Biographers,” Justin Kaplan, whose life of the poet was discussed above, writes of the odd contrast between the extraordinary wealth of documentation concerning
Whitman’s late years and the thinness of any corresponding narrative tension that might sustain a compelling plot. “For the biographer writing Whitman’s life in the usual linear way, from birth on,” Kaplan reflects, “all this material can be dismaying in its quantity, even an obstacle to the completion of a story that has already run on too long. The writer smells the stable and gallops through Whitman’s last ten years” (15).
Kaplan, we know, avoided this problem by placing the late years first in his biography.
However novel, such a strategy merely exorcizes the haunting that these late years hold—a haunting that Kaplan largely avoids by making these years into his biography’s inaugural mystery, and that other biographers have dismissed by ignoring the more complex and layered relationships between Whitman’s late work and his late life.
Whitman articulates what would become his haunted post-War aesthetics most powerfully in his letter to O’Connor early in 1865, in which he describes the place of the yet unpublished Drum-Taps in his evolving oeuvre. Taking on the dual language of the aesthete and the writer engage, he writes that “it is in my opinion superior to
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Leaves of Grass, is certainly more perfect as a work of art, being adjusted in all its proportions, & its passion having the indispensable merit that though to the ordinary reader let loose with wildest abandon, the true artist can see it is yet under control”
(Correspondence 1: 246). Whitman’s aesthetic statement here continues as he introduces the political not as a predominating factor but as something that enters via indirection and suggestion:
But I am perhaps mainly satisfied with Drum-Taps because it delivers my ambition of the task that has haunted me, namely, to express in a poem (& in the way I like, which is not at all by directly stating it) the pending action of this Time & Land we swim in, with all their large conflicting fluctuations of despair & hope, the shiftings, masses, & the whirl & deafening din.
The Civil War—its grim and bloody achievement of unity limping uneasily into the discord of the post-war years—continues to haunt Whitman’s work for the rest of his life as it becomes the central axis around which all else pivots. And that work, persisting into the Gilded Age and beyond, remains duly haunted.
The Uses and Abuses of Whitman’s Lateness from Matthiessen to Creeley
Though Whitman remained something of an outlier in academia into the mid-
50s and never melded seamlessly with the ascendant New Critical paradigms,
Whitman’s place in the canon of American literature—and in the American academy—was secured, in no small part, by F.O. Matthiessen’s landmark study,
American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman
(1941). Arguably, Matthiessen’s title alone proved as influential in ushering Whitman into the canon as anything contained between its covers. Published the same year as
Luce’s essay “The American Century,” Matthiessen’s study shares with that piece a
Vander Zee 111 nationalist rhetoric extolling the vitality of America along with its core democratic values that were very much under threat at the time. Both writers encouraged a burgeoning national self-consciousness at the start of World War II, a self- consciousness that Matthiessen traces back to what he names a “devotion to the possibilities of democracy” so vividly present in the mid-century work of Emerson and Melville, Hawthorne and Whitman (xi).
The portrait of Whitman that emerges in American Renaissance has been a lasting one. Whitman arrives in the canon not as the Good Gray Poet, as he does in
O’Connor’s pamphlet of that title, but as the ante-bellum innocent. It is an innocence, however, that Matthiessen alternately sustains and disavows. Late in his study, for example, it becomes clear that Whitman’s apparent naïveté and innocence in the years leading up to the Civil War grates on a scholar staring down yet another looming conflict. “The Whitman who is most nearly meaningless,” he writes, “is the one who could declare at the start of his career and repeat on occasion to the end: ‘I am myself just as much evil as good, and my nation is—and I say there is in fact no evil’” (625).
We might call this the problem of Whitman’s almost unthinkable magnanimity: his tendency towards a capacious and yet blithely indiscriminate sensibility. Earlier commentators, from Van Wyck Brooks to D.H. Lawrence, who once decried the bard’s “awful pudding of one identity,” had sufficiently identified this problem (150).
Though Matthiessen’s declared formalist bent keeps him from editorializing, one senses the evident evil of Nazi Germany, and the looming totalitarianism of fascism more generally, pressing upon his words here. For Matthiessen, this is an unfortunate innocence that Whitman never lost. He notes, for example, that even as Melville was
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“work[ing] towards a resolution of the tragic problem of life” in his own late work
(Billy Budd, left unfinished upon his death in 1891) “Whitman was benevolently dismissing its existence” (625). Though Whitman served as an important, if somewhat evanescent, emblem of antebellum innocence as he went, in Matthiessen’s words,
“billowing away into a dream of perfectibility” (652), he was no barometer for the trials of post-Civil War America in which—and here Matthiessen’s language again grows more explicitly political—the blind pursuit of “empire builders,” those “strong willed individuals who seized the land, and gutted the forests and build the railroads,” dominated the scene like so many monomaniacal Ahabs (459).
In his post-war autobiography From the Heart of Europe (1948), Matthiessen would seem to value Whitman’s innocence in a less skeptical and more nostalgic, almost elegiac, tone, signaling an important turning-point in what Whitman’s lateness comes to signify in the post-World War II. There, Matthiessen writes of Whitman as
“the central figure of our literature affirming the democratic faith” (90). It was a picture of innocence and hope already beginning to fray in Matthiessen’s own post- war years as democracy started to seem a matter of faith rather than an untarnished reality. The years surrounding the centennial celebration of the first edition of Leaves of Grass (1855) saw a number of landmark publications—a few of them by
Matthiessen’s own students—that retain this central thesis of lost innocence. Such scholars were drawn into the orbit of Matthiessen’s American Renaissance thesis, which corralled the competing forces of American literature into an orbit of five years during which Whitman tacitly plays the part of the innocent against the tragic monomania of a Melville, or Hawthorne’s dark romance. Whitman was, as one of
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Matthiessen’s students R.W.B. Lewis put it in the title of his 1955 study, The
American Adam. This was an era in which Whitman’s lateness became increasingly shrouded as his critics, in what might be called the enduring era of the permanent post- war as international conflicts continued to pile up, reached back for some receding innocence embodied in Whitman while allowing themselves to be chastened by his sterner peers. Though Whitman’s reputation slowly recovered from the New Critical neglect that had been particularly strong in Allen Tate and Cleanth Brooks in the years leading up to World War II, his late work played no part in this recovery.43
The subtitle of Lewis’s study—Innocence, Tragedy and Tradition in the
Nineteenth Century—defines Whitman’s role in the emerging dialectic of American literature even more clearly than Matthiessen had. “We can hardly expect to be persuaded any longer by the historic dream of the new Adam” Lewis writes. “But it can pose anew, in the classic way of illumination as it did in the American nineteenth century, the picture of what might be against the knowledge of what is, and become once more a stimulus to enterprise and a resource for literature” (10). In Lewis’s carefully crafted dialectic, we progress from the Party of Hope, epitomized by
Whitman’s timeless Adamic innocence, to the thickly temporal, resistant, and antithetical work of Hawthorne and Melville. Whitman gets trapped in his innocence, his character allowed texture, but not depth: “Adam had his moments of sorrow also,”
Lewis concedes. “But the emotion had nothing to do with the tragic insight; it did not spring from any perception of a genuine hostility in nature or lead to the drama of colliding forces. Whitman was wistful, not tragic. He was innocence personified” (48).
Whitman comes to represent a necessary illusion, a supreme fiction, his career largely
43 For an excellent account of New Critical disregard for Whitman’s poetry see Golding 86-105.
Vander Zee 114 circumscribed by that initial burst of irrecoverable potential in the first edition of
Leaves. Kept within that tight frame, Whitman appears a mere token within a broader literary exchange of innocence and experience. Without Whitman, without his crucially naïve vision, Lewis argues, we witness “not… a mature tragic spirit, but merely a sterile awareness of evil uninvigorated by a sense of loss” (9). Whitman, for
Lewis, can only measure loss, how far we have fallen. And only a vivid, if past, sense of that original Adamic man can rescue Lewis and his cultural milieu from what he calls, in a devastatingly apt phrase, their collective “achieved hopelessness”— something close to what Benjamin derided as the left-wing melancholy that he witnessed usurping his own era’s critical energies.
In the remarkable epilogue to The American Adam, “Adam as Hero in the Age of Containment,” Lewis chastises a contemporary American culture whose sense of irony, once “fertile and alive,” has “withered into mere mordant skepticism” (196).
This “new hopelessness,” he writes, is a sign of the age of containment: “we huddle together and shore up defenses; both our literature and our public conduct suggest that exposure to experience is certain to be fatal…. Instead of looking forward to new possibilities, we direct our tired attention to the burden of history, observing repeatedly that it is later than you think” (196). Whitman is duly cast out of this wizened, world-weary realm. But Lewis inadvertently articulates the central and contrary argument developed over the course of this study: in late Whitman, it is always later than you think. Just as Lewis and his peers seemed to be growing out of
Whitman, Whitman, too, grew out of himself. But kept within his innocent reserve by these mid-century critics, the poet can only help in “recalling the moral and artistic
Vander Zee 115 adventurousness of a century ago” in order to “release us a little from out current rigidity” (196). Whitman, here, is not allowed himself to embody that rigidity, or to know first-hand that heavy burden of history. Never is Whitman allowed to possess the qualities that the bard himself saw so profoundly evidenced in the genius of his poetic imagination, Abraham Lincoln: “The radical element in Lincoln,” Whitman told Traubel late in life, “was sadness bordering on melancholy, touched by philosophy, and that philosophy again touched by a humor, which saved him from the logical wreck of his powers” (WWC 1: 4). If Whitman seeks to suggest, as well, the radical element residing in himself—after all, he modeled his own poetic alter ego after the wound-binding image that Lincoln unfolds in the Second Inaugural
Address—his early commentators were utterly blind to it. As newly christened
Representative Man, Whitman had his role to play.
Another of Matthiessen’s students, Henry Nash Smith, follows Whitman’s idealism into the post-war years in his Virgin Land (1951). There, one senses how, if one would choose to move beyond the model of Whitman as a antebellum innocent, a critic had to stretch to accommodate Whitman’s post-Civil War idealism in some sensible way—something Matthiessen clearly struggled to accomplish. Smith would like to think that Whitman’s enduring idealism is not escapist, as it is in Matthiessen, but stands instead for what’s missing in Smith’s own post-war moment. Writing about the role of empire in Whitman’s work, for example, Smith notes that the poet, rather than join those whom Matthiessen’s named the aggressive empire builders, gave “final imaginative expression to the theme of manifest destiny” (44). The key distinction here is Whitman’s imaginative expression of this theme, which circumvents an
Vander Zee 116 engagement with empire’s less sanguine human and material consequences. Looking to Whitman’s return to a spiritualized optimism in poems such as “Pioneers! Oh,
Pioneers!” and “Passage to India,” Smith sees in them a “mysticism difficult for the twentieth century to follow,” but one that nevertheless still offers an “intrepid idealism” that one might be grateful for given the “less attractive inferences that other thinkers have drawn from the notion of an American empire in the Pacific” (47-48). In light of Lewis and Matthiessen, this seems not an idealism intrepid, but impossible. It became very difficult to extricate some untarnished innocence or idealism in Whitman from those post-Civil War years in which the poet, to borrow Van Wyck Brooks’s memorable formation in, basked “in a great satisfaction with material facts, before which he purred like a can by the warm fire” (194).
Richard Chase, in his 1955 contribution to a collection of centennial essays, articulates Whitman’s increasing distance from the concerns of the present most directly: “[t]he first thing to admit is that Walt Whitman was different from us” (15).
Whitman, Chase writes, was “a product of those decades just before the Civil War, of the freshness, the large-mindedness, the complex versatility, the general vigor and adventurousness which the war and the Gilded Age did so much to destroy.” This, he writes, is the “abyss history has made between us and the time of Whitman’s youth and early mid-age.” Expanding on a distance not only spiritual but social as well, he writes that “we give over much of our energy to problems generated by modern mass society and the grim, self-lacerating routines within a context of international fear which darkens the color of modern life. Many of our problems Whitman, like most people of his time, would hardly understand as problems at all” (15). Rather than
Vander Zee 117 reach for a Whitman who might be a partner in loss, who might similarly recognize only with great difficulty his former self, Chase adds this damaging element to the common refrain on the late work: “Whitman’s later poetry bespeaks a mind in which productive tensions have been relaxed, conflicts dissipated, particulars generalized, inequities equalized,” he writes. “The musing, humorous, paradoxically indolent but unpredictably energetic satyr-poet of the early 1850’s becomes the large, bland, gray personage with the vague, light blue eyes and the circumambient beard” (148).
Turning the disciples’ myth of an Apollonian Whitman on its head, Chase continues:
“Dionysius becomes not Apollonian but positively Hellenistic—prematurely old, nerveless, soothsaying, spiritually universalized. The deft and flexible wit disappears along with the contraries and disparities which once produced it” (148).
Thus, though we see in mid-century critics such as Smith some regard for
Whitman’s persistent idealism after the Civil War, the broad dismissal of the poet’s late work that we saw unfolding in remarkably consistent manner in Whitman biography persists in Whitman criticism proper. That such disregard became commonplace even in the editorial apparatus surrounding Whitman’s work shows how deep this judgment ran. Take Malcolm Cowley’s cranky, if critically and pedagogically influential, introduction to his 1954 edition of Whitman’s Complete
Poetry and Prose. “This… Whitman, ripening with age—and becoming much more discreet after he moved to Washington and went to work for the government—at last merged blandly into the figure of the Good Gray Poet. He wrote poems, too, as part of his role, but they were as windy and uninspired as the speeches of Polonius” (11).
Whitman, of course, liked to think of his lateness more along the lines of Lear, but he
Vander Zee 118 might have appreciated the Shakespeare reference in any case. And Cowley’s sense of
Whitman as role-player is key as the bard becomes less performative and more theatrical, less expressive of self and more conventional. But later in Cowley’s introduction, this more complex sense of role-playing loses any sense of tension: “one can say that Whitman in his age had effected a cure of himself and had moved from his private world into a stable relation with society” (25). Drained of the kind of well- wrought literary tension and ambiguity critics of the era craved, Whitman becomes a spectral presence in his own life: “he is a reassuring, even an inspiring figure: good and gray, but not so much of a poet as the effigy on a poet’s tomb.” It is a remarkably prescient statement in terms of my own study, one that casts Whitman’s lateness as its own allegorical afterlife: some ever-living ghost of what was. But that lasting is taken by Cowley as an achieved stability, and not as a fraught self-haunting. What matters for Cowley is not Whitman in age, but what he termed the miracle of the first edition of Leaves. This—what we might call Cowley’s “miracle” thesis—would grow increasingly influential after he issued the 1855 Leaves in 1959 with a long introduction that again consigns Whitman in age to the dustbin of literary history.
Even as Whitman’s role in the emerging field of American literature became increasingly central, the canon of his own work grew increasingly circumscribed.
By the mid-50s, Whitman had emerged more fully from critical obscurity, but on distinctly opposite terms from those that emerged under the careful conservatorship of the disciples. Where in Whitman’s own lifetime, as we will see in Chapter 3, his lateness was made to sponsor his greatness, in his post-World War II genesis it would be the youthful bard that emerges most powerfully. But at the same time, this is a
Vander Zee 119 youthful bard cast in an elegiac light as something lost, something losing: a stranger to our loss. In what the extended post-war period stretching from the mid-century to the present, Whitman has remained such a stranger, a figure lost in plane sight.
James H. Miller’s A Critical Guide to Leaves of Grass (1962), alongside the landmark critical and biographical scholarship produced in the 1950s discussed in the previous section, helped to construct this understanding of Whitman’s gradual poetic decline. Miller speaks for many when he writes that the later poems “are not even the genuine article but mere echoes, weak imitations” (253). The remaining voices of old- school Whitman criticism hold firmly to this thesis of poetic decline where they do not ignore the late work altogether.44 To their discredit, recent scholarship has offered very little to combat this narrow conception as the annexes remain marginalized, a mere supplement to Whitman’s canonical body of work.
The basic parameters of Whitman’s late work and life, established in the post- war years, have remained remarkably consistent in more recent criticism, though the pathos of the response has been somewhat diluted as ways of reading became increasingly professionalized within the academy, and increasingly wed to more constraining critical imperatives. This might seem surprising. Though the work of
Matthiessen and his students could be considered very much rooted in those years
44 Howard Waskow’s Whitman: Exploration in Form (1966), for example, ignores late Whitman altogether, while Thomas Edward Crawley’s The Structure of Leaves of Grass (1970) finds more explicit grounds for dismissal (81). See also Gay Wilson Allen’s widely influential The New Walt Whitman Handbook (1975) 155-59. Miller, one should note, would later temper his understanding of the late Whitman in his revised edition of The Critical Guide (1977). There, he develops a more engaged relationship to the late work. The properly late work—appearing in the annexes—Miller concedes, “have suffered neglect, overshadowed as they have been by the large structure of the basic Leaves that looms over them” (113). As he arrives at the final page of his own study, he writes that the Annexes constitute an astonishing body of lyric poetry written in the final years of a poet of remarkable creative power, and deserve a better fate than they have had. Rather than launch such an attentive effort, however, he gives the task to future readers: “Readers should discover for themselves the poems they believe to be worthy of consideration, even overlooked masterpieces of lyric expression” (113).
Vander Zee 120 flanking World War II, they created largely de-historicized, de-sexed and de-classed versions of Whitman. Thus, one would think that with the multiplication of critical approaches, Whitman’s lateness would have found a worthy response. But even as the work of criticism grew from an entrenched New Critical focus on the work itself to a more philosophically and linguistically inflected formalism in its structural and poststructural iterations, and as cultural studies and New Historical approaches emerged to give a more complete picture of Whitman’s relation to gender, race, class, ideology, and sexuality, only a two book-length critical studies have taken Whitman’s post-war work as their starting point—and both of these studies remain invested in the effects and memories of that central conflict rather than attend to the late poetry itself.
Both of these studies leave Whitman’s lateness proper essentially untouched.45
Why this neglect? Why hasn’t the momentous growth of Whitman studies— with hundreds of books and thousands of articles published since the mid-50s— created adequate conceptual space for Whitman’s lateness? If we move beyond the narrowly subjective aesthetic judgment that Whitman’s late work is—as James Harlan said of the poet himself in justification for firing him from his Government post—very bad, we might explain this neglect by noting the sense of organicism and unity that, with its tropes of growth and evolution, so deeply informs Whitman criticism.46 The
45 I refer to Luke Mancuso’s The Strange Sad War Revolving: Walt Whitman, Reconstruction, and the Emergence of Black Citizenship (1997). Walter H. Eitner’s Walt Whitman’s Western Jaunt (1982), which covers Whitman’s journey out west in the late 1870s, is more accurately considered a supplement to biography rather than criticism. Martin T. Buinicki’s Walt Whitman’s Reconstruction (2011) appears to be an important addition to critical appraisal of Whitman’s post-war work, though like Mancuso’s study, it remains most concerned with the Reconstruction years and not with the final 15 years of Whitman’s life and work. 46 See Killingsworth’s significant bibliographic study The Growth of Leaves of Grass: The Organic Tradition in Whitman Studies (1993) and also Mark Maslan’s “Whitman and His Doubles: Division and Union in Leaves of Grass and its Critics.” Maslan assesses the obsession with the Whitman of union and organic identity that pervades the critical scene. Maslan suggestively hopes to draw attention to “a
Vander Zee 121 result is a diachronic critical tendency that usually finds its raison d’être somewhere in the first three editions of Leaves (with the exception of the fourth, 1867 edition of
Leaves as the focus of studies focusing on the Civil War) leading to what biographer
Emory Holloway had dismissively termed Whitman’s long poetic afternoon already in
1926.
The major synoptic studies of American literature from the ’60s and ’70s, such as Roy Harvey Pearce’s The Continuity of American Poetry, do little to challenge this critical common sense, understandably focusing on those Whitman poems that had been deemed canonical. Books tracing Whitman’s influence were similarly reluctant to engage the late work, drawn instead to his importance to the tradition of what James
E. Miller, in American Quest for the Supreme Fiction (1979) termed the “personal epic,” or what Thomas Gardner, in Discovering Ourselves in Whitman (1989), more generally terms the contemporary long poem. If Whitman’s late work comes under discussion in such studies, it is dispatched quickly enough, as when Pearce sees in the late work only “indifferent poetry, confused religion, and bad philosophy—a sign that
[he] had gone beyond the outer limits of [his] basic style” (172). The policing of boundaries here, where Whitman is held to a rather rigid program of vitality, shows how a reduced poetic canon within Whitman studies proper has resulted in a rather flattened program of vitality and innocence—however tested by crisis—when it comes to Whitman’s broader role in American literature.
Whitman whom these assumptions have kept hidden from view—one for whom division is a guiding principle rather than a problem to be solved” (120). Unfortunately, Maslan also subscribes to the “mystery… of Whitman’s decline as a poet after 1865” (137), thus closing the door on what I think to be an essential platform for a discussion of what he aptly calls the significance of division in Whitman’s poetry.
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But what can we learn from the terms of dismissal themselves? Some critics dispatch the late work with unequivocal bluntness. C. Carroll Hollis, for example, in a significant early approach to Whitman’s technique that blends New Critical formalism and speech-act theory with the increasingly dominant methodologies of structuralism and poststructuralism, is tellingly frank in its opinion of the late work. For Hollis, as for many critics, the dominant question in relation to Whitman’s poetics must take up that long foreground, that miracle of Leaves’s emergence. In those early years, Hollis asks, “what did he actually do to language to make it work poetically?” (18).
Indulging the enduring fascination with Whitman’s long foreground, Hollis then breaks off from the critical narrative with this strangely corrective aside, which is, of course, no correction at all but only a sterner recapitulation of the critical common sense: “But let me make my own position clear. Whitman was a poet, not a prophet, and poet he always was. After the Civil War, he became increasingly a weak (even bad) poet, and we ought to admit as much” (21). Hollis, here, borrows a sturdy template of dismissal from Whitman biography: stripped of the prophetic trappings in which disciples had so eagerly ensconced the bard, we witness a poetry duly shorn.
While Hollis and others would dismiss the late work out of hand, most critics simply do not find room—physical or conceptual—in their studies for Whitman’s late work. Given the more selective tasks of criticism, these exclusions make a certain amount of sense: a biographer is responsible for a life, but a critic naturally deploys a narrower attention. But when viewed en masse, these dismissals comprise a corporate lack of imagination; they come to seem lazy, even, as the durable rhetorical template that underscores this compounding disregard come so clearly into view. Of course,
Vander Zee 123 each study has a certain role for Whitman to fulfill. The problem arises when the aging
Whitman’s apparent inability to fulfill that limited critical role—often cast in terms that the poet himself would find strange indeed—results in the default aesthetic judgment of failure and decline. In George Hutchinson’s study on Whitman’s ecstatic literary shamanism, for example, we read that “although good short poems would continue to bubble up until the end of the poet’s life, he would never again produce the sort of grand, ecstatic performances for which he is most revered” (171). The same critic later writes of the early-1870s poem “Prayer of Columbus” that it is “the last of the poet’s works to approach authentic visionary quality…. Whitman has come full circle. He knows that his ecstatic work is done (186).47
The aging poet’s foreknowledge about his lack of fitness in regard to future critical paradigms has become a kind of trope in Whitman criticism. Whitman’s lateness, that is, is not only buried, but the poet himself is more often than not found holding the shovel. Thus, Kerry Larson’s Whitman’s Drama of Consensus (1988), which looks for evidence of what he terms a certain radical conservatism, a tension between “legislated union” and “spontaneous accord” (xxi) finds no such tension in the late work. Addressing that work as a kind of afterthought, Larson writes that the work after the war is “drained of dramatic tension” (244). The gap between acknowledgement of post-war ills and the reluctance to translate that acknowledgement into significant poetic form was his end. “Half realizing that his best work was behind him,” Larson concludes, “Whitman loaned out the better part of his remaining years in garrulous reminiscence and endless revisions and of
47 For a related study that similarly eschews the later work for a more detailed look at the antebellum culture of conversion, see Sowder.
Vander Zee 124 adjustments to Leaves of Grass,” reminiscences that he finds mostly “forgotten and forgettable” (244). Mark Bauerlein’s study, Walt Whitman and the American Idiom
(1991), which addresses the problematic of representation along similarly deconstructive lines, echoes this complaint as well: “the late poems neither explore the historical and linguistic circumstances of their coming into being nor do they anticipate their destiny, the historical and linguistic transformation they will undergo.
The anxiety has disappeared, and it seems that, after 1860, Whitman is secure in writing a poetry blissfully ignorant of the problematic of representation and interpretation that haunted his early work” (237). To fault Whitman for decline in age is unimaginative, but to fault Whitman’s late work for not anticipating critical paradigms that would continually re-frame his accomplishment seems ungenerous to say the least.
When we move from the ecstatic and political Whitman to what Vivian
Pollack terms The Erotic Whitman (2000), this template of dismissal remains firmly in place. In “Whitman Unperturbed: The Civil War and After,” her contribution to Walt
Whitman: The Centennial Essays (1996), Pollack argues that “once he became the good gray poet, the benevolent patriarch, and, as I have attempted to show, the
Lincoln lover, his story was over. Mostly, after he war,” Pollack continues, “there was no more need for symbolic language and for the estranging power of poetry. In the ghostly pines and the cedars dusk and dim there was nothing left to obscure, not even anything sexual” (43). It is a quiet irony of Whitman studies that the momentous recovery of the gay Whitman has only further obscured Whitman in age. If studies dedicated to Whitman’s eroticism—and homoeroticism in particular—seem to deny
Vander Zee 125 the poet’s lateness, those focusing on Whitman’s body and physiology more generally might seem more suited to approach Whitman in age. But the same irony simply repeats on a broader scale: even as his body becomes more visible, more of an imposition in age, it simultaneously fades from critical view. Studies that take up
Whitman’s sexuality under the guise of psychoanalytic criticism, as does Pollack, similarly find no room for Whitman in age, an echo, perhaps, of Freud’s own association of age with castration and his reluctance to analyze older patients.48 There seems to be nothing left, recalling Pollack, to obscure. Whitman in age routinely fails at tasks set for a very different kind of poet. Rarely has such an inflexible diachronic bias—coupled with narrow and often exclusive critical concern, and leavened by a subtle ageism—so consistently passed itself off as scholarly critique.
While it is important to note, however partially, this sturdy template of dismissal, we should look beyond what has become a critical caricature of late
Whitman to studies whose dismissal of Whitman in age, if not less perfunctory, is at least more imaginative. M. Wynn Thomas, in his important study The Lunar Light of
Whitman’s Poetry (1987) turns to the late work in terms that are dismissive, but also rather suggestive. “It is very apparent that into Whitman’s poems of old age,” Thomas writes, “there creeps, alongside the well-established habit of looking always to the present and future as blithely perfect fulfillment of the past, a new and deeply moving contrary tendency to recognize aspects of the past as irretrievably lost” (236). Though
Thomas senses something “quietly revolutionary” and “antiprogressive” in the late work, he doesn’t dwell on these elements, turning instead to the “self-rectifying balance of optimism in Whitman’s temperament” which ironed out the doubts of this
48 See Woodward 26-52.
Vander Zee 126 otherwise “melancholy memorializer” (239). But Thomas himself seems less inclined to give up that melancholy figure that seems to haunt the late work. When he writes that after the War, Whitman developed “the trick… of turning up the volume of his rhetoric in order to drown out the noise of his doubts” (266) one wishes the critic would dwell more on these scrambled frequencies rather than allow Whitman’s default optimism to drown out the critics subtle sense a discord more lasting.
If Thomas aptly captures the pathos of Whitman’s loss of faith in the late work,
Betsy Erkkila, in her seminal Whitman the Political Poet (1989), lends Whitman’s lateness an almost gothic endurance that we might learn from as well. In the poems of the ’70s, she finds in Whitman’s work an effortful disembodiment that can never quite successfully discard the dregs of self. In reappraising Whitman’s jingoistic “Song of the Universal,” for example, she demurs from Whitman’s location of the drama of democracy in the world of spirit rather than body. A heavy language of disability even seeps into her own prose, suggesting that this body is not so easy to discard after all:
“His poetry begins to limp with the hollow abstractions of democracy,” she writes.
“Although Whitman continued to grope toward a more communal form, he lacked the stamina to complete such a work” (287). Just as Whitman’s body persists despite his efforts at spiritualization, she finds in Whitman’s gropings ample traces of troubled times. Whitman’s work seemed to absorb the social, political and economic woes just as his body seemed a reflection of the unfolding corruptions of Gilded Age America.
Erkkila notes, for example, how Whitman’s severe physical and emotional depression between 1873 and 1875 coincided with the worst economic depression—as scandal- driven as anything witnessed to the present—that America had seen (283). Despite this
Vander Zee 127 crucial corollary between Whitman’s limping body and a failing body politic, she finds Whitman “stiffened into his public pose as the good gray poet of democracy…. no longer willing to give voice to his questions and fears about the future of America.”
And yet she notes that these fears do emerge indirectly, as when he admits the
“shrieks” and “moans” of propulsive industry in the otherwise celebratory “To a
Locomotive in Winter” (288). It is precisely the indirections of anxiety that we need to draw out of Whitman’s late work, indirections that do not always come in the most obvious shrieks and moans, but are often disguised by the thinnest veneer of optimism—a kind of pasteboard mask that must be struck through.
The strength of Erkkila’s account of late Whitman resides in the sense that neither the poet’s physical body nor the evolving corpus of his work seems able to withstand the pressures of his historical moment as they press upon him. Thus, though
Erkkila imagines that Whitman “sought a saving national vision by leaping out of history toward spiritual grace” (273), she simultaneously registers the intense embodiment of these woes in Whitman’s dual corpora—his physical body and his body of work. In that sense, though Erkkila does not make the point explicitly, the spiritualization that we see in the post-war work is not so much an escape, but—as so often happens in an exilic late style—a motivated departure, which is to say that it forms a response to these ills, however indirect. Alongside this motivated spiritualization, we have the suggestive correlation between Whitman’s bodily debilities and national ills, a coincidence that Whitman himself frequently deployed.
This tension between spiritualization and embodiment remains a key location of
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Whitman’s lateness, and no critic has offered as complete an account of that tension as
Erkkila does in her landmark study.
Approaching the late work proper in her concluding chapter—aptly titled
“‘How Dangerous, How Alive’”—Erkkila writes of how Whitman’s “crippled disease-ridden body, old before its time, seemed once again an image of America itself at the close of the century. But despite the wreckage,” she continues, “the poet continued to sing, picking over the remains of his own and the national life” (317).
Though it might seem a dismissal, Erkkila uncannily senses the crucial scavenger work—the work of remains, of debris—that attains something like a formal principle in Whitman’s late work. Thus, “Whitman’s last poems,” she writes, “are end-of-the- century poems that register the ‘cherish’d lost designs’ of youth and the ‘ungracious glooms’ of old age at the same time that they affirm ‘the rhythms of Birth eternal.’
(317). Once we concede that, for late Whitman, democracy was no longer inevitable, the late poems do not merely fail; rather, they become radically free of the heavy democratic design that coursed through so many poems of the 1870s. These late poems are, in that sense, the least programmatic, the least determined. Whitman, in the late poems more than anywhere else, shows evidence of what one critic, in addressing something else in Whitman, aptly describes as a “catastrophically freed attention”
(Breitwieser 143). Though Erkkila concludes that “Whitman’s major work during the
1870s and 1880s was not in poetry, but in prose” (293), one senses everywhere the potential for a very different story pushing through.
In these incisive reflections from Thomas and Erkkila—as in the partial hints revealed, however inadvertently, in the biographical reflections surveyed above—we
Vander Zee 129 begin to grasp the unsounded potential of the late work, a potential that has persisted despite its marginalization. Before moving on to the late work proper, one should note the small body of criticism has quietly emerged over the past three decades that pursues this potential more directly, challenging this broad narrative of decline with more earnest intention.
Though biographers such as Asselineau had valued the formal complexity and careful revisions of the late work, the first pointed attempts at explicit reappraisal of the late poetry itself did not emerge until the late 70s in a duo of brief essays from the
Walt Whitman Review in 1978 and 1981. These essays, perhaps self-consciously reflecting both the perceived slightness of their topic and a daunting tradition of dismissal it had received, are brief, and both concede the general weakness of the late work. But both also present particular challenges to any strict thesis of decline. Thus, though Donald Barlow Stauffer’s note on “Walt Whitman in Old Age” (1978) admits that the late works “are clearly not the work of a poet at fullest command of his powers,” he nevertheless touts what Ezra Pound, early in his own career, had called the poet’s deliberate artistry (146). And though he is more likely to value those poems that offer “occasional flashes of inspiration that recall the younger poet,” he tests out certain telling contradictions in the late work as an ideology of health meets the debilities of age. Denying the thesis of supplementarity that sees that late work as an after-image of earlier stronger work, Stauffer recovers the degree to which Whitman himself at times worked to justify the prospect of age itself as fundamental to his project, even if Stauffer himself does not fully explore the ramifications of this new vista.
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M. Wynn Thomas remains similarly tentative in his early contribution to this conversation in “A Study of Whitman’s Late Poetry,” published a few years later.
Somewhat defensively, Thomas notes that “critics can hardly be blamed for their neglect since it is obvious that Whitman’s powers, long and steadily in decline since at least the mid-1860s, are not best recommended through a study of his poetry at what seems to be its weakest” (3). And yet, with Whitman safely canonized, the ground seems safe for an “experiment of seeing what can be said” of this diminished body of work. Hunting for isolated gems amidst the broad swath of mediocre, if not
“potentially damaging” poems (15), Thomas provides extraordinarily sensitive readings, as when he interrogates the conceit that begins the late poem “Not Meager,
Latent Boughs Alone”: “Not meager, latent bought alone, O songs! (scaly and bare, like eagle’s talons)” (CPP 633). Whitman, Thomas notes, at once strips vitality from the song (the are “scaly and bare”) while comparing its bareness to the quiet and aggressive threat of the eagle talon. And for all his marked tendency towards recovery of the Adamic and affirmative in the late work, Thomas has a striking ear for the melancholic and elegiac strains of poems such as the plaintive “Yonnondio,” which he calls “an elegy for a past which has been obliterated, rather than assimilated and advanced.” Thomas’s real strength as a critic arrives here, in his scrupulous attention to individual poems.
But Thomas too often works to protect Whitman’s reputation from what we might think of as his late work’s allegorical “other speaking,” a tendency that ironically constrains the shadowed and haunted potential of Whitman’s late work to introduce that momentous and needed discord that Whitman sought to voice in the late
Vander Zee 131 work. Closing the door on this other speaking, Thomas charges that “what is unpardonable, because potentially damaging to Whitman as a poet, is the blurring of the vital distinction between those aspects of his old age which are fully present in and established by his poetry, and those which can only be inferred or constructed from the evidence which the poetry offers” (15). But it is precisely by zeroing in on those moments when Whitman, as Thomas puts it, “no longer empowers his poems to speak for him” that Whitman’s lateness—strange, resistant, refracted, distanced—also lives.
As he would do once more in his book-length study of the poet five years later,
Thomas here locates important contrary tendencies in this “melancholy memorializer,” even if he chooses to read past them to some grander unity that the poet himself, in his brighter moods, still clung to.49
Another duo of essays a decade later move beyond this genre of broad survey to plumb more deeply Whitman’s revision strategies and the cultural factors influencing the poet’s conception of his lateness. Geoffrey Sill’s “‘You Tides with
Ceaseless Swell’: A Reading of the Manuscript” offers a suggestive template for future archival work. In his essay, Sill scrutinizes the Whitman’s composition and revision strategies late in life, attention sorely lacking in the scholarship despite ready electronic access to Whitman’s manuscripts. The evidence suggests, as Sills shows in
49 Thomas revisited this early essay in his recent “Whitman, Tennyson and the Poetry of Old age.” Secure in his position as a prominent Whitman critic, the defensive gestures have largely passed. The late work is now judged to be “not only a scatter of fine individual poems but a masterly, or old- masterly performance, the gradual construction of a character of himself in old age” (2). Pursuing this point, Thomas turns to Tennyson as a model upon which Whitman modeled his own lateness in ways that were at times obsessive, reverential, and touchingly competitive. Thomas also writes powerfully of the paradoxically enabling powers of disability. In the late work, he writes, we witness “a gradual teaching of each of his senses to appreciate how their powers of apprehending the world could be paradoxically enlarged by the reduction of physical mobility and the straitening of circumstance” (175). Though Thomas is more likely to find the resulting vista remarkably serene rather than damaged, the critic’s sense that Whitman’s vision—a crucial trope across the bard’s work—is fundamentally altered in age is momentous and necessary.
Vander Zee 132 relation to one late poem, that Whitman labored over these poems, making it more difficult to consider either their accomplishments of perceived deficits to be merely accidental.
George Hutchinson’s “The Laughing Philosopher: Whitman’s Comic Repose,” locates an important philosophical source for Whitman’s conception and construction of his own lateness. Highlighting Whitman’s intense attachment to Epictetus and a stoical philosophy of detachment, Hutchinson spends much time unfolding what he calls Whitman’s comic pose late in life. Exploring the theatrical tropes that saturate both Epictetus and Whitman’s own roaming conversations in With Walt Whitman in
Camden, Hutchinson finds a more self-consciously theatrical Whitman, a poet aware that even his real me, removed from the pulling and hauling, is itself a pose. The real strength of his argument, however, comes not from the recovery of how important stoical philosophy was to Whitman later in life, but the degree to which stoicism itself embodies a philosophy of detachment that is always motivated by a less sanguine reality. “Despite the apparent serenity of Whitman’s later years,” Hutchinson writes,
“and despite his ever-repeated belief that democracy was now assured of its future, it is clear that this serenity and this belief were hard-won—that they masked a level of anxiety the poet perhaps could hardly admit to himself” (183).
Hutchinson suggests that Stoicism enters into Whitman’s life as a response to social threats and personal doubts. “One of our greatest poets of ‘democratic identity,’” Hutchinson writes, “Whitman in his final years struggled with the fundamental difficulties posed by secularization, fragmentation, and modernity— struggled to ‘keep his act together’ within a world in which constant, rapid change
Vander Zee 133 threatens any stable matrices of meaning upon which a life story can be based” (185).
The comic repose, then, masked a deeper melancholic tragedy that I will trace through the late poetry itself—something Hutchinson declines to do. Stoical detachment, in this sense, shares something with the basic structure of allegory: it is theatrical, almost clunky in its staging. But it always contains that charged other speaking. Hutchinson notes that Stoicism emerges “in historical period when the individual is alienated from a social or cultural matrix,” when there’s a crisis of authority as in the days of Zeno when empire began to swallow city states, or in the era of Epictetus himself when the
Senate’s authority in Rome began to fray (183). It is, however indirectly, a philosophy of crisis, just as Benjaminian allegory is a trope of crisis.50
After these early and brief reappraisals from Stauffer and Thomas, and alongside the important archival and literary-historical additions of Sills and
Hutchinson, James Perrin Warren offers the most thorough formalist reconsideration of Whitman’s late poetry. Indeed, Warren’s Walt Whitman’s Language Experiment
(1990) stands out for its attention to Whitman’s continued language experiment.
Rather than viewing the late work as that momentous experiment’s failure or terminus,
Warren seeks its deeper, shifting evolution. For example, rather than simply dismiss
50 Hutchinson, in a companion essay from the South Central Review a year later (the essay repeats many of the basic points from his earlier essay) expands the thesis on Whitman’s stoicism to talk more generally about how, after the Civil War, Whitman turns “from tropes of ecstatic immediacy to tropes of aesthetic mediation” (23). Whitman, that is, moves from a mode of absorption to one of artifice, a move that comes, as discussed above, with a more theatrical prophetic pose and a more conventional poetics, neither of which Whitman criticism has adequately valued. Hutchinson himself does not follow this tension into the late poetry proper (he does not address poetry at all), focusing instead on theatrical metaphors that suffuse Whitman’s Lincoln lecture. Hutchinson thus finds a fruitful tension between reality and representation in the very years that, for critics such as Larson and Bauerlein, had largely dissipated. Near the end of his essay, Hutchinson offers an important insight: “After all, Whitman’s drive for self integrity… was, in part, a retort to his post-war physical paralysis and his long- approaching death. He was fighting off the debilitating potential of an unchecked, radically ironic consciousness that threatened to unravel the self as well as history, revealing all as a ‘con’” (32). This is a crucial backdrop for Whitman’s effortful optimism, and what Hutchinson terms Whitman’s rather desperate Kierkegaardian leap of faith.
Vander Zee 134 the “poet’s increasing use of archaic, formal, abstract diction,” Warren more generously (if extravagantly) justifies these formal strategies as “enact[ing] the cumulative quality of American English, blending the ancient and the modern to form a linguistic ensemble’” (138). Thus, rather than a conservative retrenchment into archaic forms, we witness a bold “commitment to the “vista” of future linguistic and spiritual developments, one that even anticipate the modernists own return to the linguistic and poetic past even as they would strive to make it new.
Though Warren does grant the poet’s decline, admitting that he “would agree that Whitman’s strength no longer finds a focus in individual poems,” he argues that the “poetic power is not therefore absent; rather, it makes itself felt on a new formal level in the postwar editions of Leaves of Grass. In the cluster arrangements and the annexes, Warren senses a “movement from a linear sequence to a more spatialized form” (140). By looking for poetic accomplishment outside both the discrete lyric and the broader, more controlled accomplishment of the long poems, Warren finds a way to value the resonance of certain images and ideas that echo between poems in
Whitman’s ensemble of cluster arrangements and annexes. Indeed, insofar as
Whitman himself considered Leaves itself to be a book-length poem, it seems necessary to be alive to all of its diverse and contrary resonance. While Warren offers a novel way to approach the late work, he does not articulate how the social pressures discussed by critics such as Erkkila or biographers such as Reynolds factor into
Whitman’s evolving formal strategies. The continuing language experiment thus threatens to become a mere exercise when severed from its social contexts.
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Two subsequent reappraisals of Whitman’s late work arrive over a decade later, shedding new light on important aspects of the late work’s relation to physiological and textual materiality. Benjamin Lee’s “Whitman’s Aging Body”
(2004) offers an antidote to those studies that have increasingly ignored Whitman’s body in age.51 Lee begins by noting the absurdity of claiming that “Whitman’s career as a ‘poet of the body’ ends with the Civil War” (40). If the body in the early work was the human motor of sympathy and contact that underscores his radically democratic poetics, then “what happens,” Lee rightly asks, “to the poet of the body when his body is in pain? What happens when physical decline makes it impossible for Whitman to recreate his former, sensual poetic presence, when direct contemplation of his own body leads not to communication but to alienation?” (43).
Lee’s pointed questions, here, contribute a crucial element to the limited critical reflection on late Whitman even as they affirm Erkkila’s incisive remarks on the correlation between a body and country in decline. Furthermore, Lee’s attention to the distinction between metonymy and metaphor—figures of presence and absence respectively—provide a critical vocabulary through which we might read Whitman’s bodily presence in these poems not only thematically, but stylistically—a potential for critique that Lee, however, does not undertake in his brief polemic. Indeed, Lee
51 See Burbick, who, though she doesn’t approach the late work, explores how “many narratives of health written during this period provide, however, only a thin veneer of optimism for the age. One finds in these writings enormous cracks in the bravado of democracy which display the fears and anxieties of the new order had evoked” (2). For a more dedicated account of Whitman and the body see Aspiz, who offers an excellent account of the various pseudo-scientific and hygienic literatures in antebellum America that influenced Whitman’s early poetry, though he says much less of the body in age. Aspiz, in fact, largely erases the body as an important locus for understanding the late work when he writes that “neither disease, debility, nor death stayed the tide of mythmaking about the aging poet’s body” (13). For a second dedicated account of Whitman relationship to the body that similarly ignores the body in age, see Killingsworth’s Whitman’s Poetry of the Body (1991).
Vander Zee 136 largely abandons this new direction with the rather anticlimactic concluding observation that the late work should “remind us what a gift is good health, and what wonders accrue to those who can move about freely through the world” (44). What matters in any account of Whitman’s late work, of course, is not the wonders that failed to accrue—as though our relationship to Whitman terminates in some strange schadenfreude—but the historical debris that did.
In a foray into the material history of Whitman’s lateness, Elizabeth Lorang looks into Whitman’s relationship with the New York Herald, a popular journal in which the poet published 36 poems and prose pieces in the late 1880s. Whitman’s open contract with the paper, in which he published more poems than in any other periodical, has received little attention in the scholarship. Lorang seems perhaps too eager to establish a causal relationship between the demands of popular newspaper verse, which include brevity, a certain simplicity, and a sense of local color.
Whitman’s late poems might appear to meld with these requirements, but Lorang herself later describes those poems—pervaded, she incisively writes, by “a sense of curiosity, checked by dread, shaded by optimism, and consumed by thoughts of growth and decay” (187)—as decidedly less facile than the generic constraints would suggest. Furthermore, Whitman had turned to writing briefer poems well before the contract with the Herald materialized, and he wrote a number of them after that relationship ceased. Perhaps more significant than the material history of these poems that Lorang recovers is her more general sense of the late work as more representative of its times than has previously been granted. Looking back to Erkkila’s recognition of the late production as a quintessentially fin-de-siècle poetics, Lorang offers a
Vander Zee 137 compelling sense of the compounding twilights present here: Whitman’s own aging, the wearing of American ideals and attendant worries about America’s future, and the uncertainty of the Herald’s own role as a cultural mouthpiece as it receded from its own circulation high-water mark of nearly 200,000 in the years after the Civil War.
Dedicated critical reflection on Whitman’s late work, arriving sporadically over the past 30-odd years, presents a compelling, if still incomplete, record of
Whitman’s lateness. Alongside a deepening sense of the philosophical and poetic contexts of Whitman’s lateness afforded by Thomas and Hutchinson, Warren and Sills offer important reflections on Whitman’s continuing language experiment. And even as Erkkila expertly unfolds the rankling of the post-war years, Lee and Lorang reminds us of the unique physiological and generic pressures that shaped the late work. While any new account of Whitman’s late authorship must hold these necessary accomplishments—however partial on their own—in mind, a more complete account of Whitman’s lateness awaits.
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CHAPTER 3
“WHEN LILACS LAST”: LATE WHITMAN
In the previous chapter, I asked how a century’s worth of reflections on
Whitman’s late work has affected our ability to approach that work with a more informed and imaginative critical curiosity. In the present chapter, I return to that work’s genesis with two related sets of questions. First: how did Whitman come of old age? That is, how did he address, accommodate, and even strategically deploy age in its many significations? Though I do not presume to have special access to some essential reality of Whitman’s lateness that exists apart from the many pressures that shaped it, I do think that recognizing more fully, and articulating the relationships between, the competing cultural, aesthetic, and political vectors of lateness that claimed Whitman—and that Whitman claimed—in his private and public lives will help us see the poet more completely and complexly than before. The second question follows from the first: what kinds of poems did Whitman write in the final decades of his life, and what reading practices will help us reclaim and value the late work’s strange, melancholic insight rather than reduce it to various forms of repetition, afterthought, and echo?
It is easy to think that authorial late style is a retrospective fantasy of criticism rooted in romantic conceptions of genius and Victorian conceptions of venerable and serene age. But one cannot ignore what Gordon McMullan calls the “profound self-
Vander Zee 139 consciousness about lateness” in nineteenth-century Anglo-American literature in particular (172). “The Victorians,” he writes, “were not the first culture in history to be aware of the value of the valedictory gesture, to give it moral or theological loading, but they were the first to systematize this awareness in relation to artistic productivity and to establish lateness as a self-reflexive phenomenon.” The romantic conception of the organic growth of an authorial career created a situation of coerced destiny, what
McMullan names a “magnificent paradox of subjectivity and subjection” in which authentic artistic selfhood in age is predicated upon what a given culture accepts as viable models of lateness (182). There has been much written about what Michael
Millgate has named the “testamentary acts” of late authorship—acts that would include Whitman’s late self-conscious editing and reframing of poetic materials.52 But we do not yet have an adequate account of this paradox in relation to Whitman’s late work itself, particularly the stylistic difference on both macro and micro levels that I described as its distinguishing late form in Chapter 1.
Though critics have often cast Whitman as perhaps too eager to shape his emerging bardic ethos, they have largely overlooked the elaborate poetic construction of his burgeoning lateness, a lateness whose aesthetic, cultural, and political significance the poet himself both sponsored and subtly resisted, anticipated and deftly allegorized, through both his aging body and his evolving oeuvre. Whitman’s literary corpus, after all, has everything to do with his literal corpus, a punning relation
Whitman himself suggests in one of his final jottings, a note titled “A Crude Notion” passed to his doctor in the weeks before he passed:
52 This phrase is also the title of Millgate’s book on the topic.
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My great corpus is so like an old wooden log. Possibly (even probably), that slow vital, almost impalpable by-play of automatic stimulus belonging to living fiber has, by gradual habit of years and years in me (and especially of the last three years), got quite diverted into mental play and vitality and attention, instead of attending to normal play in stomachic and muscular and peristaltic use…. what is there in this, if anything? (Notebooks 3: 1288)
Whitman’s dual corpora here arrive as a kind of petrified debris charged with a new level of intellection—an attention and vitality and mental play that critics have largely erased from Whitman’s late years.
Before turning to my own reappraisal of the late work, I want to begin this chapter by gaining some distance from this deathbed scene. Thus, I begin by examining what I call the long foreground of Whitman’s lateness. The phrase echoes
Emerson, who, in his famous letter responding to Whitman’s first edition of Leaves, congratulates the upstart on the books fine “wit and wisdom,” welcoming the poet at
“the beginning of a great career, which yet,” he adds, “yet must have had a long foreground somewhere” (Correspondence 1: 41). As we learned in the previous chapter, biographers and critics have been much more concerned with that mysterious foreground as they puzzle over how such a work could have emerged from the pen of a man who seemed a mediocre journalist and a worse carpenter. It is perhaps understandable, then, that future scholars would prefer this mysterious foreground to the thickly scripted and well-documented later years where Whitman was surrounded by disciples, each, it seems, with a pen in hand. Perhaps this foreground is unavoidable if we consider that even endings must have their beginnings somewhere.
Thus, we might say that Whitman’s lateness itself has a kind of foreground buried in
Vander Zee 141 the first three editions of Leaves of Grass (1855, 1856 and 1860), and it is to that foreground that I turn now.
“Old age superbly rising”: Whitman Comes of Age
It is not often noted that the first image in Whitman’s untitled preface to the first edition of Leaves (1855) is a specter of death, or, more exactly, a disappearing corpse. Whitman opens with a funereal scene in which the dead body of the past is borne out of the “eating and sleeping rooms” of America’s house, an allegory for
American cultural ascendance. Though “fittest for its days,” Whitman generously asserts of the dead figure, its “actions have descended to the stalwart and wellshaped heir who approaches… and that he shall be fittest for his days” (CPP 5). The lesson that we learn in these first words of Whitman’s Leaves should not be taken lightly: age always figures, always points to something outside itself. Because Whitman’s late work is so often constrained to a narrow biographical and scholarly regime, it becomes increasingly important to track how age accrues myriad significations that do not simply dissolve into some common critical sense. As Whitman himself suggests above: you cannot dissolve those dual corpora, cannot wrench the tenor from its vehicle, or the life from its allegorical other-speaking.
Though treated gently enough at the start of the preface as it is ushered out the eating and sleeping rooms of America’s house, the aging or deceased body elsewhere in the preface becomes a threat and an emblem of failure when it is left to linger.
Pitting a poet’s true prudence of “soundest organic health” and “large hope” against
Vander Zee 142 the “melancholy prudence” of middle-class domestic and economic life that can only terminate in benign old age, Whitman declares:
The premises of the prudence of life are not the hospitality of it or the ripeness and harvest of it. Beyond the independence of a little sum laid aside for burial-money, and of a few clapboards around the shingles overhead on a lot of American soil owned, and the easy dollars that supply the year’s plain clothing and meals, the melancholy prudence of the abandonment of such a great being as a man is to the toss and pallor of years of moneymaking… and all of the loss of the bloom and odor of the earth and of the flowers and atmosphere and of the sea and of the true taste of women and men you pass or have to do with in youth or middle age, and the issuing sickness and desperate revolt at the close of a life without elevation or naivete, and the ghastly chatter of a death without serenity or majesty, is the great fraud upon modern civilization and forethought, blotching the surface and system which civilization undeniably draft. (21- 20)
To parse the unwieldy prose here—two key expletives barely structure the grammatical sprawl of that second, long sentence—Whitman posits that crass economic pursuits mar life’s essential goodness and simplicity. The loss of the “bloom and odor” of youth, as well as the loss of a romantic old age embalmed in naïve majesty and serene elevation, corrupts the propulsive force of modern civilization. A stiffened Victorian prudence is all that remains. Against this conservative outcome,
Whitman chooses an ideology of life and health along with an attendant romanticization of healthy and rarified old age. Historian of aging Thomas Cole defines what we witness in Whitman here as a Victorian civilized morality, an ideological outlook professing the limitless accumulation of health and wealth.53
Whitman, equal parts conformist and rebel, splits the difference. Already in the preface, then, we sense the antinomies of Whitman’s late style caught between the ideologies of youthful bodies and healthful republics on the one hand, and the threat of
53 See Cole, “Victorian Morality in a New Key.”
Vander Zee 143 disease and decay, figured here as an outcome of unbridled economic striving, on the other.
Disease remains a threat in the early poetry as well, though Whitman seems at first to romanticize and abstract age in light of such threats. Robert Scholnick, approaching Whitman from the perspective of disability studies, argues that, while later editions of Leaves betray more anxiety about age and disability, “implicit in
Whitman’s first volume is the assumption that national progress and acceptance of the disabled are not opposed concepts.” Indeed, according to Scholnick, we see that such
“diversity contributes to the national fabric” (249). Given Whitman’s inclusion of lunatics and prostitutes alongside laborers and presidents in his sprawling early catalogues, such inclusivity does, indeed, seem in force early on. But when we see
Whitman not simply cataloging others, but giving them bit parts in his poetic drama of self, this democratic inclusivity appears more strained and anxious. Witness one key passage from section 40 of “Song of Myself” that Scholnick chooses to read as an example of such magnanimous and untroubled inclusivity:
To any one dying. . . . thither I speed and twist the knob of the door, Turn the bedclothes toward the foot of the bed Let the physician and the priest go home.
I seize the descending man. . . . I raise him with resistless will.
Oh despairer, here is my neck, By God! You shall not go down. Hang your whole weight upon me.
I dilate you with tremendous breath. . . . I buoy you up . . . . (73)
Though not explicitly a scene depicting old age, the correlation of aging with disease in the nineteenth century, along with the staging of the priest and physician alongside this “descending man,” gives this sickbed scene the implicit coloring of a deathbed.
Vander Zee 144
Coming, as it does, directly after Whitman has his poetic persona “jetting the stuff of more arrogant republics” on “women fit for conception,” the poet’s aggressive seizure and resistless will here seems a too-ardent denial of death and disease rather than a generously democratic inclusion of them. Indeed, the prostrate body here must be propped up if it is not to give the lie to Whitman’s subtly eugenicist dream that precedes it.
More often in the early work, however, Whitman hails age from a safer distance. That is, he leans on its more romantic conceptions that require less dramatic poetic effort. Near the end of section 45 in “Song of Myself,” for example, Whitman extols age pitched as a grand abstraction: “Old age superbly rising! Ineffable grace of dying days!” (81). In another 1855 poem later to earn the title “Great Are the Myths” before being parceled out into a number of other pieces after the fourth edition of
Leaves (1867), Whitman sets up a series of binaries that subtly tempers this unqualified ineffable grace: “Great is Youth—equally great is Old Age—great are the
Day and Night; / Great is Wealth—great is Poverty—great is Expression—great is
Silence” (140). Here, we move through carefully rendered parallel structures, progressing from binary figures of nature (Day and Night), to those of class (Wealth and Poverty), to those of a more elemental human voicing (Expression and Silence) that verges on the existential and even political if we consider what it means to have a voice, or to be silenced, in a democracy. Regardless of the competing valuations these carefully balanced binaries suggest, Whitman smoothes them out in the next stanza into a plane of equanimity capped in a serene vision of age. This next stanza would
Vander Zee 145 later be included as a separate lyric in the 1881 edition of Leaves with the more streamlined title: “Youth, Day, Old Age, and Night”:
Youth, large, lusty, loving—Youth, full of grace, force, fascination! Do you know that Old Age may come after you, with equal grace, force, fascination? Day, full-blown and splendid—Day of the immense sun, action, ambition, laughter, The night follows close with millions of suns, and sleep, and restoring darkness. (368)
The shift from parataxis to hypotaxis—where we move from the percussive “sun, action, ambition, laughter” to the moderating pace of “suns, and sleep, and restoring darkness”—creates a calming lilt. Within the context of its first appearance in the
1855 Leaves, the stanza urges us to forget the competing valuations of age as Whitman dissolves the poem into a quiet, infinite serenity. Within the context of its 1881 appearance as a separate poem, these competing valuations are effectively edited out of the picture.
In addition to noting the discrete moments where Whitman, sometimes anxiously, approaches age, one should attend to the broader poetic structures through which these anxieties surface. Cultivating a sense of serene mystery was one of
Whitman’s most frequently deployed tendencies when it came to figurations of age.
In the very brief poem—“To Old Age”—from the third, 1860 edition of Leaves,
Whitman addresses age, succinctly proclaiming: “I see in you the estuary that enlarges and spreads itself grandly as it pours into the sea” (414). But the 1860 Leaves also contains what almost seems an anxious reply to this single, polished strophe in scattered poem-cluster, later removed from Leaves, called “Debris.” Presenting seemingly unrelated fragments, each separated by diacritical marks, “Debris”
Vander Zee 146 anticipates the serial experiments of Robert Creeley and others over a century later.
“Debris,” in it poetic organization, works against the grain of both the briefer, self- contained lyrics as well as the more ambitious poems of crisis and recovery that
Whitman offers in “As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life” and “Out of the Cradle,
Endlessly Rocking”—poems that resemble what M.H. Abrams would call the Greater
Romantic Lyrics of Wordsworth, Keats, and Shelley. One of the fragments from
“Debris” begins with “despairing cries” calling out to the poet from across the sea, seeking the meaning of death. The fragment ends not with a confident answer, but only with the repeated question: “Old age, alarmed, uncertain—A young woman’s voice appealing to me, for comfort, / A young man’s voice, Shall I not escape?”
(Comprehensive Reader’s Edition 606). When dealing with abstractions of age,
Whitman seems confident, reconciled, as in the single-strophe poem “To Old Age” noted above. But when age itself begins to pose its own questions, Whitman becomes less sure—a lack of confidence reflected in these non-linear, experimental cluster arrangements of which “Debris” is the most extreme, and the most telling, example.
In the 1860 Leaves, we also witness Whitman’s continued allegorizing of age, where serene and boundlessly healthy old age becomes more clearly not a romanticization of physiology alone, but a profound figure for the nation—the body politic—itself. Whitman began allegorizing age in this manner already in 1855 where we meet, in the poem that would later become “I Sing the Body Electric,” the
“common farmer” of “wonderful vigor, calmness, beauty” who was “over eighty years old” (120). Here, age appears as a reflection and embodiment of America itself:
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I knew a man…. he was a common farmer…. he was the father of five sons, and in them were the fathers of sons…. and in them were the fathers of sons.
This man was of wonderful vigor and calmness and beauty of person; The shape of his head, the richness and breadth of his manners, the pale yellow and white of his hair and beard, the immeasurable meaning of his black eyes, These I used to go and visit him to see…. He was wise also, He was six feet tall…. he was over eighty years old…. his sons were massive clean bearded tan-faced and handsome, They and his daughters loved him…. all who saw him loved him… they did not love him by allowance… they loved him with personal love […] (119-120)
This vignette appears in a poem most often discussed for its daring portrait of a slave auction and for its unashamed catalogue of the human anatomy. Whitman’s emblem of age, meanwhile, has eluded critical attention. Much has been made of Whitman’s metonymic catalogues as snapshots of a witnessed reality, but it is important to note how individual items in these catalogues at times serve blatant figurative purposes.
Here, Whitman’s fecund farmer, at over fourscore, is an allegory of the Republic entering its eightieth year just as Whitman published his first and second editions of
Leaves in 1855 and 1856. Playing on the literal age of the Republic was not an uncommon convention in post-Revolutionary-War poetry.54 America, in this scheme, represented a lively and independent youth rebelling against the tyranny of the English patriarch. But by the 1850s, this figure itself was aging, and as Whitman continues to anthropomorphize the Republic’s literal age in such a robust and idyllic manner, he betrays a powerful nostalgia for national unity at a time when the political tensions that would lead to the Civil War were already in evidence, and when age itself had
54 David Humphreys, a Revolutionary War poet who fought with George Washington, for example, employs this trope frequently. See, especially, his “Poem on the Industry of the United States of America” in The Miscellaneous Works (1804).
Vander Zee 148 become both increasingly discredited and, simultaneously, romanticized in popular culture. Whitman himself takes part in this demotion of age in the vitriolic, some would even say unhinged, “Respondez!”—a poem published alongside the above portrait of age in the 1856 edition of Leaves under its original title “Poem of the
Propositions of Nakedness”: “Let the heart of the young man still exile itself from the heart of the old man!” he exclaims, “And let the heart of the old man be exiled from that of the young man!” (Comprehensive Reader’s Edition 592)55
But in general—and especially when Whitman himself becomes the imagined subject of age—he errs on the side of serenity. In the1860 poem called “Poem of Joys”
(later to be named “A Song of Joys”) Whitman calls out to the “old manhood of me, my joy!” describing “my white hair and beard, / My largeness, calmness, majesty out of the long stretch of my life” (CPP 327). In the subsequent vision of womanhood’s ripened joy, it seems to be lady liberty herself who proclaims: “I am more than eighty years of age—my hair, too, is pure white—I am the most venerable mother, / How clear is my mind—how all people draw nigh to me!” Thus, by 1860, we see Whitman continuing to experiment with conceptions of age: romanticized, allegorized, but also tempered by silence, despair; contained, at times, in a well-wrought dialectic of crisis and recovery, but also challenged by more purposefully disjunctive and fragmentary arrangements.
55 “Respondez!” seems at times a sponge absorbing all the negative energies that could not be admitted into the unifying force of his more optimistic chants. The poem last appeared in Leaves in his 1876 centennial edition. As Whitman enters his last decade of poetic production with the 1881 Leaves, after which its structure was fundamentally unchanged, it is as though the bluntly negative force of “Respondez” transmutes into the allegorical texture of his lateness.
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Whitman struggles to hold age at a figurative arm’s length in the early editions of Leaves. The resulting anxiety receives an allegorical figure of its own in brief crisis lyric from the 1860 Leaves, “A Hand-Mirror,” quoted here in its entirety:
Hold it up sternly! See this it sends back! (Who is it? Is it you?) Outside fair costume—within, ashes and filth No more a flashing eye—not more a sonorous voice or springy step. A drunkard’s breath, unwholesome eater’s face, venerealee’s flesh, Lungs rotting away piecemeal, stomach sour and cankerous, Joints rheumatic, bowels clogged with abomination, Blood circulating dark and poisonous streams, Words babble, hearing and touch callous, No brain, no heart left—no magnetism of sex; Such, from one look in this looking-glass ere you go hence. Such a result so soon—and from such a beginning! (408)
The poem itself functions as a kind of hand-mirror, forcing the reader to peer within its furrowed lines as if into a reflection. The poem sounds out a diminished echo of
Whitman’s trope of the anthropomorphized book where, in poems such as “So Long,”
Whitman declares to his Camerado: “who touches this touches a man” (611). In “A
Hand-Mirror,” we are no longer touching, but only looking. And we see that it is not
Walt after all, but only ourselves reflected. By effecting this alienation of author and reader, Whitman accentuates his own isolation as well, holding up this mirror to himself as a kind of ars poetica as he figures the rhetorical distance that separates his real self, like some prescient and closeted Dorian Gray, from the idealized old age he would try to manufacture. The poems of age in the first three editions of Leaves, then, range from the caustic, anarchic refrain from “Respondez!” to the republican emblem of venerable old age, and from the despairing, unanswered cries of those approaching death, to the poet preaching the fine equanimity and majesty of old age. Whitman’s
“Hand-Mirror,” by uneasily holding these figures together at the same time—so small
Vander Zee 150 is the distance between the poem’s “venerealee” and the venerable image it obscures—betrays his own anxieties of decay of both body and body politic on the eve of war. “A Hand Mirror” concludes what I above described as the long foreground of
Whitman’s lateness. During the Civil War, age becomes less of a variously anxious or hopeful abstraction, and less of an allegorical item in a longer catalogue, and more of an internalized role that Whitman would not only claim, but embody. Before moving on to the late work proper, then, I want to turn to the poem where Whitman puts down the mirror and embraces the guise of age.
The presence of damaged bodies takes on a more literal grounding in the context of Drum Taps (1865), a volume of poems that arose from Whitman’s experience as a volunteer nurse working in Washington D.C.’s makeshift hospital wards. Though Whitman attempted a number of patriotic guises in these war lyrics— trumpet blower, flag waver, and, ultimately, elegist—it is as the wound dresser that
Whitman would come to treat age as more of a permanent performance rather than just a temporary change of garments. The iconic poem that introduces this figure, at first titled “The Dresser,” begins tentatively. As with many Drum Taps pieces, the poem establishes a dramatic frame that would seem, in this case, to distance Whitman from the figure of the title. The poem’s speaker projects a moment in the future from which the poem will unfold in retrospect: “An old man bending, I come, among new faces, /
Years looking backward, resuming, in answer to children, Come tell us old man”
(442). At the start, the “old man” relates tales of a war in which he appears to have fought: “Soldier alert I arrive, after long march, cover’d with sweat and dust; / In the nick of time I come, plunge in the fight, loudly shout in the rush of successful charge”
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(443). The poem quickly breaks off from these rather pat martial memories—vicarious ones in Whitman’s case—and moves instead into a world cast in silence, in “dream’s projections,” as the dresser enters the hospital wards to recover a different memory of war, this one tinged with an elegy in which even nature takes part: “So soon what is over forgotten, and waves wash the imprints off the sand, / In nature’s reverie sad, with hinged knees returning, I enter the doors— .” After this crucial “turning” within the poem, the rhetorical frame fades away as descriptions of the war’s wounded, variously tender and tragic, begin to arrive in starkly realistic terms that rupture the poem’s dreamscape.
Whitman demonstrates superb skill at rendering the way the percussive effects of war break through the trance-like state of memory. He did this in another poem from Drum Taps, “The Artilleryman’s Vision,” which joins Ajax’s thousand-yard stare as an uncanny anticipation of what we now recognize as Post-Traumatic Stress
Disorder. In “The Dresser,” the trauma is kept close to the surface as well: “Bearing the bandages, water and sponge, / Straight and swift to my wounded I go” (444). Here,
“blood reddens the grass,” a “refuse pail” arrives “filled with clotted rags and blood, emptied, and filled again.” We see the “stump of the arm,” the “amputated hand.”
Whitman himself emerges from this vivid scene, closing out the poem with a parenthetical in which the poem’s fiction finally breaks and he embraces aged persona for the first time: “(Many a soldier’s loving arms about this neck have cross’d and rested, / Many a soldier’s kiss dwells on these bearded lips)” (445). In many of
Whitman’s poems, parentheticals function precisely as they do here: to signal the poet’s own voice entering the poem to comment and reflect.
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In “The Dresser,” Whitman would seem at first to approach the diseased and dismembered body at a sort of aesthetic arm’s length. But the poem’s intentional staging, its almost religious movement from the rush of war to the silent and dreamy world of the wards, is ruptured at first by the violence so plainly laid out alongside the poem’s almost fanciful framing. It is ruptured a second time by Whitman himself on whose bearded lips the soldiers’ kisses dwell, and whose lips will transform Leaves of
Grass into a book not only with the war, but with the curious old man—Whitman, however prematurely, in age, on hinged knee turning—at its center. Here, age enters
Whitman’s oeuvre not as a thin abstraction or figure as it was before, but as an abstraction, as Wallace Stevens might say, blooded—and by the poet himself:
Whitman becomes the Good Gray Poet.
The Creation of the Good Gray Poet: From the Disciples to Dowden
As we witness in “The Dresser,” the Civil War years formed a crucial hinge in the construction of Whitman’s identity as it evolved in the post-war years. Nowhere is this fact more clearly laid out than in Bucke’s 1883 study of Whitman, a document part biography, part explication, part critical anthology collecting specimens of
Whitman criticism. There, he posits that “three unflinching years of work in that terrible suspense and excitement of 1862 – ’5 changed Walt Whitman from a young to an old man” (40). Whitman begins the war with the equipment of a robust soldier and ends a sacrificial saint, the same path charted out in “The Dresser.” Though the story of Whitman’s chastened and sanctified reputation in the post-war years has been told, less attention has been paid to the explicit role that age plays in the rhetorical
Vander Zee 153 construction of Whitman’s post-war years. We should remember that Whitman at this time was in relatively good health, a man still in his 40s. Thus, the explicit and premature guise should strike us as strange at first, but it is a guise that Whitman fully embraces as the Civil War comes to drive his literary personality as he enters midlife.
Much attention has been paid to William Douglass O’Connor’s 1866 pamphlet whose unassuming title—The Good Gray Poet—did more to launch Whitman’s identity after the Civil War than any other. If Whitman tests the postures of age in his poetry and prose, gradually developing it into as a suitable guise for his sacrificial work in the hospitals, O’Connor helped the poet capitalize on that image. The story of the pamphlet’s genesis is well known. Whitman had traveled to Washington from
Brooklyn to find his brother, whom he feared had been injured or possibly killed in a recent battle. After finding his brother, he stayed for the duration of the war, taking on an informal role as nurse, companion, secretary, and confidant to thousands of the war’s wounded. Though Whitman was never compensated for this service, O’Connor used his Washington connections to secure the poet a government job as a clerk in the
Bureau of Indian Affairs. With flexible hours, the work left plenty of time for his poetry and for his continued presence among the wounded soldiers. His work in the
Department of the Interior where the Bureau was housed began in January of ’65, approximately five months before the Confederate surrender at Appomattox on April 9 and Lincoln’s assassination less than a week later. Shortly before the surrender,
Lincoln had installed a new Secretary of the Interior—Senator James Harlan of
Iowa—who was both a political and personal ally. In a twist of irony that turned out to be extraordinarily fateful, Lincoln’s rather prudish appointee began his tenure with a
Vander Zee 154 purge, prompted nominally by matters of efficiency but driven by a deep conservatism and self-righteous moral exigency. Dozens of clerks, including all of the women in employment, were let go. Whitman, a very capable clerk, had left his heavily annotated edition of the 1860 Leaves in his desk drawer, and Harlan, whose perusal of the text confirmed most of the less savory rumors circulating about its author, declared the book indecent and the man, quite simply, very bad. He could not tolerate such a man in his office and he let Whitman go.
O’Connor—a brilliant, fiery rhetorician—answered this perceived injustice in his pamphlet of forty-odd pages that would establish the iconography of Whitman in age. Already by the 1920s, prominent figures such as such as H.L. Menken would recognize this as an iconic moment. With witty hyperbole in the final chapter of
Prejudices: First Series (1919), Menken reflects on Harlan’s coincidentally prominent role in American letters, noting that true champions of American literature should
“repair, once a year, to [their] accustomed houses of worship and there give thanks that God, one day in 1865, brought together the greatest poet America had produced and the world’s damndest ass” (249). Whitman is the one immortalized here, but
Harlan plays the necessary role Judas to Whitman’s Christ—a felix culpum that gave us, in however roundabout a way, a durable American Classic.
What Menken merely suggests, O’Connor more explicitly spells out:
Whitman’s entrance into the canon arrives in the form of age itself. Although Harlan’s actions in many ways triggered O’Connor’s invective, the latter’s work is much more concerned with creating a legend rather than with dwelling on the actions of a small- minded, ephemeral bureaucrat. Mirroring Whitman’s own fondness for portraiture—
Vander Zee 155 and inaugurating a tradition of Whitman iconography that we saw played out in early biographies—O’Connor’s piece begins with a finely wrought likeness:
For years past, thousands of people in New York, in Brooklyn, in Boston, in New Orleans, and latterly in Washington, have seen… a man of striking masculine beauty—a poet—powerful and venerable in appearance; large, calm, superbly formed; oftenest clad in the careless, rough, and always picturesque costume of the common people; resembling, and generally taken by strangers for some great mechanic or stevedore, or seaman, or grand laborer of one kind or another; and passing slowly in this guise, with nonchalant and haughty step along the pavement, with the sunlight and shadows falling around him. The dark sombrero he usually wears was, when I saw him just now, the day being warm, held for the moment in his hand; rich light an artist would have chosen, lay upon his uncovered head, majestic, large, Homeric, and set upon his strong shoulders with the grandeur of ancient sculpture. I marked the countenance, serene, proud, cheerful, florid, grave; the brow seamed with noble wrinkles; the features, massive and handsome, with firm blue eyes; the eyebrows and eyelids especially showing that fullness of arch seldom seen save in the antique busts; the flowing hair and fleecy beard, both very gray, and tempering with a look of age the youthful aspect of one who is but forty-five; the simplicity and purity of his dress, cheap and plain, but spotless, from snowy falling collar to burnished boot, and exhaling faint fragrance; the whole form surrounded with manliness as with a nimbus, and breathing, in its perfect health and vigor, the august charm of the strong (99).
Alongside ample intimations of dignified old age in O’Connor’s striking portrait—
Whitman appears venerable, calm, majestic, serene, his brow seamed with wrinkles, his hair flowing, fleecy and very gray—one gets a sense of the effortful staging of the scene. The bard’s dress is a costume; he appears in the guise, variously, of some stevedore or seaman; the chiaroscuro play of light and shadow are such as an artist might have chosen; his hard-hewn features resemble classical sculpture. Such a well- wrought visage—what we might term the Apollonian baroque—is thick with artifice, and it stands grandly alongside O’Connor’s quite diminutive title: The Good Gray
Poet. It is precisely this combination—of majesty and pathos, transcendence and humility—that drives O’Connor’s canonizing efforts.
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The goal of the piece was to make Whitman’s poetic ascendency inevitable.
But an overlooked strategy of O’Connor’s vindication is the degree to which this magnificent guise of age is what Whitman must wear if he is to enter the canon.
Indeed, the image of age here lies at the heart of his Civil War persona as the binder of the nations wounds. Though O’Connor writes pointedly of all the unsavory matter that fills the works of the greatest authors—more objectionable lines appear in
Shakespeare, he claims, than in anything Whitman every wrote—the piece argues that we can grant Whitman’s bodily excesses not simply because all great authors utter a bawdy line here or there, but because they are leavened a certain transcendent timelessness. O’Connor’s guise of vindication, that is, masks in fiery rhetoric the reality of concession: Whitman must become the Good Gray Poet, trading immorality for immortality. He must ironically take on the de-sexed mantle of age to survive the contumely of what O’Connor derisively terms “devotees of a castrated literature” even as he becomes an unwitting member of that cohort. Precisely this logic played out as well, both visually and verbally, a few years later in 1868 when a cropped and de- sexed image of Whitman’s 1855 frontispiece was used to lead off William Michael
Rossetti’s selected (and expurgated) English edition of Whitman’s poetry.56 Whitman, in O’Connor’s recasting, embodies a more “majestic civilization in the immense and sane serenities of futurity” removed from a bawdier past. In the sexless guise of age,
Whitman becomes one for the ages as he joins that “old chivalry of letters.”
O’Connor’s canonizing efforts here established a durable template for the work of other early Whitman disciples. William Burroughs, a year later, published Notes on
56 See Folsom, Whitman Making Books / Books Making Whitman, available on the Walt Whitman Archive.
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Walt Whitman: As a Poet and Person (1867). There, through a rather puzzling sleight of hand, Burroughs tries to obscure the ardor that got Whitman into so much trouble in the first place. “Those who have met the poet of late years,” Burroughs writes, “and think of him only as the composed and gray-bearded man of the present, must not forget, in reading his LEAVES, those previous and more ardent stages of his career.”
He was, as we just learned, fired a year earlier in no small part for the poetry that emerged from such ardor. One year, the Good Gray Poet emerges from the war; the next, one must summon imaginative energies to remember the bodily yawper of yore.
Burroughs also writes of “The Dresser” that it is “but daguerreotypes of the poet's own actual movements among the bad cases of the wounded after a battle.” Thus, “The
Dresser” again morphs from the highly mediated, dramatic set piece that it attempts in its initial stanzas to a kind of documentary photo-realism. Once the template of age was set up, Whitman, who collaborated with Burroughs on his study, clearly endorsed this iconographic turn in his evolving literary reputation. In the personally significant centennial edition of Leaves (1876), Whitman includes, for the first time since the third edition in 1860, twin frontispieces that visually chart this evolution. On the verso page in front of “Song of Myself,” we see the famous frontispiece of 1855, all youthful nonchalance and wry bluster, the same frontispiece that would also appear, sans crotch, in Rossetti’s 1868 edition mentioned above. Opposite the newly titled
“The Wound Dresser,” however, stands a woodcut of a photograph that seems his own approximation of the verbal pictures wrought by O’Connor and others. He had found the visual equivalent of this accruing iconographic rhetoric; more than ever he declares his identity as an “Old Man.”
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In addition to the hagiographic work of Whitman’s closest disciples, which was monitored by the poet himself, and which has received more attention in the scholarship, the Irish critic Edward Dowden played a crucial and almost entirely ignored role in the construction of Whitman’s lateness. In Michael Robertson’s
Worshipping Walt (2008), more attention is given to Dowden’s fellow Irish celebrity,
Oscar Wilde. And in the case of Whitman’s transatlantic relations more generally, it is usually the notable literary figures—Carpenter, Rossetti, Tennyson—who come to the fore. Dowden was admittedly a very minor poet, but he became, in the years in which he corresponded with Whitman, the foremost Anglo-Irish scholar. Furthermore,
Dowden, especially well known among Shakespeare scholars to this day, was an early pioneer in inaugurating late-style approaches in literary criticism. Yet his importance remains relevant not just because his work on Shakespeare and other figures was among the first to project romantic theories of organic development onto the life and mind of particular artists; he was also an ardent supporter of Whitman during the final decades of the poet’s life. The role he played in Whitman’s evolving sense of his own late authorship, however, has never been discussed.57
Dowden’s idealism is rooted in his seminal 1871 essay on Whitman—“The
Poetry of Democracy: Walt Whitman”—which was among the first legitimately
57 Joann P. Krieg’s Whitman and the Irish (2000) offers the most complete account of Whitman’s relationship with Dowden, though she focuses more on Dowden’s efforts to present Whitman as a national and democratic poet. Though Dowden receives a brief mention in the comprehensive Walt Whitman: An Encyclopedia (1998) and also in the more focused Whitman and the World (1995), these entries are limited to brief rehearsals of Dowden’s important essay on Whitman, “The Poetry of Democracy: Walt Whitman” (1871). Michael Robertson in his Worshipping Walt (2008) and M. Wynn Thomas in his Transatlantic Connections: Whitman U.S., Whitman U.K (2005) do not, rather surprisingly, mention Dowden at all. This is an unfortunate omission, for Dowden had as much to do with influencing Whitman’s self-conscious entry into lateness as Horace Traubel, the other disciples, or even prominent figures like Tennyson and Epictetus whose model of literary and Stoical lateness Whitman seemed drawn to at times. For more on the Tennysonian strains of Whitman’s self-stylized lateness, see Thomas, “Whitman, Tennyson, and the Poetry of Old Age.” For more on Whitman’s late infatuation with Epictetus, see Hutchinson, “The Laughing Philosophy: Whitman’s Comic Repose.”
Vander Zee 159 scholarly reflections on the poet. Dowden himself was just emerging as a scholar. His important book, Shakspere: A Critical Study of His Mind and Art (1875), was his first, and he had been elected Professor of Oratory and English literature at Trinity College,
Dublin in 1867 at the age of 24. His piece on Whitman—published anonymously in the Westminster Review, a prestigious English journal—was one of his earliest. He would go on to write multiple books on Shakespeare and a well-regarded life of
Shelley amongst many other tomes as he became Ireland’s foremost literary scholar.
In his early Whitman essay, Dowden defends Whitman’s poetic faith as a necessary corollary to organic ideals of Democracy and posits a distinctly rosy picture of nature and history as indissolubly yoked and inherently progressive:
Biology and natural history with their doctrine of development and evolution, the science of origins with its surveys of the earliest history of our race seems to confirm the conviction, so flattering to men's desires, that nature and man harmoniously work under laws which tend towards a great and fortunate result. The events of the past are interpreted in the light of this conviction. Faith in the future becomes passionate, exists in the atmosphere, and obtaining nutriment from every wind, appears to sustain itself apart from all evidence—that miracle which belongs to every popular faith.
The extent of Dowden’s idealism is remarkable here, going so far as to discard historical evidence for a popular faith in miracles. This is not informed optimism, but a willfully blind faith. Dowden’s interest in an idealized dialectic of nature and history erases the inherent tension between these two poles that led Benjamin to articulate his ideas of allegory early in his career. Where Dowden sees nature and history working seamlessly together, Benjamin demonstrates how, with the appearance of ruins in
German Trauerspiel, a fundamental breach between history and nature comes to light.
The eventual decay of things both natural and inanimate belies Dowden’s notion of an
Vander Zee 160 ever-progressing history “apart from all evidence.” If Dowden’s argument is about irresistible progress, Benjamin’s is about inevitable decay. Whitman, as we will see, lies vexingly somewhere in between, uncertain as to the status and value of his late works between worldly engagement and self-transcendence, and unsure, finally, that his closest disciples are interested in helping him work out this central problem. If
Dowden largely enabled Whitman’s understanding of his own late style as an ideal arena of poetic production, the shadow-side of that idealism created the ground for a more alienated, allegorical late work.
Dowden lobbied for his own rarified sense of a poetic late style in his personal correspondence with the poet as well. In a letter dated April 12, 1873—the spring after the Whitman’s debilitating stroke—the critic expresses his concern for his friend’s health, but proceeds to proclaim the value and durability of his poetry despite extenuating circumstances:
Over and under all feeling which the fact of your illness produces lies the one feeling (which the growth of my own way of thinking together with your poems and other causes has made very real and strong)—that for some persons, and for you among such persons, casual misfortune or calamity is not a supreme affair. We give our grief to you with the very reserve that after all Walt Whitman has not been really laid hold of by chance and change—that after all he eludes them and remains altogether untouched. (WWC 1: 441)
In retrospect, this letter appears less like a scholarly get-well-soon than an early case for Whitman’s own burgeoning and transcendent lateness. Whitman’s newly debilitating condition triggers an evacuation of self and of history—of all “casual misfortune or calamity.”
Dowden’s 1873 letter to Whitman might be viewed as a testing ground for ideals of late style that the critic would unfold most fully in his seminal study of
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Shakespeare, which went through over ten editions by the end of the nineteenth century. Dowden sent Whitman a copy of the book, and the poet thought very highly of it. Writing to Burroughs, he describes how “Dowden advances, expands, or rather penetrates, the first two Chapters of his Shakespeare which I have read thoroughly, are very fine—(I have underlined passages on every page).” (Correspondence II: 331).
The second of those chapters charts in more general terms the organic growth of
Shakespeare’s mind in relation to his work. Indeed, the presentation copy of
Dowden’s tome is crowded with Whitman’s marginalia on each of the first 80 pages and with slightly less frequency thereafter, often in varied ink and pencil, evidence of multiple re-readings (Correspondence 2: 331, n3).
In his book, Dowden argues that the force of late works resides in their almost effortless spiritual attainment and transcendence. Great artists find themselves recipients of a mysterious benediction where “one does not seek for truth, but rather is sought for by truth, and found; one does not construct beautiful imaginings, but beauty itself haunts and startles and waylays” (336). What abets this movement from rigorous formal construction actively pursued to the diffusions of style passively registered becomes more clear when Dowden describes how “we have been endeavoring, so to speak, to scan the metre of Shakspere’s life; to do this rightly, we must count rather by accents than by syllables; if we can find the last accented syllable, we have found the real close of the verse, although it may be an additional syllable or two follow, and enrich the verse with a dying fall” (338). Life becomes style: Dowden displaces the classical quantitative scansion of Greek and Latin poetry with the romantic metrics of a life, exchanging the genre-driven career model of the rota Virgilii, which begins
Vander Zee 162 with the provincialities of pastoral and culminates in the epic utterance of national concern, for one based on the evolution of a particular mind. What was once an authorial program for literary recognition has become fodder for critical retrospect.
Poets may make verses, Dowden insinuates, but critics create careers.
One prominent flaw of late-style criticism noted in the previous chapter had to do with its elision of lived reality in favor of a kind of transcendence. But Dowden does not altogether exclude the social in his model of organic development. His dramatic elevation of a transcendent late style as he applies it to Shakespeare occurs only after he notes a period of the bard’s deep social concern reflected in the manic misanthropy of Timon, for example, or the impassioned social critique voiced through
Lear’s looped and windowed raggedness on the heath. What happens to the indignation that surfaces in these characters’ realization of the world’s injustice? “In his last period of authorship,” Dowden writes, “Shakspere remained grave—how could it be otherwise?—but his severity was tempered and purified” (361). Dowden further unfolds this sense of exquisite, untroubled late style:
[Such works] receive contributions from every portion of Shakspere’s genius, but all are mellowed, refined, made exquisite; they avoid the extremes of broad humor and of tragic intensity; they were written with less of passionate concentration than the plays which immediately precede them, but with more of a spirit of deep or exquisite recreation…. In the tragedies Shakspere had made his inquisition into the mystery of evil. He had studied those injuries of man to man which are irreparable. He had seen the innocent suffering with the guilty. Death came and removed the criminal and his victim from human sight, and we were left with solemn awe upon our hearts in presence of the insoluble problems of life…. His present temper demanded not a tragic issue—it rather demanded an issue into joy or peace. The dissonance must be resolved into a harmony, clear and rapturous, or solemn and profound. (361-363)
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One could quote Dowden endlessly, carried on by his breathless portrayal of that
“luminous and high tableland of joy or of renouncement” where the artist “has really transcended self” (369). This drive to make the wisdom of late works speak to a pending spiritual sense rather than a lived history typifies the romantically infused lateness that Dowden harnessed for his program just as Whitman was entering his own late phase. Beyond its importance for Whitman and for late thought in general, however, I give such generous play to Dowden because his impulse to at once elevate age and erase it—evident in his movement from the metrics of a life and the evolution of a mind to a scene of removed recreation and self-transcendence—echoes a more specific historical trend in American attitudes toward aging from the early Republic through the Gilded Age and into our own century. Dowden’s program for the organic growth of a career also clashes with Whitman’s own experience both of the body in age and the world in which it dwelled. Age’s compensations are too often abstract; its personal and political deficits too real, and too often ignored.
Whitman, however, would do his best to inhabit Dowden’s sense of literary lateness. He makes his most direct, most effervescent, case for his own transcendent ripening in an article on “Old Poets” (1890) that he published in the North American
Review. There, Whitman drowns his lateness in a profusion haze of superlative adjectives:
Perhaps, indeed, the rarest and most blessed quality of transcendent noble poetry—as of law, and of the profoundest wisdom and aestheticism—is, (I would suggest,) from sane, completed, vital, capable old age. The final proof of song or personality is a sort of matured, accreted, superb, evoluted, almost divine, impalpable diffuseness and atmosphere or invisible magnetism…. Completed fruitage like this comes (in my opinion) to a grand age, in man or woman, through an essentially sound continuated physiology and
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psychology and is the culminating glorious aureole of all the several preceding…. It stands at last in a beauty, power and productiveness of its own, above all others, and of a sort and style uniting all criticism, proofs and adherences. (CPP 1253)
Though Whitman works to own this hyperbolic notion of lateness with his parenthetical insertions—(“I would suggest),” “(in my opinion)”—these sentiments are pure Dowden. And though the thought of such an evacuation from self and history may have eased Whitman’s mind at times, he more often saw his lateness as an embodiment of historical calamity rather than its escape. Defending the inclusion of bodily complaints in late work, of invalidism as he called it, Whitman once told
Traubel that “a man may be sick for the sins a dead generation committed: that admonishes us to be a bit gentle in applying the rod” (WWC 2: 234-5).
Whitman, here, alludes to his declining health after his first majorly debilitating stroke in 1873, which he and his disciples viewed as a literal result of his inexhaustible service in the wartime hospitals. In a brief note appended to Good-Bye my Fancy (1891), Whitman writes of these debilitating late years as “palsied old” and
“shorn” (Prose Works 2: 738). The condition was not merely evidence of old age, or chance disease, but was, Whitman believed, “the indubitable outcome and growth…. of too over-zealous, over-continued bodily and emotional excitement and action” in the Civil War years. He describes these years and their after-effects with a daunting profusion of adjectives and descriptors: “those hot, sad, wrenching times… the wounded, suffering, dying—the exhausting, sweating summers, marches, battles, carnage—those trenches hurriedly heap’d by the corpse-thousands, mainly unknown.”
After this morbid catalogue with its stunning kenning in “corpse-thousands” crowning this nightmare after-image of war, Whitman asks: “Will the America of the future—
Vander Zee 165 will the vast rich Union even realize what itself cost, back there after all?—those hecatombs of battle-deaths—those times of which, O far-off reader, this whole book is indeed finally but a reminiscent memorial from thence by me to you?” Where
Whitman saw his deteriorating condition as a reflection of national crisis, Dowden viewed it as the initial impetus for his removal him from this arena of historical concern. This is precisely the tension we find in Whitman’s late work.
The competing versions of lateness here seem, at first, irreconcilable. The prospect shifts from a transcendent, unifying and progressive vision to the mournful memory of the Civil War and its aftermath. Both poles, however, ultimately signify the elegiac bearings of Leaves. His life’s work reflects so many “leavings,” to borrow one of his neologisms, so many departures. These “leavings” are the deaths recalled, the war dead piled up, the cost of union, but also his multiple evacuations of this reality through the motivations of a transcendent late style. Leaves thus becomes both a layered elegy and an escape, both a sepulcher and a premature celebration. The unrelenting optimism of Dowden’s account may reflect the fondest aspirations of
Whitman’s late style, but such sentiment elides the more difficult, allegorical, and resistant energies that comprise what I call Whitman’s late form.
Dowden’s words carried a special weight for Whitman. The poet appreciated the scholarly impartiality of his transatlantic ally, a quality that he highly valued in light of the frequently fawning and ingratiating praise of his disciples. Later in life,
Whitman spoke with Traubel about Dowden’s continuing importance. “Dowden is a confirmed scholar,” Whitman asserts. “The people who call my friends ignoramuses, unscholarly, off the streets, cannot quarrel with the equipment of Dowden. Dowden
Vander Zee 166 has all the points they insist upon—yet he can tolerate Walt Whitman” (WWC 1: 224).
Speaking of Dowden’s aforementioned letter to the poet, Whitman writes: “That is one of Dowden's early letters—one of the first: he has lasted, still firmly adheres to his original view.” Speaking to how fickle would-be champions could be, Emerson being the foremost example, Whitman continues: “I have seen many defections—have had quite an experience of that sort: young fellows who take to me strong, then, as they get older, recede—sometimes come to entirely disavow me. Dowden is still haunting the corridors.” The language of haunting is particularly suggestive here. The ideas that
Dowden represents—optimism and transcendence embodied in the organic growth of a poetic career—are not the accepted radical around which Whitman’s more alienated late form persists in shadowed form. It is the optimism itself that haunts and lingers.
For a few final glimpses of these important contemporaneous constructions of
Whitman’s lateness, I want to revisit Whitman in Camden where casual conversation, like the one recounted above, often turned to these matters in telling ways. The best resource for such conversations, apart from a handful of late essays, remains the nine- volume, nearly 6,000-page account of Whitman’s last three years, a record compiled by Traubel from transcribed conversations, letters, and personal reflections. Traubel’s anecdotal constellation of materials under the unassuming title With Walt Whitman in
Camden represents a singular act of attention and devotion unmatched in American letters. With Walt Whitman contains much that we see in the late poetry itself: an effortful optimism that seems always to rise above a persistent backbeat of doubt and complaint. But the resistant force impacted in Whitman’s poetic late form lies patently on the surface of With Walt Whitman, providing a key to the former’s decipherment.
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As Traubel recalls, Whitman continually brought up what he called the
“whether-or-no-ness” of his late work—whether the late work, that is, melded with the ensemble of Leaves, what Whitman called its “totality,” its “massings” (WWC 6:
281). Though such conversations often ended with Whitman redoubling his faith in the late work, the resolution was not always so convincing. “I for my part have never been deeply convicted on the point of the late poems—never absolutely certain of myself— of results,” he told Traubel one evening. “To be sure I am convinced all has forged forward from a poetic background…. But whether here at last comes morbidity, introspection—forbidden, forbidding appearances—in that is the rub.” Such appearances—he does not indicate any in particular—seem to challenge the unity of his Leaves, rendering him finally unconvinced: “I have put the bucket deep in me— brought water from the deepest deeps—questions—and though inclined to be convicted, am not.” In typical fashion, Traubel works to inspire Whitman’s better inclinations: “‘But,’ I argued, ‘why necessarily weakening because changing field?
Death, pain, age, are only disease when the observer makes them so.’ W. thereupon:
‘So it seems to me: and I think it is in such a conviction I shall abide.’”
And abide he does—for the most part. Yet the depth of Whitman’s complaint here renders his blithe “so it seems to me” less than believable. This incident repeats a common pattern in which Whitman voices his doubts about the late work, only to arrive again—with few exceptions, and usually after the relentlessly affirmative assurances of Traubel or his other disciples—on the shores of faith, in a renewed confidence in the harmony, serenity, and organic wholeness of Leaves. A seemingly minor incident centered on four syllables illustrates this conjoining of faith and
Vander Zee 168 friendship. When Whitman concluded a late poem on the word “oblivion,” a number of correspondents objected. They thought that the word too blatantly contradicted
Whitman’s faith. Traubel records Whitman’s response as follows:
I do not feel it to be necessary to fight for my words—I use them and let them go and that’s an end on’t. But oblivion as I use it there is just the word, both as furnishing sense and rhythm to the idea I had in mind. It seems strange to me (perhaps it shouldn’t seem strange) how my friends always want to keep me on their track—want me to go the way they think I ought to go: choose even my words for me and declare penalties of disobedience. (WWC 1:141)
This anecdote reveals the supple formal intelligence that Whitman developed in his late work as his increasingly clipped lines and brief poems permitted new registers of formal expression. We are used to hearing about Whitman as the consummate controller of his own poetic legacy as he penned self-reviews, co-authored hagiographic biographies, and constructed the multiple Whitmans that appear throughout his career, and that respond to various crises both national and personal.
But Whitman, here, has to defend his most basic poetic instincts, to maintain control, in age, over his own motives and thoughts. The irony of this situation is clear: his disciples would choose to forget—to remain oblivious to—the very sense of oblivion that Whitman thought so perfect. In forgetting oblivion, they forget Whitman’s more conflicted sense of lateness pulled between idealism and despair, symbol and allegory.
Whitman continues, after the above complaint, to offer a biting commentary on the helplessness of the late figure who has survived, recalling Said’s definition of lateness, beyond what is normal or acceptable: “I suppose every writer has more or less the same experience: the world says jump and he must jump—the world says die and he is dead.” A bleak view of the pressures an author faces late in their career to be sure, and a remarkably prescient one as well when we recall some of the rougher terms of
Vander Zee 169 neglect in the preceding bibliographic chapter. Whitman’s sentiment suggests the degree to which the failure of his disciples predicts the failure of contemporary
Whitman scholars: the failure to hear what is sounded by his lateness, and what is seen by it.
If at times Traubel seems earnestly to ease Whitman’s doubts, at other times he suggestively to constellate their informing materials. Very late in Traubel’s record, he recounts a conversation where Whitman recalls a recent letter from Bucke about his last pamphlet of poems, Good-Bye my Fancy:
‘Doctor wrote me again: he is thoroughly taken with ‘Good-Bye’— thoroughly—it is quite exhilarating to see how he freezes to it. But what—what—will be said of it, long, long hence, when I am a person passed—passed—into the night?’ I picked up a book from the floor— W.H. Babcock’s ‘The Two Lost Centuries of Britain.’ W. then, “I have been looking into it, casually, a bit here, a bit there—but it seems to me the more he writes, the more lost they seem—the more dark—the deeper the mystery. I suppose if the charge was made to him he would say, well, that is what I meant to show—that they were dark, lost, irrecoverable!’ (WWC 8: 122)
It is tempting to take this for a shadow discourse on Whitman’s own lateness, though the recent decades of Whitman scholarship hardly qualify as “long, long hence.” Yet the passage demonstrates Whitman’s fascination with veiled meanings. If some aspect of Whitman remains somehow consigned to oblivion, it turns out that Whitman himself relished the idea that he would remain in some sense fundamentally unknown.
Though Whitman, in part, courts this sense of mystery, he could also appear anxious about how Traubel’s written record might obscure his legacy. Traubel seemed highly aware of his role as a kind of lesser Boswell. One gets a sense of this self- consciousness in a conversation he records, very fittingly, about an actual copy of
Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson. “Here is Boswell,” Whitman reportedly tells
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Traubel, handling the book. “I thought I had given it back to Tom. I notice, by the way, that a good many of the things told by Boswell are contradicted by the notes of annotators, who intimate that this could not possibly have happened, or that, or the other, simply because the man was absent at the time, or dead, or unknown—or for reasons similar” (WWC 1: 270). Though Whitman courted a certain mystery regarding his legacy, he had a very pragmatic sense of the much less mysterious work of annotators and secretaries and critics, all of whom have their own reasons for skewing the original story, for casting Whitman’s lateness in their own image.
Whitman at times even doubted the integrity of his own controlling plan for
Leaves. In a late essay under the interrogative titled “What Lurks Behind
Shakespeare’s Historical Plays?” Whitman argues that Shakespeare’s work, much as he often thought of his own, must have some essentially controlling plan. “What was that plan?” he asks, only to immediately circumvent the question: “Or, rather, what was veil’d behind it?—for to me there was certainly something so veil’d” (CPP 1149).
He imagines that “inexplicable element” in all great minds that “causes it to cover up and involve its real purposes and meanings in folded removes and far recesses.”
Whitman’s comment here is suggestive for his own late form, and he had a similar sense about Lincoln, the giant of his political and, after the Civil War, poetic imagination. Speaking of the dubious claims of biography, Whitman reflects that
“Lincoln comes to us more or less falsified.” The real Lincoln, he insists, must exist apart from the grand narratives. “While I accept the records I think we know very little of the actual. I often reflect how very different every fellow must have been from the fellow we come upon in the myths—with the surroundings, the incidents, the push and
Vander Zee 171 pull of the concrete moment, all left out or wrongly set forth” (WWC 1: 108).
Whitman’s comments here, written just a few years before he passed away, seem only a lightly veiled reflections on his own cultivated obscurity, his own coded lateness.
It seems that something always masked or left out— “wrongly set forth”— in accounts of Whitman’s late career, a trend that continued posthumously. Consider
Whitman’s letters to Dr. Bucke. These were almost daily missives over the last years of his life that describe the banal happenings of any given day, but their more salient feature is the ritual accounting of aches and pains, constipations and bowel movements. In his contribution to In Re: Walt Whitman (1893), a volume that was part post-mortem memoriam and part anthology of essays and notes written about the poet by his broad band of disciples, Bucke describes Whitman in his final years as “equally removed from fear and bravado; maintaining absolute equanimity; patient and forbearing; at times suffering intensely but never complaining—so far from it, indeed, that he would rarely acknowledge he was in pain” (68). Always the stoic, Whitman,
Bucke writes, “awaited with calmness and resignation the inevitable end, never for a moment losing (not even in short intervals of delirium) the sweetness and charm of his habitual manner, manifesting throughout neither exaltation nor depression, maintaining the mental attitude of a child who starts on a journey to a foreign land of which it knows nothing but in charge of some one in whom it has complete trust.” In a note appending this description, he writes in the wake of Whitman’s passing that the aforementioned remains true, that it even “fail[s] to represent the heroism of the man”
(68). With its “short intervals of delirium” tucked into parentheses, his pain rarely acknowledged, Whitman’s lateness is ironed out into an emotional and psychological
Vander Zee 172 flatline—a plane of pure equanimity. The ravaged folds and furrows of Whitman’s lateness remain obscure.
To make an honest aesthetic judgment about the late work in the midst of such encomia would not quite meld with the rhetorical sublimation of earthly trials into spiritual triumph. We saw in Chapter 2 how Whitman’s biographers and critics have perpetrated a kind of benign neglect. For the disciples, this is neglect not benign, but benevolent. His flaws were largely papered over by a well-wrought iconology of age; his own deep misgivings about the status of his own work were elided, even as the particular achievements of that work were similarly shrouded in his deification.
Whitman’s lateness was sufficiently idealized out of existence, but a certain melancholy debris remains.
“Yet the lilac with mastering odor holds me”: Whitman’s Melancholic Debris
Though Whitman’s biographers and critics, surveyed in the previous chapter, have provided some touchstones for the poet’s lateness, they have largely failed to articulate the relationship between the formal attributes of Whitman’s late work on the one hand, and its rapidly changing post-Civil War context on the other, between
Whitman’s lateness and what the Robert Duncan, in a poem called “Poetry, Natural
Thing,” would call “the lateness of the world” (Opening of the Field 50). Realizing this connection between the private and the political is not a problem for Whitman criticism alone. Indeed, one of the most perennially fraught critical tasks involves untangling the complex, often opaque interpenetrations of world and word, history and form. Alan Liu aptly captures this complexity when he writes that “literary texts
Vander Zee 173 emerge… precisely through a critical or second-order negation: the arbitrary but nevertheless determinate differentiation by which they do not articulate historical contexts” (46). In this sense, Liu continues, the literary text becomes “a sheaf of absences and dissonances stitched together by that which is never on the page: the history not there.” The history we might read into or alongside Whitman’s late career is not lost, then, but it is often only available on levels that one might not think to look, and where that act of looking invites some critical risk. Whitman, I argue, saw his own damaged body, and the final lilt of his last songs, as the charged locus of this ciphered and impacted history.
The question arises: how does one arrive at a composite sense of Whitman’s lateness in a way that brings their impacted, unresolved, and contrary energies to light? Too often, Whitman’s critics have chosen to read repetition as retrenchment, echo as an evisceration, accrual as a kind of conservative consolidation. We need, instead, to see the patterns of difference within repetition to place multiple allegorical resonances together at once to grasp their ensemble character; to see the persistence and scattering of elegy not as mere restatement, but as an ongoing requiem of reprise, a poetics of what Whitman called his “massings” (WWC 2: 373). To read thus is to read Whitman’s melancholic debris. To decipher rather than dismiss these echoing tendencies is to bring to life Whitman’s crucial tropes of allegorical accrual and lasting. Such an approach does not combat the broad organic tradition that has so heavily influenced Whitman’s poetry and the work of subsequent criticism alike.
Instead, it introduces a skeptical, anti-progressive organicism, one rooted in a sense of
Benjaminian decay and debris that resists easy sublimation. In addition to this more
Vander Zee 174 skeptical organicism, I adopt an attendant structural approach that takes up Whitman’s shorter work not as a series of merely occasional lyrics written for newspapers and sloppily tossed into supplementary annexes, but as a dynamically interconnected lyric environment with an integrity of its own.
Cabling to J.H. Johnston ahead of Whitman’s funeral to provide the necessary details, Traubel needed few words: “Lilacs. Hour, two. Love” (WWC 9: 606). The two had worked out a special code for their telegrams to avoid leaking any sensitive information about Whitman, a precaution informed more by the feelings of poetic camaraderie than by any practical concern. Lilacs meant funeral. On March 29, 1892, one could barely see Whitman’s casket for all the flowers adorning it—an abundance that recalls the profusion of flowers in his elegy for Abraham Lincoln, “When Lilacs
Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.” Just as Whitman had commemorated the personal and national giant of his poetic imagination with his lilacs, so his disciples marked their grief at Whitman’s passing with what had become, for them, the quintessential symbol of regeneration and renewal across his work.
In his great elegy, which for many critics was Whitman’s last truly great poem, the poet at first gently honors generic convention by delicately placing a sprig of lilac on Lincoln’s passing coffin. Here, even the selection of the sprig takes on a sense of ritual.
In the dooryard fronting an old farm-house near the white-wash’s palings, Stands the lilac-bush tall-growing with heart-shaped leaves of rich green, With many a pointed blossom rising delicate, with the perfume strong I love, With every leaf a miracle—and from this bush in the dooryard, With delicate-color’d blossoms and heart-shaped leaves of rich green,
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A sprig with its flower I break. (CPP 459)
The slowly unfolding scene, the careful suspension of brokenness—this stanza’s deferred verbal action—suggests a rural, ante-bellum innocence. Lincoln’s funeral train passes through a landscape that would itself form a kind of rural iconography in
Whitman’s later poems where these elegiac bearings necessarily return: “I mourned,”
Whitman writes in the poem’s third line, “and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.” The train moves on, “Passing the yellow-spear’d wheat, every grain from its shroud in the dark-brown fields uprisen, / Passing the apple-tree blows of white and pink in the orchard, / Carrying a corpse to where it shall rest in the grave, / Night and day journeys the coffin” (460).
The sense of ritual delay continues in section six as the catalogue turns from this pastoral scene to one peopled with “the silent sea of faces” and the “mournful voices of the dirge’s pour’d around the coffin.” Finally, Whitman once more enters the poem, his syntax of giving the inverse of his prior suspension of that breaking action:
“A sprig with its flower I break,” he tells us earlier in the poem. And now: “I give you my sprig of lilac.” This act of giving, neatly contained as it echoes its grammatical inverse from earlier in the poem, abruptly explodes in the next stanza’s strangely bracketed profusion of lilacs:
(Nor for you, for one alone, Blossoms and branches green to coffins all I bring [….]
Copious I break, I break the sprigs from the bushes, With loaded arms I come, pouring for you, For you and the coffins all of you O death.) (461)
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Whitman’s ecstatic aside, oddly tempered by parentheses, signals the consuming elegiac context beyond Lincoln’s singular death, what he will identify, later in the poem, as the “debris and debris of all the slain soldiers” (466).
“Lilacs” has remained central to Whitman’s oeuvre in part because of its disarmingly quiet beauty, mindfully pitched between the expansive catalogues of
“Song of Myself,” and the more delicate, measured cadences that one hears increasingly across his late work. Furthermore, “Lilacs” forms Whitman’s most powerful response to the crisis of the Civil War, the national calamity that would become the central hinge in the dramatic structure for Leaves. In his 1876 Preface to
Leaves, written a decade after “Lilacs,” Whitman had identified the “two distinct veins, or strata” that structure his work: “Politics for one, and for the other, the pensive thought of Immortality” (Prose Works 1: 746). In the year of America’s centennial,
Whitman conceived of his late work along the lines of a Dowden-inspired romantic lateness, a release from the world and a pushing out toward immortality, a movement we see enacted most powerfully in “Passage to India” (1971), his last major effort at a long poem. But his earlier “Lilacs” resists any neat conscription into either of these strands, bearing the weight of both historical remembrance and transcendence. And as in “Lilacs,” so in the late work itself: though Whitman would at times seem to enact a clean break in his poetic movement from the bodily to the spiritual, from politics to immortality, they more often than not, thinking back to the geological metaphor that the poet deploys above, persist together in the broad geography of Whitman’s lateness.
They persist as strata, as sediment. We must look not to the sky, then, but under our boot soles.
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Many critics have taken issue with the efficacy, and even the ethics, of how
Whitman harnesses the symbolic force of lilacs. In the kind of pastoral imagery epitomized in his lilacs, the argument goes, Whitman seems to elide history— especially the racial history at the root of the civil war—while naturalizing or glossing over the violence and the rankling sentiment of disunion that remained as the Civil
War came to a close. 58 Such arguments, which look back to the romantic-ideology critique of Jerome McGann, fail to register the poem’s own discomfort with the very blind-spots in question. While it may be tempting to read a poem as ideology and a poet as an ideologue, Whitman, like most poets, is a complicated kind of ideologue.
Without involving myself in the critical battles waged over this canonical poem, I grant Whitman’s lilacs the symbolic power and healing force they assume at the charged moment of their publication. I do, however, want to follow Whitman’s lilacs outside this poem to trace their allegorical lasting, their life beyond their significant symbolic accomplishment in the Lincoln elegy. One cannot read Whitman’s lilacs, that is, without grasping their charged afterlives. Thus, I ask what happens when those lilacs last, when transcendence begins to grate against remembrance, when immortality fails to forget politics, when symbol fades into allegory. As lilacs last across Whitman’s career, returning in various settings before finally adorning his own casket, they become a cipher through which we might read the secret of Whitman’s discontent in his waning years, and a key to tallying the melancholic debris of his late poetry.
58 For ideology critique directed toward Whitman’s Lincoln elegy, see especially Sweet 71-77 and Bellis 166-78.
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The sense that the lilac trope is not neatly contained within the Lincoln elegy is not entirely a new one. Pursuing the very brief pre-history of lilacs in Leaves, for example, critics have pointed to the early poem, “There was a Child Went Forth”
(originally untitled in1855), which provides the back-drop for the consummate accomplishment of Whitman’s elegy. Following Helen Vendler in noting Whitman’s retrieval of lilac imagery from this early poem to use in his Lincoln elegy, Max
Cavitch argues that the flower here functions as “a threshold through which the child passes into the day, into the world” (248), a liminal space of union that would grow to be a general trope for the individual’s entrance into and engagement with the world.59
That early poem begins:
There was a child went forth every day, And the first object he look’d upon, that object he became, And that object became part of him for the day or a certain part of the day, Or for many years or stretching cycles of years. The early lilacs became part of this child…. (CPP 491)
Thus, when Whitman returns to lilacs in his Lincoln elegy, they summon the abundant force of union and convey an ante-bellum nostalgia that binds the poet to the world.
But if lilacs mark the entrance into a world at first saturated with pastoral imagery, the ensuing catalogue rather quickly admits a more troubling human element:
Winter-grain sprouts and those of the light-yellow corn, and the esculent roots of the garden And the apple-trees cover’d with blossoms, and the fruit afterward, and wood-berries, and the commonest weeds by the road; And the old drunkard staggering home from the out-house of the tavern, whence he had lately risen.
Though critics have noted this early instance of lilacs, they have not noted other key pastoral images from this earlier poem that echo later in “Lilacs,” where we see again
59 See Vendler 139.
Vander Zee 179 the “yellow-spear’d wheat, every grain from its shroud in the dark-brown fields uprisen, / Passing the apple-tree blows of white and pink in the orchard” (460). The birth of these symbols—the primary lilacs and the secondary pastoral images that, as we will see, always seems to cling to them—signals the re-birth of a nation, though it does so in a pocket of childhood innocence that even this poem shows to be strained, with that very different “going forth” of the drunkard, and, later in the poem, the figure of a “father… manly, mean, anger’d, unjust” and the “doubts of day-time and the doubts of night-time, the curious whether and how” (492-493).
When lilacs appear again late in Whitman’s career, however, they go largely unrecognized. It would seem that after the “cedars dusk and dim” of the Lincoln elegy, lilacs do little more than serve as a reminder of that harrowing act of sacrifice and promised recovery. Lilacs, for example, make a quiet return in a telling revision of
“This Compost.” Originally published in the second edition of Leaves (1856) under the title “Poem of Wonder at the Resurrection of The Wheat,” “This Compost” began as a poem of personal existential crisis in which the poet negotiates his fear of death and dissolution before recommitting himself to nature’s regenerative powers.60 By the time he published the fifth edition of Leaves in 1871, Whitman had traded a roughly chronological arrangement of his poems for one structured thematically around the central crisis of the Civil War. “This Compost” proved remarkably adaptable, moving beyond its founding pre-war moment of personal crisis and migrating to a distinctly post-war position as it took on the symbolic resonance that lilacs held after the war.
“This Compost” begins with a bold renunciation as the poet refuses the intimate, charged contact and union with nature so central to his poetic vision: “I will
60 In this, it resembles the better-known crisis poem “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking.”
Vander Zee 180 not strip the clothes from my body… / I will not touch my flesh to the earth” (495).
The governing conceit of the poem asks how spring can seem so glorious when it disguises all the “distemper’d corpses within you.” Whitman cannot remain aloof for long, however. What Jed Rasula has described as a Whitmanian necropoetics might be better described as a kind of figurative necrophilia as Whitman enacts an aggressive, effortful recovery in this poem, turning to “run a furrow with my plow… press my spade through the sod and turn it up underneath” to uncover “the foul meat.”61 The images that follow resemble many nature catalogue in Whitman, but echo “There Was a Child Went Forth” and “Lilacs” most explicitly:
Behold this compost! Behold it well! Perhaps every mite has once form’d part of a sick person—yet behold! The grass of spring covers the prairies, The bean bursts noiselessly through the mould in the garden, The delicate spear of the onion pierces upward, The apple-buds cluster together on the apple branches, The resurrection of the wheat appears with pale visage out of its graves, The tinge awakes over the willow-tree and the mulberry-tree, The he-birds carol mornings and evening while the she-birds sit on their nests, The young of poultry break through the hatch’d eggs, The new-born of animals appear, the calf is dropped from the cow, the colt from the mare, Out of its little hill faithfully ruse the potato’s dark green leaves, Out of its hill rises the yellow maize-stalk, the lilacs bloom in the dooryard The summer growth is innocent and disdainful above all those strata of sour dead. (495-96)
Whitman’s “Lilacs” borrows from the pastoral catalogue that this poem shares with
“There Was a Child,” discussed above, as it replays images witnessed alongside
Lincoln’s funeral train “[p]assing the yellow-spear’d wheat” and “the apple-tree blows of white and pink in the orchards.” “This Compost,” in turn, borrows for its post-Civil
61 See Rasula 64-68.
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War revision a significant element lacking in the 1856 version of the poem: the lilacs blooming in the dooryard. With that delicate placement of lilacs in the post-war version of the poem, and the eventual migration of “This Compost” to the self- consciously late “Autumn Rivulets” cluster of the 1881 edition of Leaves (following the war-saturated Drum-Taps cluster and other poems in memory of Lincoln),
Whitman signals a subtle post-war recovery effort, quietly turning this poem of personal crisis into a national elegy. The image of the “distemper’d corpses” and the
“strata of sour dead” riddling the ground in “This Compost” found its true locating ground in the devastating effects of a war that Whitman witnessed in the hospital, the damaged vistas of which would have become very familiar to him in what was the first extensively photographed war. The lilacs emerge in “This Compost” to enact the symbolic force of renewal as the poem moves from crisis to recovery. Near the end of the poem, the poet can only marvel—“What chemistry!”—as it works toward its inevitable recovery. Though the earth, in a powerful anticipation T.S. Eliot’s April in
The Waste Land, “grows such sweet things out of such corruptions,” it also, as
Whitman writes in the poem’s final lines, “renews with such unwitting looks its prodigal, annual, sumptuous crops,” and “gives such divine materials to men, and accepts such leavings from the last” (497).
Lilacs make a more momentous return in the explicit coda to his famous
Lincoln elegy in “Warble for Lilac-Time,” first published in Galaxy in 1870 before earning a spot in the 1871 edition of Leaves. In quietly epic gesture, Whitman begins by invoking himself:
Warble me now for joy of lilac-time, (returning in reminiscence)
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Sort me O tongue and lips for Nature’s sake, souvenirs of earliest summer. (505)
Turning to the muse of himself, Whitman would seem to complete the progression of the lilac topos from the threshold experience of entering the world, through suffering and consolation, and finally, here, to reminiscence and consolidation. Notably devoid of both people and pain—we witness nothing resembling the Lincoln elegy’s “debris and debris” in this blithe recapitulation—the poem dutifully poses a confident answer to the question Whitman raised in section 10 of that earlier poem: “O how shall I warble myself for the dead one there I loved? / And how shall I deck my song for the large sweet soul that has gone?” Whitman’s warble, however, exchanges the personal drama of the Lincoln elegy for a less troubled rehearsal of its pastoral, spring-time imagery. The “Floods of the yellow gold of the gorgeous, indolent, sinking sun, burning, expanding in air” that arrive with all their present-participial energy in
“Lilacs,” for example, become the later warble’s rather stilted “tranquil sunny haze, the clinging smoke, the vapor.” The mood is serene, subdued, and commemorative.
The gorgeous floods of light in the earlier poem’s sinking sun become the afterglow of a tranquil, sunny haze in the later “Warble” as elegy lingers like some “clinging smoke” or “vapor.” After cataloging the “welcome signs” of spring with this pastiche of images from “Lilacs,” Whitman reinforces the poem’s consolatory mechanism, ending with a repetition of the first line, the conclusion to which now emerges from its earlier parenthetical enclosure: “Warble me now for joy of lilac time, returning in reminiscence” (506).
The act of remembrance is no longer an aside, a diminished parenthetical reference to a prior act of consolation; rather, the poetics of reprise both remembers
Vander Zee 183 and extends a previous value, making remembrance monumental. M. Wynn Thomas, one of the few critics to address this poem, asks his readers “why on earth… are these marvelously poignant lines not better known? It is after all a passage brimming with emotion—or rather, with many emotions—and the reference to ‘When Lilacs’ is of course central to them all” (The Lunar Light 242). Most readers, I suspect, are turned off by what draws Thomas to this poem: the “sense of the creation’s perennially innocent renewal of itself in beauty.” To paraphrase Pollak’s sense of Whitman’s late work from the previous chapter: after the cedars dusk and dim of Whitman’s “Lilacs,” there truly does seem nothing left here to obscure, here or elsewhere, a lack of tension for which a putative return to innocence can seem an escape for both critic and poet.
Thomas, however, duly returns this poem safely to the Adamic innocence it craves.
The evolution of lilacs up to this point in Whitman’s career suggests, writ small, Whitman’s ideal career model as structured by a romantic sense of lateness: what passes through consolation, however strained, becomes consecrated by repetition, and, most important, an effortless transcendence. And where lilacs fail to appear is almost as telling as where they do. In a discarded post-war fragment dating from the mid 1860s, Whitman writes of “Ashes of heroes [^soldiers], / blended with ashes of roses / & lilacs” (“Ashes of heroes”). The fragment was never incorporated into his revisions for Drum-Taps (1865), signaling a need to save the lilac from the flames, somehow preserving its inexhaustible symbolic force, removing it from the scene of martial sacrifice just as the “Warble” discussed above wipes its surface clean of the carnage it nevertheless cannot help but recall.
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This work of preservation proved difficult, especially as Whitman’s was a long leave-taking. Whitman, after all, wrote his poem “So Long!”—the poem that would conclude Leaves proper up to the Deathbed edition—already in 1860. His subsequent work includes a long string of goodbyes, on obsessive valedictory gesture that deserves an essay in its own right. In his 1876 “Preface” to the centennial edition of
Leaves, Whitman’s self-conscious sense of lateness had become explicit: “At the eleventh hour, under grave illness,” Whitman dramatically intones, “I gather up the pieces of Prose and Poetry” (Prose Works 1, 744). Echoing Dowden’s urge towards transcendence over worldly matters, Whitman writes: “Has not the time come, indeed, in the development of the New World, when its Politics should ascend into atmospheres and regions hitherto unknown— (far, far different from the miserable business that of late and current years passes under that name)—and take rank with
Science, Philosophy and Art?” (PW 747). After the crisis years, Whitman longed for an elevated politics, a pure form democracy: “the true growth-characteristics of the
Democracy of the New World are henceforth to radiate in superior Literary, Artistic and Religious Expressions, far more than in its republican forms, universal suffrage, and frequent elections.” This premature closing argument had been well-rehearsed already in his long essay, Democratic Vistas (1871), which deploys a Hegelian script to announce the coming national unity, an ideal transcendence that signaled what
Whitman called a New World metaphysics and a grand cosmic politics.62
It is not that Whitman failed to voice his deep political discontent. Indeed, his
Vistas boldly call out the evils that lingered in the wake of a fragile post-war union.
62 For more on Whitman’s infatuation with, and use of, Hegelian idealism, see Haddox; Reynolds (253- 255; 480-483); and Lindberg.
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He moves far beyond the “miserable business” that he later tucks into parenthesis in his 1876 Preface, offering something like an American Jeremiad:63
Never was there, perhaps, more hollowness at heart than at present, and here in the United States. Genuine belief seems to have left us. The underlying principles of the States are not honestly believ’d in nor is humanity believ’d in…. We live in an atmosphere of hypocrisy throughout…. The depravity of our business classes of our country is not less than has been supposed, but infinitely greater. The official services of America, national , state, and municipal, in all their branches and departments, except the judiciary is tainted. The great cities reek with respectable as much as non-respectable robbery and scoundrelism. (CPP 937)
Yet if, as some have argued and as this passage makes clear, the realities of post-Civil
War America made a more disengaged and romanticized thinking much less feasible, these very realities formed the impetus behind Whitman’s own sense of a removed and idealized lateness. Real solutions were not the order of the day; instead, Whitman called for a literature that might rise up to the task of creating a national identity.
Whitman responds to this crisis of faith with utter confidence: “the problem of humanity all over the civilized world is social and religious, and is to be finally met and treated by literature. The priest departs, the divine literatus comes” (932). If the resurgent union that was to emerge after the Civil War never arrived—stymied by a botched reconstruction, sullied by the excesses and abuses of the Gilded Age, and marked by an appetite for empire—Whitman was not waiting around for it. In light of this sustained effort at transcendence, the symbolic force of Whitman’s lilacs as they continue to reemerge in his late work begins to show signs of wear. But as these lilacs last, they become less an effect of conservative consolidation, and more of a rankling, elegiac remainder revealing the persistence of loss rather than an escape from it.
63 See Balakian for more on this sense of (to borrow the title of his essay) “Whitman as Jeremiah.”
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Lilacs make what seems an almost accidental appearance in Whitman’s “Song of the Exposition,” a poem originally written for the National Industrial Exposition of the American Institute in 1871. A paean to progress, Whitman’s poem begins by summoning the muse of industry—“all the world of works, trade, products”—and proceeds to survey the modern industrial wonders:
Earth’s modern wonder, history’s seven outstripping, High rising tier on tier with glass and iron facades, Gladdening the sun and sky, enhued in cheerfulest hues, Bronze, lilac, robin’s-egg, marine and crimson… (345)
It is precisely the demotion of the lilac topos that we must note here as this central elegiac counter enters here merely to adorn industry: it is a color rather than the flower itself. Later in the poem, Whitman echoes this demotion of lilacs by willing away the central, violent drama of his personal and poetic life: “Away with themes of war! away with war itself! / Hence from my shuddering sight to never more return that show of blacken’d, mutilated corpses!” (346). The mundane, almost cynical, placement of lilacs stalls the rush of progress and movement beyond. Elegy lingers and haunts. Lilacs, tossed in as a mere embellishment of progress might seem the economic obverse of elegy, but their persistent elegiac force remains.
Having established this backdrop for Whitman’s lilacs, we can revisit
Whitman’s late Spring song “Out of May’s Shows Selected,” discussed at the start of
Chapter 1, with an eye towards this evolving floral topos:
Apple orchards, the trees all cover’d with blossoms; Wheat fields carpeted far and near in vital emerald green; The eternal, exhaustless freshness of each early morning; The yellow, golden, transparent haze of the warm afternoon sun; The aspiring lilac bushes with profuse purple or white flowers. (617)
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In that earlier chapter, I claimed that this poem demands a different kind of attention, a critical ear willing to hear that what remains utterly desolate in this poem arrives not in a heavy music of despondency, but pulses instead in subtle counterpoint underneath the poems dulcet tones. From the inverted syntax of the title, through the eclipsing of particular vision in the poem’s demoted catalogue, and culminating in the freighted re- emergence of Whitman’s lilacs, I suggested, this poem offers a glimpse of the alienated and revisionary force that forms a resistant sub-section of Whitman’s late work even as it seems a contented rehearsal of an old optimism ever faithful, ever renewed. Whitman, here, becomes the poet of ‘or,’ an indecisive operator that refuses a cumulative progressive vision, inviting us instead to look askance, to see otherwise.
The sparse catalogue in this poem arrives as a veritable pastiche of lilacs past.
The signature expansive catalogue contracts here, worn down to a kind of formal ruin, a mere remnant of former sentiment and conviction. The apple orchards and wheat fields appear in consecutive order both in both “There Was a Child Went Forth” and
“This Compost,” just as they do in the Lincoln elegy. In this late iteration, they are crisply recalled with a specificity of vision and a finely modulated tone. While the first two lines hold this resonant echo together, the sun-drenched images from “Lilacs” and his subsequent “Warble”—where he sees the “Floods of the yellow gold of the gorgeous, indolent, sinking sun, burning, expanding in air” and, in the later poem, the
“tranquil sunny haze, the clinging smoke, the vapor”—appear in a distinctly allegorical landscape in this poem’s durative image of “eternal, exhaustless freshness” that precedes the clotted vision of a “yellow, golden, transparent haze of the warm afternoon sun.” Here, we sense the unreal, paradisal lasting that would prompt
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Wallace Stevens to ask, in terms echoing the classical image of late style as perfectly ripened fruit that Adorno so decried: “Does ripe fruit never fall? Or do the boughs /
Hang always heavy in that perfect sky?” (69). Compared to the effortful recovery that
“This Compost” and other poems of crisis enact, “Out of May’s Shows Selected” arrives as a stilted, reduced, and paratactic version of precedent songs. Removed from the relentless economy of crisis and consolation, Whitman’s momentous return to lilacs in his very late work—the unsure, tentative presence of those “purple or white flowers”—offers an iconic resistance to their prior consolatory form. If this poem looks back to the elegiac context of “Lilacs,” then it does so not to retrieve that consolation, but to mourn its disintegrating efficacy. The lilacs are, for once, unrealized, drained of their symbolic, healing force, a concluding gesture that falls flat.
One might think of Emerson’s “Experience,” here, and his candid admission that “the only thing grief has taught me, is to know how shallow it is. That, like all the rest, plays about the surface, and never introduces me into the reality, for contact with which, we would even pay the costly price of sons and lovers” (29). In a similar way, what Whitman mourns here is finally the inability to mourn—the inability of
Lincoln’s sacrifice to pay for the atrophied politics left in its wake—as elegy fades into allegory. If, as some critics have argued, Whitman’s prophetic vision moves in the late work to a more pointed and particular visual register, then “Out of May’s Shows
Selected” does not participate in this new sense of vision as it offers only an estranged and alienated way of seeing. What it opens for us is a finally damaged vista.
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When lilacs appear for the final time in Whitman’s work, they do so in
“Mirages” from Good-Bye my Fancy, a poem that follows this depleted vision into a landscape riddled with artifice. The poem has never, as far as I can tell, been discussed, much less acknowledged, but critics. One of those poems never isolated as a late “gem” in accounts of the late work, its quietly strange restaging of lilacs has escaped attention. The prefatory gloss on the poem tells the reader that it is “Noted verbatim after a supper-talk outdoors in Nevada with two old miners,” though
Whitman had never traveled further west than Denver. In the poem itself, which arrives in one, long sentence, Whitman attempts a certain dialect, a certain western lilt:
More experiences and sights, stranger, than you’d think for; Time again, now mostly just after sunrise or before sunset, Sometimes in spring, oftener in autumn, perfectly clear weather, in plain sight, Camps far or near, the crowded streets of cities and the shop-fronts, (Account for it or not—credit or not—it is all true, / And my mate there could tell you the like—we have often confab’d about it,) People and scenes, animals, trees, colors and lines, plain as could be, Farms and dooryards of home, paths border’d with box, lilacs in corners, Wedding in churches, thanksgiving dinners, returns of long-absent sons, Glum funerals, the crape-veil’d mother and the daughters, Trials in courts, jury and judge, the accused in the box, Contestants, battled crowds, bridges, wharves, Now and then mark’d faces of sorrow or joy, (I could pick them out this moment if I saw them again,) Show’d to me just aloft to the right in the sky-edge, / Or plainly thereto the left on the hill-tops. (652)
The desert landscape in which the miners work—digging deep for their necessary materials while conjuring consoling mirages on the horizon—seems a carefully wrought conceit for Whitman’s own lateness. The images resurrected, of course, are
Whitman’s own, more or less. In addition to the basic stuff of Whitman’s early catalogues—animals and trees, people and scenes, faces of sorrow and joy—we catch more particular echoes, such as the “crape-veil’d women” who also appeared in
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“When Lilacs Last,” alongside, of course, the persistent lilacs themselves, which arrive here through layers or artifice. Whitman mines his memory for such matter but can summon only a distant echo of consolation as the lilacs arrive in a fictional vision, within a conversation that never happened, within a poem that identifies itself only as a “Mirage”—a poem that arrives, moreover, as secondary annex left hanging off the edges of Leaves proper. To say that Whitman’s lilacs are demoted is to state the obvious. But they offer a certain truth, and a certain clue to what Liu calls “the history not there.” In the lasting of Whitman’s lilacs, we see how, to borrow Jim Hansen’s succinct statement on the lessons of Benjaminian allegory, “Form decays historically; its truth is its loss, its historical decay” (673). Whitman’s lilacs deny the supreme act of post-war reconciliation that they were originally deployed to ensure, becoming instead a sign of exile from the crisis of the Civil War and its divisive aftermath.
Rather than the myth of Whitman’s decline, we see Whitman’s self-recognition in failure, his consciousness of loss, his melancholy debris.
The poignant devolution of Whitman’s lilacs appear as just one isolated facet of a more widespread trend in his late work, and they offer a key, therefore, to reading his late forms. Maintaining a macro-formal approach to the lasting of certain symbols or images across his career, one might turn to Whitman’s obsessive deployment of nautical metaphors. Robert Creeley, in his late essay on Whitman, seems to hint at such an approach when he puzzles over the strange conceit that concludes Whitman’s late poem, “You Tides with Ceaseless Swell” (1886). In that poem, Whitman, asking the sea and the mysterious pull of the tides for the secret of their power, supplies his own grasping, questioning figure: “What subtle indirection and significance in you?
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What clue you? What fluid, vast identity, / Holding the universe with all its parts as one—as sailing in a ship?” (618). Whitman’s unsure, truncated conceit could stand alongside his lilacs as a kind of master-trope for his late form. Indeed, the figure revisits, however obliquely, the foundational Whitmanian problematic of the one and the many, which Whitman posits not as a confident both/and proposition, but as a markedly unsure and questioning figure, unable, formally, to hold the poem’s explicit existential and muted political crises together at once.
Nautical images suffuse Whitman’s work, forming a kind of composite allegory dispersed among otherwise unrelated poems. In many poems, the ship takes on the political metaphor of the ship of state—an image that recurs in such poems as
“O Captain! My Captain!” and “Aboard at a Ship’s Helm.” In such poems, Whitman unfurls the metaphor to embody leadership and control. This nautical resonance coexists with the existential metaphor of the ship of life—an image, apparent in such poems as “Old Age’s Ship and Crafty’s Death’s” and “Passage to India,” that figures life’s end as a final voyage, a departure from what would seem the concerns of state:
“a passage,” he writes, “to more than India” (539). But no nautical poem in Whitman’s oeuvre seems more relevant here than “The Dismantled Ship,” one of Whitman’s seldom discussed late efforts.
In “The Dismantled Ship,” one of the most tightly structured soundscapes to be found in Whitman’s poetry, Whitman speaks to the ruin of the political journey he had advocated, and to the existential journey that is coming to a close. The poem eschews typical Whitmanian rhetorical framing, as though it was wrenched, as those images
Vander Zee 192 from “Out of May’s Shows,” out of some sad catalogue. The dual nautical metaphors of politics and physiology settle here into a mournful allegorical stasis:
In some unused lagoon, some nameless bay, On sluggish, lonesome waters, anchor’d near the shore, An old, dismasted, gray and batter’d ship, disabled, done, After free voyages to all the seas of the earth, haul’d up at last and hawser’d tight, Lies rusting, moldering. (634)
The formal control here is remarkable. The smooth iambs of the first three lines— growing from a line of pentameter to hexameter to an epic fourteener—seem almost unrecognizable at first.64 These are not the rollicking iambs, the incessant binary metrics of a Longfellow whose “sickness of verbal melody” Whitman damned with faint praise in his Specimen Days (Prose Works 1, 289). As Whitman’s fourteener draws to a close, the fourth line—the poem’s longest and least metrical—resembles a typically Whitmanian free-verse line as it summons the lost idea of those “free voyages.” It turns out to be a specious departure, however, a mirage perhaps, as the rhythm is again battened down in the end by a train of iambs: “haul’d UP at LAST and
HAWsr’d TIGHT.” The poem, approaching an abrupt terminus, pointedly enjambs into its final resting place, where the present-participial energy that propelled so much of Whitman’s earlier verse lies in a kind of ocean grave.
Whitman liked to think of his dingy Camden bedroom as a kind of ship’s cabin. He had an old salvaged ship’s wheel mounted on the wall; his floor was a vast archival sea of papers; when, very late in life, Whitman received a waterbed to ease his pain, he fancied himself very much “like a ship” (WWC 9: 594). In another late
64 I call this an epic fourteener because Whitman’s long line is often associated with his own epic poetic ambition, but more specifically because the fourteener—a line of seven iambic feet—was famously used in George Chapman’s popular translation of Homer’s Iliad.
Vander Zee 193 poem, however, these compounding nautical metaphors find a release of sorts from their bodily terminus in the corpus of the late work itself, its unsung potential. “A Font of Type” transmutes these bodily remains into the pure futurity of text even as it hints at its own ciphered, latent meanings. The poem, as with many of the more often ignored items in Whitman’s late work, is disarmingly complex, the poem’s conceit itself is as fine as anything Donne hammered out, or, to borrow his own figure, “to aery thinness beat”:
This latent mine—these unlaunch’d voices—passionate powers, Wrath, argument, or praise, or comic leer, or prayer devout, (Not nonpareil, brevier, bourgeois, long primer merely,) These ocean waves arousable to fury and to death, Or sooth’d to ease and sheeny sun and sleep, Within the pallid slivers slumbering. (614)
Whitman here exceeds the great many poems of old age from his contemporaries that that figure life as a ship’s journey, including Emerson’s “Terminus,” Tennyson’s
“Crossing the Bar” and “Ulysses,” and Longfellow’s sonnet “Old Age” to name a few.
Indeed, Whitman seems to look much further back here even as he looks dimly into the future. In its backwards glance, Whitman’s late poem echoes the durable trope of the storm-tossed lover. More specifically, it forms a remarkable echo of Thomas
Wyatt’s translation of Petrarch’s famous sonnet 189, bringing that poem to life in an entirely new way. “My galley charged with forgetfulness…” Wyatt’s s translation begins, “with every owre a thought in readiness / As though that death were light in such a case” (81).
Whitman’s poem obliquely echoes Wyatt here. “Galley” is, of course, another word for the printer’s case in which letters being composed are stored. To someone who spent as much time in printing houses as did Whitman, the sonnet’s metaphor of
Vander Zee 194 the storm-tossed lover—already a cliché for Wyatt in the first half of the 16th century—must have barely veiled its anxious meditation on the emerging print culture.
Whitman’s “latent mine” of fonts also helps us hear Wyatt’s metallic pun—“every owre a thought in readiness”—just as the tension between the material body in age and its hopeful literary apotheosis in Whitman’s poem comes to life in Wyatt’s sardonic statement: “As though death were light in such a case.” If Whitman’s literary corpus, along with all its hopes for the ascendance of self and society, terminates in “some unused lagoon, some nameless bay” of his “Dismasted Ship,” his body of work survives in those pallid slivers slumbering where we might find wrath, argument, or praise, or comic leer, or prayer devout. This is Whitman’s true swan song: a life composted and a life composed, as Ed Folsom has noted, at the tip of a compositor’s stick (Whitman Making Books / Books Making Whitman). Looking to the literary futures it also subtly courts, “A Font of Type” casts the late work precisely as a latent mine holding the unlaunched voices of Whitman’s lateness as it sounds out the resistant energies of his life’s work, a work whose unsure, undecidable, still- slumbering significance seemed a crucial element of their lasting.
Once we have become more attuned to what Whitman’s lateness looks like, one begins to notice poem after poem whose range of expression is at odds both with the typical late poem of softly voiced, sentimental synthesis, and with the fundamental ideology of progress that supposedly drives Whitman’s career from beginning to end.
“Continuities,” a poem from “Sands at Seventy,” the first annex to Leaves but originally published in November Boughs (1888), for example, offers an interesting example. The first unusual feature here is the italicized parenthetical between the title
Vander Zee 195 and the poem: “[from a talk I had lately with a German spiritualist]” (626). Whitman is not usually one to gloss a poem, though he does so increasingly in his later poetry to provide a historical backdrop for his numerous occasional pieces, perhaps a response the generic demands of newspaper verse. But this gloss is unique for the way it instantiates a distance between the poet and the poem’s core message—an unprecedented act of poetic outsourcing for a poet who always strove to embody his message.
“‘Going Somewhere’,” an elegy for Whitman’s close friend Anne Gilchrist, enacts a similar displacement. With the title in quotes—the only poem in Whitman’s oeuvre to be so contained—Whitman begins the poem by introducing “My science- friend, my noblest woman-friend, / (Now buried in an English grave—and this a memory-leaf for her dear sake,) / Ended our talk,” and then he continues to quote a message whose basic point is that “we are all onward, onward, speeding slowly, surely bettering […] all surely going somewhere” (627). This poem’s message, not only mediated by another presence, but literally voiced by another, no longer seems
Whitman’s own. In “Song of Myself,” Whitman had confidently proclaimed that “All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses / And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier” (194). It is tempting to say, as Asselineau argues about the late work more generally, that Whitman here only repeats what he had formerly proclaimed in a more stentorian voice. But to make that argument, one must elide the intentionality and control that Asselineau also grants to Whitman’s late work. The voicing itself in this late poem seems purposefully unremarkable with its dual hedging
“surely’s” and such confused descriptors as “speeding slowly.” That this poem was
Vander Zee 196 scrawled out on the reverse side of a letter asking the poet where he might publish his well-received lecture on Lincoln makes this poem the elusive and confounding obverse of broader national elegy.65 A number of Whitman’s late works similarly opt for thick artifice over absorption, theatricality over performativity, allegory over symbol, absence over presence. And this is where Whitman’s lateness resides.
Whitman, in various poses of humility, worried over the status of his late works, asking himself, in the preface to Good-Bye my Fancy (1891): “Had I not better withhold (in this old age and paralysis of me) such little tags and fringe-dots (maybe specks, stains)?” (Prose Works 2: 736). In the prose epilogue to that collection, however, Whitman answers himself in a pointedly distancing third-person voice, declaring that “the book is garrulous, irascible (like old Lear) and has various breaks and even tricks to avoid monotony. It will have to be ciphered and ciphered out long— and is probably in some respects the most curious part of its author’s baffling works”
(740). That ciphering has now begun.
Beyond Crisis and Recovery
In a recent piece of personal correspondence, M. Wynn Thomas posed an important question in light of the revisionary sense of Whitman’s lateness that I propose here. “Given your highlighting of the misgivings that haunted Walt in old age
(and I’m in complete agreement with you there, of course),” he asks, “in what way are these different (as you seem to imply) from those that had shadowed his optimistic vision all along, and that had grown perceptively darker and more persistent ever since
65 Cavitch, in his essay “Audience Terminable and Interminable,” notes this fascinating manuscript history, though fails to note the layers of artifice that make this elegy not a mere proxy elegy to Lincoln, but an expression of elegy’s unsure endurance.
Vander Zee 197 the Civil War?” The question emerges from a certain reluctance to trade a more nuanced reading of the late work for a less supple one of the early work, as though one could simply rewrite Whitman’s role in the drama of innocence and experience sketched out by Lewis in The American Adam. Whitman’s early work is full of resistance, full of doubt. If ideas of allegory allow us to see what accrues to
Whitman’s poetic materials, showing them to be increasingly haunted, this new knowledge also shadows the earlier work. From the prospect of lateness, therefore,
Whitman’s early lilacs emerge already under great allegorical pressure, just as the more confident faith in inevitable progress that Whitman voices in “Song of Myself” and elsewhere must appear now shrouded by Whitman’s distinctly less enthusiastic recasting of that sentiment in “‘Going Somewhere’.” And even as Whitman’s late work casts a shadow over his earlier, more optimistic chants, it also echoes the darker energies that were always present in the poet’s work. We might note the acerbic prose of “The 18th Presidency” (1856), which in one section refers to would-be congressmen as follows:
Office-holders, office-seekers, robbers, pimps, exclusives, malignants, conspirators, murderers, fancy-men… blind men, deaf men, pimpled men, scarred inside with the vile disorder, gaudy outside with gold chains made from the people’s money and harlot’s money twisted together; crawling serpentine men, the lousy combings and born freedom sellers of the earth. (CPP 1314)
Or, we might look to the seemingly anomalous and unhinged poetics of “Respondez!” whose anarchic howls scholars still don’t seem to know how to approach:
Let all the men of These States stand aside for a few mouchers! Let the few seize on what they choose! Let the rest gawk, giggle and starve, obey! Let shadows be furnished with genitals! Let substances be deprived of their genitals!
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Let there be immense cities—but through any of them, not a single poet, saviour, knower, lover! (CRE 593)
Or, again, we might look to the expurgated fragmentary cluster-form of “Debris,” which, in its ominous call of death, in its unresolved fear of age, becomes, then, not merely an extension of the innovative collage technique that Whitman inaugurated in his early notebooks and the first edition of Leaves, but a harbinger of a less confidently conclusive and controlled poetics, an understanding of which will become only more crucial as we approach the late work and that work’s haunting presence across the long American century.66
Though such poems seem clear outliers amidst the early work, they inaugurate a poetics of debris—“duly the needed discord-parts offsetting, blending” (CPP 619), as Whitman writes in another late poem—that would gradually transmute into the allegorical texture of Whitman’s lateness. Against the diachronic drift of so much
Whitman criticism, it is time to take a more insinuating backwards glance, to begin with Whitman’s lateness and that works more shadowed and haunted unfolding.
Rather than take these poems as unconscious evidence of Whitman’s struggles, we might take them as a more purposefully evolved formal means to express precisely those elements—those charged remains—that cannot be contained within the narrative of that broader recuperative economy of crisis and recovery that so often predominates in Whitman’s poetry and its reception.
66 Matt Miller’s Collage of Myself: Walt Whitman and the Making of Leaves of Grass (2010) explores the poet’s innovative collage technique, focusing on the early notebooks and the first edition of Leaves as a way to again explain the aesthetic principles behind the miracle of that first edition. I would extend this conversation about Whitman’s collage technique to the later work, reading this early collage technique to an anticipation of what we now call serial form. “Debris” is, I would suggest, the first major serial poem in English, and its suggestion of scatter and disintegration models nonlinear, antiprogressive logic that writers from George Oppen and Williams Carlos Williams to Langston Hughes to Robet Creeley found so useful in giving their own words and worlds significant form.
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Whether discussing Whitman’s critical reception, biographical lives, or his body of work, I have urged that we, as critics and readers, make the poet’s late work and life central rather than merely supplementary. It is crucial that we value the late work and seize the epistemic vantage it affords as we reread Whitman’s oeuvre in and through that lateness. But this revised sense of Whitman’s late work does much more than simply refresh our backward glance; it transforms, as well, how we view
Whitman’s influence as it persists across the long American century. It is to this question of influence that I turn in the final chapter.
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CHAPTER 4
WHITMAN’S LATENESS FROM MODERN TO CONTEMPORARY
When Whitman offered those lilacs in his Lincoln elegy, he could not have anticipated their persistence across his own body of work, much less their perennial flowering across subsequent poetries. But he knew that the work of mourning endured:
“I mourn’d, and yet shall mourn,” he writes in his Lincoln elegy (CPP 459). “Every poem an epitaph,” T.S. Eliot confirms in his Four Quartets as modernism entered its own late phase (208). It is, Michael Palmer echoes at the start of our own century, “as if elegy were endless” (Moths 37). Though Whitman anticipated what one critic has called the broader “elegiac temper” of the long American century, he has most often been sealed off from the resistant, melancholic intensities that so often comprise it.67
Whitman endures as the utopian other of an ineluctably elegiac present, a figure somehow lost to us.
Just as scholars have been slow to recognize and value Whitman’s late work on its own terms, those concerned with charting the poet’s continuing presence have had little to say about how that late work and its presiding genius—Whitman in age—has quietly informed subsequent poetries. These dual oversights are closely linked: the first avoidable neglect has prevented a deeper subsequent engagement. Many critics have identified in Whitman’s late work an example of successful mourning marked by a resolution, however attenuated and perfunctory, of personal and political losses.
67 John Vickery deploys this phrase throughout his The Modern Elegiac Temper (2006).
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Challenging this critical common sense, the Chapter 3 recovered the overlooked but persistent state of crisis in Whitman’s post-war work: its self-consciousness as failure and ruin; its uncanny propensity to annotate the distance between the ideal and the real; its reluctance to invest fully in ideals of progress, whether personal, spiritual, or national; its refusal neatly to replicate the steady cycle of crisis and recovery that might otherwise seem the master-trope of his poetic and political imagination. These diverse melancholic energies give his late work an allegorical insight that not only revises standard accounts of Whitman in age, but also suggest new ways to read
Whitman’s continuing presence.
As we shift our attention from the lasting of a poetic practice across a career to a durable poetics of influence, we move from late Whitman to a more capacious focus on Whitman’s lateness, a word I use in a deliberately capacious manner to move from the aesthetic concerns of his late work and the material considerations that shaped it, to the twined senses of elegy and age that mark Whitman’s reputation as it lasts across the twentieth century and beyond. I begin this chapter by rehearsing how key modernist poets managed the deep sense of loss that marks modernity by what
Freudian mourning theory would deem the successful work of mourning. That is, they directed their old attachments towards a new language, and new solutions, that might answer or correct what William Carlos Williams famously called Whitman’s
“magnificent failure” (Selected Letters 135). The modernists’ success in mourning
Whitman appears more illusory than actual, however, and they come to prefigure, increasingly in their own late work, post-World War II poetry’s chronically melancholic response to the American bard. Tracing Whitman’s influence through
Vander Zee 202 modernism and up to the present, then, this chapter argues that the deepening
Whitmanian melancholy in the post-war era, while debilitating in itself, has made available an eventual recognition of Whitman not as a distant poet speaking for a lost
America—a “Glorious mistake,” in Robert Duncan’s phrase (Opening 64)—but as a partner in historical and personal loss.
Thus, while a depressive, constraining, and passive relationship with a fading
Whitmanian idealism continues to consume many poets from Allen Ginsberg and
Robert Duncan to Michael Palmer and Robert Hass, I sense the possibilities of a more intentional and actionable melancholic orientation empowered by knowledge of what, precisely, has been lost. Reading subsequent poetries through the lens of Whitman’s damaged vista, I note how certain poets have begun to rewrite the static elegiac script that isolates Whitman as an emblem of paradise now lost. Instead, they repurpose the forms and themes that emerge in Whitman’s late work to address pressing personal and political crises. This has been most evident in the late work of C.K. Williams and
Robert Creeley, whose echoing lateness answers Whitman’s own in precisely these ways. Imitation, in this case, is the sincerest form of elegy, and both reveal a model of late work freed from the necessity of novelty and the urge towards self-transcendence.
A similar awareness of Whitman’s lateness is beginning to emerge, as well, in mid- career poets such as D.A. Powell, who powerfully incorporates the strains of
Whitman’s late form into his own work. Thus, if bearing the melancholic weight of
Whitman’s elegiac influence has become a merely comfortable pose for many of their peers, these poets are beginning to exceed these limitations, releasing Whitman from
Vander Zee 203 his role as a lost best hope for American poetry as the knowledge of loss impacted in
Whitman’s late work comes obliquely into view.
“‘Too lovingly triumphant, and too large’”: Influence as Elegy
If critics have never fully acknowledged the revisionary force of Whitman’s late work, how, then, does one begin to chart an influence that was never fully granted, that proceeds, to borrow a few key words from Whitman’s own poetics, via suggestion and indirection? We can gauge the presence of Whitman’s lateness through four non- exclusive registers: the apparitional, the apostrophic, the tropical, and the thematic. As an apparition, an often-aged Whitman appears as an imagined presence within a poem.
While such explicit cameos are relatively rare, conjuring Whitman’s absent via the trope of apostrophe is much more common. In these cases, poets resume a uniquely
Whitmanian dialogue, responding in kind to a poet who frequently called out his to future readers. Perhaps the most famous example, “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” takes such interpersonal crossings between poet and reader across space and time as its central figure. When Whitman is not a rhetorical presence—visualized or voiced— within a poem, he often arrives through certain key Whitmanian figures, his lateness sensed less explicitly via tropical proxy: the mockingbird or the hermit thrush, the fallen star or the regenerative compost, the ship of state and life, the prophetic beard and good gray visage, and, of course, those durable lilacs, which bloom continuously across the long American century as poets recast their relationship to the Whitman as a fundamentally elegiac one.68 Most frequently, however, Whitman’s lateness persists as
68 Critics, at times, have distanced themselves from engaging these more explicit echoes, which Harold Bloom, in his Anxiety of Influence, for example, derisively calls the “wearisome industry of source-
Vander Zee 204 a more diffuse thematic presence. Even as a distinct tradition of talking back to
Whitman persists, his influence has simultaneously become so much a part of the poetic ether that poets cannot help but respond to him.69 In the context of the present project, I sense this presence whenever a poet deals with the ideological weight of
America, with what it means to be an American poet drawn to its ideals, yet shrinking from the many ways it has forgotten those ideals from the start. A mix of nostalgia and complicity, hope and rage, attends the most powerful conflations of poetry and politics after Whitman, and Whitman in age remains the presiding poetic spirit of this vexed national feeling.
This story properly begins, however, not with the heavy residue of what
Gregory Corso calls—it is also the title of his 1970 collection—Elegiac Feelings
American, nor with certain charged Whitmanian tropes, but with the unique kind of poetic conjuring that is the province of elegy itself. A few years after Whitman’s passing, E.A. Robinson, a poet still in his mid-twenties, wrote what would seem a rather conventional elegy in honor of Whitman. “The master-songs are ended,” the poem begins:
and the man That sang them is a name. And so is God A name; and so is love, and life, and death, And everything. (32)
hunting, of allusion counting” (31). Bloom anticipates that such mere diligence will “touch apocalypse anyway as it passes from scholars to computers.” But Bloom fails to distinguish between the mere drudgery of databases from the community-building force of the archive. Seeking only “primal words” never really spoken, Bloom safeguards his own rarified knowledge but fails to recognize the egalitarian ethos—what one might call the democracy of symbols—that enables poetic exchange. 69 This is a common refrain in studies of Whitman’s influence. Roy Harvey Pearce, as noted in the early pages of this study, suggests that American poetry after Whitman is essential a continued argument with Whitman, a theme that motivates Ed Folsom’s Walt Whitman: The Measure of His Song, which traces precisely this kind of “talking back.” As Thomas Gardner puts it in his study of Whitman’s influence on the American long poem: “that Whitman’s influence has been generalized now as one set of tensions within our cultural heritage is perhaps the strongest evidence we have of his continuing ‘presence’” (1).
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Here, Robinson frames his sense of loss in the context of language’s abstracting force: substance recedes into shadow, res into verba, the thing itself into its mere naming.
Whitman, in his death, has entered the degraded realm of mere discourse. In losing
Whitman, Robinson moves on to suggest, we have lost not only a poet, but also a more elemental and grounded way of seeing and understanding:
But we, who are too blind To read what we have written, or what faith Has written for us, do not understand: We only blink and wonder.
The diminishments of discourse and inscription continue, here, to figure Robinson’s sense of loss as a certain epistemological certainty sponsored by Whitman’s presence gives way to the blank stare of ontological dread now that he is gone. Whitman’s death brings an end to both an elemental poetic presence, and to an elemental poetic expression:
Last night it was the song that was the man, But now it is the man that is the song. We do not hear him very much to-day: His piercing and eternal cadence rings Too pure for us—too powerfully pure, Too lovingly triumphant, and too large.
Too and too and too and too: as befits its generic commitments, Robinson’s elegy opens up a severe gap between what has past and what remains. Elegy, in its most basic form, moves from lamentation to consolation through the fraught work of idealization. It is within this crucial middle ground that Robinson’s elegy generates its most compelling drama: how, the elegist must ask, can one idealize without casting the lost figure permanently out of reach? Robinson’s solution is to appeal, in
Whitmanian fashion, to those few comrades, those intimate initiates, who might still
Vander Zee 206 know and understand. Thus, Robinson makes the crucial turn as he works to transmute tragedy into triumph:
But there are some that hear him, and they know That he shall sing to-morrow for all men, And that all time shall listen.
Whitman, here, becomes a messianic presence, his voice released to “all time,” which is also no time: a deferred utopian presence in a fallen world.
Against this fallen world, Robinson tries to recover not only Whitmanian promise, but also the powers of elegiac inscription itself, which must be rescued from the broader ravages of discourse and abstraction. He tries, that is, to recover the viability of elegy itself:
The master-songs are ended? Rather say No songs are ended that are ever sung, And that no names are dead names. When we write Men’s letters on proud marble or on sand, We write them there forever.
Whether or not Robinson successfully recovers the monumental force of elegy in this instance, his self-conscious anxieties about elegiac inscription anticipate the difficulties that the discourse of loss came to face as it became, in the twentieth century, more of a pervasive mood than a particular mode. But more important for our present concerns, Robinson’s poem uncannily captures how this pervasive mood reflects the enduring elegiac economy of Whitman’s influence, an influence predicated upon Whitman’s ineluctable distance across which those few initiates—a Crane here, a Duncan there—struggle to revive, if only for a moment, some fading Whitmanian promise. Whitman has indeed endured, but a significant strain of his influence has come to occupy the fundamentally elegiac structure that Robinson establishes here.
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Thus, even if Robinson manages to close that gap via the idealizing powers of his early elegy, it is precisely this gap—one that elegy creates but cannot resolve—that would define Whitman’s influence in the century to come. Taking this generic affinity a step further, one could argue that Whitman’s continuing presence comprises a sort of composite pastoral elegy with its procession of mourners; its lilac topoi; its invocations and conjuring work; its pastoral interludes, increasingly futile; its scathing, grief-stricken digressions. Whitman’s lateness often resides precisely where influence fades into elegy.
Hewing to the traditional demands of the genre, Robinson apprehends the elegiac intensity of Whitman’s influence. But many of the modernists seem to mourn
Whitman by refusing to mourn at all in a traditional sense as they reject that idealizing tendency so crucial to the genre. Subtly invoking figures of age, certain modernist poets tend to cast Whitman’s influence through figures of obsolescence in terms of both technique and sensibility. The ideal of progress itself, for key modernist writers, involved getting beyond Whitman, and the modernist drive to make it new not only reflects certain embedded ageist attitudes, but also represents a highly efficient mode of mourning indeed. Capturing the broader ethos of modernism as an institution, T.J.
Clark in Farewell to an Idea notes that “what makes modernism great are not… the solutions it offers, needless to say, but its picture of a culture where solutions were still the order of the day” (369). Though Clark is speaking specifically about abstract art, he captures the aesthetic—and extra-aesthetic—ambitions that informed major modernist poets as well. Think of Eliot’s religious turn or Stevens’s supreme fiction,
Pound’s totalitarian politics or Williams’s mania for measure, H.D.’s revisionary
Vander Zee 208 mythmaking or Crane’s visionary history. Even as Whitman’s seemingly relentless faith in such achievable clarity, order and coherence—a faith, as Whitman’s “Song of
Myself” declares, in “form and union and plan” set against “chaos or death” (CPP
87)—would seem to sponsor these modernist ambitions, he was inevitably the curious byproduct of this solutions-oriented modernism, a poetic entity most of the major figures cycled through on their way to something else.
William Carlos Williams—a poet often viewed as a direct descendent, if not a fawning disciple, of the bard—figured his relationship with Whitman within the context of his own maturing poetics. Drawn to Whitman early in his career, he would frame early projects such as Al Que Quiere! (1917) and Spring and All (1923) through strong Whitmanian gestures. In the self-assured epigraph to the former, Williams writes that he has published a book that “the poets of the future will dig for materials as the poets of today dig in Whitman’s ‘Leaves of Grass’” (Collected 1: 480). In
Spring and All, without apparent irony, Williams recasts Whitman’s famous declaration of elemental connection—“every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you” (CPP 27)—when he tells the reader that “In the imagination, we are from henceforth… locked in a fraternal embrace, the classic caress of author and reader. We are one. Whenever I say, ‘I’ I mean also, ‘you’” (Imaginations 89).
But even as Williams held Whitman close at these key moments, he certainly had reservations. These emerge, at first, as a formal complaint decked out in notably ageist rhetoric. In a 1932 letter to Kay Boyle, for example, Williams writes that “free verse—if it ever existed—is out. Whitman was a magnificent failure. He himself in his later stages showed all the terrifying defects of his own method. Whitman to me is one
Vander Zee 209 broom stroke and that is all” (Selected Letters 135). In a letter to Henry Wells almost two decades later, Williams would echo these terms of manual labor, proclaiming that
Whitman “cleaned decks, did very little else” (287). The terms in which this dismissal arrives proves not only Whitman’s passing importance for Williams, but also demonstrates the way in which that passing takes on a certain weight of obsolescence in the context of Whitman’s own work, which, he writes in the earlier letter to Boyle,
“grew into senseless padding, bombast and bathos. His invention ended where it began” (135). Whitman, as Williams writes in a late essay “didn’t know better” and that “the corrective to that is forgetting Whitman” (Selected Essays 339). While these might seem brash dismissals, something of the elegiac clings even to Williams’s criticisms here when we recall the immense value he placed on what he called measure. When Williams writes in the same late essay that “today verse has lost all measure,” we sense a merely formal complaint; when he continues, in the next sentence, lamenting that “our lives also have lost all that in the past we had to measure them by,” we sense more clearly the existential anxieties that so often attend
Williams’s formal concern.
The case of Williams demonstrates the degree to which so many canonical modernists viewed Whitman’s accomplishment as somehow accidental and his influence as an artist negligible. Whitman was a powerful precursor, a fact that these dismissals paradoxically confirm. But the manner in which certain key modernist poets engage Whitman also reveals how, in certain key cases, a sense of an obsolete and aging bard attends these dismissals, suggesting a certain anxiety of obsolescence that must have haunted the modernists. Pound reflects a similar sense of obsolescence
Vander Zee 210 in his “A Pact,” which describes Whitman’s fading importance as a form of lapsed labor: “It is you that broke the new wood,” Pound deferentially concedes, letting
Whitman play the poetic pioneer (Personae 90) But even as he consigns Whitman to the past, sliding from the present (“is”) to the past tense (“broke”), Pound’s pact quickly transforms into something more like a dismissal in the next line’s clearly articulated move back into the present tense: “Now is a time for carving.” In the context of this poetic “commerce,” Pound would always remain a step ahead. When
Pound tired of carving as he moved from the refining work of imagism to the more dynamic forces of voriticism, we find Whitman, in a truncated survey of “American
Art” in the second and final issue of Blast, a “bland and easy braggart of a very cosmic self… whittling a stick in a very eerie dawn” (82). Pound, of course, occupies the final space in this brief survey, depicted as a “Demon pantechnicon driver, busy with removal of old world into new quarters.” To put it in the crudely economic terms that both Pound’s and Williams’s rhetoric here invites, Whitman’s use value for the modernists was waning. “Nothing is good,” as Williams writes in his Prologue to
Kora in Hell, “save the new” (Selected Essays 22).
Where Pound and Williams dispatched Whitman through manly figures of labor, Eliot, early on, zeroed in more specifically on the passing efficacy of
Whitman’s lilac topos, which he consigned first to pointedly gendered Victorian sentimentality, and later to his cultural waste land.70 We should note that the tradition of elegy itself often carried gendered associations, especially in the Victorian era.
70 The tradition of feminizing Whitman can be traced back to his own disciples. In his 1925 article in American Mercury, “Walt Whitman, Stranger,” Mark Van Doren both notes and joins this tradition of feminizing Whitman, describing him as “fastidious, eccentric and feminine” (278), a sentiment he takes up from Whitman’s noted disciple John Burroughs who wrote that there “was something fine, delicate, womanly in him” (Correspondence 4: 111).
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Jahan Ramazani collates this broad assumption in the context of modernism’s more austere elegiac leanings. “Yeats, Eliot, Pound, and T.E. Hulme insistently describe modern poetry as ‘hard,’ cold,’ ‘dry,’ ‘austere,’ and ‘impersonal,’” Ramazani writes,
“sharply distinguishing it from the poetry of ‘sentiment and sentimental sadness,’ of
‘moaning or whining,’ of ‘effeminacy’ and ‘emotional slither’” (21). Eliot’s nightmare vision of spring lilacs as they blossom in the opening lines of The Waste Land—“April is the cruelest month, breeding / lilacs out of the dead land”—give us the clear obverse of Whitmanian elegy (53). Not only does Eliot ritually cut off the present-participial energy that propels so much of Whitman’s poetry, but he also revokes the rejuvenating force of those iconic lilacs, letting them instead whither in the chastening light of
Eliot’s already depleted modernism.
Though critics have routinely noted this aggrieved and aggressive Whitmanian echo, among others, in The Waste Land, they have not noted the more explicit feminizing of the lilac trope in his earlier “Portrait of a Lady,” first published in
Others in 1915. We might think of this as Eliot’s own threshold poem—some early lilacs echoing Whitman’s own in “There Was a Child Went Forth”—marking his departure from American poetic traditions, which he exorcizes through that unique
Eliotic blend of awkwardness, misogyny, and anxiety. At the center of this triptych,
Eliot’s titular lady ominously twists a sprig of lilac around her finger—a gesture upon which Eliot nervously fixates—as she voices her hopes for future friendship in recognizably Whitmanian terms:
I am always sure that you understand My feelings, always sure that you feel, Sure that across the gulf you reach your hand. (10)
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Eliot, as he constructs this scene and its one-sided dialogue, projects a dingy romantic impulse and subtle innuendo: there’s the drippy Chopin, the candlelight like “Juliet’s tomb,” the atmosphere of charged expectation. Needless to say, he seems reluctant to be the kind of poet Whitman’s calls out to in poems like “To Whoever You Are,
Holding Me Now in Hand.” Eliot, instead, refuses Whitman’s proleptic embrace; his elegiac vision is already too hard and dry, too chaste, too cynical. Whitman, Eliot writes in a brief 1926 essay, “had the faculty… of transmuting the real into an ideal”
(WMS 153). It is precisely this propensity for idealization that Eliot’s already strained elegiac outlook can no longer replicate. Rather than attribute this tendency to something in Whitman’s “honesty” or “clearness of vision,” which might have at least honored Whitman’s outmoded efforts, Eliot writes that this tendency “sprang from what might be called… a faculty for make-believe.” Whitman, because of his consistent pursuit of the illusion, the ideal, remains, for Eliot, “a great representative of America, but emphatically of an America which no longer exists.” Whitman appears, once again, obsolete, unable to speak to and for a present in which his hopeful, sentimental lilacs cannot stand up to Eliot’s more ascetic knowingness.
Against these rather severe reservations, poets practicing on the margins of mainstream modernism such as Langston Hughes were more likely to conceive of
Whitman as an enabling presence. Nowhere does Hughes suggest the sense of progress and innocence grounding Whitman’s poetic project than in an essay—“The
Ceaseless Rings of Walt Whitman”—written as the introduction to an edition of
Whitman’s selected poems intended for children. There, Hughes writes that “the good gray poet of democracy is one of literature’s great faithholders in human freedom….
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The Whitman spiral,” he continues later in the essay, “is upward and outward toward a freer, better life for all, not narrowing downward toward death and destruction” (WMS
186-187). Alongside these more optimistic sentiments, however, Hughes’s work is shot through with a pointed, if less aggressive, withering of Whitmanian idealism. We can see this already in Hughes’s most famous early poem, “The Negro Speaks of
Rivers,” in which Whitman’s long line measures a history of injustice. At the start of the poem, a hesitant first line breaks out into a bold and sustained affirmation of some elemental knowledge: “I’ve known rivers: / I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins” (Collected Poems 23). Rather than replay Whitman’s typically broad and sprawling catalogue, however, Hughes offers a contracted view of human history that takes us, in four devastating steps, from freedom to slavery, and from self-possessed action—“I bathed… I built”—to a more constrained passivity—“I looked… I heard”:
I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young. I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep. I looked upon the Nile and raised my pyramids above it. I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went down to New Orleans, and I’ve seen its muddy bosom turn all golden in the sunset.
The story of human history that this catalogue tells is the story of human bondage against which Whitman’s long line marks only a quiet poetic irony, not a ceaseless ring of human freedom. This is, perhaps, why the poet “speaks” rather than “sings” of rivers: it is difficult for Hughes to summon a more triumphant Whitmanian song of himself.
Similarly, in Hughes’s “I, Too,” we witness the poet claiming, in self- consciously Whitmanian terms, a future in which he will be seated at the proverbial
Vander Zee 214 table, a table that here figures the ideal of racial equality and inclusion. The poem is flanked by confident reclamations of voice: “I, too, sing America…. I, too, am
America” (46). But just as “The Negro Speaks” pointedly contracts its Whitmanian catalogue, “I, Too” clips Whitman’s quintessential long lines, offering a formal reflection of reduced mobility and range:
Tomorrow I’ll be at the table When the company comes. Nobody’ll dare Say to me “Eat in the kitchen” Then
In Hughes’s aforementioned essay, he would write that “Whitman’s ‘I’ is not the ‘I’ of the introspective versifiers…. Rather it is the cosmic ‘I’ of all peoples who seek freedom, decency, and dignity, friendship and equality between individuals and all races all over the world” (187). The promise of Whitman’s singing self, however, transmutes in “I, too”—as it does across so much of Hughes’s work—into what he names, in his own late work, a Montage of a Dream Deferred.71
If Hughes’s apparently triumphal invocations of Whitman as an enabling presence meet implicit formal resistance across his work, then Hart Crane stages the failure of Whitmanian promise much more explicitly, if also more earnestly, than his mainstream modernist peers. Indeed, such a tension lies at the very heart of his poetic project. Early in 1923, when Crane’s epic The Bridge was merely an idea in its author’s mind, it was very clear how a Whitmanian idealism drove the project: “The more I think about my Bridge poem,” Crane writes to the literary critic Gorham
71 See Ed Folsom’s incisive discussions of Whitman and Hughes’s shared logic of deferral in his recent essay “So Long, So Long! Walt Whitman, Langston Hughes, and the Art of Longing.”
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Munson, “the more thrilling its symbolical possibilities become…. I begin to feel myself directly connected with Whitman. I feel myself in currents that are positively awesome in their extent and possibilities” (Letters 128). These “symbolical possibilities” that sponsor a profound and direct connection with the bard, however, threaten to recede into allegorical echoes as the distance between Crane and Whitman, and between their respective Americas, increasingly reveals itself. Crane continues to acknowledge this distance, particularly in a series of letters he exchanged with Waldo
Frank as The Bridge was finding its way into the world a few years later. Crane admits, for example, to feeling a “ghostliness that is new,” as he apologizes for his more vulgar complaint in his previous letter, where he wrote that the artist of the present only lives to “[lick] his own vomit”—his only amusement, he writes, “in a culture without faith and convictions” (259). If this is a pointed jab at the fashionable pessimism of his day—what he liked to think of as the fastidious whimpering of Eliot and his tribe—it remains a pessimism that Crane cannot help but echo: “Emotionally I should like to write The Bridge,” he writes; “intellectually judged, the whole theme and project seems more and more absurd” (261). The lost promise of Whitman stands in for this deep pessimism: “If only America were half as worthy today to be spoken of as Whitman spoke of it fifty years ago,” Crane laments, “there might be something for me to say—not that Whitman received or required any tangible proof of his intimations, but that time has shown how increasingly lonely and ineffectual his confidence stands” (261-262).
The Bridge, Crane’s epic attempt meaningfully to bridge America’s past promise with its future possibilities, turns prominently to Whitman to perform its
Vander Zee 216 manic drama, which pitches personal and poetic impotence against an ecstasy recoverable only in instances. In “Cape Hatteras,” the section of the poem that takes
Whitman as its source and guide, Crane summons his predecessor to the present via an explicit echo of Whitman’s own proleptic conjuring work in his poem “Recorders
Ages Hence”:
“‘—Recorders Ages Hence’—ah, syllables of faith! Walt, tell me, Walt Whitman, if infinity Be still the same as when you walked the beach Near Paumanok—your lone patrol—and heard the wraith Through surf, its bird note there a long time falling… (82)
Crane already knows the answer to his rhetorical question here, and the poet’s earnest inquiry recedes into a more pained cynicism as the melancholic intensity of that birdsong overpowers what can only be read as an ironic invocation of Whitman’s open road:
O Saunterer of free ways still ahead! Not this our empire yet, but labyrinth Wherein your eyes, like the Great Navigator’s without ship, Gleam from the great stone of each prison crypt Of canyoned traffic.
That pained adverbial modifier—not this our empire yet—marks, writ small, the distance between Whitmanian vision and its unlikely inception, between those free ways still ahead and the labyrinth in which Crane finds himself.
Crane more dramatically performs the failure of Whitman’s vision through this section’s central figure of aviation, which conflates technology and techne, literal and poetic flight. At the center of “Cape Hatteras,” the subtle mixture of unease and ecstasy that marks Crane’s figures for flight—that “blind crucible of endless space” whose “nasal whine of power whips a new universe” and transforms man from “an
Vander Zee 217 atom in a shroud” to an “engine in a cloud” (78)—ends in unmitigated disaster just as his neatly measured lines that comprise this stanza break up upon descent:
Now eagle bright, now quarry-hid, twist- ing, sink with Enormous repercussive list- ings down Giddily spiraled gauntlets, upturned unlooping In guerilla sleights, trapped in combustions gyr- Ing, dance the curdled depth down whizzing Zodiacs, dashed (now nearing fast the Cape!) down gravitation’s vortex into crashed …. dispersion… into mashed and shapeless debris…. (81)
On the heels of this nightmare vision, Crane once again summons Whitman, and with him, a different kind of ascension that might not end in dispersion and debris:
Oh Walt!—Ascensions of thee hover in me now As though at junctions elegiac, there, of speed With vast eternity, dost wield the rebound seed! The competent loam, the probable grass… O, upward from the dead Thou bringest tally, and a pact, new bound Of living brotherhood! (81-82)
Where does Crane turn to recover these ascensions, to turn, at junctions elegiac, from loss to recovery? At first, he offers a brief glimpse of the Good Gray
Poet as the wreckage on Cape Hatteras summons images of war: “What memories of vigils, bloody, by that Cape,— / Ghoul-mound of man’s perversity at balk / And fraternal massacre! Thou, pallid there as chalk / Hast kept the wounds, O mourner, all that sum / That then from Appomattox stretched to Somme! (82). Whitman, for a
Vander Zee 218 moment, shares Crane’s sorrow—indeed, seems to embody a particularly modern form of loss—but he is almost immediately removed from this scene via the subsequent pastoral interlude which moves back to innocent beginnings rather than a shared terror:
Cowslip and shad-blow, flaked like tethered foam Around bared teeth of stallions, bloomed that spring When first I read thy lines, rife as the loam Of prairies, yet like breakers cliffward leaping! (82)
Crane, here, pointedly withdraws from Whitman’s lateness, repairing, instead, to some pastoral escape. Whitman is removed from the present, and ascends once again as
Crane’s ethereal “Panis Angelicus,” his “Meistersinger” (83), as this brief pastoral interlude gives way to what can only seem, after the manic maneuverings of Crane’s poetic flight, an illusory embrace: “The Open Road—thy vision is reclaimed!” Crane writes with sudden and surprising confidence. “Recorders ages hence,” Crane affirms,
“yes, they shall hear / In their own veins uncancelled thy sure tread / And read thee by the aureole ’round thy head / of pasture-shine, Panis Angelicus.” Crane, against severe odds, takes Whitman in hand:
Afoot again, and onward without halt,— Not soon, nor suddenly,—no, never let go My hand in yours, Walt Whitman— so— (84)
Crane, here, would seem to turn to a new beginning. Indeed, the form of this ending replays the poem’s opening lines, whose obscure figure offers a strange anticipatory destiny of geology and physiology:
Imponderable the dinosaur sinks slow,
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the mammoth saurian ghoul, the eastern Cape… (77)
But Crane’s closing lines also comprise, through their fragmentary formal slide, a startling mimesis for the image of devastated flight that is this section’s doomed centerpiece. His Whitmanian embrace reflects not only mythical beginnings, then, but also the “crashed dispersions,” the “mashed and shapeless debris” that had originally motivated Crane’s movement towards Whitman’s embrace.
Crane’s more pained relationship with his predecessor might seem to make him the outlier in this abridged story of modernism’s Whitmanian inheritance. He exceeds the cynical and often self-serving dismissals of his more mainstream peers, and performs more openly the difficult dramas of that inheritance that remain largely implicit in Hughes. Exchanging knowing irony for a more pained earnestness, he comes closest to recognizing Whitman’s own loss. It is this outlier status—especially as it concerns his affections for Whitman—that paradoxically cemented Crane’s status in the modernist canon. As Alan Golding argues in From Outlaw to Classic, Crane earned his place in the modernist canon precisely as a cautionary tale. Speaking specifically to how critics such as Allen Tate and Yvor Winters, along with other burgeoning New Critics, dealt with Crane, Golding writes that “views of Crane and
Whitman shape each other in mutually reinforcing fashion,” he writes: “if you follow
Whitman, you end up like Crane, and if you end up like Crane, then Whitman must have been a bad place to start (102).72 For many poets and critics, Golding argues,
72 Golding turns our attention to Thomas Yingling’s earlier reflection on this quirk of canon formation, which both critics tie to homophobia and sexism: “Crane’s status in the canon seems to be in spite of himself—he is the very sign of excess for American letters, and this was his original function for New Critics” (qtd. in Golding 102).
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“Whitman’s prophecy for America turned out to be wrong, so his poetry must be dismissed.” Crane endures as a failed emblem of Whitmanian vision, an allegory of misplaced allegiance. Thus, something of modernism’s ironic dismissals of Whitman resonate even in the work of his most earnest poetic comrade.
This extreme distance between an evolving modern poetry and its fading
Whitmanian idealism emerges alternately through outright dismissals and desperate and despairing attempts to make one’s poetic vision commensurate with the bard’s.
Eliot’s early lilacs, Pound’s whittling Whitman, and the coded significance of age in
“Cape Hatteras” provide few new details to a story that, in its broader contours, has been told. Against this backdrop, however, one should note the curious persistence of
Whitman’s lateness that we sensed briefly in Crane. We see this even in Eliot, who writes, in the same essay that consigns Whitman to a world of make-believe, that
“Beneath all the declamations there is another tone, and behind all the illusions there is another vision. When Whitman speaks of the lilacs or of the mockingbird, his theories and beliefs drop away like needless pretext” (WMS 153). This other tone, this other vision, recalls the charged allegorical other speaking that resides, for Eliot, in the lilac topos, whose potency remains even in its passing. “And the lost heart stiffens and rejoices,” as Eliot writes in his riddling conversion poem “Ash Wednesday,” “In the lost lilac and the lost sea voices” (94). We sense the presence of an elegiac Whitman as well when Pound does not hold Whitman as the obsolescent other to his pressing despair in Pisa, but instead voices Whitman’s own words and sentiments from the Sea
Drift elegies, their sorrows neatly merged in Canto LXXXII. Hughes, as well, captures something crucial about Whitman’s lateness in his 1954 poem “Old Walt”: “Old Walt
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Whitman / Went finding and seeking. / Finding less than sought / Seeking more than found” (446). This seems, in retrospect, to voice the quiet poetic logic behind
Hughes’s many montages of dreams deferred. And Crane, who replicates, with great psychic pain, Whitman’s script of crisis and recovery, writes to Allen Tate a few years before his own death about a Whitman who already knew the loss: “It’s true,” Crane writes, “that my rhapsodic address to him in The Bridge exceeds any exact evaluation of the man” (Letters 354). Conceding their very different judgments about Whitman,
Crane chides Tate in turn for not noting those things in Whitman that most echo the kind of fashionable pessimism he would otherwise approve: “you, like so many others, he writes, “never seem to have read his Democratic Vistas and other of his statements sharply decrying the materialism, industrialism, etc., of which you name him the guilty and hysterical spokesman.” Though Crane would revert to Whitman’s innocence via his repeated pastoral gestures in “Cape Hatteras,” something of a more disaffected Good Gray Poet clings to his Whitmanian inheritance.
In what is perhaps the most profound entrance of late Whitman into the modernist poetic imaginary, Williams Carlos Williams concludes Book IV of
Paterson with a vision of an aging Whitman himself emerging out of the sea. At the end of Book IV, which was, upon its publication in 1951, the presumed end of the epic, Williams depicts a man striding, like some aged Odysseus, from the sea, returning home. The figure brushes himself off, dresses, picks some sea plums, and heads home. In his Autobiography, Williams makes the Whitman connection clear: “In the end the man rises from the sea where the river appears to have lost its identity and accompanied by his faithful bitch… turns inland toward Camden where Walt
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Whitman, much traduced, lived the latter years of his life and died” (392). Williams would seem to summon Whitman in age to mark a new beginning, though critics ignore the explicit figure of Whitman in age here, noting, instead, the triumphal return to the local scene, to the particular. But the words that begin the unanticipated Book V belie this neat conclusion, indicating that this return is not simply to Whitman’s home, but to the place that awaits us all if we are lucky—to old age itself:
In old age the mind casts off rebelliously an eagle from its crag (205)
Here, after Whitman returns to the scene of his own lateness, Williams provides us with an old-age echo of one of Whitman’s resistant late poems, “The Dalliance of
Eagles.” This figure of charged descent would come to preside quietly over Williams’s late work. “The descent beckons / as the ascent beckoned,” Williams writes in one of his most famous, late poems (Collected 2: 245). There, we might sense an implicit reflection on Whitman’s lateness, where “a / world lost / a world unsuspected / beckons to new places.” Near the end of that poem, Williams anticipates the crucial distinction between disabling melancholy and a more actionable, enabling vision of loss:
The descent made up of despairs and without accomplishment realizes a new awakening: which is a reversal of despair.
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Even as these diffuse energies of Whitman’s lateness persists in the work of late modernists, we can trace these energies back to Eliot’s wasted lilacs, Crane’s
Whitmanian debris, Pound’s obsolete whittler of sticks, Hughes’s broken Whitmaian forms, and Williams’s magnificent failure. That is, the modernists’ self-conscious denials of Whitmanian promise—whether that promise is mourned or more cynically dismissed as mere illusion—capture the melancholic energies that persist in
Whitman’s own late work. For the modernists, Whitman’s continuing presence was often predicated upon his irrelevance and obsolescence. But it is now the way
Whitman himself reflects the irrelevance and obsolescence of modernism—its appalled hopes—that allows him live once more. The quiet irony at the heart of the modernism’s Whitmanian dismissals and disaffections, then, indicates how close they are to Whitman’s own lateness, to a “descent,” to turn to Williams again, that is
“endless and indestructible (246).
‘Glorious mistake’: Whitman at Mid-Century and Beyond
This quiet irony is something that a critic might identify retrospectively, but for poets emerging in the middle of the long American century, modernism’s dismissals and disaffections, coupled with an emerging academic institution that was anathema to
Whitman’s poetics and to the politics it implied, made Whitman seem a peculiarly intimate stranger. To gauge the distance mid-century poets felt from Whitman, we might turn to the quintessential poem of Whitman’s lateness, Ginsberg’s “A
Supermarket in California.” Though a much-discussed poem in the context of
Whitman’s influence, reviewing it again in the context of the present argument will
Vander Zee 224 serve as a useful touchstone, offering a glimpse of the kind of Whitman many poets confronted at mid-century. Its careful use of each register of Whitman’s lateness discussed earlier—the apparitional, the apostrophic, the tropical, and the thematic— reveals the important though often overlooked role that signifiers of age and elegy play when poets look back to the bard. As a conjured presence, a notably aged
Whitman stumbles into Ginsberg’s supermarket as he stumbles, at turns tragically and comically, through so much American poetry: as a sign of lost potential, of what might have been, both for poetry and for America itself. Ginsberg, at first, spies the poet in his supermarket amongst the peaches and penumbras: “I saw you, Walt Whitman”—
Ginsberg writes, addressing a distinctly aged Whitman—“childless, lonely old grubber, poking among the meats” (59). The mood of is one of a surreal, fluorescent- lit paranoia as Ginsberg pursues an aged Whitman through the grocery aisles: “I wandered in and out of the brilliant stacks of cans following you, and followed in my imagination by the store detective.” He imagines leaving with Whitman, moving out of the city, out of the suburbs, to a rural retreat as he asks the old courage-teacher:
“Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love past blue automobiles in driveways, home to our silent cottage?”
The chance of such a pastoral escape, of course, is patently illusory, and
Ginsberg’s questions grow increasingly urgent even as they appear self-consciously desperate: “Where are we going, Walt Whitman?” Ginsberg asks. “The doors close in an hour. Which way does your beard point tonight? / (I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the supermarket and feel absurd.) / Will we walk all night through solitary streets?” Knowing that solitary streets do not offer the promise of Whitman’s
Vander Zee 225 more confident and assured open road, Ginsberg nevertheless charts out some melancholic common ground with old Walt: “We’ll both be lonely,” he writes. But even this melancholic embrace seems impossible as the distance between Ginsberg and Whitman widens. As if to acknowledge this increasing distance, Ginsberg shifts to a pointedly apostrophic address as Whitman’s imagined presence suddenly fades.
Ginsberg wonders in his final, quiet chant what Whitman’s America would even look like anymore, what these two poets could possibly share: “Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher,” Ginsberg writes, “what America did you have when
Charon quit poling his ferry and you got out on a smoking bank and stood watching the boat disappear on the black waters of Lethe?”
As Whitman moves from apparition to apostrophe, from a richly imagined presence to an absent one, Ginsberg calls forth a range of Whitmanian symbols that annotate, often ironically, his distance from his predecessor: the prophetic beard gives no clue as to where they might go; Ginsberg recasts Whitman’s open road as the “open corridors” of the supermarket and the “solitary streets” of the city; and the ferry ride that Whitman takes across the waters of forgetfulness rings with a certain finality.
Those hopeful lines uttered in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”—“it avails not, neither time nor space… distance avails not” (CPP 308)—barely echo here. When Ginsberg touches Whitman’s book, the famous lines from “So Long” replay in the readers mind:
“Comerado! This is no book; / Who touches this touches a man!” But instead of feeling assured at such a touch he feels absurd. Grounding this absurdity is the poem’s broader thematic engagement, which binds these apparitional, apostrophic, tropical registers together as the poem turns, in elegiac circles, around intimations of that “lost
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America of love.” As befits Ginsberg’s conjured relationship with a poet for whom comradely amativeness—that close, personal connection with a single other— becomes a metaphor for broader political and social formations, the fleeting personal union with Whitman that arrives in the California supermarket figures a broader disaffection of the socio-political imagination.
Ginsberg’s poem is a quintessential poem of Whitman’s lateness extending into the twentieth century because it shows so clearly how, as symbolic force of
Whitman’s reputation endures, he remains a prophet isolated on those receding utopian shores opposite a more chastened and deepening elegiac temper of the evolving present. This static economy of influence renders Whitman a canonical stranger in the very poetic century he helped to define. Ginsberg does hold the Good
Gray Poet in a shared elegiac embrace, if only for a moment, in those words quoted above: “we’ll both be lonely” (my emphasis), just as Crane briefly summons a more despairing, world-weary Whitman in “Cape Hatteras.” But the deep, melancholic gulf between them—one amplified by the forgetful, dividing waters of Lethe—abides for
Ginsberg as it abides for so much post-World War II poetry.
Post-World War II American poetry is in many ways predicated upon this distance from Whitman, a distance that itself betrays a reductive view of Whitman’s poetic project and a certain blindness to the more resistant, melancholic energies of
Whitman’s own late work. In Ginsberg’s poem, we sense a profound elegiac gulf opening alongside anxieties about that lost America of love, but Robert Creeley, reflecting back on the mid-century, offers a clearer view of the many competing many.
In his introduction to his Selected Whitman (1973), Creeley articulates the complicated
Vander Zee 227 mesh of resentments and qualifications that made it incredibly difficult for many young poets to engage Whitman authentically:
In the forties, when I was in college, it was considered literally bad taste to have an active interest in his writing… There was a persistent embarrassment that this naively affirmative poet might affect one’s own somewhat cynical wisdom. Too, in so far as this was a time of intensively didactic criticism, what was one to do with Whitman, even if one read him? He went on and on, he seemed to lack ‘structure,’ he yielded to no ‘critical apparatus’ then to hand. So, as students, we were herded past him as quickly as possible and our teachers used him only as an example of ‘the America of that period, which, we were told, was a vast swamp of idealistic expansion and corruption. Whitman, the dupe, the dumb- bell, the pathetically regrettable instance of this country’s dream and despair, the self-taught man. (WMS 285-286)
Creeley goes on to discuss his peers’ sophisticated embarrassment at Whitman’s sentimentalism as well as their less composed unease with the gay themes present in
Whitman and those, like Crane, who formed deeply personal ties with the poet. In addition to a certain cultural resistance to what Whitman represented, Creeley is keenly aware of how the mid-century’s emerging pedagogies subtly determined not only how students read but what they read. Given this environment, Creeley felt he did not have an alternative poetic tradition to fall back on. Speaking of how major modernist figures—even those on the fringes of the academy—dismissed Whitman,
Creeley writes that “the heroes of my youth, as well as my teachers, were almost without exception extremely critical of Whitman and his influence and wanted as little as possible to do with him” (286). This sense of estrangement from a major precursor, a result of conservative academic and social cultures, not to mention a modernism eager to get beyond Whitman, was felt by many of Creeley’s peers.73 The generation of poets emerging after World War II were left with a double loss. Whitman’s
73 See Allen Grossman’s From Outlaw to Classic (1995), 92-94.
Vander Zee 228 availability both as a literary resource and as a political ideal had been largely revoked. 74
Yet for many poets and critics, something of Whitman’s promise remained crucial to mid-century poetics. Michael Davidson, in his study of the San Francisco
Renaissance, recognizes that although the utopian dreams embodied by Whitman often seemed lost, this occasioned, he writes, “an elegiac mood that projected the future
Arcadia while mourning the loss of those democratic vistas envisioned by Whitman”
(32). It is through this “convergence of elegy and utopia,” Davidson continues, that we might best understand the poets of the San Francisco Renaissance. For Davidson, who seeks to articulate this distinguishing structure of feeling for a very specific mid- century poetic community, Whitman enters as a convenient poetic prop, effectively dramatizing, as representative of some enduring faith, this charged convergence of elegy and utopia. Crucially, for Davidson, the persistent utopian dreams of San
Francisco Renaissance lead them out of the kind of chronic melancholia that this elegiac crossroads might otherwise suggests: “The ‘Arcadian retreat’ that these poets imagined,” Davidson writes, must not be read as “the futile yearning of aesthetes for a new Eden outside of history. That yearning is present,” he continues, “but it is for an immanent potentiality and not a Paradise lost” (37). Indeed, in many cases the elegiac
74 While the modernists had plenty to say about Whitman’s form, these disagreements concerning aesthetics often serve as veiled attacks upon the many political uses for Whitman. Whitman’s early reputation, at least in America, was linked with print venues such as the socialist Conservator (edited by Horace Traubel, Whitman’s foremost disciple) and the progressive interests behind Seven Arts led by Van Wyck Brooks and Randolph Borne, who championed a more activist and engaged bard whose message and form were mutually reinforcing. Whitman also profoundly influenced poets such as Carl Sandburg and Vachal Lindsey, who viewed Whitman as a proving ground for their home-grown aesthetic. In light of the ascendant international and cosmopolitan modernism that emerged alongside the more homegrown traditions in the 1920s, such figures gradually came to be seen as limitedly parochial. Here is an affirmative Whitman, a poet of the working class, a poet of political and social progress, a poet, finally, of local and common experience. This Whitman held little use for many of the major modernists, much less for those in the New Critical establishment who would canonize them.
Vander Zee 229 straining only makes those hopes more intense, more necessary. “Whitman’s vision of a democratic ensemble is a ‘glorious mistake,’” Davidson later writes, alluding to
Duncan’s poem containing that declaration, “but it is one the contemporary poet relies on in search for his lost potential” (146). While that sense of immanent potentiality can be maintained at certain moments or in certain poems, when one takes a broader view of the long American century, this progressive hope fades precisely into a
Paradise lost. Recoverable in instances, yes, but Whitman remains at a seemingly insuperable distance.
Robert Duncan’s influential early ’60s poem “A Poem Beginning with a Line from Pindar” positions itself precisely at this difficult crossroads. But what makes
Duncan’s poem such an important document in the history of Whitman’s influence is the central and, again, overlooked role that figures of age and aging play here. After the first section of the poem, which riffs on the myth of Psyche and Eros—its allegory of innocence and love at first lost, then regained—Duncan shifts to a parallel, though pointedly non-mythical, landscape as he considers more temporal matters: the kindred concerns of aging and political discontent, and the possibilities of recovery from decline and discontent. Breaking abruptly from the mythical set-up, the poem’s second section ushers us into a world of temporality and lasting:
This is magic. It is passionate dispersion. What if they grow old? The gods would not allow it. Psyche is preserved.
In time we see a tragedy, a loss of beauty the glittering youth of the god retains—but from this threshold it is age that is beautiful. It is toward the old poets
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we go, to their faltering their unfaltering wrongness that has style, their variable truth, the old faces, words shed like tears from a plentitude of powers time stores. (63)
Duncan, here, pointedly revises romantic notions of a grand and timeless artistic late style, providing a glimpse of what a more damaged, strained late work might look like.
He then ties physical disability to declining national health, subtly placing Whitman’s aging body at the center of his unfolding national allegory in which things fall apart:
A stroke. These little strokes. A chill. The old man, feeble, does not recoil
……………………………………………
demerging a nuv. A nerb. The present dented of the U knighted stayd. States. The heavy clod? Cloud. Invades the brain. What if lilacs last in this dooryard bloom’d?
Setting up his more explicit move to honor Whitman later in this poem, Duncan turns not to grand poets of old, but literally to old poets, the complex integrity of their contrary late forms: “their faltering / their unaltering wrongness that has style, / their variable truth.” Expanding on this sense of style, he alludes to how “Strokes. These little strokes” cause words to become “in-jerrd,” transforming, for example, the
President of the United States into “The present dented of the U / nighted stayd.”
Ventriloquizing the literal deformations of aphasiac speech, and alluding as well to the steady battery of strokes suffered by Whitman during the last decade of his life,
Duncan courts the truth that lies hidden within an injured language.
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Duncan’s rhetorical question—“What / if lilacs last in this dooryard bloom’d?”—asks after the role that Whitman’s durable emblem of recovery might play even as his vision becomes old and damaged, strained by literal age and by his lasting influence. The question seems, in the end, ironic rather than earnest, the conclusion foregone. On the heels of that pronounced nod to Whitman’s elegy for
Lincoln, Duncan offers a resume of failed presidents and failed politics that make
Whitman’s innocent love for Lincoln seem an act of political reverence now impossible. “Hoover, Coolidge, Harding Wilson,” one couplet reads, “hear the factories of human misery turning out commodities.” After this inventory of national woe, Duncan can only offer his lament in pained conversation with Whitman’s elegy:
How sad “amid the lanes and through old woods” echoes Whitman’s love for Lincoln!
……………………………………………………
It is across great scars of wrong I reach toward the song of kindred men and strike again the naked string old Whitman sang from. Glorious mistake! (64)
Duncan’s invocation here is at once powerful and pitiful. The gesture is strong, but from this lonely outpost, the vista seems bleak indeed. Duncan does his best to work from perpetual damage back to the proud dream of that naked string. But Whitman is stricken, damaged, and we get the sense that the old song that Whitman continued to sing was old already in Whitman’s late years. Unwilling to follow through with this vision of Whitman’s damaged lateness, Duncan instead laments a lost Whitman, a
“Glorious mistake.”
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This declaration reflects Whitman’s persistent, utopian idealism, a sense of optimism that could only be seen, in the wake of war’s tragic destruction, as a glorious mistake—but a mistake whose idealism needs to be sustained nevertheless in the name of progress and hope. This complex effort—part utopian yearning, part elegy— achieves its consummate expression at last when Duncan revives what he sees as an indelible Whitmanian faith consecrated by the symbolic lilac.
I see always the under side turning, fumes that injure the tender landscape. From which up break lilac blossoms of courage in daily act striving to meet a natural measure. (65)
In this intensely realized act of recovery, Duncan honors how Whitman transcended the difficulties he encountered—the death of his president, the accumulated debris of war, the corruption and pettiness of post-bellum politics—through the echo of this symbolic deus ex machina as the lilac breaks through the injured landscape. But if
Duncan extends Whitman’s consolatory gesture, he seems not to learn much from its own lasting across Whitman’s work. He takes for granted the lilacs enduring ability, as a symbol that holds both utopian hope of rebirth and the memory of loss, to function in precisely the way Whitman intended. This is, perhaps, Duncan’s own “Glorious mistake!”—this hope that Whitman might still evince an unthinkable faith in the democratic process that seems ever more difficult and ever more necessary to sustain, a vision whose purity was unthinkable, especially, in his own time.
While this tension between elegy and utopia remains generative for the poets through the Vietnam era and beyond, it gradually transforms, as Whitman’s influence persists, into a kind of urgent impotence. It reinforces the bard’s libratory potential
Vander Zee 233 even as it places is out of reach, and even as it misses the elegiac strains that persist in late Whitman himself. In developing this schema, it is telling that Davidson quotes the venerable critic Roy Harvey Pearce as voicing precisely what Whitman means to poets in the second half of the twentieth-century: “Whitman as a poet,” Pearce writes,
“succeeded not as he portrayed failure, but rather as he gave us the means to measure success” (qtd. in Davidson 146). Pearce would later reaffirm this sentiment in an essay with the spirited—if not so subtle—title “Walt Whitman and Our Hope for Poetry.”
From crisis, to recovery—always recovery. Duncan embodies this hope as well, and though “A Poem Beginning with a Line by Pindar” remains a true master-work of open field poetics, Whitman’s role in that field is oddly limited. Whitman is left at the crossroads of endlessly deferred utopia and enduring elegy. He is the source of something grand, but something so removed that we can barely hear him or see him.
This lone “post of the good” recedes more with each passing year.
At times, the distance poets felt from Whitman could be extreme. If Duncan seems, at times, like the last true believer in a Whitmanian poetics of hope and ecstatic connection, poets coming of poetic age after World War II would increasingly deny the value of these affirmations, whether out of disillusionment or disdain. Jack Spicer offers a clear example of a general disillusion that veers quickly into this kind of disdain, if not outright desertion:
Forgive me Walt Whitman, you whose fine mouth has sucked the cock of the heart of the country for fifty years. You did not ever understand cruelty. It was that that severed your world from me, fouled your moon and your ocean, threw me out of your bearded paradise. The comrade you are walking with suddenly twists your hand off… when I dreamed of Calamus, as I often did when I touched you or put my hand upon your hand, it was not as of a possible world, but as a lost paradise. (55)
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Spicer’s indictment begins in the tone of grave apostasy—“Forgive me Walt
Whitman”—a reflection of the fact that many of his peers in the San Francisco
Renaissance clung to and renewed the affirmative potential that Whitman embodied.
But Spicer directly contradicts Davidson’s sense that these poets turned to Whitman as a poet of immanent potential rather than a paradise lost. And yet Spicer and Duncan are closer than one might think: both poets believe, in the very least, that Whitman is an affirmative poet, that this is the indisputable Whitmanian inheritance. They simply differ in how accessible, how possible, they find that affirmation at the dawn of the
Cold War as the bard’s visionary republic came to seem more like a blind empire.
The more acerbic and aggressive strain of influence voiced by Spicer here has lead to what Walter Benjamin termed a left-wing Melancholy—“a clowning of despair,” in his words, a “heaviness of heart” that “derives from routine” (305-6). The problem is not the empathetic orientation towards the past, but rather the way that this attachment has become itself the object of attention, obscuring a more earnest engagement with historical and political processes. “This left-wing radicalism,”
Benjamin contends, “is precisely the attitude to which there is no longer in general any corresponding political action. It is to the left not of this or that tendency, but simply to the left of what is in generally possible” (306). In terms of the poetry under consideration, this melancholia elides the sense of loss that marks Whitman’s own late work, and this mood has insinuated itself more deeply into our poetic fabric insofar as the loss of Whitmanian possibility now often doubles for the lost promise of lyric itself. As Spicer concludes another well-known poem: “No one listens to poetry”
(373).
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This more debilitating elegiac ethos emerges over and again as American entered the Vietnam era. Where Ginsberg imagines a moment of American promise before Whitman’s bustling republic turned blind empire, Louis Simpson, in his
Pulitzer Prize winning At the End of the Open Road (1963), is more openly cynical:
“Where are you, Walt?” he asks. “The Open Road goes to the used-car lot.” Simpson, here, voices a persistent strain of Whitmanian influence in post-WWII poetry—a strain in which utopian potential no longer seems visible through compounding layers of personal, political, and historical loss. We find a very similar sentiment in
Gregory’s Corso’s 1970 collection Elegiac Feelings American. That collection’s title poem is an elegy for Jack Kerouac, but it doubles, explicitly, as an elegy for Whitman and the ideal of America that both of his poetic compatriots held close. Here, Corso appears, for a moment, to extend Duncan’s own efforts to bridge the distance between
Whitman and the present, to strike again that naked string old Whitman sang from. He invokes a “Whitman we were always wanting, a hoping, an / America, that America ever an America to be, / never an America to sing about or to, but ever / an America to sing hopefully for” (7). Against this hopeful, insistent, and explicitly utopian
America—an America, he writes, “out there and in our hearts insatiable yet / overflowing hallelujahs of poesy and hope,” an ideal America “unboundaried and unhistoried”—Corso confronts the historical reality of America as utopia recedes into elegy once more. “And what has happened to our dream of beauteous America, Jack?” he writes, interrogating his elegiac subject, “that / unreal fake America, that caricature of America?” What happened to this beauteous dream, Corso suggests, happened to
Kerouac: “Death / happened to him; a gypped life happened; a God / gone sick
Vander Zee 236 happened; a dream nightmared; a / youth armied; an army massacred” (10). Corso, here, addresses Kerouac’s loss opposite a fading Whitmanian idealism.
This distant Whitman, a product of various poetic cultures emerging in the wake of World War II, has proved to be much more than a passing vogue. Indeed, these years have morphed into what we might call a permanent postwar, which is also a permanent prelude to war: Korea, Vietnam, the first and second Iraq wars,
Afghanistan, and the more amorphous war against terror. Whitman as an emblem of permanent loss has been the dominant poetic persona of this era. No critic has documented this broader ethos of Whitman as the poet of the permanent post war as clearly as Cary Nelson in Our Last First Poets: Vision and History in Contemporary
American Poetry (1982). There, he reads a range of poets—from Galway Kinnell and
Robert Duncan to Adrienne Rich and W.S. Merwin—through precisely this melancholic matrix. “Viewed synchronically,” he writes, “these poets of the 1960s were the last first poets; they wrote as though they were the avatars of an open exaltation whose death was inscribed in their work” (2). These poets are often consumed with a post-Whitman malaise that Susan Sontag captures in a 1974 essay where she describe her contemporary America as “a garbage-strewn plentitude—the willful travesty of Whitman’s magnanimous dream.” (qtd. in Nelson 92). Nelson recognizes this distinctly post-Whitmanian melancholy, but firmly divorces Whitman from it: “Despite his difficulties with the Civil War,” he writes, “Whitman managed to revive his faith in a national openness in which death would be visible but luxuriant, a sensuality democratized to the arms of lovers and the uncut hair of graves” (92). This
Vander Zee 237 sense of Whitman as the ineluctable other of our despair lives on in criticism and poetry alike.
Take, for example, Michael Palmer’s contribution to Walt Whitman:
Hom(m)age, a recent French-English anthology of poems commemorating the 150th anniversary of the first edition of Leaves of Grass. Palmer pointedly makes his contribution not a poem but a letter. Granted, the epistolary form lies at the very roots of lyric, but its self-consciously prosaic form, and the absence of its addressee, makes this an attenuated apostrophe. “Dear Walt,” the missive begins, “I must confess that I was thinking of you all last week, as I sat in my daughter’s apartment overlooking Fort
Greene Park in Brooklyn, across the waters from Mannahatta.” Palmer asks Whitman if he remembers how, as editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, he lobbied to make land available for a park that would eventually house a proud monument to heroes of the
Revolution. Palmer continues: “I don’t know whether you keep abreast of the news,
Walt, but it is not good. The current administration, a dungheap of pious hypocrites and liars, has used the pretext of the war against terror to dismantle the founding principles and values of the Republic and to abrogate international treaties.” He mentions Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. He describes prisoners held in American territory with no rights, prisoners held elsewhere tortured, given electric shocks, nearly drowned, then nearly drowned again.
Palmer breaks off this inventory of atrocity abruptly: “And so, as Paris calls to celebrate you (Paris, Walt—I think you’d have liked it!), I cannot help but reflect on the pall of irony now cast by events over one of your late, if admittedly far from best,
Vander Zee 238 poems.” He then quotes “America,” the only poem that Whitman recorded in his lifetime:
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.
“Of course,” Palmer concludes, “such a place never was nor could be, as hard as you tried to make it so by means of the poem. For which we now salute you, Walt, and send love.”
Palmer’s letter to Whitman grows elegiac even before he submits that litany of wrongs. He refers to Manhattan by its Native American name, “Mannahatta,” a reminder of the genocide that persisted alongside the Revolution Whitman would seek to honor. The deliberately anti-poetic mode of address amplifies the elegiac strain insofar as this letter to a dead man refuses the possibilities of a more ecstatic
Whitmanian communion. In the end, Palmer can only quote Whitman back at himself as a mark of sad irony—an irony that approaches absurdity when we remember that just a few years later, the Bard debuted on screen in a Levi’s ad of all places, a prophetic voice for American consumerism that confuses revolutions in fashion and politics.
This pointedly Whitmanian melancholy enters Palmer’s poetry more recently as well. Palmer’s works could be situated, to borrow a title from At Passages, within a
“matrix for war.” Poetry works, alongside and within—and also against—that oppressive matrix. It follows that Palmer’s books fully reflect this pressure as we encounter suffocated words, burning pages pitched against mass destruction. The
Vander Zee 239 language in his work not only reflects violence, it becomes subject to it. In the title poem of his most recent collection, Thread, Whitman’s lilacs enter to annotate, once more, this distance between utopia and elegy. The poem itself begins on a note of life having outlasted art as it gently echoes Neruda’s famous love song, where we learn that love is short, but forgetting so long:
I asked the Master of Shadows Wherefore and wherefrom
But he said that art was short And life was long. (1)
The next couplets tease with the promise of some recovery, some recourse to a lyric of praise, but soon, as so often happens in Palmer’s work, we see those sentiments up in flame—a demise figured prominently in Whitman’s lost lilacs:
… let us praise Those flames that consume the day
Stone by stone And the lilac by the barn
And the hours when you were young And the mother- and the father-tongue.
Curled by fire the leaves of grass, Buckled, the roof beam,
Shattered, the wagon’s haft, Ash-flecks in the wind’s swell.
The house of Whitman, here, collapses, just as the sentimental of one curling up by the fire to read a book goes literally up in smoke. Palmer’s gesture is fundamentally
Eliotic as he subjects Whitman’s lilacs to the withering of a more chastened poetic sensibility.
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This is, I submit, an exhausted post-Whitmanian melancholy. And yet it is at the end of this exhausted state that we might find Whitman again. “It was only when no one could believe in me”—as the projected voice of the bard in Larry Levis’s
“Whitman” tells us—“That I began living again” (WMS 376). Levis, here, articulates a foundational truth of Whitman’s post-World War II influence: it is not simply that poets stopped believing in Whitman; unbelief has become, in many cases, the grounding condition of their engagement with Whitman. Though I note the often debilitating effects of this lasting Whitmanian melancholy in the post-World War II era as it continues into the present, I argue that this profound distance also makes available an eventual recognition of Whitman not as a lost poet speaking for a lost
America, but as a partner in historical and personal loss: it allows, that is, Whitman to live again in and through a shared lateness.
At the start of the twenty-first century, a new story has begun to emerge, a story that might lead us to take Whitman’s damaged vista as our own. This story does not come, in its initial stirrings, from a new generation of poets, intent on claiming a
Whitman of their own, but from our old poets, some of them recently lost to us.
Barbara Guest, in her final book The Red Gaze (2005), for example, asks us to move beyond a more limiting Whitmanian melancholy towards some new prospect, some new way of seeing. Working her way out of this hopelessly elegiac Whitmanian orientation toward a more engaged response, she begins: “Perhaps you are hiding, perhaps you have decided not to reveal / your singular presence” (496). Singing, at first, that familiar song of loss, she writes from the vantage of “A disappointed generation” whose “words collapse around us / Like the one who jumped into the sea.
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But the seas disappoint us, also.” What would seem a defeated poetic ruin—a quiet elegy for Whitman and his beloved sea, and for our most Whitmanian modernist Hart
Crane who took his final, despairing leap into the ocean—makes a crucial turn in the final line as Guest demands something else: “we are ready for a new orientation,” she concludes. This new orientation merges not from a renewed Whitmanian triumphalism, but through a new orientation towards Whitman’s lateness—towards late Whitman himself. I conclude with extended reflections on two poets—C.K.
Williams and Robert Creeley—who reach for these new intensities of Whitman’s influence in ways both subtle and startling. Each poet takes us from late Whitman, through Whitman’s lateness, into a Whitmanian presence that is at once new and late:
Whitman, that is, lately.
Whitman, Lately Part I: C.K. Williams
C. K. Williams boldly accepts Guest’s invitation, even as he comes dangerously close to foreclosing on its rare potential. Williams answers this call in the form of two books, released as unintended companion volumes in spring 2010: On
Whitman, a brief pocket-book of prose appearing in Princeton’s Writers on Writers series, and his most recent collection, Wait. Both volumes come on the heels of his
Collected Poems (2006), a tome that had threatened—prematurely, we now see—to define his career. Responses to C. K. Williams’s significant oeuvre, as represented in his Collected, have begun, predictably, to track the antinomies of authorial late style: on the one hand, an unreserved praise testifying to the rarity and preeminence of the
Great Man; on the other, a less sanguine account that judges the late work through the
Vander Zee 242 prism of all prior accomplishment, and finds that work necessarily frail, sentimental, and giving off some unmistakable mustiness.
Take two prominent reviews of Collected Poems. Peter Campion, writing for
The Boston Globe, plays the durable, if redundant, role of kingmaker to the king. For
Campion, Williams—winner of numerous awards, including a Pulitzer, a National
Book Award, a Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, and about a dozen other high honors—has set a “new standard for American poetry,” has become a “representative consciousness.”
Whitman, of course, has often been derided for such a colonizing consciousness, most famously, perhaps, by D.H Lawrence. In his Studies in Classic American Literature
(1923), Lawrence writes brilliantly on the dangers of such representativeness in
Whitman’s work. He begins by quoting Whitman in caps: “I AM HE THAT ACHES
WITH AMOROUS LOVE” (148). Lawrence will have none of it: “Walter, leave off.
You are not HE. You are just a limited Walter. And your ache doesn’t include all
Amorous Love, by any means. If you ache you only ache with a small bit of amorous love, and there’s so much more stays outside the cover of your ache, that you might be a bit milder about it.” Williams, it seems to me, never attempts such a representative consciousness. His poetry constantly, even obsessively, reflects his own limited
Walter. When Williams does approach something like a representative consciousness, he suspects his own motives. Indeed, he is one of our most recursive and self- consciously thoughtful poets, continually snagging his cuffs on his own poeticisms.
Where Campion elevates Williams to a rarified late-style grandeur, Dan
Chiasson, writing for The New York Times, is quick to ground our enthusiasm. “The contest between comfort and distress,” Chiasson writes with an eye to the latest work,
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“feels rigged for comfort…. Williams is now too susceptible to the consolations he once spurned; the poems are narrow at the base and wide at the top. They tip from too much sentiment. His subjects have lost their precise force; he now just cues up the child poem, the war poem, the street person poem, and rears back in admiration.”
Both of these poet-critics seem to have read Williams deeply and widely.
Why, then, are their approaches to Williams so predictable, so oddly unimaginative?
There are many ways alternately to value or eviscerate a poet’s accumulated work, and
I choose not to position myself between these polar readings of Williams’s career.
Both seem constrained by worn narratives of growth and decline: of lessons learned for Campion; for Chiasson, forgotten. I take Williams’s two new efforts as an invitation to move beyond these generic career résumés. However partial the vista it affords, I want to approach Williams’s work more narrowly through his engagement with Walt Whitman—specifically late Whitman. In On Whitman and Wait, we witness two competing intelligences: a prose intelligence that works through recollection and remembrance, recreating the formative Whitman of Williams’s early career, and a poetic intelligence that more quietly forges an authentic late-Whitmanian presence for
Williams’s compositional present.
Williams parcels out On Whitman into over two dozen small chapters, most with succinct chapter titles coded to Whitmanian keywords: there’s a chapter on “I” and “You”; chapters on “America,” “Imagination,” “Vision,” “Sex,” and “Nature”; we have “The Voice” and “The Body.” If these signposts bear a recognizable significance for most readers of Whitman, the chapters themselves often surprise with genuinely fresh insights. In the chapter with the shortest title, for example—“I”—Williams
Vander Zee 244 explores a deep affinity between Whitman and the seventh-century Greek poet
Archilochos, bringing us to the very roots of lyric. In “Sex,” he offers a familiar glimpse of Whitman presiding over the ’60s, but manages to express the exuberance of the moment without overly glamorizing it: “sadly,” he writes of the often illusory freedom that saturated the times, “it didn’t, couldn’t, fundamentally change our anxieties, our propensity for aggression, our basic instinctual conflicts” (103). And yet there is something to be said, Williams tells us, for the way Whitman casts off centuries-old repressions, the way he eroticizes not only sex, but, more boldly, all of creation.
Here and elsewhere, On Whitman exceeds the standard stuff of poet-prose, which can dwell too often in mere enthusiasm for—rather than true amplification of— its subject. Few have written so suggestively, for example, of Whitman’s connection to Baudelaire. Williams scrupulously documents their affinities: born just a few years apart, they both compiled their most important work in the mid-1850s, with
Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal coming out two years after the first edition of Leaves.
Both of their books prompted accusations of indecency and obscenity. Both men were flâneurs cruising their respective urban centers—Paris and New York. Both were poets of love at last sight, of fleetingness and fading impressions. Both wrote of death and evil, of ruins and prostitutes, or outer gildings and inward decay, the kind of which we witnessed in the previous chapter’s discussion of Whitman’s “A Hand-
Mirror” and “This Compost.” Williams enumerates and explores these connections with a critic’s assured knowledge and a poet’s knowing intimacy. Noting how both poets strove “to find new routes through the deterministic logics of mind and self that
Vander Zee 245 had come before,” he casts Whitman as the “creator of something entirely new, not only like Baudelaire in its matter, but in its utterance, its very shape: he created a new form to enact and encompass the world as he passionately wished it to be” (79).
The subsequent chapter on Hugo and Longfellow, which might seem a strange aside, only deepens the Whitman-Baudelaire connection by annotating their struggles against poetic counterparts who had more fame, more money, and more cultural cachet. A novel connection in its own right, it also reverses a history of literary associations where Whitman was the other of presumably darker, more world-weary poets. We witness T.S. Eliot, for example, who writes that “for [Whitman] there was no chasm between the real and the ideal, such as opened before the horrified eyes of
Baudelaire” (WMS 153). And we find Whitman’s soaring arc in the “Cape Hatteras” section of Crane’s The Bridge opposite “The Tunnel,” whose underground nightmare vision is presided over by Poe. Whitman, his “eyes tranquil with the blaze / of Love’s own diametric gaze, of love’s amaze” (46) stands opposite Poe for whom “love” is just
“a burnt match skating in a urinal” (99). As Muriel Rukeyser writes with slightly more reserve, “Melville is the poet of outrage in his century in America, Whitman is the poet of possibility” (WMS 199). And finally, from Ted Berrigan’s poem Whitman in
Black where he presents “Whitman’s city lived in Melville’s senses.” Here, we get a nightmare vision of what New York City has become: “urban inferno / Where love can stay for only a minute” (WMS 302). Whitman’s status as the utopian other to some more shadowed, world-weary knowingness is well engrained in our poetic and critical traditions alike.
Williams is a passionate close reader of Whitman’s work, drawn foremost to
Vander Zee 246 what he calls, in the book’s first chapter, “The Music.” “It’s essential to keep in mind,” Williams writes, “that in poetry the music comes first, before everything else, everything else: until the poem has found its music, it’s merely verbal matter, information. Thought, meaning, vision, the very words, come after the music has been established, and in the most mysterious ways they’re already contained in it” (3).
Williams voices the unpredictable, yet somehow precise, music that Whitman’s lines often produce, and he has a supreme sense of the contrastive surprise that accompanies the accrued music of Whitman’s catalogues. If Williams is at times overly exuberant, that merely reflects the degree to which On Whitman is a book that looks back, unembarrassed, to the energy of his own early encounters with the poet, and also to the miraculous birth of Whitman’s poetic presence, coming, as he seemed to, out of nowhere and everywhere at once.
This emphasis on a Whitman in the full flush of health inspires and enables many of Williams’s keenest observations. But it also sponsors the study’s neglect of
Whitman in age. It is not that Williams fails to attend to Whitman in his lateness; he won’t give the old bard a break. Discussing the endless revisions of Leaves that didn’t cease until the Death-bed Edition of 1892, Williams writes that Whitman “continued to put it through his mill long after his poetic powers had deteriorated. This is a sad thing to say about any artist, but a side-by-side reading of the different versions makes it undeniable” (xiv). This staid narrative of decline, as we have amply seen in Chapter
2, is too common in Whitman criticism. Alongside this narrative, Williams dutifully asserts his respect for Whitman’s stoicism in the face of his music’s fading:
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Even when some twenty years or so later he realized it had left him, had left him even years before that, he expressed no great grief, though he surely had no inkling during those early blazing years that it ever might wane. But, sadly, at some point, it did go bad for him. He lost the connection to his music, not knowing at first hand that he had. Trying to keep it going, after the 1860s, into the ’70s and ’80s, he kept making new poems, but his locutions become odd and awkward, his rhythms uncertain, his diction sometimes almost primitive. (12)
Whitman, to Williams’s deep dismay, resorted to an “endless tinkering” which inevitably “untuned the original power of his symphony” (13). Trying to guess at the roots of Whitman’s failure, Williams asserts that “he was having fatal trouble sounding like himself, the poet he had been, whose music was diluted now, and weary, maybe because his body itself had begun to be prematurely sick and weary and old.”
Can’t Whitman be allowed to evolve? Mustn’t he? Isn’t harboring a fatal fear of sounding like oneself the mark of any great poet? Shouldn’t Whitman’s music be allowed to change with the debilities of age, not to mention the evolving political and cultural crises of post-war America. Deciphering Whitman’s late work, as we learned in previous chapters, requires that we seek to understand precisely how it tracks the decay of both his body and his dream for America. Yes, his late work can seem odd and uncertain, cragged and conflicted, even as it continues to echo some former glory and accomplishment. This remains the essential, contrastive drama of late Whitman, and it gives rise to a strange, difficult, and discomfiting music with a strong critical undertow for those prepared to hear and explore it.
When Williams turns to Whitman’s prose, he comes much closer to recognizing an ideologically complex Whitman. He quotes at length from Democratic
Vistas (1871), where Whitman betrays the shadow side of his exuberant poetic optimism: “Never was there, perhaps, more hollowness at heart than at present…. We
Vander Zee 248 live in an atmosphere of hypocrisy throughout.” He laments the “depravity of the business classes,” the “corruption, bribery, falsehood, mal-administrating” that saturate public life (qtd. in Williams 70). After giving voice to this other side of
Whitman, Williams notes in a parenthetical aside how similar this sounds to “what we’ve come to know, politics by party, politics as power.” And then, in a crucial insight, Williams asserts: “He already knew the loss.”
These are the five truest words in On Whitman, perhaps the truest, most necessary words we could say of Whitman today. But Williams abruptly backs away, beating a retreat to the poetry, to the early Leaves of Grass, which he calls “a hymn of praise to the nation, to its people, its land, its nature, its animals” (71). Over this symphony of optimism orchestrated by (in Williams’s phrase) a “stunningly successful, hardly ever flagging poetical-fictional colossus,” it is difficult indeed to hear the muted strains of Whitman’s lateness (32).
Williams’s blindness to Whitman’s lateness and all it signifies has its roots not in any disrespect for age or fear of death, but in a profound underestimation of
Whitman’s music. Reflecting on Whitman’s teasing question from “Song of Myself,” where he asks the reader: “have you ever felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems,” Williams offers this stunning claim:
What’s striking is that there are no ‘depths’ in Whitman, no secrets, no allegories, no symbols in the sense of one thing standing for another, an aspect of matter standing for an element of spirit. Everything in Whitman’s poems is brought to the surface, everything is articulated, made as clear and vivid and in a way as uninterpretable as it can be. (22)
But this tyranny of the ostensible only represents one of Whitman’s many changes of garments. What of the Whitman who writes, in the preface to Leaves, of the essential
Vander Zee 249 poetic qualities of indirection and suggestiveness? The one who writes in “Among the
Multitudes,” of some far-off reader “picking me out by secret and divine signs” (CPP
286). Whitman, we also recall, was something of an amateur Egyptologist, obsessed with hieroglyphics and their hidden portents. And wasn’t Williams himself utterly convincing when he substituted Whitman for the deeply allegorical Poe, the American poet most often compared to Baudelaire? Whitman knew his late work had plenty of secrets in store.
Williams can be a learned, enthusiastic critic, whatever his oversights. But he is a poet at the core. If On Whitman repeatedly dismisses Whitman’s lateness, his most recent collection of poems, Wait, stands out for its quiet admission of late Whitman’s more complex, conflicted, and insinuating music, even if he remains unable, finally, to move beyond a debilitating elegiac orientation toward the bard. It is not that Whitman saturates the book by any means. But what finally gives the collection a more durable significance are the late-Whitmanian moments scattered about in these poems.
Wait begins with a subtly Whitmanian piece, “The Gaffe,” a poem that opens onto a Whitman mostly absent from Williams’s prose reflections. The poem begins in a convoluted, long-lined stream of purposefully vague pronouns and veiled references:
“If that someone who’s me yet not me yet who judges me is always with me, as he is, shouldn’t he have been there when I said so long ago that thing I said?” (3). The lines powerfully recall Whitman’s self-interrogation in “As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of
Life.” In that early pre-war poem of crisis, Whitman introduces a similar phantom self, what he calls his “real Me”:
But that before all my arrogant poems the real Me stands yet untouch’d, untold, altogether unreach’d,
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Withdrawn far, mocking me with mock-congratulatory signs and bows, With peals of distant ironical laughter at every word I have written… (395)
For Williams, this is the “conscience beast,” that entity within who draws “from infinitesimal transgression complex chords of remorse” and “orchestrate[s] ever- undiminishing retribution from the hapless rest of myself” (3). Whitman is similarly divided between the bard singing the song of himself, and what Williams here calls that “hapless rest of myself,” that self-interrogating presence, always lurking. While
Whitman would seem to escape this phantom presence in “As I Ebb’d,” resolving crisis into recovery, a deeper engagement with Whitman’s late work shows that he never fully exorcizes this interrogator. This interrogative presence, I would argue, is the unsung strain of Whitman’s lateness across the long American century. Williams cannot exorcize this interrogator either. “The Gaffe” is a threshold poem, a beautiful poem about childhood and lost innocence; it can also in this context be seen as an invitation to seek out a different Whitman, a Whitman who already knew the loss, understood it could not simply be transcended. The power of such threshold poems— one thinks back to Whitman’s early lilacs in “There Was a Child Went Forth”— resides in the combination of elegy and innocence, with the latter cast as a utopia, a no-place.
Admittedly a subtle presence in “The Gaffe,” this more conflicted late
Whitman becomes the explicit centerpiece of “United States,” a finely orchestrated allegory that brings us close to Whitman’s lateness even as it approaches the kind of left-wing melancholy that has become such a ready impulse for contemporary poets.
The poem begins with an image rife with the ironies of globalization and empire:
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The rusting, decomposing hulk of the United States is moored across Columbus Boulevard from Ikea, rearing weirdly over the old municipal pier on the mostly derelict docks in Philadelphia. (49)
Here we are in Philadelphia, the birthplace of the American republic, marked not by
Independence Hall, but by so many derelict docks. Columbus is there too, a reminder that the ideals of the republic were erected on a slippery slope where discovery quickly ceded to displacement and genocide. The presence of the SS United States nearly buckles under its own allegorical weight. Built in 1952 as a joint venture between private interests and the U.S. Government, the ship was an intentional marker of America’s unquestioned power, both in terms of material wealth and military might: it was a luxury leisure liner and a ready conveyance for American troops should another world war break out. And it was fast. It broke the transatlantic-crossing speed record on its first voyage, and then again on its way back. The ship dominated the seas until 1969, when its fate became more muddled. As the ship aged, it was passed back and forth between various private interests. Nobody seemed to have any idea what, profitably, to make of the thing. It was shipped to Ukraine for asbestos removal, picked up by the Norwegians for a brief period, and later tied up in an unlikely time-share cruise concept. The U.S. Navy considered commissioning it as a hospital ship, but nothing came of that scheme. The United States has sat strapped to those derelict Philadelphia docks since 1996 in the shadow of a Swedish megastore.
This is all to say that Williams’s “weirdly” in the first stanza doesn’t quite do the ship’s rusting, decomposing presence justice.
Midway through the poem, Williams fills out this already freighted allegory.
We move from the poem’s present to a moment of recollection as Williams tells the
Vander Zee 252 story of his first transatlantic crossing aboard that very ship: “We were told we were the fastest thing afloat,” Williams wistfully recalls, “and we surely were.” Pulling into port in northern France—not far from the beaches of Normandy—Williams’s poem begins to voice a distinct American triumphalism:
At Le Havre we were out of scale with everything; when a swarm of tiny tugs nudged like piglets at the teat, the towering mass of us in place all the continent of Europe looked small. (49)
Breaking away from this allegory of America’s ascendency, the third-to-last stanza brings us back to that initial, ruinous image:
Now, behind its raveling chain-link fence, the ship’s a somnolent carcass, cables lashed like Lilliputian leashes to its prow, its once pure paint discoloring to blood. (50)
“Lilliputian”: the nod to Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels binds the poem to a broader tradition of allegory. In the Benjaminian terms discussed in Chapter 1, we might say that in “United States,” Williams’s allegory endures as a symbol in ruins, the aging of some symbolic force.
Just as Williams underscores his poem’s overwrought allegorical aspirations, a decidedly late Whitman enters the poem in the last two stanzas to further complicate and amplify the poem’s conceit:
Upstream, the shells of long-abandoned factories crouch for miles beneath the interstate; the other way the bridge named after Whitman hums with traffic towards the suburbs past his grave;
and “America’s mighty flagship” waits here, to be auctioned I suppose, stripped of anything it might still have of worth, and towed away and torched to pieces on a beach in Bangladesh. (50)
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Whitman is more than just another convenient landmark for this allegory about globalization, about how we devalue the past, about the decay of the American dream.
Whitman himself, of course, was docked for the final years of his life in Camden, across the river from Philadelphia where he saw his own life and work, his own body, as a kind of relic, a ruin. Presiding over the letters and poems that littered the floor of his bedroom late in life, Whitman confided to his close friend and disciple Horace
Traubel, “I live here in a ruin of debris—a ruin of ruins” (WWC 5: 435). Those words from Williams’s prose volume—those five truest words—come back to mind: “He already knew the loss.”
In the previous chapter, I discussed the nautical images that suffuse Whitman’s work, forming a kind of composite allegory. No nautical poem in Whitman’s oeuvre seems as relevant to Williams’s “United States,” however, as “The Dismantled Ship.”
Holding its political and existential crises together at once, the dual nautical metaphors of state and life here age into a mournful allegorical stasis. I discussed this poem in more detail in Chapter 3, but I quote it in full again here:
In some unused lagoon, some nameless bay, On sluggish, lonesome waters, anchor’d near the shore, An old, dismasted, gray and batter’d ship, disabled, done, After free voyages to all the seas of the earth, haul’d up at last and hawser’d tight, Lies rusting, moldering. (CPP 634)
At the end of Williams’s poem, he invites us to see Whitman himself as “American’s mighty flagship” poet, a poet of obsolescence “stripped of anything / it might still have of worth.” But Whitman, we learned in the previous chapter, had already invented
Williams’s allegory of the dismantled ship of state and life that—in words accentuated by what is perhaps the most meaningful line break in Whitman’s poetry—“lies rusting,
Vander Zee 254 moldering,” like the United States lashed to the derelict docks in Philadelphia. He already knew the loss.
Williams is not our most Whitmanian poet despite the long lines that tempt people to make the connection. Here, he takes us close the difficult energies of
Whitman’s lateness but drives on past Whitman in age to the suburbs as his poem settles into the same complacent disposition his poem would seem to resist. We have much to learn from this Whitman about how to read the virtues of lateness and transformation, how poetic tricks and tropes age across a poet’s work, and how a poet in age, just when his powers might seem to flag, becomes not worse, not lesser, not radically or shatteringly new, but something else entirely. Whitman knew this something else well.
Whitman, Lately Part II: Robert Creeley
If C.K. Williams’s attention to Whitman’s late work is glancing and dismissive in his prose study, his relationship with the aging poet is much more suggestive in his poetry. Robert Creeley, however, offers an unparalleled engagement in both poetry and prose with Whitman in age—an engagement that quietly spans a long literary career. I related, in this study’s introduction, how early in 2005, eleven days before he passed away, Robert Creeley was slated to deliver a talk at the Virginia Festival of the
Book on a panel celebrating the sesquicentennial of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass
(1855). The question that loomed over the meeting was one that has both inspired and vexed readers of Whitman from the start: “Who Is the Real Walt Whitman? Given the almost uniform dismissal of Whitman late work, and noting that the meeting itself had
Vander Zee 255 as its focus Whitman’s beginnings and not his endings, Creeley’s answer to the question posed by the panel must have surprised. Rather than concur with the myth of
Whitman’s decline, the title of Creeley’s talk—“Reflections on Whitman in Age”— suggests that the real Whitman must be the late Whitman. Yet, as I noted, the grammatical ambiguity of Creeley’s title—where age might refer not to Whitman, but to Creeley’s own subject position “in age”—creates a powerful double gesture impelling a reading of the late Whitman from the critical prospect of lateness itself. In this, he would seem to follow Whitman, who, just years before he died, wrote that:
“To get the final lilt of songs… To diagnose the shifting-delicate tints of love and pride and doubt,” the “keen faculty and entrance price” is “Old age” itself (624).75
Though many critics designate anything Whitman wrote after the Civil War as sufficiently late, Creeley’s essay stands out for its singular attention to the poet’s final collections—November Boughs (1888) and Good-Bye my Fancy (1891). Creeley’s reflections, furthermore, are remarkable for their concentrated and sincere acts of reading, and for their refusal to be constrained by standard accounts of Whitman’s career. Noting the “common sense that Whitman’s poems faded as he grew older,”
Creeley redresses this view by dwelling on the poet’s life: “The life,” he writes, “is finally the poetry” (61). And by a life he does not mean Whitman merely as the
“curious icon of his own intent” (68), or as a thing of biography, but as, unequivocally, a body. “Now I know,” he writes, “that age itself is a body, not a measure of time or record of how much one has grown” (60). Creeley uses Whitman’s aging body not as mere fodder for biography, or as an emblem of growth or wisdom gained, but as a
75 All quotations from Whitman, unless otherwise indicated, are to Walt Whitman: Complete Poetry and Collected Prose.
Vander Zee 256 crucial point of departure for his inquiry into the poet’s isolated, idiosyncratic late work. Reflecting on Whitman’s “Old Age’s Lambent Peaks,” he asks: “Where does one think this man is? What are the compulsions of the cadence, the ‘airy, different’ rhythms? Why the persistent backbeat, the ‘falling twilight’…. For a poet these details are profound masteries in themselves and speak as emphatically as will the evident content one otherwise calls ‘the meaning’” (62). Considering the general dismissal of
Whitman’s late work—not to mention the C.K. Williams’s astounding declaration that there are no depths in Whitman—Creeley’s keen formal attention quietly breaks new ground. Creeley himself, it must be said, tends at times to elide the density of artifice in Whitman’s late poetry, as when he writes that the poet “seems as if writing with a habit so deep and familiar it no longer separates from him as an art or intention” (62).
This makes sense insofar as a great deal of the late Whitman does replay old themes, and does revert to a kind of physiological complaint leavened by a super-induced hope. Creeley also finds himself wary of a jingoistic Whitman, who flaunts his flag in poems like “Proudly the Flood Comes In,” making himself all too “convenient to public sentiment of the time” (78). But there remains an undeniable resistance in the late work that refuses such habituated expression, and that often casts a more bellicose rhetoric, whether intentionally or not, in a critical light by magnifying, rather than eliding, artifice. Creeley seems very much in tune with this more revisionary and unresolved strain.
We see this in Creeley’s reading of Whitman’s “Had I the Choice,” a poem in which Whitman begs of the ocean: “Would you the undulation of one wave, its trick to me transfer?” (7). For Creeley, the question betrays a “curiously determined lapse
Vander Zee 257 almost perversely ‘chosen’” (72)—particularly when one recalls the profound lesson learned through the early crisis poem, “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” where the sea’s secret is revealed in that “low and delicious word death” (CPP 393). Many aspects of Whitman’s late work also seem if not perverse, then at least somehow unaccountable. We witnessed this in the previous chapter’s charting of Whitman’s lilacs as they fade into mirage, for example. Creeley’s commentary on “You Tides with Ceaseless Swell” shows a similar feel for this estranging late Whitman. Partaking in a prominent apostrophic subgenre of the late work, Whitman asks the vast sea to reveal its secret: “What subtle indirection and significance in you?” he exclaims,
“what clue to all in you? What fluid, vast identity, / Holding the universe with all its parts as one—as sailing in a ship?” (CPP 618)). Creeley comments brilliantly that
“those last five words come in with such poignance. Like Coleridge’s ‘gentleman from
Porlock,’ they break the sliding rhetoric” (73). The image of the ship appears as a truncated conceit, its world of finely wrought detail entirely missing. Whitman implicitly seems to doubt the image himself, incorporating it in the interrogative mode of the poem while letting it dangle off the end of his poem, suspended with a dash. For
Creeley, however, the image remains “charmingly apt” precisely because “the sea can’t be put as such a simplifying reference.” This pointed Porlockian intervention saves this late poem from being a mere exercise, a mere old-age echo of previous sentiments. It introduces a knowing formal distance between poet and utterance, reader and poem. Shrewdly, Creeley senses in his late essay, if only quietly and on the edges of Whitman’s work, a tone that does indeed break the sliding rhetoric of the
Vander Zee 258 serene triumphalism, however diminished, that critics have taken to be the mark of his lateness.
Creeley seemed keenly aware of his predecessor’s quintessential lateness even in an early, unpublished graduate school paper tracing Whitman’s influence submitted for John Gerber’s graduate course at the University of New Mexico in the summer of
1957. Though only thirty-one, Creeley was no novice. He had served a tour on the
Burma/India front during World War II, subsequently living for some time in France and Mallorca; he had already published five small books of poems and a book of stories; he had married, had two children, and separated; he had, among other editorial activities, run the Black Mountain Review going on three years, publishing within its pages both poetry and what he called “quick graphs” of prose. He did not lack experience, worldly or otherwise. Yet, despite the sense that Whitman was, for better or worse, a key part of the American poetic tradition, Creeley confesses in his introduction to his Whitman Selected (1973) that “my own sense of Whitman was curiously numb until I was thirty” (WMS 285). In the bits of critical prose that Creeley published in the early 1950s, Whitman is not mentioned at all. Nor is Whitman a notable strain running through his voluminous correspondence with Olson during this period. Whitman was, of course, a giant for Olson, but given the latter’s sparse mention of him throughout their voluminous correspondence, he was the quieter giant.76 Thus, Creeley’s unpublished graduate-school essay, “Walt Whitman and Other
Poets,” is not only his first direct engagement with Whitman, but his most sustained
76 Herman Melville is, of course, the other Giant of Olson’s inheritance. But by signaling the other giant, I am referring to Olson himself, a man of prodigious physical size with a literary ego to match.
Vander Zee 259 meditation on any poet up to that point. This piece of what one might call Creeley’s critical juvenilia deserves attention upfront for two reasons: first, it reaffirms and gives a particularly expressive example of just how complicated the question of Whitman’s influence was in the post-war years in general; second, and more specifically, it provides a vividly conflicted example of a young poet straining after a meaningful literary engagement with a figure whose reputation, significance, and paths of influence had largely been decided and divvied up.
In his essay, reflecting on the status of Whitman in the post-World War II years and also on his own modernist predecessors, Creeley writes, articulating what would become a common critical refrain from Roy Harvey Pearce to Thomas Gardner to Kenneth Price, that “Whitman’s influence on the poets who follow him is, again, very ambiguous; or, if that is the wrong term, the very largeness and generality of the image involved makes it difficult to point to specific references, except in those instances where the poet involved declares a specific relationship” (7-8). I would add that even when specific references are made, the governing generality and grandness of Whitman’s influence still threatens the integrity of any such alliance, especially for mid-century poets emerging from a more chastened modernism. How could anyone at this stage, Creeley seems to suggest, delicately ally themselves with the grand, multitude-containing, contradictory poet of: the poet of democracy, the poet of death, the poet of the body, the poet of slave and master, the poet of cosmic optimism, and so on. Whitman’s various guises occupy such a maximal space that it becomes difficult to imagine what a more subtle engagement with the bard would even look like. The drive to make Whitman somehow broadly representative, as some kind of grand poetic
Vander Zee 260 signpost, has a long and entrenched history: from Emerson’s enthusiastic praise of
Leaves through Whitman’s own exaggerating self-presentations in his poetry and prose, and from Whitman’s prosthelytizing disciples down through the most contemporary criticism. Creeley’s early essay is unique in the searching ways that he views the largeness and generality of Whitman’s influence as a problem that a young poet must address in an ongoing struggle to forge a more authentic, understated, and life-size engagement.
The past few chapters have documented, in their own ways, how Whitman became so suspicious to the bearers of opinion, became, in Creeley’s words, “the dupe, the dumb-bell, the pathetically regrettable instance of this country’s dream and despair” (WMS 286). His politics, his sexuality, his aesthetics—embodied both in
Whitman and his unfortunate influence—all inform this suspicion, but this pervasive anxiety about things Whitmanian tells us much more about those experiencing it than they do about the bard himself. For these reasons, among others, and to put a long story short, Creeley reports that he came to Whitman late. But this approach also helps him arrive, I would argue, at a decidedly late Whitman: a Whitman he could create for himself out of the wreckage of his reputation that the modernists handed down.
In what follows, I turn to Creeley’s Whitman, but not as a way to chart anything as ambitious as a new history of American poetry; rather, I uncover an influence that reveals an overlooked facet of that history, and of late Whitman’s role in that history. Like his post-war peers, Creeley struggles with the Whitman’s relentless economy of affirmation and consolation. But instead of breaking with Whitman, he gradually forges, over the course of his career, an underground connection with the
Vander Zee 261 poet based not on elegiac longings underscored by utopian dreams, but based on the recognition of a resistant core within elegy itself, what I described by way of introduction with reference to the mournful quality of Benjamin’s theory of allegory.
For Benjamin, this mournful aspect of allegory makes available an acute recognition of loss and unbridgeable distance, a recognition that harbors an unresolved and non- affirming element that, in dwelling and meditating on that distance, teaches lessons of historical and political import that mere consolation and affirmation cannot.
Though Creeley does not actively engage, much less rescue, Whitman’s late work in this essay, he seems aware of how hyperbolically critics often treated
Whitman’s poetic decline. Early on, he notes Malcolm Cowley’s authoritative pronouncement in the latter’s introduction to The Complete Poems and Poetry of Walt
Whitman that “[the poet] had little to say after 1860 and fell silent after 1874” (3).
Paying little heed to such overarching judgments for biography, Creeley pointedly moves on to quote from Whitman’s 1876 preface to Leaves. Given Creeley’s judgment of Whitman’s supposed “silence,” Whitman, here, would seem to speak beyond and over the critic’s eulogy. Fittingly, then, Creeley moves from Cowley’s blunt judgment to D.H Lawrence’s maverick homage—part excoriation, part exaltation—to Whitman, the great “post-mortem poet,” the “ghost” whose poems “are really huge fat tomb- plants, great rank graveyards of growth” (4). Lawrence, of course, dwells on
Whitman’s obsession with death because he feels that the poet has unduly dissolved his identity beyond the point where it might attain any meaningful particularity. The question that Whitman’s late poetry asks, then, is how the post-mortem poet can continue to sing after he has been, as he writes in one late poem, “call’d back, resumed
Vander Zee 262 upon myself,” after the expansiveness that Lawrence mocks contracts of its own accord (CPP 619). Creeley’s critical attention to Cowley and Lawrence forges an inchoate image of Whitman’s post-mortem poetics calling out on the edges of
Leaves—in silences, in absences, and in the great rank graveyards where Whitman’s final poems continue to grow in their abandoned plot.
More telling, perhaps, than the date attached to the passage that Creeley excerpts from Whitman’s 1876 Leaves is the statement itself. In that preface, Whitman offers a striking precedent for projectivist poetics when he writes that “my form has strictly grown from my purposes and facts, and is the analogy of them.” Striking in its precision, Whitman’s statement forms a crucial precursor for what was, after Olson placed it in caps in his “Projective Verse” essay, Creeley’s rallying cry for open-field poetics: “form is never more than an extension of content.” Whitman’s statement in his preface seems to present a transcendentalist vision of Creeley’s organic aesthetics.
Creeley’s eager acceptance of Levertov’s Emersonian revision of that statement, where she substituted revelation for extension, demonstrates as much. Creeley wants to understand poetic form as a natural, unaffected, and effortless reflection of the content at hand. “Form is what happens,” he would later say, simplifying and condensing the original statement (Tales 30). Creeley takes this affinity with Whitman as a partner in projectivist poetics a step further when he credits Whitman with
“recast[ing] the line as a singular coherence, extending it as far as its energy component will permit” and for concentrating his efforts “in the content in hand” (6).
Though his modernist predecessors eventually paid lip service to Whitman’s influence and importance despite all their criticism, Creeley’s incisive and generous reading of
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Whitmanian formal energies and directives here remains both singular and singularly overlooked. For Creeley, Whitman was a fellow craftsman in a way that goes deeper than even Ginsberg’s use of the Whitmanian line and his attenuated embrace of his bardic ethos. Though Creeley and Whitman at first seem utterly opposed, the difference in their poetics did not stretch the poles of minimus and maximus; rather, they were simply variations on the extension of energy as the poem confronted its informing experience. And in both poets, age would be the final, and perhaps most profound, informing experience—something that Creeley seems to understand from a very early stage, melding his evolving poetics to physiology: “The Plan Is The Body,” as he writes in a poem from his 1976 collection Away (Collected 1: 601).
But no matter how novel and incisive Creeley’s comments on Whitman’s poetics are, the hoped-for affinity is not as straightforward as it seems. Although
Creeley wants to read Whitman as invoking the poetic ideals of immediacy, presence, and process, Whitman qualifies that sense of immediacy by invoking poetic intent
(“my purposes”) and a certain formal distance (via the figural logic of “analogy”). It is an admittedly picky qualification to make, but it has real consequences for the poetics
Creeley was trying to develop. The intrusions of intent and figurality present what
Olson might call forms of interference that result in a poetry that is “the act of thought about the instant” rather than the “act of the instant itself” (50). Creeley’s modest ideal of presence, what Charles Altieri has called his immanentist mode, shrinks from the kind of linguistic abstraction and assumed prescriptions that Whitman’s statement courts.77 Even language itself often seems to present enough of a problem for Creeley, who puzzles in Pieces how he can ever get “the fact // of things // in words of words”
77 See Altieri 29-52.
Vander Zee 264
(Collected 1: 429). Looking for a Whitman to endorse his own poetic ideal, Creeley ends up with one who instead exposes its blind spots. Creeley’s motivated misreading points to a shortcoming in the mapping of literary inheritance that this project has sought to revise. For insofar as critics do not think of affinities as being structured by the critical force of suggestively correlated failures and formal anxieties, the literary kinship that functions so powerfully in Creeley and Whitman falls under the critical radar as it becomes increasingly based not in the success of their ambitions, but, as I will show, in their struggle to bring their respective poetic visions to fruition. Whitman and Creeley come together on the difficult terrain of their shared lateness.
So much about Creeley’s early essay seems prescient, setting the ground for his more explicit engagement with the late Whitman in the final years of his life. Yet, in many ways, his interventions and observations remain mere suggestions left to dangle untethered at the end of his essay. After an often startlingly sensitive series of comments on the literary kinship that Hart Crane and Allen Ginsberg forged with
Whitman, Creeley ends, somewhat abruptly, by laying the foundation for the basic paths of influence. He offers the following lineage: “Whitman to Pound/Williams to
Kenneth Rexroth/Charles Olson” (20). He then notes, in what would seem an apt predictor of Harold Bloom’s agonistic model of literary inheritance, that “the men most marked by him are probably now those most impatient with what an aspect of his heritage has led to. Yet this is also in the tradition.” After all the subtle tracings of influence, we are left, finally, with the pig-headed father functioning as a kind of return of the modernist repressed. Though he comes close in this early essay to new sense of Whitman’s lateness, Creeley merely poses the question that he would
Vander Zee 265 continue to ponder, and that his poetry would implicitly answer, over the next fifty years: “what sort of poet would now enroll himself as pupil to Whitman. Has the world changed too much? Are there comrades left?”
With this question, a silence rings out near the end of Creeley’s early essay, and he has little to say about Whitman over the next decade, though there are signs of an enduring engagement. In Creeley’s 1964 interview with British poet Charles
Tomlinson brings up T.S. Eliot, whom he considers the absent presence in their conversation about “the great older generation” and their ability to influence American poetry. Creeley offers a quick and dismissive “no,” before continuing: “and there is one much earlier poet who is far, far more available than Eliot… That is the figure the
New Critics and the universities to this day have conspired to ignore: that is Walt
Whitman” (Contexts 28). Though it comes dramatically at the end of the interview,
Creeley’s contention here is not wholly accurate. Walt Whitman, after all, had been the subject of major critical studies at least since F.O. Matthiessen broke major ground with his American Renaissance (1941), and was already the subject of a major,
Pulitzer-prize-winning biography by 1926. Indeed, the bibliography of Creeley’s early essay on Whitman includes many such works.
What underlies such hyperbole becomes clearer in a 1967 interview with Linda
Wagner. She asks Creeley whether he “would… say that the influence of a poet’s contemporaries is as strong as his ‘ancestors.’” Creeley replies that he has always found his immediate contemporaries to be real sources of engagement and growth, though he notes Pound and Williams as important ancestors, as he does almost by rote in nearly every interview since. Here, however, he chooses to look further back:
Vander Zee 266
“Whitman finally comes to have for me this possibility, although I must confess I’m beginning to know Whitman in a way that I hadn’t known him previously” (Tales 68).
One wishes that Wagner had asked Creeley what he meant by this statement: who is this mysterious Whitman, previously unknown to him? Is this the Whitman whose themes of homoerotic adhesiveness Crane clutched in his embrace? Or the one who supplied Ginsberg with the expressive long lines for his howls? Is this the Whitman
Duncan mourns as that “glorious mistake,” in his “Poem Beginning with a Line from
Pindar”? Perhaps, finally, this was Louis Zukofsky’s Whitman—Zukofsky, who concluded his “Five Statements for Poetry” in 1962 by printing, in full, what he called
Whitman’s greatest poem—the scathing, ironic, and expurgated “Respondez!” (1856).
The point, here, is that Creeley had many examples of how Whitman fits into his contemporary literary world—a sense we gather even in his early graduate school essay on the bard—even if he chose to remain aloof of the revival of Whitman scholarship that persisted in the 1950s and ’60s. Yet he opts to position himself somehow on the threshold, on the edges, of these already established relations, hinting at a different kind of Whitman than those that had come before.
Around the time of his interview with Wagner, Creeley was composing an introduction to Zukofsky’s “A” 1-12 (1967). There, Creeley discusses the prevalence and significance of “leaves” as a strong Whitmanian signifier throughout Zukofsky’s oeuvre. This Whitmanian presence persists even if it is largely unconscious, and despite, Creeley writes, “what seem dissimilarities” (58). By noting Zukofsky’s subtle invocations of Whitman, Creeley establishes a precedent for his own unlikely affinity with the poet, one that emerges most often not through bold declarations of
Vander Zee 267 comradeship, but through oblique, elegiac echoes, through suggestion and indirection.
Among the handful of passages Creeley points to is one from“A”-11, a powerful self- elegy in which Zukofsky considers his own eventual absence. At first, the poem would seem to have nothing to do with Whitman. Blending imagery of organic growth and musical notation, Zukofsky imagines his poem being set to music by his wife, a composer, and his son, a violin prodigy. Near the end, the poem enters a complex mode of address as Zukofsky composes a message that this song itself must deliver to his son after the poet, his father, passes. “Having had breath go,” he writes,
Face my son, say: ‘If your father offended You with mute wisdom, my words have not ended His second paradise where They turn, quick for you two—sick Or gone cannot make music You set less than all. Honor
His voice in me, the river’s turn that finds the Grace in you, four notes first too full for talk, leaf After leaf of your mind’s music, page, walk leaf Lighting stem, stems bound to the branch that binds the Tree, and then as from the same root we talk, leaf Over leaf of his thought.’ (124)
“That men do so in time relate!” (59) Creeley exclaims after excerpting this touching image of a poem’s binding force: its ability to hold his literal family together, but also, for Creeley, its power to hold a literary family of poetic influences together through the Whitmanian echo whose mute wisdom is sensed here only on what he would call, in a late poem of his own, the very “edges of leaves.”
The poetic logic through which he sees Whitman in Zukofsky’ poetry approaches a kind of “mute wisdom” as well, both the musical upper limit to which the latter’s poetry aspired, and the absent voice communicated through its proliferation of “leaves.” We might say, then, that Whitman’s presence comes to be seen precisely
Vander Zee 268 through his absence. There exists an uncommon urge here to make Whitman’s inheritance a quiet one. Whitman, for Creeley, becomes pure music—the page, the note, the process of sounding. Against the received image of Whitman as a magnificent failure, as an embarrassment, or as some poster-boy or sign-post, Creeley locates Whitman in Zukofsky’s mute wisdom, and that’s where we find him in
Creeley’s own poems as well.
Whitman enters Creeley’s “Fall,” a brief series from In London (1970) through these same traces of leaves, establishing the shifting terms of Creeley and Whitman’s shared sense of lateness. The poem is one of Creeley’s first extended, self-conscious meditations on lateness and age, a trait we notice in its autumnal title, its amplification of mournful distance, and its unfolding, euphemistic conversation with Whitman “over hills.” Seeing as this poem was written thirty-five years before his own passing,
Creeley’s anecdote about his ex-wife’s grandfather taking to his deathbed thirty years before he passed might betray a subtle anxiety about his premature lateness after all.
The poem begins with two five-line stanzas:
Again you feel the air be light a smoke would burn in.
Leaves, leaves, the hill we drive up over- hung with leaves, the trees all covered. (Collected 1: 471)
After clearing the air in an image of searing beauty—which may also simply be
Creeley contemplating having “a smoke”—Creeley ushers in a gratuitous, almost
Vander Zee 269 clotted insistence on the fact of leaves on a certain hill, a profusion that lightly echoes
Whitman’s trademark exuberance. The poem then moves from the specific site of observation—two people driving over a hill in the country—to a more displaced reflection, one might even say estrangement:
IT IS FUNNY—strange—to see the young swirl—leaves, they might be said to be, in a current of our own.
One of Creeley’s gifts as a poet is the way he signals shifts in meaning through tight control of his spare vocabulary where deictic indicators and shades of pronominal reference radically redirect and complicate a poem’s trajectory. Here, seeing a swirl of leaves caught in an eddy of air, Creeley imagines the motion of “the young”— children, perhaps—caught in a kind of swirling game. Duncan’s “child’s game / of ring around of roses told” from “Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow” comes to mind (Opening 7). But this carefree image of childhood—a romantic nod to innocence and possibility—is just an illusion of the poet’s “own” making. The leaves, we learn, are caught in a current not of “their” own, but of “our” own.
After this admission, the next tercet moves to an unforced and direct image: not the hedging of what “might be / said to be,” but what is:
The limp gestures of older persons, the hands unable to hold them, all the world in a flaccid attentiveness—
Now it is fall, and one must yield again to the end of a cycle, call it spring, and its endless instances.
From childhood, we arrive suddenly at the limp gesture of older persons. What, one wonders, are these hands unable to hold? Their own gestures, lacking the care-free
Vander Zee 270 precision in the dancing fancy of children? The image of leaves sheds the illusion of youth. They begin to seem more like “limp gestures of older persons” as the poem gives way to thoughts of aging. The subsequent tercet appears more muddled, almost nonsensical: how is the end of a cycle in fall an instance of spring? And how can spring’s instances be “endless” when seasons are defined by their ephemeral nature?
The poem appears pitched between youth and age, between “theirs” and “ours,” between spring and fall—or, thinking of another absent presence in this poem, between Spring and All (1923). That landmark work by William Carlos Williams holds a similar hope for the “endless instances” of spring. Early in that hybrid collection, Williams writes that “to refine, to clarify, to intensify the eternal moment in which we ourselves live, there is but a single force—the imagination” (Imaginations
89).
Following its network of echoes, Creeley’s poem comes to be about distances unbridgeable by any act of the imagination. But these abstract distances are not themselves the self-consuming reference in the poem: the words—the leaves, especially—give occasion to a more specific referent. Rather than simply recycling, however powerfully, the venerable poetic pathos of a lyric calling out over a distance, this poem uses that trope of distance as a figure for how Whitman, as I have been discussing throughout, was somehow inaccessible, with oceans between Creeley and an authentic relationship with that particular poetic father. By signaling the
Whitmanian presence, he not only gives the poem a more specific referent, but permits that Whitmanian subtext to amplify and underscore the distance he imagines between
Vander Zee 271 any two people, but also between a single person and his own sense of self. Creeley’s poem then moves from its digressive tercets to a more controlled couplet:
You will never be here again, you will never
see again what you now see— you, the euphemistic
I speaks always, always wanting a you to be here. (472)
Ever since the charged clearing of the initial five-line stanza and the abundant leaf imagery of the second, the poem has begun to lose its footing, slowly shrinking from the five-line stanza, to the tercet to the spare duality of the couplet—a diminishment that occludes the quatrain altogether. In an interview from the mid-60s, Creeley recalls
Pound telling him that “verse consists of a constant and a variant.” He then explains that, for him, “the quatrain… is the constant. The variant then can occur in the line, but the base rhythm also has a constant which the quatrain in its totality indicates. I wanted something stable, and the quatrain offered it to me” (Tales 30).
The formal drama in this small serial poem, then, consists of a search for the constant—the quatrain—with the gradual shrinking of the stanzas reflecting the shifting concerns of the poem as it loses ground. The couplets enter here both to stabilize the poem, and also to reflect how the poem has contracted into two irreconcilable terms. If the poem at first supported the fiction of speech, with an “I” addressing “you,” that community has contracted at this later point into a single mind.
Creeley raises the possibility that “you” is only a euphemism for “I,” a figure through whom the self addresses itself across the abstractions of language and the passage of time where self-identity is constantly fleeting, as even his line-breaks suggest: “You
Vander Zee 272 will never be here / again.” The poem ends with a kind of coda, which could serve as a summary description of the poem. Never has a quatrain in Creeley felt so necessary and yet so insufficient.
• How the I speaks to you— over hills.
The return to the constant of the quatrain here makes a formal gesture of stability that the poem’s own drama of relation cannot seem to reflect or answer. The variability of the line breaks underscores the lack of stability and divisions that have plagued the poem, with the ‘I’ separated from the speaking voice, and both separated from the desired object, which is as far away as Whitman and as close as one’s own estranged self. But this is precisely how Creeley talks to Whitman: over unbridgeable distances, with confident gestures that nevertheless show the strains of erosion and doubt. As with Creeley’s adaptations of Whitman’s late theorizing about his “purpose” and
“facts” to fit his own poetics of immanence, this poem shows not a consummate connection with the poet, but a suggestively annotated failure of contact. Fittingly, the final moment of stability and contact—“how the I / speaks to / you— / over hills”— takes us, in a kind of loop poetics that Creeley would increasingly employ, back to the initial stanzas: “Leaves, leaves, / The hill we / Drive up over- / hung with leaves, / the trees all covered.” The lines also echo the understated engagement that Creeley senses in Zufofsky’s “A-11,” where the latter writes in “leaf / Over leaf of his thought.”
Creeley’s “Fall” locates its constant, its eternal spring, in its endlessly recursive
Vander Zee 273 nature, how it returns to revisit a central drama over and over, each time thrown back up on the shrinking beauty of that initial five line stanza.
Locating a motivation for Creeley’s pronounced use of grammatical abstractions—“I,” “you,” “here,” “there”—throughout his poetry, Lynn Keller notes that “in using such generalized terminology, Creeley permits his reader to enter into the same mental activity as the poet but within the context of the reader’s immediate situation—something that would not be possible if Creeley used specifically referential expressions” (171). This is a novel, perhaps necessary way to read Creeley, for, as she notes, “the moment Creeley’s reader ceases to participate in the poem’s repeated movement into presence, he or she will find Creeley’s statements either too obscure and elliptical to be meaningful or, more often, too obvious, trivial, or naïve to command much interest” (179). While Keller’s method of reading may sustain interest for a time, many of Creeley’s poems can be usefully expanded beyond the blank drama of his pronouns by noting their veiled referents. In “Fall,” Creeley enlists the foundational Whitmanian drama of the distance separating poet and reader, the solitary singer and the people en masse, as a maximal figure or backdrop for his own minimalist drama of mind: how self-abstraction and language constantly remove one from the present moment or perception that he so obsessively courts across his career.
Creeley struggled to locate a poetics, an efficacious vocabulary of form, that could repair or close the insuperable distance and abstraction between poet and world, and this problem, increasingly near the end of his career, began to show the strains of extended effort. Thrown back into the strictures of self, Creeley moves not from crisis to recovery, but from crisis to its manic subversion within the folds of his recursive
Vander Zee 274 late form. In the end, he does not resolve this dilemma in his own late work; alongside
Whitman, he recreates and traverses its allegorical landscape.
With the publication Creeley’s Selected Whitman in 1973 for the Penguin Poet to Poet series, this almost inaudibly subtle engagement with a distant Whitman that had persisted from his early days in graduate school becomes much more pronounced.
For Creeley, to understand the nature of Whitman’s influence is to understand something essential about poetry across the twentieth century. Thus, Creeley writes in his introduction that “it was, finally, the respect accorded to Whitman by three of my fellow poets that began to impress me as not only significant to their various concepts of poetry but as unmistakable evidence of his basic use to any estimation of the nature of poetry itself” (WMS 287). After noting the central role that Whitman inhabits in the work of Ginsberg, Duncan and Zukofsky—a kind of update to his tour of influence in that earlier graduate school essay—Creeley carves out his sphere of influence very much as he does in his early essay: by marveling at the complex motions of
Whitman’s prosody. Early in the essay he complains that most of the work accompanying Whitman’s introduction into the American canon “had primarily to do with Whitman’s work as instance of social history or else with its philosophical basis, or, in short, with all that did not attempt to respect the technical aspects of his writing, his prosody and the characteristic method of his organization within specific poems”
(287). It may be difficult to get overly excited about the minutiae of poetic form, but it is also difficult to over-exaggerate the revisionary force of Creeley’s keen attention to the technical aspects of Whitman’s poetry. He discusses “the constantly recurring structures… the insistently parallel sounds and rhythm” in a “process of… endless
Vander Zee 275 gathering, moving in the energy of his own attention and impulse” (291). Here,
Creeley offers a rather precise definition of the kind of serial form—distinct from both the modern poetic sequence and the modernist long poem of epic ambition—that has its roots both in Whitman’s cluster arrangement in the early Leaves, the non-linear structure of “Song of Myself,” and also the later annexes. Creeley himself had been experimenting increasingly with this form as well, as evidenced in his landmark
Pieces (1969). Later in the essay, Creeley marvels at the “flexibility of diction” in
Whitman’s lines along with the careful modulation of “tone or mood” that the poems accommodate: “It is very open, familiar, at times very casual and yet able to be, on the instant, intensive, intimate, charged with complexly diverse emotion.” The reader is invited to “share with Whitman in a paradoxically unsentimental manner the actual texture and force of the emotions involved.” And of course, there is the “uncanny feeling of his literal presence, physically” (293).78
Near the end of Creeley’s introduction to his Selected Whitman, he appears to fall back on a final accession to the crux of elegy and utopia, recalling Davidson’s argument above: “If our America now is a petty shambles of disillusion and violence,”
Creeley writes, “the dreams of its possibility stay actual in Whitman’s words” (294).
At first, this sounds much like Pearce’s longing for Whitman as the “hope for
America.” But Whitman’s vision does not provide a blueprint for a possible future; they are not transcriptions of native optimism. Rather, we are thrown back on the
78 It is far too easy to forget Whitman’s poetic virtuosity, and the modernist disdain for his verse making lives on even in the most astute, contemporary criticism that deals with his influence. Take Brian Reed’s recent monograph, Hart Crane: After His Light (2006). Reed’s Whitman is not at all multi- talented. Discussing “Passage to India,” he argues that “Whitman here writes, as always, in the anaphoric, end-stopped free verse that he learned from the King James Bible” (24). As always: it is as though Whitman only had one crude keyboard. It is in this critical climate, more common than not, that Creeley’s attention to Whitman’s technical intensity and variability becomes so important.
Vander Zee 276 words themselves, which, when inhabited with the kind of attention Creeley accords, may harbor some dream, some faint illusion, of its possibility—but they are not possibility itself. Indeed, a more nuanced reading of Whitman’s late work found even there not the possibility but the dream of possibility continually deferred. Creeley’s dream of a possibility buried within words, then, resembles the kind of allegorical archeology that buries Whitman’s lilacs in his final “Mirage” beneath layers of artifice and neat poetic lies. Whitman criticism and Whitman’s influence alike are determined by what the bard’s words lead out to, what they imagine, what they make possible.
For Creeley, however, Whitman’s words always lead back to themselves, and in the end are cast back on their own appalled hopes. Just as Creeley was famously reluctant to leave any act of attention outside the poem through merely descriptive acts, he is reluctant to release Whitman’s words to worldly possibility, as their actuality resides only in their questionable, questioning dreams.
If Creeley does not precisely articulate this point, his editorial selections themselves bear out this broader logic. Creeley included a few standard late works, but concluded his edition with poems that we might say take the place of lateness, such as the expurgated “Debris” and “Respondez!” In other words, he places materials that
Whitman himself was unable to rework, materials Whitman himself discarded, and placed that resistant core at the end. These works don’t simply occupy the space of lateness, but, as I suggested at the end of Chapter 3, they show how the allegorical insight and melancholic debris that we see in the late work was present even in the earlier work.
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After the publication of his Selected Whitman in the early 70s, Whitman enters
Creeley’s life and writing from this point forward in often surprising ways. At certain points, he appears to recycle the worn trope of Whitman as a poet fundamentally lost to the present. In “Desultory Days” from Later (1979)—a book whose title gently echoes the jaunty slang of Whitman’s ritual good-bye poem, “So Long”—Creeley meditates on “time’s wandering / impermanences—” (Collected 2: 164). An uncharacteristic political poem, Creeley first revisits the mythical city on a hill, the myth that never became a reality:
As friends, before I die, I want to sit awhile
upon this old world’s knee, you charming hill, you see, and dig the ambient breezes,
make of life such gentle passing pleasure!
He suggests that from this prospect, one might just avoid “the heaped-up canyons of the dead,” “L.A.’s dear smut,” and “N.Y.C.’s / crushed millions” (165). What he calls the “latent fascism / of the soul” forms a stark contract to some lost, absurd
Whitmanian promise:
What leaves behind those other people, like they say
reneges on Walter Whitman’s 19th century Mr. Goodheart’s Lazy Days and Ways in Which
we might still save the world. I loved it but I could never believe it.
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Just as so many poets before him, Creeley recoils from the bright light of this
Whitman myth and joins a more austere, ironic sensibility that lies closer, quite literally, to his New England home: “rather, the existential / terror of New England / countrywoman, Ms. Dickinson,” he writes. As if a final rebuke to Whitman—who named himself, in his inscriptions to Leaves, “a single separate person”—Creeley writes that “I am no longer / one man— / but an old one // who is human again” (167).
Creeley’s dismissal of Whitmanian promise transforms quietly, here, into a more intimate dismissal of Whitman from Creeley’s embodied experience of age, of what it means to grow old. And this is precisely where he would find Whitman again.
By the mid-90s he began to mention Whitman’s late works along with themes of aging in various talks. In a talk given at Boulder High School in July of 1994,
Creeley jokingly mentions a review of his recent Echoes (1994) that claimed aging as his foremost concern over the previous two decades. Without denying this preoccupation, Creeley proceeds to tell a story about his ex-wife’s maternal grandfather who took to his deathbed a full thirty years before he passed. Whenever his wife would leave the house on any errand or visit, Creeley recalls, “the husband would tell her that she was doing what no woman has every done: leaving her husband on his deathbed.” Chuckling along with the audience, Creeley protests that he hopes he has not been guilty of that preoccupation, but admits to his longstanding fascination with what he calls the social, political and personal aspects of age nonetheless. This fascination saturates his late work.
Even if Creeley does not project his own lateness as preemptively or explicitly as Whitman, he could certainly relate to the pressures of lateness that his predecessor
Vander Zee 279 felt. Just as Whitman’s late work stands at a far remove from its powerful inception in the 1855 Leaves, and its tragic testing during the Civil War years, it remains stunning to recall just how far removed Creeley’s last books——If I Were Writing This (2003) and the posthumous On Earth (2006)—are from the major touchstones and crises that define it. His most influential works appear earlier in his career, with For Love (1962) and the more experimental seriality of Pieces (1969) receiving the bulk of critical attention. Furthermore, his late work appears over half a century after Charles Olson and Creeley worked out their ideas about post-modernism, projective verse, and open- field poetics; over four decades after Donald Allen’s ground-breaking and canon- making New American Poetry (1960) gave critics a surprisingly sturdy set of affinities and genealogies with which to approach a diverse group of poets writing after World
War II; and over three decades after the Vietnam War, which created rifts among
Creeley’s closest friends who debated fiercely about the poet’s responsibility in the face of world-historical suffering; and, finally, Creeley’s late work arrives nearly three decades after the increasing institutional presence of language poetry and deconstructive criticism began to provide the dominant terms through which many have come to understand and defend Creeley’s evolving poetics.79 As with the late
Whitman, we are left with a situation where the dominant terms of the discussion seem inadequate to the poet’s lateness, to the sheer temporal distance that his late work achieves.
79 This now dated critical emphasis is beginning to change, as we can tell by the recent publication of Form Power and Person in Robert Creeley’s Life and Work (2010). While we begin to see fresh insights into Creeley’s late work here, most of the critics featured—Michael Davidson, Marjorie Perloff, Alan Golding, Charles Altieri—represent a sturdy tradition of commentary on Whitman. One wishes that a few new voices that might represent the future of Creeley criticism might have been invited.
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Though Creeley’s late works are recent enough not to have been especially neglected, his sheer poetic longevity has established the ground for misunderstandings of his late work, the inauspicious beginnings of which have already begun to emerge already in the critical reaction to the second volume of The Collected Poems (2005) and in the editorial apparatus surrounding the Selected Poems (2008).80 In his introduction to the new Selected Poems, Ben Friedlander charts a movement “from crisis toward care” (11), with Creeley’s final books, culminating in On Earth, offering
“a glorious conclusion to Creeley’s life in poetry, a succession of poems that are graceful, eloquent and wise” (31). In the twilight of his “diminishing physical powers”
Creeley achieves “artistic fullness.” This could just as well be Dowden talking about
Shakespeare in its assumption of mellowing growth, and its movement from the engaged realm of crisis to a decidedly non-committal and removed care. However agreeable these terms may have been to Creeley himself, I choose here to read his late work, along with Whitman’s, against the grain even of their own affirmations. I find them both loath to leave “crisis” for “care,” and frequently unsure enough about the efficacy of their enduring poetic projects to render that transition in any case
In his Preface to Good-Bye my Fancy (1891), Whitman writes that he feels
“much like some hard-cased dilapidated grim ancient shell-fish or time-bang’d conch
80 In what might as well be a paraphrase of much criticism written on Whitman’s late work, Charles Simic argues in his review of Creeley’s entire career that after For Love (1962) “the better poems are rare and come after many pages of banal musings on aging, decline of his faculties, and death, in a language that is flat and thoroughly predictable.” Creeley’s poems, he argues, were everywhere limited by a theory of poetry that largely eschewed description and revision. This judgment closely echoes critical responses to Whitman’s poems as well, which are equally curtailed by their own poetics that simply failed to make necessary distinctions. But just as many of Whitman’s critics can’t stand to see the poet of America so badly abused, and therefore highlight instead Whitman’s remarkable faith and consistent optimism in his drive toward union even in the face of death, Creeley’s most recent commentators seem eager to cement Creeley’s reputation by relegating his late work to a kind of benign realm of echo and consolidation.
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(no legs, utterly non-locomotive)” (Prose Works 2: 737). The metaphor speaks to what he termed his “forced confinement” in ill health, crammed up in his Camden bedroom.
Whitman’s shell-fish condition echoes his haughty question mid-way through “Song of Myself,” exposing its wishful thinking:
To be in any form, what is that? (Round and round we go. All of us, and ever come back thither,) If nothing lay more develop’d the quahaug in its shell were enough.
Mine is no callous shell… (CPP 215)
We have witnessed Whitman’s reversion back into this shell-fish condition in the way he retreats from a more optimistic presentation in his elegy for Anne Gilchrist, the way he uses traditional metrics to annotate his very real constraint in “The Dismantled ship,” the way he reverts to the short, static lyric, and the way he held on to his lilacs long after their symbolic resonance had retreated into distanced, melancholic allegory.
Creeley did not share Whitman’s earlier long-lined, multitude-containing poetic practice, but his serial structures, which grew to be a central aspect of his poetics after Pieces enacted their own quiet expansiveness. For both poets, this early expansiveness was sponsored by a deep sense of phenomenology: the need for presence, contact, and engagement whose frequent failing provided the dramatic structure for both of their work. And for Creeley as well as Whitman, this expansiveness contracts notably in his late work, where he finds a more permanent home in the quatrain, in regular meters, and in tight, almost campy rhymes. In “Wish” from On Earth (2006), he enters his own compact shell, echoing Whitman’s lateness:
I am transformed into a clam.
I will be very, very still.
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So natural be, and never ‘me’
alone so far from home a stone
would end it all but for this tall
enduring tree, the sea,
the sky and I. (Collected 2: 632-633)
Creeley’s “Wish” may only be a “Mirage,” thinking of Whitman’s late poem of that title. But the vista is not absolutely bleak. At once playful and profound, Creeley seems to lend Whitman’s shell-fish condition a sense of control, or purpose.
Amidst numerous poems whose primary tenor is one of departure and farewell full of kindled memories and fine sentiment, “‘To Think…’” is in many ways the quintessential poem of this more serene lateness, and yet it offers key points of resistance as well:
To think oneself again into a tiny hole of self and pull the covers round and close the mouth—
shut down the eyes and hands keep still the feet, and think of nothing if one can not think of it—
a space in whose embrace such substance is, a place of emptiness the heart’s regret.
World’s mind is after all an afterthought
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of what was there before and is there still. (606)
Whitman and Creeley, whose formal strategies differ so widely, converge in their late work at the unlikely locus of iambs. Why such formality? What does it enclose? What refuse? Though Creeley returns to his favored quatrains here, he seems to do so as if they were the last remaining constant, tamped down by an exquisite beat of iambs— one of the few Creeley poems that scans the whole way through.
“‘To Think’” is a powerful self-elegy with one foot in the world and the other in the canon. Its marshaling of literary echoes dissolves the poem into a networks of traditions as one hears both Wallace Stevens’s “The Snow man” in its gnomic rumination on nothingness, and Emily Dickinson’s post-mortem dialog between truth and beauty where the two abstractions talk until “the moss reached our lips / and covered up our names” (216). The final gesture toward “Worlds mind” as
“afterthought,” which appears at first a kind of poetic solipsism, is actually a finely humble gesture. “World,” Creeley was fond of saying, “is simply ‘the length of a human life’ as its etymology defines it’” (On Earth 60). The poet’s mind here, which is necessarily the poet’s world, is mere afterthought, a supplementary and secondary drama, a “tiny hole” against the whole of humanity. This is a most gracious “leaving,” and one can hardly imagine a quieter, more serene, more finely modulated departure.
The short-list of takes on Creeley’s lateness—from Friedlander’s introduction to Creeley’s Selected Poems, to the numerous reviews and online tributes to the poet in the wake of his passing—have noted a similar strain of lateness in Creeley.
Friedlander, as I noted above, writes of the transition from crisis to care, from shiftiness to a final sentimentality that reveled in the company of friends and family.
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The final poems are “graceful, eloquent and wise,” he writes. D.H. Tracey, in his review of On Earth in the New York Times, speaks of a book full of “warm elegies for friends” and “poems of baffled gratitude.” Addressing Creeley’s poetics, Tracey writes that they are “often buffered by his aw-shucks affability.” He notes, as many have, the increasing presence of more traditional forms and metrics in the late Creeley, calling the “flirtation with form in On Earth a kind of “rivalry turned chummy, as if the tradition Creeley fought to part from has grown unthreatening and even useful, but needing its nose tweaked no less for that.”
Never has Creeley—famously pugilistic in youth—seemed so sweet and avuncular. There is something earnest and true about these reflections, but also something deeply misleading. As regards this last bit from Tracey in particular, a memorable fragment from Adorno’s notes on Beethoven comes to mind: “The stereotypes in the late Beethoven,” he writes, “are in the vein of ‘My Grandfather used to say’” (Beethoven 136). The blinders of traditional late style readings (à la
Friedlander) that come to border on a condescending ageism (à la Tracey) offer up a late Creeley who, so recently passed, is in danger of being egregiously passed over.
We can honor this aspect of Creeley’s lateness, but a true critical eulogy could learn much from Creeley’s own essay on the late Whitman where he shows not only how the bard clung to habituated expressions of lateness only to emphasize the degree to which he also broke that sliding rhetoric, how he became, in a sense, anomalous even to himself at times. There is something else happening in these late works, but, to borrow a line from Creeley’s late essay on Whitman, “one does not hear it unless in the most obvious way one listens” (60). We, also, must expand the register of that
Vander Zee 285 critical listening to Creeley’s own lateness beyond the shortsightedness of the above tributes.
Creeley’s “War” from On Earth frustrates the inchoate consensus on his late work as it mediates on a certain compound lateness, suggestively joining the obsolescence of the aesthetic and of age. The poem begins:
Blur of world is red smear on white page, metaphors useless, thoughts impotent, even the sense of days is lost in the ranging militance.
No life other than political, the fact of family and friends subjorned to the general conduct of this bitter abstract. (611)
Creeley wrote this poem at a time of deepening violence in Iraq after the national embarrassment of Abu Ghraib and as rumors of a more pervasive use of torture filled the news. In If I Were Writing This (2003), the last book Creeley himself saw into print, he incorporated a long poem that had been previously published in June of 2001 as its own chapbook, then titled Drawn & Quartered. The title is a clever play on
Creeley’s quatrains, which accompany Archie Rand’s rough drawings in one of
Creeley’s many collaborative projects. But as the reality of U.S. torture became an icon of both national and human failure, Creeley’s quaint recycling of a brutal medieval execution method for the title of his chapbook must have seemed embarrassingly rash in retrospect. It is in this context that I think we need to consider the self-loathing and “impotent” lines of “War.”
Aside from its sturdy quatrains, “War” resists formal reading explicitly, declaring “metaphors useless” as the red smear of an indistinct violence scars the
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“white page”—here, the open field of poetic composition or the more determined space of the daily newspaper. Unlike many other poems in On Earth that return to more consistent rhymes and gracious metrics, “War” resists efforts at scansion, offering no stable rhythm, no consistent backbeat. The lines seem flatly prosaic and paratactic. The way this poem shuns a particular kind of formal attention that other poems in the same collection seem to invite underscores its sense that there is “no life other than political.” The poem does strive for some alliterative rhythm with its “fact of family and friends,” but such affection is immediately “subjorned” in that lines curt enjambment, where the possibility of Creeley’s signature sentimentality is suspended just long enough to heighten the drama of its disappearance.
In the final three stanzas of “War,” Creeley ties this meditation on aesthetic impotence to the experience of age itself:
I look in the mirror to see old man looking back, eyes creased, squinting, finds nothing left.
He longs for significance, a scratch in the dust, an odor of some faint fruit, some flower whose name he’d lost.
Why would they hate him who fight now insistently to kill one another —why not. (611-612)
Creeley’s consideration of the final inefficacy of poetry in a world of unrelenting and renewed violence fittingly arrives in a poem marking what Kathleen Woodward calls the mirror stage of old age where “the hostility toward others which is associated with the mirror stage of infancy is now reflected back upon oneself as well as projected
Vander Zee 287 onto others” (67). Creeley’s hostility, however, is largely reserved for himself. His concluding interrogative lacks the punctuation mark that might give the poem a final sense of open-ended inquiry. The final “why not” becomes pure matter-of-fact. A rhythmic pulse does return in with Creeley’s suggestion of “some faint fruit, some flower,” but the name is finally lost. One cannot help but think of Whitman’s lilacs here, which Creeley appears unable to summon. Refusing any easy movement from crisis to care, “War” is finally a meditation on the irreconcilable and unresolved. It is, recalling Said’s definition of lateness, a deliberately unproductive productiveness going against. “War” thinks lateness and aesthetics together as Creeley harnesses the social rendering of age’s obsolescence, how it “longs for significance,” as a way to think about the obsolescence of the aesthetic itself, it helplessness in the face of
“War,” a passiveness that only invites hate and derision.
When faced with such difficult, intractable lateness, Creeley’s “Help!”—which is the only poem to so emphatically offer itself with such pointed titular exclamation— offers none of what its title advertises. Indeed, it only mocks the self-consuming drama of “War.” Here is a sampling of quatrains—any, it seems, would do:
Help’s easy enough If it comes in time. Nothing’s that hard If you want to rhyme.
It’s when they shoot you It can hurt, When the bombs blast off And you’re gone with a squirt.
Sitting in a bunker, Feeling blue? Don’t be a loser, It wasn’t you—
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…………………….
It’s wrong to kill people Just to make them pay. Wrong to blast cities To make them go away. ……………………..
You think that anyone Ought to get pushed, Shoved around for some old Bush? (615-16)
Few would marvel at the formal control here. Not capitalizing the line that contains a reference to George W. Bush is perhaps the peak of this poem’s subtlety. He also differentiated the poem from “War” and many others in his last collection by capitalizing every letter at the beginning of the line. Oppen did the same out of respect for the integrity of words; Creeley’s goal here seems more knowingly cynical as he funnels the poem toward a triumphant call to arms:
Sing together! Make sure it’s loud! One’s always one But the world’s a crowd
Of people, people, All familiar. Take a look! At least it won’t kill you. (617)
We know that Creeley loved his quatrains, loved his rhymes, but this poem seems like intentional doggerel masquerading as the impossibility of political engagement via poetry. It is a purposefully honest political poem, purposefully colloquial and cliché, and purposefully—perhaps necessarily—bad. Its shrill formality only emphasizes form’s distance from things as they are. Critics and reviewers do not discuss this poem, perhaps because they have no idea what to do with it. Perhaps it mars the fine
Vander Zee 289 structure of Creeley’s lateness receding into that final “hole” of self. The poem does not seem easy to categorize alongside warm elegies and touching sentiment. Its
“crisis” seems manufactured and its “care” vastly over-extended to an undifferentiated
“people, / All familiar.”
Creeley, of course, has a very uneasy relationship with this kind of political expression. During the Vietnam War, Creeley was routinely asked why he failed to direct his work toward the political situation. Creeley’s answers were honest and various. He was loathe to give the war his experience of words—war in general already demanded such various personal and public energies. Though he respected attempts at political verse by Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov, he never had much luck himself, always feeling a pang of the inauthentic. The presence of “Help!” in his final collection seems an important reflection on these previous positions. In its theatrical excoriation of the role of the poet in a time of war, it not only laments the role of the poet, it recalls Whitman’s own failure by echoing what he considered
Whitman’s half-hearted, absent jingoism. The movement from crisis to care is only a critical myth of lateness transported from Dowden to Whitman and on to Creeley—a way of explaining away, rather than explaining, the difficult, often unaccountable late work of both poets.
Creeley’s final essay, “Reflections on Whitman in Age,” is a prose elegy for
Whitman as much as it is for William Carlos Williams, Robert Duncan—the two poets who form the poles of Whitmanian influence to Creeley’s mind: one elects to forget
Whitman, the other elegizes him; Whitman is either made absent or mourned, however inadvertently, out of existence. Creeley quotes generously from both at the end of his
Vander Zee 290 essay, though he does not offer his own late affirmations to echo Duncan’s, for example. “I could go on quoting,” he writes, “age wants no one to leave” (83). Here,
Creeley perfectly captures the elegiac undertow that saturates Whitman’s Leaves, which is, in the end, a book of leave-takings, a long good-bye. “Things close down in age, like stores, like lights going off,” Creeley writes, “like a world disappearing in a vacancy one had no thought might happen. It’s no fun, no victory, no reward, no direction” (83).
This might seem a pessimistic conclusion, but it carries with it the kind of light and honesty that can only be wrested from shadows. In this, it is not unlike
Benjamin’s leap of faith, or the odd glimmer that shines even in Adorno’s most pessimistic passages. “In the abandonment of the illusion of harmony,” Adorno writes of the late Beethoven, “there is an expression of hope” (Beethoven 193). In Whitman and Creeley as well, such a hope runs parallel with utter renunciation. But with them as well, it is possible that “this difference between resignation and renunciation is the whole secret of these pieces” (Beethoven 193). Such hope is what chooses to endure, chooses not to “end it all,” thinking back to Creeley’s “Wish,” abiding instead in lateness and in the difficult beauty of its living ruins.
On that day in March 2005, Robert Creeley never did give his talk. Wheeled up to the stage by his wife, Penelope, Creeley reportedly leapt out of his wheelchair, left his oxygen tank behind, bound onto the stage, and grabbed a chair to join his fellow panelists Ed Folsom and Stephen Cushman. According to Folsom, Creeley never mentioned the essay on the late Whitman from which he was asked to offer an excerpt for the audience, though the essay would later be published in the Virginia
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Quarterly Review and then as a coda to his posthumous collection On Earth. Creeley did note the ways that Whitman has emerged as an often quiet but persistent force in his career, and he touched upon his own old-age poems. Gradually, however, the conversation shifted to the broader question of how things are handed down from one poet to the next, one generation to the next. This would seem the perfect opportunity to lay out the kind of late-style genealogy that might fill in the details involving how
Whitman’s lateness impacted Creeley’s own late work, and that of he peers. But instead, in what Folsom calls Creeley’s “predictably unpredictable” manner, he began to rehearse in animated detail Allen Ginsberg’s claim regarding a certain sexual genealogy leading from Whitman to Ginsberg via Edward Carpenter, Gavin Arthur, and Neal Cassady.
Creeley’s bold actions that day might seem a refusal of age as he abandoned his wheelchair and oxygen tank, and even abandoned late Whitman himself—his putative subject—telling instead a sexier, more virile story of influence. But Creeley’s talk can also be read as a partial gloss, an echo, or perhaps a kind of allegory of the story he begins to tell about Whitman’s lateness in the final essay that he did, in fact, see into print, a story whose significance remains largely untouched, untold. It is that story—rife with its own compounding allegories and shadow narratives about age and art and life and the possibilities of a new orientation—that I have taken up in these pages.
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CODA
“COSMOS, LATE BLOOMING”
We have seen versions of Whitman’s lateness enter quietly into the work of select poets here, some entering their own late phase, some recently passed. But how has a more self-conscious awareness of Whitman’s lateness begin to shape and inform the work of poets still who are still emerging? D.A. Powell’s fourth book of poems,
Chronic, published by Graywolf in 2009, has been justly and widely praised. Powell is known for what Stephen Burt calls his “long, stuttering line,” spliced with caesurae, that I think itself embodies a sort of hesitant Whitmanian verve; for a playful conflation of low and high culture, slang and refined wit; and for a neo-confessional poetics located at the difficult intersection of erotic and elegy, a poetics that both reflects and refuses its grounding—both emotional and political, personal and social— in the AIDS crisis. Though Powell is not known as a particularly Whitmanian poet, the bard is often present, if nowhere named, in Chronic. One does not even need to read a poem to discover this connection: Powell’s author photo shows his torso and pelvis in x-ray, a cropped and medicalized echo of Whitman’s famous frontispiece to Leaves of
Grass, mingling the working-class erotics of Whitman’s pose with a something much more stark, anonymous, almost antiseptic.
Though Powell is a firmly mid-career poet, his book self-consciously takes on the weight of lateness in both a personal and an apocalyptic sense: in part a meditation on his own chronic illness (Powell is HIV-positive) his book is also about a diseased
Vander Zee 293 body politic and a diseased earth. Whitman, we know, also saw his aging and increasingly damaged body as a sign of the times. In a brief note appended to his late collection Good-Bye my Fancy (1891), Whitman wrote of the deficits of age, describing himself as “palsied old” and “shorn,” a direct result of his exertions during the Civil War years (Prose Works 2: 738). Though Powell does not so clearly fabricate a cause and effect relationship between a damaged body politic and his damaged body, his book arranges itself around the same suggestive analogy.
The title poem from Chronic mines these mutually inflecting intensities of demise:
here is another in my long list of asides why have I never had a clock that actually gained time? that apparatus, which measures out the minutes, is our own image forever losing
and so the delicate, unfixed condition of love, the treacherous body the unsettling state of creation and how we have damaged— isn’t one a suitable lens through which to see another?
......
Choose your own adventure: drug failure or organ failure cataclysmic climate change or something akin to what’s killing the bees—colony collapse more like us than we’d allow… (35-36)
If we see Whitman in this trope of the literal body mirroring body politic, Powell summons the bard more explicitly later in the poem. “The body’s burden, its resolute campaign: trudge on,” he writes, as this physical lasting comes to figure for broader world-historical matters:
and if the war does not shake us from our quietude, nothing will I carry the same baffled heart I have always carried a bit more battered than before, a bit less joy for I see the difficult charge of living in this declining sphere… (37)
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It is not until we arrive at the next line’s more explicit summoning of Whitman via the lilac topos that we see this not as a private or personal complaint, but an act of poetic comradeship:
by the open air, I swore out my list of pleasures: sprig of lilac, scent of pine…
We find ourselves back with Whitman “in the fragrant pines, the cedars dusk and dim” of the Lincoln elegy with its profusion of lilacs. Just as Whitman tells the thrush in that poem to “sing on… / sing from the swamps, the recesses… / limitless out of the dusk… / loud human song with voice of uttermost woe!” (CPP 463). Powell concludes his own poem with a similar commitment to song:
if I, inconsequential being that I am, forsake all others, how many others correspondingly forsake this world.
light, light: do not go I sing you this song and I will sing another as well. (38)
Both poets here pledge to sing limitless out of the dusk.
The title poem, then, establishes this quiet Whitmanian presence. Nowhere, however, is this presence more clear and suggestive than in the two poems that comprise a floral diptych on facing pages near the start of Chronic: “Cosmos, Late
Blooming,” and “Sprig of Lilac.” The poems are, in one sense, persona poems, voiced by the tropes on which they turn. But they are also confessions, emerging from the collection’s sensibilities of lateness and durability and lasting—that is, they have everything to do with what one might call the chronic ego that grounds Powell’s collection, and that, I argue, binds him to Whitman’s lateness.
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Though I see these poems saturated by Whitman’s presence, Powell does not encourage that reading in a brief prose reflection in the 2008 Best American Poetry in which the first poem appeared. There, he values cosmos for their durability, and seems more in tune with their floral connotations than their identification with a poet who called himself “one of the roughs, a kosmos” (CPP 50). And yet it is precisely that roughness that draws him in: “As we overload the environment with pollution,” he writes, “isn’t it amazing that something beautiful can endure in spite of us? (174). In
“Cosmos, Late Blooming,” the neatly metaphorical flowers, however, do not appear particularly beautiful: “contused and stricken,” they arrive in “tatters, pinked edges, unpressed”—the latter, unpressed, perfectly capturing a sense of being unkempt, and also unheld, unpreserved, as we might press a flower in a book for a keepsake (16).
This unkempt flower, then, becomes the recipient of the benevolence of some
“strapping Gardner,” some saving grace. Though the flower feels unlovely—“lord,
I’m a homely child”—it risks opening itself to this “caretaker, this lost man,” who takes the flower for his chaplet, which can be read simply as a floral wreath, or as something like the poet’s wreath, or, thinking of Baudelaire, a lost halo. It’s hard not to see Whitman as this caretaker, this lost man, a kosmos, one of the roughs. And in
Whitman’s own poem titled “Kosmos,” he articulates the grounding trope of his late work, which is also the grounding trope of Chronic: the literal body as an allegory for larger bodies—politics, celestial, earthly: “Who,” Whitman writes in “Kosmos,” “out of a theory of the earth or his or her body understands by subtle analogies all other theories, / The theory of a city, a poem, and of the large politics of these States” (CPP
516).
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Powell’s concerns about corrupted flesh are Whitman’s own as well. In “This
Compost,” Whitman strives for union with his earthly love, but finds himself repulsed: the earth is full of infections, distempered corpses, every continent “worked over with the sour dead”—drunkards, gluttons (495). And just as Whitman overcomes this repulsion in one of the most strangely moving near-necrophiliac moments in all of poetry—“I will run a furrow with my plow, I will press my spade through the sod”—
Powell, likewise, concludes “Cosmos, Late Blooming” on a quietly sexual note: the strapping gardener, now named a sorrow, a caretaker, a lost man, claims the poet:
“these brambles part for your boots… your hand upon my stem now grasps the last shoots of summer / choose me for your chaplet, sweetheart. Wasted were my early flowers” (16). This is a poem about Whitman choosing us in our loss, in our disease, both personal and social. Whitman plucks us, degraded, for his own durable, degraded halo.
As this floral diptych crosses the page, we go from chaplet to boutonnière, and from cosmos to a more identifiable Whitmanian trope with the sprig of lilac. Whitman, in his Lincoln elegy, essentially invents lilacs for modern poetry—it was not, like the rose or bay leaf, a staple poetic trope before Whitman. Powell’s lilacs meld twin genealogies, emerging out of Whitman, of socio-political melancholy and queer solidarity—a genealogy that courses through lilacs in Proust, Oscar Wilde, T.S. Eliot,
Pablo Neruda, Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, Robert Duncan, Michael Palmer, Robert
Creeley and Robert Hass, among others. In Powell’s “Sprig of Lilac,” the floral topos itself crumbles under this allegorical weight: “in a week you could watch me crumble to smut: spent hues / spent perfumes” (17). Moths enter, signifying the ephemeral. If
Vander Zee 297 the lilac often symbolizes the loss of Whitman—what this poem terms, again with subtle sexual undertones, “oddments of ravished leaves”—Powell shows that trope to be exhausted. The lilac has been to too many funerals, has come to stand in for too many of our unhealed and unhealable losses, our melancholy politics.
Looking to the archetypal moment of utopian union, however illusory, with
Whitman, Powell writes that, “We kissed briefly in the deathless spring.” But the final lines of Powell’s poem, the concluding couplet of this floral diptych, both voice and move beyond the worn tracks of Whitman’s influence. “Unbutton me now from your grasp,” Powell writes. This is Whitman refused, the Whitman of lost promise on the other side of Ginsberg’s Lethe, the Whitman who’s hand Spicer severs, the Whitman, recalling Levis, that we have stopped believing in. But the poem makes a crucial turn at the caesura: “no, hold tighter, let me disappear into your nostrils, into your skin, a powdery smudge against your rough cheek.” For Powell, we enter a new and more honest reflection of Whitman’s lateness via the worn elegiac topos of lilacs not in their symbolic force, but in their allegorical lasting into ruin and loss. The poem itself is a fading impression, crumbling beneath our desire to grasp it. But it finally joins
Whitman on the grounds of lateness—these “Cosmos, Late Blooming.” His wasted lilacs become a part of the poetic, chronic body that Powell projects—a body that must not succumb to loss, but must instead inhabit its knowledge while moving beyond that static melancholia that so often predominates in Whitman’s wake.
At the end of a certain strain of Whitmanian inheritance marked by a debilitating melancholy, I sense a deliberate turn, a deliberate versus, that works against the grain of a more reactionary melancholy to return to craft a more actionable
Vander Zee 298 melancholy within and alongside persistent loss. In that sense, the answer lies not in extremes either of unending crisis or specious recovery, but in a deepening knowledge of loss.
“‘The Final Lilt of Songs’” has sought to make Whitman’s lateness and the knowledge it holds available in a new way for critics and poets alike. As we approach the twilight years of what I call the long American century, I have shown that in missing Whitman so deeply, we have begun to find him once again as contemporary poets sense the need for this “new orientation,” recalling the words of Barbara Guest.
Poets have begun to look back across that scarred allegorical landscape of the long
American century to seek a new knowledge in and through a truer reflection of
Whitman’s lateness, just as Whitman peered through the ruins of his own work to reanimate his freighted lilacs.
In the lasting of Whitman’s lilacs across his own work and into the present, we see how, to borrow Jim Hansen’s succinct statement on the lessons of Benjaminian allegory, “Form decays historically; its truth is its loss, its historical decay” (673).
Whitman’s lilacs deny the supreme act of post-war reconciliation that they were originally deployed to ensure, becoming instead a sign of reflective exile from the crisis of the Civil War and its divisive aftermath. Rather than the myth of Whitman’s decline, we see Whitman’s self-recognition in failure, his consciousness of loss, his melancholy debris persisting in the wake of gilded-age greed and botched
Reconstruction. These are lilacs that persist across the twentieth century as elegy fades to influence, an emblem of form’s lasting ruin and accrual. Where canon, biography, and the constraints of too-well-defined critical programs so often betray the artifice of
Vander Zee 299 authorial destiny, form remains the embodiment of historical experience. Form is where we go for stories we do not yet know, but might; stories that begin with a question, begin with the momentous act of noticing, of recognition; stories that begin, that is, with our own unknowing, and proceed through the knowingness of form—the history, to borrow Alan Liu apt phrasing, not there.
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