The Continuing Presence of Walt Whitman The Continuing Presence of Walt The Life after the Life Edited by Robert K. Martin University of Iowa Press 1m Iowa City University of Iowa Press, Iowa City 52242 Copyright © 1992 by the University of Iowa Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Design by Richard Hendel No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, without permission in writing from the publisher. The following essays have been previously published, in somewhat different form, and are reprinted here with permission: Thorn Gunn, "Freedom for All," Times Literary Supplement, January 5-11, 1990, pp. 3-4; Maurice Kenny, "Whitman's Indifference to Indians," Greenfield Review 14 (Summer/Fall1987): 99-113; Michael Lynch, "The Lover of His Fellows and the Hot Little Prophets: Walt Whitman in Ontario," Body Politic 67 (October 1980): 29-31; Ned Rorem, "A Postscript on Whitman," © 1969 by Ned Rorem, published in Rorem, Settling the Score (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1988), pp. 311-313. Ronald Johnson's poems first appeared in Valley of the Many-Colored Grasses (New York: Norton, 1969), pp. 89-98. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The Continuing presence of Walt Whitman: the life after the life I edited by Robert K. Martin.-1st ed. p. em. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN o-87745-366-7 (cloth: alk. paper) 1. Whitman, Walt, 1819-1892-Criticism and interpretation. 2. Authors and readers-United States. 3· Reader-response criticism. I. Martin, Robert K., 1941- PS3238.c59 1992 811'. 3-dc20 CIP 96 95 94 93 92 c 1 2 3 4 5 TO MICHAEL LYNCH, 1944-1991 Contents Acknowledgments ix Introduction xi READING THE NATION Reading Gay America: Walt Whitman, 3 Henry James, and the Politics of Reception Eric Savoy Langston Hughes and the "Other" Whitman 16 George B. Hutchinson Whitman's Indifference to Indians 28 Maurice Kenny Tropes of Selfhood: Whitman's 39 "Expressive Individualism" M. Jimmie Killingsworth Rereading Whitman under Pressure of AIDS: 53 His Sex Radicalism and Ours Michael Moon II SOME READERS A Serpent in the Grass: Reading Walt Whitman 69 and Frank O'Hara David Eberly Whispering Whitman to the Ears of Others: 82 Ronald Johnson's Recipe for Leaves of Grass Ed Folsom Free Verse in Whitman and Ginsberg: The Body 93 and the Simulacrum Amitai Avi-ram Fetishizing America: David Hackney 114 and Thorn Gunn Robert K. Martin viii Contents III BEYOND THE BORDERS "Still on My Lips": Walt Whitman in Britain 129 Gregory Woods Walt Whitman in Ontario 141 Michael Lynch Atlantic Poets: "Discovery" as Metaphor and 152 Ideology Maria Irena Ramalho de Sousa Santos Pessoa and Whitman: Brothers in the Universe 167 Susan Margaret Brown IV THE POETS RESPOND Whitman's "Live Oak with Moss" 185 Alan Helms Forays against the Republic 206 Thorn Gunn A Postscript on Whitman 213 Ned Rorem Loving Walt Whitman and the Problem of 217 America Alicia Ostriker Letters to Walt Whitman 232 Ronald Johnson Notes on Contributors 241 Selected Bibliography 245 Index to Whitman Poems Cited 257 Acknowledgments Support has been provided by Concordia University. I am particularly grateful for the expert services of two research assistants, Lazer Lederhendler and Frances Slingerland. Lazer provided valuable editing skills, and Fran was a scrupulous reader of drafts and checker of facts with a keen eye for the details that I tend to miss. Both of them made this project more enjoyable. All unspecified references to Whitman's poetry are from the Comprehensive Reader's Edition; citations are by line number. Introduction ROBERT K. MARTIN Poets to come! orators, singers, musicians to come! Not to-day is to justify me and answer what I am for, But you, a new brood, native, athletic, continental, greater than before known, Arouse! for you must justify me. -Walt Whitman Whitman counted on the future to fulfill what he had begun. He himself had provided only, he wrote in a moment of modesty, "one or two indicative words for the future" ("Poets to come," 5). The poet who sought to be a nation's bard has found his audience and his new brood not only in America but inter­ nationally. The Whitman his readers have created is as diverse as those readers themselves. But he is, as he promised, every­ where: "Missing me one place search another, I I stop some­ where waiting for you" ("Song of Myself," 1345-1346). It sometimes seems hard to avoid the presence of Whitman­ even for whose who would do without it. An almost random culling of my shelves yields four examples that testify to the range of his appeal and the ways in which he has been trans­ formed in the generations that have followed his death. The ear­ liest, barely a few years after his death, at a time when his poetic influence seemed least, is Kate Chopin's The Awakening. Chopin records her heroine's awakening to sensuality and death in a remarkable passage that, although in prose, seems to come straight out of Whitman: The voice of the sea is seductive; never ceasing, whisper­ ing, clamoring, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander for xii : Introduction a spell in abysses of solitude; to lose itself in mazes of in­ ward contemplation. The voice of the sea speaks to the soul. The touch of the sea is sensuous, enfolding the body in its soft, close em­ brace. (34) The personified soul seduced into a realm of physical pleasure, the caresses of an oceanic bliss, the loss of self in a world of pure sensation that is paradoxically reached through the self-these Whitmanian touches are all strikingly present. And so is a Whit­ manian rhythm, the cradling movement of the sea here embodied in the repeated present participles and the soporific sibilants. While Chopin's passage can be traced to a number of Whit­ manian "origins," including "Out of the Cradle" and section 22 of "Song of Myself," her mention a few lines earlier of Edna's age-twenty-eight-locates this text quite clearly in a line of de­ scent from section 11 of "Song of Myself." Chopin creates Edna Pontellier in part out of the hint provided by Whitman: "Twenty­ eight years of womanly life and all so lonesome." Like Whitman's respectable woman, Edna's life has been lived "aft the blinds of the window," as an observer rather than as a participant in life. Her discovery of her sexuality requires that she, like Whitman's "I," be "undisguised and naked," leaving behind the social cos­ tume that has concealed the body and hence the self. Naked in the sea, she is like "some new-born creature," at once Venus and Eve in a redeemed garden. For Chopin, Whitman pointed the way to the celebration of the body and to a liberation from social convention. For a black poet of the Harlem renaissance of the 1920s, the heritage of Whitman was more complex. Part of the difference may lie in the impossibility for a black artist of accepting the psy­ chological approach of a writer like Chopin-Edna's personal fulfillment is enabled by her very considerable financial means and the labor of the servant Celestine. Another part of the differ­ ence comes from the shift in Whitman's cultural position: the man who in the late 1890s was still an outlawed figure of sexual freedom had by the 1920s become the hero of the prairie nation­ alists. This meant that the Whitman available for Jean Toomer Introduction : xiii was already mediated by writers such as Carl Sandburg (whose Chicago Poems was published in 1916 and Cornhuskers in 1918) and Sherwood Anderson (whose Mid-American Chants was pub­ lished in 1918). Such socially conscious writers seemed incapable of capturing the realities of working-class life as experienced by American blacks or indeed of adapting Whitman's poetics to a less naive time. The Americanist writers of the late teens pro­ vided Toomer with a watered down, sentimentalized, and het­ erosexualized Whitman (albeit a Whitman that Whitman had permitted himself to be) as a poet of the land and its fertility. Toomer was not immune to these forces, of course, in his troubled celebration in Cane of a return to a more "primitive," chthonic world of the South. The "Harvest Song" included in the second part of Cane is Whitmanian in form, even as it tries to break away from the celebratory tone of the Whitmanites. The reaper who speaks the poem is isolated, worn out by labor, beaten down, unable to communicate. The song plays variations on its principal themes, "I am a reaper" and "I hunger." Al­ though the speaker seeks comradeship and knowledge of his brothers, he is blind and deaf. He is reduced to his pain. The poem is composed of a series of eleven stanzas, all spoken by the reaper in plain, almost exhausted language. Pauses are indicated in Whitmanian fashion by ellipses. For Toomer, the Whitman heritage, the poetry of the ordinary person, could not celebrate but only record suffering. Learning from Whitman how to orga­ nize the verse paragraph and replacing linearity with circularity and repetition, Toomer has to find his way out of the blithe cele­ bration that constituted Whitmanism in the 1920s. In the world of black Paris of the 1930s, poets such as Sand­ burg and Anderson must have seemed totally beside the point and embarrassingly provincially American. The blacks who helped forge a new artistic community under the name of negri­ tude brought together African music and chant, European poetic tradition, and American jazz.