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Randall<br>Jarrell
Some Lines from Whitman
Whitman, Dickinson, and Melville seem to me the best poets of the<br>nineteenth century here in America. Melville's poetry has been<br>grotesquely underestimated, but of course it is only in the last four<br>or five<br>years that it has been much read; in the long run, in spite of the<br>awkwardness and amateurishness of so much of it, it will surely be<br>thought well of. (In the short run it will probably be thought entirely<br>too<br>well of. Melville is a great poet only in the prose of<br>Moby Dick.)
Dickinson's poetry<br>has been thoroughly read, and well though<br>undifferentiatingly loved -- after a few decades or centuries almost<br>everybody will be able to see through Dickinson to her poems. But<br>something odd has happened to the living changing part of Whitman's<br>reputation: nowadays it is people who are not particularly interested<br>in<br>poetry, people who say that they read a poem for what it says, not for<br>how it says it, who admire Whitman most. Whitman is often written<br>about, either approvingly or disapprovingly, as if he were the<br>Thomas<br>Wolfe of nineteenth century democracy, the hero of a de Mille movie<br>about Walt Whitman. (People even talk about a war in which Walt<br>Whitman and Henry James chose up sides, to begin with, and in which<br>you and I will go on fighting till the day we die.) All this sort of<br>thing, and<br>all the bad poetry that there of course is in Whitman -- for any poet<br>has<br>written enough bad poetry to scare away anybody -- has helped to scare<br>away from Whitman most 'serious readers of modern poetry.' They do not<br>talk of<br>his poems, as a rule, with any real liking or knowledge. Serious<br>readers, people who are ashamed of not knowing all Hopkins by heart,<br>are not at all ashamed to say, 'I don't really know Whitman very well.'<br>This may harm Whitman in your eyes, they know, but that is a chance<br>that poets have to take. Yet 'their' Hopkins, that good critic and<br>great<br>poet, wrote about Whitman, after seeing five or six of his poems in a<br>newspaper review: 'I may as well say what I should not otherwise have<br>said, that I always knew in my heart Walt Whitman's mind to be more<br>like my own than any other man's living. As he is a very great<br>scoundrel<br>this is not a very pleasant confession.' And Henry James, the leader of<br>'their' side in that awful imaginary war of which I spoke, once read<br>Whitman to Edith Wharton (much as Mozart used to imitate, on the<br>piano, the organ) with such power and solemnity that both sat shaken<br>and silent; it was after this reading that James expressed his regret<br>at<br>Whitman's 'too extensive acquaintance with the foreign languages.'<br>Almost all the most 'original and advanced' poets and critics and<br>readers of the last part of the nineteenth century thought Whitman as<br>original and advanced as themselves, in manner as well as in matter.<br>Can Whitman really be a sort of Thomas Wolfe or Carl Sandburg or<br>Robinson Jeffers or Henry Miller -- or a sort of Balzac of poetry,<br>whose every part is crude but whose whole is somehow great? He is<br>not, nor could he be; a poem, like Pope's spider, 'lives along the<br>line,'<br>and all the dead lines in the world will not make one live poem. As<br>Blake says, 'all sublimity is founded on minute discrimination,' and it<br>is<br>in these 'minute particulars' of Blake's that any poem has its primary<br>existence.
To show Whitman for what he is one does not need to<br>praise or<br>explain or argue, one needs simply to quote. He himself said, 'I and<br>mine do not convince by arguments,<br>similes, rhymes, / We convince by our presence.' Even a few of his<br>phrases are enough to show us that Whitman was no sweeping<br>rhetorician, but a poet of the greatest and oddest delicacy and<br>originality<br>and sensitivity, so far as words are concerned. This is, after all, the<br>poet<br>who said, 'Blind loving wrestling touch, sheath'd hooded, sharp-tooth'd<br>touch'; who said, 'Smartly attired, countenance smiling, form upright,<br>death under the breast-bones, hell under the skull-bones'; who said,<br>'Agonies are one of my changes of garments'; who saw grass as the 'flag<br>of my disposition,' saw 'the sharp-peak'd farmhouse, with its scallop'd<br>scum and slender shoots from the gutters,' heard a plane's 'wild<br>ascending lisp,' and saw and heard how at the amputation 'what is<br>removed drops horribly in a pail.' This is the poet for whom the sea<br>was<br>'howler and scooper of storms,' reaching out to us with 'crooked<br>inviting<br>fingers'; who went 'leaping chasms with a pike-pointed staff, clinging<br>to<br>topples of brittle and blue'; who, a runaway slave, saw how 'my gore<br>dribs, thinn'd with the ooze of my skin'; who went 'lithographing<br>Kronos<br>... buying drafts of Osiris'; who stared out at the 'little plentiful<br>manikins<br>skipping around in collars and tail'd coats, / I am aware who they are,<br>(they are positively not worms or fleas).' For he is, at his best,<br>beautifully<br>witty: he says gravely, 'I find I incorporate gneiss, coals,<br>long-threaded<br>moss, fruits, grain,...