Dragonfly

Walt Whitman&the World

Edited by Gay Wilson Allen & Ed Folsom

This book started as an updating of Gay Wilson Allen’s Walt Whitman Abroad (1955), but it turned into a project trying to capture the ongoing poetic dialogue with Whitman around the world for more than a century, a kind of resistant “talking back” to Whitman by other cultures. We are presented by a tapestry of a wide array of international responses which reveals the way democratic ideals, democratic attitudes, and democratic institutions are perceived around the world, showing how his views of democracy are being reconfigured by every culture he enters, from British Isles, Russia, France and Belgium, Germany, Spain and Latin America to former Yugoslavia, and so many other countries. Hence the book shows how various cultures have reconstructed Whitman in order to make him fit their native patterns and how the act of translation has altered his poetry and made it conform in ways it otherwise would not to the traditions and tones of the receiving nation, and also how his writing undertakes a different kind of cultural work than it performs in the United States.

Walt Whitman&the World gives us not only an overview of political responses to Whitman’s poetry but also an overview of aesthetic and religious responses, thus Franz Kafka found him “among the greatest formal innovators in the modern lyric”, and many Indian writers heard ancient Hindu voices at the hearth of Whitman’s poetry in Whitman’s ability to reconcile contradictions and to resist the valorisation of soul over body.

Additionally we are given an insight into the influence of reading Whitman in other cultural context on “the rather provincial understanding of Whitman held by many American readers and writers, who tend still to view him only in an American context and who tend to be oblivious to the variety of ways that Whitman has been constructed for the purposes and needs of other cultures.”

The fact Whitman „has appealed to so many people in so many places in so many ways“ and „that everyone seems to find in his poetry what she or he wants and needs“ is beautifully explained in what Jorge Luis Borges said on Whitman:

„He wrote his rhapsodies in the role of an imaginary self, formed partly of himself, partly of each of his readers.“