Before this project, I taught Whitman a lot, in three or four different courses, but had come to focus almost solely on “Song of Myself”– sometimes 1855, sometimes Deathbed, sometimes with humor, sometimes with aggravation, always with an appreciation for poetic genius, and always with a pretty clear picture in my head of the kind of guy I was dealing with: macho, swaggering, egotistical.  You know, this guy:

The Enhanced Manly Whitman

Even his radical inclusion had begun to feel at best appropriative, at worst cannibalistic, consuming the American people to feed his vast, virile self.  “Song of Myself” was like a poetic codpiece.  I couldn’t see the forest for the fibres of manly wheat.  You understand me.

I exaggerate, of course, but don’t entirely lie.  During the re-immersion in Whitman that I undertook about a year ago, something happened.  In between blaming Whitman for Charles Olson and rolling my eyes at his father-stuff, I began to see someone unexpected emerging–someone with soft hips and warm eyes, someone surprisingly quiet, a good listener, a bringer of lemons and ice cream, a moon-watcher.  This person:

The Marriage Photo, with pleased smiles and fleshy hips

And this one:

Whitman, about 1869, sad

This Whitman appeared in the memoirs of his friends, in letters to his mother, and, powerfully, in the Civil War writings to which I was turning fresh and focused attention.   (To my surprise, when I went back to “Song of Myself,” of course this Whitman was all over it.)  Right now my favorite work of this Whitman may be “Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field One Night,” which is here.

“Vigil Strange” imagines a private wake for a young dead soldier, kept through the night by an older, grieving comrade.  It is not a perfect poem, being marred by weird syntactic inversions and being, arguably, maudlin.  But it is intensely moving in the quietness of its grief:

Till late in the night reliev’d to the place at last again I made my way,

Found you in death so cold dear comrade, found your body son of responding kisses, (never again on earth responding,)

and its acceptance of the unacceptable:

Passing sweet hours, immortal and mystic hours with you dearest comrade—not a tear, not a word,

Vigil of silence, love and death, vigil for you my son and my soldier,

As onward silently stars aloft, eastward new ones upward stole . . .

and in its exquisite, unbearable gentleness:

My comrade I wrapt in his blanket, envelop’d well his form,

Folded the blanket well, tucking it carefully over head and carefully under feet,

And there and then and bathed by the rising sun, my son in his grave, in his rude-dug grave I deposited. . .

“Vigil Strange” has a rhythm that approaches incantation or lullaby–long, frequently repetitive lines that are calming (cut short abrasively by the reality of war in the aborted rhythm of the final line/action: “And buried him where he fell”).  The swaddling of the “son,” “my soldier,” in his blanket is, I’m going to suggest, not masculine, not even paternal.  It is maternal, tender, womanly.

What problems arise from my assertion?  A lot, and two of them have to be addressed.  First, unquestionably my desire to call this voice the Womanly Whitman is rooted heavily in a construction of the womanly and the maternal that is traditional, nurturing, compassionate, the angel in the hospital ward.  It is the construction I invoked in the domestic scene that began this post.  It is a construction with which I am utterly at odds ideologically and which I have doggedly and sometimes fiercely interrogated in my teaching, my politics, and many of my life choices.  Second, there is a complication in casting the speaker of “Vigil Strange” as maternal, a Freudian complication best indicated by the title from Lawrence (curse, growl): “Sons and Lovers.”  My casting of this soldier as maternal effectively recontains the homoeroticism of the poem:

One look I but gave which your dear eyes return’d with a look I shall never forget,

One touch of your hand to mine O boy, reach’d up as you lay on the ground,

Then onward I sped in the battle, the even-contested battle,

Till late in the night reliev’d to the place at last again I made my way,

Found you in death so cold dear comrade, found your body son of responding kisses, (never again on earth responding,)

The language of “my son,” “dear eyes,” and “boy” can mask the power of that body, those kisses, the assertion of love that will transcend death (less so, perhaps, if you’ve read the repeated use of the word “son” in Whitman’s letters to his partner Peter Doyle).  OR, and this is equally problematic, I am mapping “gay” over “tender, feminine, womanly” as though they are fundamentally interchangeable.

Oy vey.  Now I’m really in the total animal soup of essentialism.

But I want that term.  Maybe because in some ways it is MY “womanly”– that is to say, “womanly” is a tag not unlike the “myWW” tag I append to certain posts to indicate a connection to Whitman that goes beyond admiration of the poetic line, the image, the nest of guarded duplicate eggs you have to have to throw over the literary establishment.  It is, I will say on safer ground, a non-patriarchal Whitman: tender, generous, nurturing, doubting, equalizing.  It’s the Whitman this semester has given me, and I’m grateful.

One of the most prominent uses of Whitman is that the journal Poetry, of central importance in the history of Modernism, from its very first issue in 1912 included this on its back cover:

To have great poets there must be great

audiences, too.—Whitman.

HELP us to give the art of poetry an organ in America. Help us to give the poets a chance to be heard in their own place, to offer us their best and most serious work instead of page-end poems squeezed in between miscellaneous articles and stories.

If you love good poetry, subscribe.

If you believe that this art, like painting, sculpture, music and architecture, requires and deserves public recognition and support,subscribe.

If you believe with Whitman that “the topmost proof of a race is its own born poetry,” subscribe.

Throughout various issues, the question of whether or not great poetry needs great audiences is actively taken up by Harriet Monroe, Poetry‘s editor, and Ezra Pound, who disagree about it.  Eventually, by the start of Volume 2,  the back cover uses only that quote by Whitman and dropped the rest of the text above.

By October 1915 in Poetry, a comment written by Alice Corbin Henderson, engaging with a critical letter written about the publication of Carl Sandburg in the magazine (ouch!  take that, Mr. Hervey!), calls on Whitman as an elder statesman, a judge of all that is good in poetry:

“And, by the way, what, oh, what do you suppose Walt would have thought of Miss Monroe’s magazine if he had lived to see it?”  So asks Mr. John L. Hervey in a recent letter to The Dial. The question is delightfully suggestive.  We would love to know just what Walt Whitman would have thought of POETRY. It is not impossible that Mr. Hervey thinks that Walt would have thought of POETRY just what he, Mr. Hervey, thinks of the magazine. No doubt it is under this conviction that Mr. Hervey delivers this last, smashing blow! Still, there isn’t any way of being sure that Walt would have come out on Mr. Hervey’s side. Walt was very tolerant ; tolerant of poets—you remember his charming, “I like your tinkle, Tom,” to Thomas Bailey Aldrich ; also tolerant of editors—of Richard Watson Gilder, to whom Whitman’s November Boughs “did not appeal” for publication in The Century.

No, it’s a toss-up just what Walt would have thought about the magazine. Undoubtedly, he would have thought about it just as each of you, whoever you are, now reading this magazine, think about it.  For the great dead, curiously enough, always mold their opinions to suit their admirers.  . . .  And now Mr. Hervey wants Miss Monroe to say what Carl Sandburg’s poems will mean to the reader of fifty years hence, if she thinks any of them will live that long.  Mr. Hervey himself does not risk a direct opinion.  Fortunately there were people intelligent and courageous enough to risk an opinion on Whitman fifty years ago.  And these people were not the editors of magazines, who “knew what the people wanted,” and took no risks. If Whitman had waited for them, Mr. Hervey might have missed his Walt, and he would then have had to invoke some other shadowy figure . . . to pass mythical judgment upon the new poetry.  . . .  Would Walt applaud the risk taken by Miss Monroe in publishing it, or would he, too, like Mr. Hervey, be shocked by her temerity?

In volume 1.3 of Poetry (1912), this discussion of Whitman’s continental influence is given:

It is significant of American tardiness in the development of a national literary tradition that the name of Walt Whitman is today a greater influence with the young writers of the continent than with our own.  Not since France discovered Poe has literary Europe been so moved by anything American.  The suggestion has even been made that ‘Whitmanism’ is rapidly to supersede ‘Nietzscheism’ as the dominant factor in modern thought.  Léon Bazalgette translated Leaves of Grass into French in 1908.  A school of followers of the Whitman philosophy and style was an almost immediate consequence.  Such of the leading reviews as sympathize at all with the strong ‘young’ movement to break the shackles of classicism which have so long bound French prosody to the heroic couplet, the sonnet, and the alexandrine, are publishing not only articles on ‘Whitmanism’ as a movement, but numbers of poems in the new flexible chanting rhythms.

In the second volume of BLAST, a Vorticist journal edited by Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis, a column entitled AMERICAN ART contains the following:

American art, when it comes, will be Mongol, inhuman,optimistic, and very much on the precious side, as opposed to European pathos and solidity.

Wait Whitman Bland and easy braggart of a very cosmic self.  He lies, salmon-coloured and serene, whitling  a stick in a very eerie dawn, oceanic emotion handy at his elbow.

What?!  BLAST also describes a book as having “a soul like Walt Whitman, but none of the hirsute mistakes of that personage, and invention instead of sensibility” (!).

Whitman appears comparatively in book reviews, as in this one on D.H. Lawrence (authorial commentary: boo Lawrence): “‘Leaves of Grass ‘ rise to one’s mind as this fine catalogue is proclaimed; it seems to me now that Walt Whitman’s poetry is the only proper parallel to Mr. Lawrence’s ‘Sons and Lovers’” (The Blue Review 1.3).

Whitman is referenced repeatedly as a thinker moreso than poet in The New Age, a publication which describes itself as “an independent socialist review of politics, literature and art” or, eventually, “a weekly review of politics, literature and art”  (examples just below from issues in 1907):

The dominant idea of Whitman, for example, is undeniably friendship, or what he calls camaraderie ; and the fact that the early Socialists called each other Comrade without distinction of sex is Significant.

This example, from a book review of a collection by Edward Carpenter, is bound to make Brendon as mad as it made me:

The politicians may make Socialism ; but such a spirit as Carpenter’s is required to make Socialists. I remember making in a moment of dubious inspiration an epithet for Carpenter that appeared to me at the time essentially true. I called him Mrs. Whitman. Whitman certainly impressed one with the sense of masculinity ; and equally certainly there are qualities in Carpenter that strike one as womanly.

In February 1910, a writer laments the shaky condition of American letters:

Nothing mortified me so much as to be told by an Englishman that Europe absorbs our finest talent. I was angry. He then began to call the names–Whistler, Sargent, Shannon, Abbey, Henry James, Henry Harland, and others of whom I had never heard. He named so many I cannot recall them. He wound up by saying Walt Whitman would have been far happier had he lived in England where he would have had a public instead of a small coterie in his own country. Needless to say my anger gave place to shame and mortification.

In November 1915, The New Age reprints this part of a review of a translation of Whitman (as an example of an ass’s bray):

To him all is without exceptions just as in prostitution to him all men are “friends,” just as to the prostitute everyone is a guest.  Pah ! Pah ! What blindness! Whitman is blind and deaf, for he does not distinguish and, therefore, does not select, neither colours nor sounds nor persons. And the human soul?–he has no comprehension of it.

We too beg, of course, to disagree.

“A Pact”

by Ezra Pound

I make a pact with you, Walt Whitman -
I have detested you long enough.
I come to you as a grown child
Who has had a pig-headed father;
I am old enough now to make friends.
It was you that broke the new wood,
Now is a time for carving.
We have one sap and one root -
Let there be commerce between us.

There are a few questions on the syllabus for next week, and here are a few more you might consider about the poets you read:

• How does W’s vision of democracy become reincarnated or altered in these poets?  How are their political purposes similar to or at odds with W’s?
• What, if any, is the relationship between their political goals and their use of poetic form?

On a different topic, the projects info page has some updated information about oral presentations.

The Vault is now open for business with a very thought-provoking prompt about the Levi’s ads (and a shout out to Dr. Earnhart!).  Hope you can find time to contribute.  (Live link if you click open this post.)

He bathed today while I was there–such a handsome body, and such delicate rosy flesh I never saw before.  I told him he looked good enough to eat, which, he said, he should consider a poor recommendation if he were among the cannibals.

Well, I include here something I found in our old friend Reynolds, a bit of letter WW sent with an advance copy of the deathbed edition on December 6, 1891 (intertextual note: 11 days before he took the “severe chill” that Longaker says marks “the invasion of the fatal sickness”):

L. of G. at last complete—after 33 y’rs of hackling at it, all times & moods of my life, fair weather & foul, all parts of the land, and peace & war, young & old—

O Whitman, Our Whitman (image from ExplorePAHistory.com)

Once steady hands now faltering from your fall,

this hand that penned mountains, sung through ferry waters, hewn rough earth boys, their bodies taken by war as your body has taken you.

You, the kosmos, can not be taken by such human failings.

Calamus cane in hand, stand erect, your perpetual journey is still left to tramp.

Your America is orphaned without your voice, your body; without your arms to encircle her.

You shall yet whisper your secrets in my ear, leaning on my shoulder should you need it.

Comrade, let me now take your hand and show you what you have shown me.

                                                                                                                                    —Jessica and Erin

Cartoon

Free Lance Star, 11/3/09

Walt + Pete

Whitman in Camden house, 1891 (is he wearing my academic robes?):

Whitman's filing system, Camden

Ford's Theater where Lincoln was shot (in rare non-rainy moment)

When we went into the actual theater (or, in some of my students’ cases, the napping room–shame on you!), I was disappointed at first that the guard ushered me upstairs since the downstairs was full.  But in the balcony I realized I was actually at eye level with Lincoln’s box, shown below.  Both Lincoln and Booth made their way through the crowded balcony that night; the door Booth entered and jammed shut is just to the right of what I captured on this photo.  The theater is very intimate, and the box is really hanging over stage left.  I had real chills when the ranger was narrating the events of April 1865.

Presidental box, Ford's Theater (image of Washington in center frame)

Afterward we toured the Peterson House where Lincoln actually died– such a small, nondescript room with a sloped ceiling and bed so short (the real one is in Chicago, but the replica) that Lincoln had to lie diagonally while they waited for his heart to stop; he was brain dead pretty much instantly after being shot.

At the Library of Congress, Barbara Bair had set out three different tickets to Whitman’s Lincoln lecture, an advertising poster for it, and the text Whitman used for the lecture, which was a novel into which he had glued written bits, parts of his published works, annotations, etc.

Tickets to W's Lincoln lectures

Advertisement with our heroes side by side

The pasted-up text of W's Lincoln lecture (wish that was my hand!)

Digital Whitman can attest that I am probably a little–well, over-invested in Lincoln.  But these artifacts, though not as personal as some others we saw, were indeed very moving to me.

]]> http://marywash.lookingforwhitman.org/2009/11/01/o-lincoln-my-lincoln/feed/ 0 http://marywash.lookingforwhitman.org/2009/10/29/video-editing-workshopredemption-session/ http://marywash.lookingforwhitman.org/2009/10/29/video-editing-workshopredemption-session/#comments Fri, 30 Oct 2009 01:26:12 +0000 http://marywash.lookingforwhitman.org/?p=1142 Bring TBJG back to the fold at the video editing session: Wednesday, November 4, 4:00 p.m., Combs 349. Bring your video uploads for hands-on help. If you can’t attend, contact TBJG directly to set up another session.

WW notebook #94, Library of Congress American Memory site

WW notebook, photo by MNS, Library of Congress

The one on top is from a link to the Library of Congress I gave the class a few weeks ago, urging them to use these digitized images to study what OMW recorded about the soldiers.  The bottom was taken on our field trip, and is surprisingly focused given that I, Brady Earnhart, and our students were nearly all literally in tears in that weird institutional room with lockers, blackened windows, and government-issue tables.  Unless we were crying with simple gratitude for the incredible time that Barbara Bair had given us (or because we were soaked to the bloody skin  and had been standing for 10 hours with two or three to go), why were we?  Nothing was much easier to read in person, as those of us who stumbled reading aloud can attest (writing still spidery, bleeding through paper, plastic protection on many items reflected flourescent glare, etc.).  We couldn’t touch anything (though, good lord, we certainly breathed all over it), couldn’t feel the paper, the wood, the leather, the hair (the hair!).

Whitman's hair, deathbed edition, photo by MNS 10/24/09

I couldn’t even smell the leather of that haversack or of its decay, and I have one good super-sniffer.

cue to tears: the haversack, photo by MNS 10/24/09

Obviously, what I am suggesting is this: the artifacts of the Library of Congress archive were in some ways no more accessible or immediate (indeed, let’s be honest, a lot LESS accessible or even immediate if we mean time instead of proximity) than the digitized images of those artifacts online.  I saw that the inside of the haversack is brown canvas.  Brendon found a fingerprint and will NOT entertain suggestions that it belongs to anyone but Walt Whitman.  But tears?

Presence.  Through the blog we are present to each other online even when we are physically apart during the week (or have never seen each other: hallooo out there, Brooklyn, Camden, and Novi Sad!).  Agreed.  But finally Saturday we were (good) old-fashioned groupies, we were Whitman lovers, and we were bodies (finer than prayer, but, geez, we were a bit rank by Hour Ten of the marathon).  We desired the physical–the textured, the pasted, the water-stained.  We may have cried because the broken skins of brittle pages and fragile covers, the light-sensitive [associative digression: Whitman's Camden eyeglasses: so small, and with one lens protectively glazed over after strokes] and subsequently entombed haversack, and the tickets to a lecture on Lincoln long since delivered were as close to Whitman (brittle, entombed…) as we are going to get, as present as we can be.  Unlike the wounded soldiers, we won’t get the healing presence of his 200-pound, hirsute, maroon-coated, deep-pocketed self.  But it turns out that the digitized can’t hold a gas lamp to the physically present, and even if it’s paper and not flesh, I’ll take it.  Whitmaniacs, pass the tissues.

Edwin Booth BOOST

Here Edwin is looking pensive (or moping about his footwear):

Edwin Booth, thespian

And here is a famous photo we saw at Ford’s, with John Wilkes lurking around at Lincoln’s second inaugural (Lincoln center, JWB top row).  Read more at this blog post on The Blind Flaneur.

JWB stalking MLL

This nauseating bit about JWB is something I learned this summer at Harper’s Ferry.  Here, from Wikipedia:

Strongly opposed to the abolitionists who sought to end slavery in the U.S., Booth attended the hanging on December 2, 1859, of abolitionist leader John Brown, who was executed for leading a raid on the Federal armory at Harpers Ferry (in present-day West Virginia).^[60] Booth had been rehearsing at the Richmond Theatre when he abruptly decided to join the Richmond Grays, a volunteer militia of 1,500 men travelling to Charles Town for Brown’s hanging, to guard against any attempt by abolitionists to rescue Brown from the gallows by force.^[60][61] When Brown was hanged without incident, Booth stood in uniform near the scaffold and afterwards expressed great satisfaction with Brown’s fate, although he admired the condemned man’s bravery in facing death stoically.^[40][62]

Hey Professor,

Long time no talk.  I hope all is going well this semester at UMW.  I miss the environment there greatly.  I just wanted to let you know that I’ve been following along with the Exploring Whitman blog as much as possible, and I have learned from, enjoyed and been in awe of some of your students’ insight.  It must be a fun class!

Anyways, I thought you would like to hear that even though I have a diploma I am still as inspired and eager to learn as ever.  I wish I could be there to go along for the ride.  Alas, I will just have to look on from afar.  So make sure the students know just how valuable and important their work is– on such a variety of levels– because I’ll be reading.  Thanks again for what you do, and good luck with the rest of the semester.

Best,
Patrick Whelan

A few notes for Saturday (check for updates!):

1. Carpool rendez-vous: Jefferson Circle behind Combs at 9:00 a.m.

2. Parking in DC: 1201 F St. NW, 20005

• Take 95 North to 395 North (follow signs from 95 for 395/495/Washington/Tysons)
• On 395, take 12th Street exit toward L’Enfant Promenade
• 12th Street (follow slight left at 11th St SW/12th street tunnel)
• Left onto Connecticut NW
• First right onto 14th St NW
• Right at F St NW
• Garage on your left
• If full,  proceed straight to next garage, 1155 F Street NW

3. Meeting place for 11:00 a.m. walking tour (1.5-2 hours): Lafayette Square, Andrew Jackson Statue (adjacent to White House, H street NW/16th St NW)

4. Tour ends in Chinatown (H and I streets between 7th and 8th)– lunch on your own

5. Meaningful afternoon activities:

• Ford’s Theater (free tix required–Scanlon): 511 10th St NW, 20004-1402
• Smithsonian Museum of American History, 19th-century and Lincoln exhibits: on National Mall, 14th and Constitution NW
• your choice

6. Library of Congress– meet out front at 5:15 p.m.

• Madison Building, 101 Independence Ave SE, 20540 (corner of Independence and 1st SE), behind Capitol Bldg. complex
• 1.5-2 miles from Ford’s/Mall if you go by foot (can follow Independence along edge of Mall)

7. Back to cars and Fredericksburg

Whitman, American Rebel Idol.

A few examples:

Walt Whitman High, Bethesda, MD

Walt Whitman High School, Huntington Station, NY

The Walt Whitman Bridge (PA-NJ)

The Walt Whitman Mall (Huntington Station, NY)

Walt Wit Beer (Philly)

LOC image, Whitman cigar box from 1898

Whitman-Walker AIDS clinic, Washington DC

Walt Whitman Hotel, Camden , NJ

Walt Whitman T from LOLA (one of many)

Walt Whitman Fence Company (NY)

Mad Magazine, 1967

Campers at Camp Walt Whitman, Piermont, NH

Jesse Merandy (CUNY) with WW impersonator (Camden)

Walt Whitman Service Area

What?

Historical marker (NY)

Walt Whitman Golf (Bethesda)

WW Park (Brooklyn)

Obvious College Football connection