Brian for November 17
Concerning Whitman’s “A Backward Glance O’er Travel’d Roads” and two giants of American literature: Walt Whitman [of course] and Edgar Allan Poe.
At one point in the “Backward Glance” essay, Whitman talks about Edgar Poe’s poetry and prose. Of Poe’s poetry, Whitman admits he is “not an admirer,” but appreciates the “melodious expressions…of human morbidity.” This is not the first time Whitman talks about Poe: Whitman had an entry in the Specimen Days cluster dated the first day of 1880 titled “Edgar Poe’s Significance.”
Bliss Perry, the great literary scholar and Harvard professor [and editor of The Atlantic Monthly from 1899-1909] who was only a generation younger than Whitman, had a chapter in his book, The American Spirit in Literature, called “Poe and Whitman” [Chapter VIII]. In this chapter, Perry writes about Poe’s theory of verse: “The aim of poetry…is not truth but pleasure. Poetry should be brief, indefinite, and musical. Its chief instrument is sound. A certain quaintness or grotesqueness of tone is a means for satisfying the thirst for supernal beauty. Hence the musical lyric is to Poe the only true type of poetry; a long poem does not exist.”
Whitman is talking about precisely this theory when he continues in “Backward Glance,” “But I was repaid in Poe’s prose by the idea that…there can be no such thing as a long poem. The same thought had been haunting my mind before, but Poe’s argument, though short, work’d the sum out and proved it to me.” Earlier in this entry, as well as in the Specimen Days writing on Poe, Whitman gave Poe a sort of hesitating praise for his poetry. But focusing on Poe’s [non-short story] prose writings, Whitman finds he has more in common with Poe than he previously thought. [A slight aside: I think it’s funny, considering that for Poe a poem cannot be longer than a musical lyric, that some of Whitman’s “long poems” could be justified as poems under this system because of such genre-defining names as “Song of Myself” or (individually, for example) “I Sing the Body Electric”].
Curiously, Bliss Perry does not specifically cite these telling words from Whitman while comparing and contrasting the writers and their respective styles, but this thought of Whitman’s doubtlessly belongs alongside Perry’s argument that the two share such artistic compulsions as “egotism,” “a Romantic temperament” and unconventional literary genius.
Still, even Perry is firm in asserting the striking differences between the two [if you must know what those are, feel free to check out Bliss Perry’s book – now in the public domain], differences that stand regardless of any advertising by contemporary sellers…
About at close as Poe & Whitman are going to get.
November 17th, 2009 at 5:41 pm
After having traced the trajectory of Whitman’s own poetic career this semester, I hardly find it surprising that Uncle Walt would have praised Poe’s “melodious expressions… of human morbidity.” Death (capital D) rises within Whitman’s work as an increasingly central source of power, ultimately attaining a position of THE governing force in his poetic universe: “I do not think Life provides for all and for Time and Space, / but I believe Heavenly Death provides for all” (from “Assurances,” p. 563 of Library of America collection). Even Whitman’s earliest poetry incorporates this acknowledgment of mortality, but with decidedly less dread than Poe gave the subject: “to die is different from what anyone supposed, and luckier” (“Song of Myself,” p. 32). Whitman’s approbation of Poe signifies, to me, his apprehension of their shared aesthetic preoccupations, if not of any resemblance between their poetic sensibilities.
November 18th, 2009 at 8:24 am
Couldn’t agree more with that last statement you make, and although [as you point out] even some of Whitman’s early writings exhibit a preoccupation with Death, I think we all would agree that the war — particularly Whitman’s up-close experience with death in it — played a profound role in accentuating this particular predisposition [and its preponderance] within his later thought and writing.
November 19th, 2009 at 5:34 pm
An interesting argument! Perhaps Whitman’s work actually does pass the Poe test. Although I am a Poe fan myself, I have trouble thinking of their respective styles as existing in the same plane of reality.
Poe’s essay on “The Raven”–written after the poem’s publication and popular success, demonstrates the simple, logical steps that the poet took to create the poem (if you can really believe that.) Poetry is not ethereal poetic inspiration, but the logical connection of words and rhyme and meter, like an intricate pocket watch.
Compare that to Whitman’s on-the-scene news reporter writing, or his political bursts, or his stream-of-consciousness jumps from scene to scene in “Song of Myself.” These are two entirely different concepts that are hard to reconcile.