Good evening. Welcome to the dKos PSlam/Open Mic. Sit at a table or on the floor, get
comfy and mellow. Step up the mic and share some words, your own or those of
your s/heroes. (In respect of fair use, please use blockquotes and provide
links when posting copyrighted material. Thanks.)
(Update by x. Do you think the PSlam should be posted earlier? Brahman Colorado mentioned in another diary that the time slot for PSlam cuts into most people's social lives. What do you think? Poll added)
I was searching for a poem to open with tonight, and found a Whitman piece. I
also found an essay, touching on all the phases of his
his life and times. It's a very good overview.
Whitman's formal public education ended when he was eleven. He went to work at
a Law office and was given access to libraries where he taught himself history
and other subjects. He became a printer's apprentice at fourteen, and a
journeyman printer and journalist by sixteen. Then fires destroyed the
newspapers, and he became a teacher.
Some excerpts from the essay below:
About Walt Whitman
[Note: This biographical essay is excerpted from a longer essay included in The
Walt Whitman Hypertext Archive at http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/...
It is copyright © 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998 by Kenneth M. Price and Ed Folsom.
Family Origins
Walt Whitman, arguably America's most influential and innovative poet, was born
into a working class family in West Hills, New York, a village near Hempstead,
Long Island, on May 31, 1819, just thirty years after George Washington was
inaugurated as the first president of the newly formed United States. Walt
Whitman was named after his father, a carpenter and farmer who was 34 years old
when Whitman was born. Walter Whitman, Sr., had been born just after the end of
the American Revolution; always a liberal thinker, he knew and admired Thomas
Paine. Trained as a carpenter but struggling to find work, he had taken up
farming by the time Walt was born, but when Walt was just about to turn four,
Walter Sr. moved the family to the growing city of Brooklyn, across from New
York City, or "Mannahatta" as Whitman would come to call it in his celebratory
writings about the city that was just emerging as the nation's major urban
center. One of Walt's favorite stories about his childhood conce
rned the time General Lafayette visited New York and, selecting the six-year-old
Walt from the crowd, lifted him up and carried him. Whitman later came to view
this event as a kind of laying on of hands, the French hero of the American
Revolution anointing the future poet of democracy in the energetic city of
immigrants, where the new nation was being invented day by day.
Whitman is America. He absorbed the ideals of the new democracy into his very
being, becoming the personification of the ideal of unity among the various,
disparate parts of the new country. A country of brothers and sisters, of
equals. He loved to be with working class people, and he also had friends in
high places. His love for humanity and equality deep and enduring.
He self published several editions of Leaves of Grass, and throughout his
life, added poems and reworked the originals. Leaves became not only the story
of Whitman, but the story of America.
It appears that Whitman's increasing frustration with the Democratic
party's compromising approaches to the slavery crisis led him to continue his
political efforts through the more subtle and indirect means of experimental
poetry, a poetry that he hoped would be read by masses of average Americans and
would transform their way of thinking. In any event, his first notebook lines in
the manner of Leaves of Grass focus directly on the fundamental issue dividing
the United States. His notebook breaks into free verse for the first time in
lines that seek to bind opposed categories, to link black and white, to join
master and slave:
I am the poet of the body
And I am the poet of the soul
And I am
I go with the slaves of the earth equally with he masters
And I will stand between the masters and the slaves,
Entering into both so that both will understand me alike.
The audacity of that final line remains striking. While most people were lining
up on one side or another, Whitman placed himself in that space--sometimes
violent, sometimes erotic, always volatile--between master and slave. His extreme
political despair led him to replace what he now named the "scum" of corrupt
American politics in the 1850s with his own persona--a shaman, a culture-healer,
an all-encompassing "I."
The American "I"
That "I" became the main character of Leaves of Grass, the explosive book of
twelve untitled poems that he wrote in the early years of the 1850s, and for
which he set some of the type, designed the cover, and carefully oversaw all the
details. When Whitman wrote "I, now thirty-six years old, in perfect health,
begin," he announced a new identity for himself, and his novitiate came at an
age quite advanced for a poet. Keats by that age had been dead for ten years;
Byron had died at exactly that age; Wordsworth and Coleridge produced Lyrical
Ballads while both were in their twenties; Bryant had written "Thanatopsis," his
best-known poem, at age sixteen; and most other great Romantic poets Whitman
admired had done their most memorable work early in their adult lives. Whitman,
in contrast, by the time he had reached his mid-thirties, seemed destined, if he
were to achieve fame in any field, to do so as a journalist or perhaps as a
writer of fiction, but no one could have guessed that t
his middle-aged writer of sensationalistic fiction and sentimental verse would
suddenly begin to produce work that would eventually lead many to view him as
America's greatest and most revolutionary poet.
A WORD OUT OF
THE SEA
(Leaves of Grass, Boston, 1860, pp. 269-77)
by Walt Whitman
Out of the rocked cradle,
Out of the mocking-bird's throat, the musical shuttle,
Out of the boy's mother's womb, and from the nipples of her breasts,
Out of the Ninth Month midnight,
Over the sterile sands, and the fields beyond, where the child, leaving his
bed, wandered alone, bare-headed, barefoot,
Down from the showered halo,
Up from the mystic play of shadows, twining and twisting as if they were
alive,
Out from the patches of briers and blackberries,
From the memories of the bird that chanted to me,
From your memories, sad brother--from the fitful risings and failings
I heard,
From under that yellow half-moon, late-risen, and swollen as if with tears,
From those beginning notes of sickness and love, there in the transparent
mist,
From the thousand responses of my heart, never to cease,
From the myriad thence-aroused words,
From the word stronger and more delicious than any,
From such, as now they start, the scene revisiting,
As a flock, twittering, rising, or overheard passing,
Borne hither--ere all eludes me, hurriedly,
A man--yet by these tears a little boy again,
Throwing myself on the sand, confronting the waves,
I, chanter of pains and joys, uniter of here and hereafter,
Taking all hints to use them--but swiftly leaping beyond them,
A reminiscence sing.
Then came the Civil War.
Although Whitman had already written some of the poems that he would
eventually publish in his Civil War book Drum-Taps (notably the "recruitment"
poems like "Beat! Beat! Drums!" or "First O Songs for Prelude" that evoked the
frightening yet exhilarating energy of cities arming for battle), it was only
now, encountering the horrifying aftereffects of a real battle, that the
powerful Civil War poems began to emerge. In the journal he kept while at
George's camp, Whitman noted a "sight at daybreak--in a camp in front of the
hospital tent on a stretcher, (three dead men lying,) each with a blanket spread
over him--I lift up one and look at the young man's face, calm and yellow,--'tis
strange! (Young man: I think this face of yours the face of my dead Christ!)" As
would be the case with many of the poems in Drum-Taps, this journal sketch
gradually was transformed into a poem:
A sight in camp in the daybreak gray and dim,
As from my tent I emerge so early sleepless.
As slow I walk in the cool fresh air the path near
by the hospital tent,
Three forms I see on stretchers lying, brought out
there untended lying,
Over each the blanket spread, ample brownish woolen
blanket,
Gray and heavy blanket, folding, covering all.
. . .
Then to the third--a face nor child nor old, very calm,
beautiful yellow-white ivory;
Young man I think I know you--I think this face is the
face of the Christ himself,
Dead and divine and brother of all, and here he lies again.
The journal entry and poem offer a glimpse into how Whitman began restructuring
his poetic project after the Civil War began. He was still writing a "new Bible"
here, re-experiencing the Crucifixion in Fredericksburg. But this crucifixion
does not redeem sinners and create an atonement with God so much as it posits
divinity in everyone and mourns senseless loss: this one young man's death
amidst the thousands is as significant as any in history. And, for Whitman, the
massive slaughter of young soldier-Christs would create for all those who
survived the war an obligation to construct a nation worthy of their great
sacrifice. The America that Whitman would write of after the Civil War would be
a more chastened, less innocent nation, a nation that had gone through its
baptism in blood and one that would from now on be tested against the stern
measure of this bloodshed.
from About
Walt Whitman
Ed Folsom, The University of Iowa
Kenneth M. Price, The College of William and Mary
Source: http://jefferson.village.Virginia.EDU/...