Carving the New Wood: Walt Whitman and Modernism

[u]Carving the New Wood:
Walt Whitman?s ?Song of Myself? and Modernism[/u]
An essay by Jeremy Davies

?It was you (Whitman) that broke the new wood . . . now is a time for carving.?#
Ezra Pound.

Walt Whitman?s ?Song of Myself? not only looks ahead to modernism but resoundingly exceeds the movement in its ideological challenge and unbridled optimism for society and mankind. This breaking of ?the new wood? of poetics ? Whitman?s post-Romantic, transcendental attempt to transfigure a subjective, objective modernism ? has perhaps suffered in the carving. Although modernism leant heavily on Whitman?s example pertaining to sensibility and structure, the general ideological response has been to reject the possibility of ?self? in democratic harmony with ?other? ? to hide in the dark kennel of pessimism, occasionally to whimper with the resigned optimism of the beaten hound.

The Post-romantic movement in America found its most strident voice in Ralph Waldo Emerson, a transcendentalist who believed that a great poet would be one who was ?representative of man?. Emerson surmised that the poet, through a muse of introspective reflection, could achieve a transcendental state of oneness with all and thus elevate all of mankind.# There would be no need to rely on tradition, to rely on the masters of the past; America would birth a new poetic, founded on the sanctity of Nature and the endless bounty the New World had to offer the Old. Working within and outside of the Romantic ideal of Nature, the Past would become subordinate to the Present.#

It was to this call that Walt Whitman harked. In 1855 Whitman published a collection of poetry titled Leaves of Grass, which Emerson initially embraced as an answer to his dream of a Great American Poet. In Song of Myself Whitman sings:

I have heard what the talkers were talking, the talk of the beginning and the end,
But I do not talk of the beginning or the end,
There was never any more inception than there is now,#

And Walt Whitman had broken the new wood. This man who would proclaim himself ?One of the roughs, large, proud, affectionate, eating drinking and breeding,?# had put the land ? the happening of the moment ? into verse, without apology or explanation or nodding to past masters. Whitman had constructed a rambling series of lists and powerful explosions of individual essence combined with a democratic, pantheistic perspective. In these ways, as a post-Romantic work, Song of Myself shines with opal-like brilliance.

I harbor for good or bad, I permit to speak at every hazard,
Nature without check with original energy#

Whitman renews the ideas of the Romantic with the power of the unused, the original. But he goes further. As a prequel to modernism he rejects such notions as form and authority with lines such as:

Not words, not music or rhyme I want, not custom or lecture, not even the best,
Only the lull I like, the hum of your valved voice.#

The slate is clean. Whitman sings for himself, which is everyone, and he sings for the Present moment, which exists nowhere and everywhere, no-when and every-when. This paradox of identity ? a transcendental conceptual ?self? that is inclusive with ?other? ? allows Whitman to make the life changing break of form and clarity which both re-invents the Romanticism of Europe, the Old World, and casts its range beyond. Already, Whitman is concerned with the coming age, the poets-to-be, and he occupies his poetics with the concern of shaping the future Presents, to pre-create and transfigure the modern.

The coming age ? modernism ? and its reaction against realism would pick up many of the tropes that Song of Myself had touched upon. Where mainstream realism attempted to describe and represent ?the all? as an objective reality, modernism would attempt to plumb the depths through fragmentary, apparently formless, subjective involvement.# Whitman writes in his preface to the 1855 Leaves of Grass: ?The old red blood and stainless gentility of great poets will be proved by their unconstraint. A heroic person walks with ease through and out of that custom or precedent or authority that suits him not.?# The modernist ?invention? of stream of consciousness writing ? the anti-realist approach to realism ? is quite apparent in Song of Myself as Whitman reaches for a single, all inclusive moment where his own, single consciousness embraces the universe and attempts to render the moment ? the fleeting moment ? in verse. ??his (Whitman?s) heart beats with the urgent, insurgent Now,?# writes D. H. Lawrence.

Whitman and Song of Myself can therefore be easily identified as a precursor, a ?courage giver?#, to modernist poetry, from the likes of Pound, Elliot, Crane and Williams. Whitman?s free verse was ?an assault on the very citadel of the poem itself?# according to William Carlos Williams, an assault that he acknowledges as necessary for poetry to progress. This was poetry with the citadel breached and the barbarians yawping in the dust.

But just as the citadel had been taken down, the barbarians sought to rebuild it from the wreckage. As the poets-to-be became the poets-that-are, poetry became more heavily rendered than perhaps any of the great poets could have imagined, and such poets, while nervously acknowledging Whitman, were compelled to take offense at his uncouth vulgarity. Acknowledgement was important, but so was distance. ?He is an exceedingly nauseating pill?, writes Ezra Pound, before conceding, ?but he accomplishes his mission.?# T. S. Eliot acknowledges that ?Whitman was ? ?a man with a message??, before continuing, ?even if that message was sometimes badly mutilated in the transmission?.# Modern poetics attaches itself to the ?mission? or ?message? of Whitman but reserves its right to carve as it pleases, which is, perhaps, exactly what the ?heroic person? must do.

?Nothing is better than simplicity?.nothing can make up for excess or for the lack of definiteness?#, Whitman wrote in his preface, and it is perhaps against this philosophy that the moderns most clearly react. Obscurity, intellectual elitism and a disregard for the reader ? an authorial exclusivity ? became a modernist preserve. Professor Frank Kermode gently accuses modernist poets of being ?obliged to adopt a habit of unnecessary obscurity.?# Coherence became a burden and a reviled restriction.# It is up to you, ?hypocrite reader?#, to understand me and if you cannot, then mange le merde! Whitman, however, never knew such pedestals.

I am of old and young, of the foolish as much as the wise,
Regardless of others, ever regardful of others,#

While Whitman?s pedigree as ?one of the roughs?, producing poetry that was accessible to ?the roughs?, is certainly assailable, the idea of Whitman, that perhaps lies outside the work itself, was one of a democratic spiritual conjoinment ? a transcendental awakening through poetry ? as opposed to the modernist position of alienation and abject disillusion. Whitman?s exhalted optimism for ?The years of the modern! Years of the unperform?d!? crashed upon a jagged reef of pessimism and Poetes maudit. ?Forward, forward, ay and backward, downward too into the abysm?#, is how Tennyson saw the progression.

However, the modernist pre-occupation with the nature of coherence and the inherently flawed relationship between language and ?reality?, expressed by the fictional Stephen Dedalus in his mission statement ? ?to discover the mode of life or of art whereby your spirit could express itself in unfettered freedom?# ? is also in Whitman. When a child asks him ?What is the grass??, in a book entitled Leaves of Grass ? poetry as grass ? he responds:

How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he.#

Whitman is self conscious; he is writing poetry, he is gabbing and loitering#, shutting himself off from the very moment he is so desperately trying to put into words. He admits:

I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable,
I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.#

He is conscious of the facsimile nature of language and art; all poetry, all rendering of the Eternal Now, is a barbaric yawp ringing out over the roofs of the world and can never fully represent the unfettered freedom of the moment, which is ?the origin of all poems.? The meaning of poetry, of art, is meaningless when compared to this.#

Authorial subjectivity ? ?how is he (the author/observer) to unify the divergent elements which he knows to constitute life itself, especially when he is aware that each consciousness experiences life differently??# ? also became a modernist concern. Through thinkers such as Nietzsche and writers such as Henry James, transcendentalism was no longer considered a valid response.# Instead, modernists surrendered completely to a self conscious subjectiveness#, as opposed to the Whitmanian ideal of attempting a singular oneness with everything ? a subjective objectiveness. This was the death of idealism. This was the death of Whitman.

But was this death or simply torpor? Is Whitman?s transfigured modernism ?still to be realized??# Hart Crane perhaps recognises this when he writes of Whitman:

Not this our empire yet, but labyrinth
Wherein your eyes, like the Great Navigator?s without ship,
Gleam from the great stones of each prison crypt
Of canyoned traffic?#

The risk of a Whitmanian modern idealism is that, instead of knowledge and awareness, we may be led into a re-illusionment, but even so, is this preferable to disillusionment and apathetic decay? When William Carlos Williams aims his tongue at the ?young men who are students of literature today? and writes: ?They are children of the times; they risk nothing, for by risking an expanded freedom you are very likely to come a cropper.?# His answer is ?to go in: into the cell, the atom, the poetic line for our discoveries. We have to break the old apart to make room for ourselves, whatever may be our tragedy and however we may fear it.?# Whitman looked inside the poetic line, and picked apart the atoms, and found that a vista was possible, through such a gaze, wherein everything became included. Whether this vision was ?right? or ?wrong? in a literary, intellectual or even a philosophical sense, the idea of it ? the idea of Whitman ? is perhaps the greatest poem of all.

The art historian Aby Warburg once quipped that ?every age gets the renaissance that it deserves.?# Considering the brutal historical prelude to our times, this age was perhaps not deserving of a Whitmanian modernism. The question of Whitman?s ability to imagine the right modernism, and his failure to do so, should perhaps be reversed and turned upon us. What have we done to fail Walt Whitman? But perhaps he saw us when he wrote in Song of Myself:

Down hearted doubters, dull and excluded,
Frivolous, sullen, moping, angry, affected, dishearten?d, atheistical,
I know every one of you, I know the sea of torment, doubt, despair and unbelief.#

This is the modernism that was Whitman?s fear, even as he passed the stone tablets amongst the people, and was perhaps in D. H. Lawrence?s mind ? the Jeremiah amongst modernity ? when he wrote ?there?s a bad time coming, boys, there?s a bad time coming.?# But Whitman has an answer, a solace for the ?down hearted doubters?, the people of the present that was one imagined future.

I take my place among you as much as among any,
The past is the push of you, me, all, precisely the same,
And what is yet untried and afterward is for you, me, all precisely the same.#

If you encompass all, if you are able to look inward and see outward, then you contain even those that discredit you ? they are as much a part of you as any other. As for timing, Walt Whitman the man, the poet, the idea, is a patient gestalt entity.

Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,
Missing me one place search another,
I stop somewhere waiting for you.#

[u]Footnotes[/u]

# Ezra Pound, Personae, New Directions, New York, 1971, p. 89.
# Alex Preminger & T.V.F. Brogan (eds.), The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, Princeton University Press, New Jersey, 1993, p. 1088.
# Ralph Waldo Emerson, Quotation and Originality, Deakin University Reader: Postromanticism, Deakin University, 2003, p.15.
# Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, The New American Library, New York, 1958, p. 51.
# Francis Murphy (ed.), Walt Whitman: A Critical Anthology, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1969, p. 29.
# Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, op.cit, 1958, p. 50.
# Ibid. p. 52.
# Peter Faulkner, Modernism, Methuen & Co., London, 1977, p. 9.
# George Perkins, Barbara Perkins (eds.), The American Tradition in Literature Vol. 1 (9th ed.), McGraw-Hill College, Boston, 1999, p. 1945.
# Francis Murphy (ed.), Walt Whitman: A Critical Anthology, op. cit, 1969, p. 193.
# Kenneth M. Price, Whitman and Tradition: The Poet in His Century, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1990, p. 6.
# Francis Murphy (ed.), Walt Whitman: A Critical Anthology, op. cit, 1969, p. 330.
# Ibid., 1969, p. 184.
# Ibid., 1969, p. 206.
# George Perkins, Barbara Perkins (eds.), The American Tradition in Literature Vol. 1 (9th ed.), op. cit, 1999, p. 1945.
# Modernism, Open University Worldwide, BBCTV, London, producer G. D. Jayalakshmi, 1998 (video).
# Peter Faulkner, Modernism, op. cit, 1977, p. 32.
# Baudelaire, To the Reader, Deakin University Reader: Postromanticism, Deakin University, 2003, p. 37.
# Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, op.cit, 1958, p. 61.
# Peter Faulkner, Modernism, op. cit, 1977, p. 5.
# James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Triad/Panther Books, St. Albans, 1977, p. 222.
# Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, op.cit, 1958, p. 53.
# The Spotted Hawk swoops by and accuses me, he complains of my gab and my loitering. Ibid., 1958, p. 96.
# Ibid., 1958, p. 96.
# Have you ever felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems? Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems. Ibid., p. 50.
# Peter Faulkner, Modernism, op. cit, 1977, p. 9.
# Michael Levenson (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Modernism, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1999, p. 19.
# Ibid., 1999, p. 19.
# Ezra Greenspan, The Cambridge Companion to Walt Whitman, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1995, p. 202.
# Ibid., 1995, p. 203.
# Francis Murphy (ed.), Walt Whitman: A Critical Anthology, op. cit, 1969, p. 330.
# Ibid., 1969, p. 331.
# Modernism, Open University Worldwide, BBCTV, London, producer G. D. Jayalakshmi, 1998 (video).
# Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, op.cit, 1958, p. 88.
# D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley?s Lover, Claremont Classics, 1999, p. 312.
# Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, op.cit, 1958, p. 88.
# Ibid. 1958, p. 88.

[u]BIBLEOGRAPHY[/u]

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