Q&A about Walt Whitman

~ Clarissa

I’ll tell you honestly, I don’t feel poetry in English like I do in Russian and, to a lesser extent, in Spanish. The meter is so different that I don’t process it as poetry. The only English-language poet that I feel is Seamus Heaney.

A vacuum of need
Collapsed each hunting heart
But tremulously we held
As hawk and prey apart,
Preserved classic decorum,
Deployed our talk with art.

Other than Heaney, I just don’t read English-language poetry for enjoyment. Walt Whitman I definitely could never understand, even though I love several Russian and Hispanic poets who were inspired by him.

This is not, of course, a criticism of Whitman but, rather, of my own limitations.

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Published by Clarissa

12 thoughts on “Q&A about Walt Whitman”

  2. For the record, I also don’t “get” Whitman. Apart from “O Captain, My Captain” I can’t stand anything I’ve seen by him. At the same time, I’m not much of a poetry person so to some degree this might also be about my own limitations more than those of the poet. But still, how am I supposed to enjoy this?

    “I think I could turn and live with animals, 
    they are so placid and self-contain’d, 
    I stand and look at them long and long.

    They do not sweat and whine about their condition, 
    They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins, 
    They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God, 
    Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things, 
    Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago, 
    Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.”

    🤮

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      1. I don’t mind other people having different taste. What I mind is that most Whitman fans are unable to accept or comprehend that someone could not enjoy him. They’ll quote mediocre lines at you and say “how can you not love this?” as if it’s self explanatory.

        I’m the one who asked the question for this, and I was secretly hoping Clarissa would talk about how much she hates him. Finding a like mind in the comments is also welcome though.

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        1. Give me a rhyming ballad any day, over… whatever Whitman is doing. On a good day, I can appreciate haiku, but as far as I’m concerned, poetry is for singing. There’s tons of not-so-great poetry that makes for great songs, as well as great poetry that at least *can* be sung. And then there’s… the rest. Which I have tried to be interested in, but can’t work up any enthusiasm.

          Even sonnets can be sung:

          –I memorized this one, because some random dudes had set it to a tune. Wouldn’t’ve stuck otherwise.

          I even like e e cummings when Joan Baez sings him– it’s sort of a melodrama that works:

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            1. I actually used to own that album. I met Grant and Gregor (aka “the Bedlam Boys”) in a subway station in Boston one time, where they were busking for pocket change, and bought the CD out of a guitar case. Nice kids. Probably middle aged fogeys now, just like the rest of us 😉

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              1. Yeah, figured if you had some Celtic blood you might like that, mind you Argylls are Campbells, and my Grandmother distrusted them all ;-D

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  3. Interestingly, I’m finding it somewhat easier to appreciate French poetry even though I’m not that good at French. Might be because it’s a more assonant language, might be because it forces me to be more aware of language itself.

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  4. I loved Carl Sandburg’s “The People, Yes” though it was also free verse like Whitman’s. It was so funny and full of proverbs, stories from American life then. A short excerpt:

    The people is a tragic and comic two-face: hero and hoodlum:

    phantom and gorilla twisting to moan with a gargoyle mouth:

    “They buy me and sell me…it’s a game…sometime I’ll

    break loose…”

    Once having marched

    Over the margins of animal necessity,

    Over the grim line of sheer subsistence

    Then man came

    To the deeper rituals of his bones,

    To the lights lighter than any bones,

    To the time for thinking things over,

    To the dance, the song, the story,

    Or the hours given over to dreaming,

    Once having so marched.

    Between the finite limitations of the five senses

    and the endless yearnings of man for the beyond

    the people hold to the humdrum bidding of work and food

    while reaching out when it comes their way

    for lights beyond the prison of the five senses,

    for keepsakes lasting beyond any hunger or death.

    This reaching is alive.

    The panderers and liars have violated and smutted it.

    Yet this reaching is alive yet

    for lights and keepsakes.

    …

    This old anvil laughs at many broken hammers.

    There are men who can’t be bought.

    The fireborn are at home in fire.

    The stars make no noise,

    You can’t hinder the wind from blowing.

    Time is a great teacher.

    Who can live without hope?

    In the darkness with a great bundle of grief

    the people march.

    In the night, and overhead a shovel of stars for keeps, the people

    march:

    “Where to? what next?”

    And his two short poems:

    FISH CRIER

    I KNOW a Jew fish crier down on Maxwell Street with a
         voice like a north wind blowing over corn stubble
         in January.
    He dangles herring before prospective customers evincing
         a joy identical with that of Pavlowa dancing.
    His face is that of a man terribly glad to be selling fish,
         terribly glad that God made fish, and customers to
         whom he may call his wares, from a pushcart.

    Washerwoman 

    THE WASHERWOMAN is a member of the Salvation Army.
    And over the tub of suds rubbing underwear clean
    She sings that Jesus will wash her sins away
    And the red wrongs she has done God and man
    Shall be white as driven snow.
    Rubbing underwear she sings of the Last Great Washday.

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  5. Interesting that the meter is something that you find a problem in English. It does feel to me that some classic meters in English poetry are very close to the spoken tongue in ways that you don’t find in Romanian or French for example. To give a lowbrow example, in Dune, Frank Herbert had his characters speak iambic pentameter whenever they said something that needed to be punchy and memorable. You couldn’t pull this trick of concealing a poetic meter in prose in French f’rex

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