InE20011

The Great American Visionary

By ANTHONY BURGESS

BRITISH musicians have been better Whitman publicists than British men of letters. Whit- man, a hard poet to quote (as Uncle Ponderevo admits in Tono-Bungay), was learned by heart by thousands of provincial choral singers—those who tackled Delius's Sea Drift, Vaughan Wjl- liams's A Sea Symphony. Hoist's Dirge for T$17o Veterans., eventually Bliss's Morning Heroes. Because Whitman, like the Bible, seemed to stand on the margin of art, composers saw that they could add some art to him. More than that, he was democratic, even sweaty, and the right libret- tist for a musical renaissance that turned against the Mendelssohnian salons and went to the sem- piternal soil. Whitman's free verse (not vers Libre. a very salony thing) was a corrective to the four-square folkiness that bedevilled so many rural rhapsodies and even The Planets, but his rhythms were lyrical or declamatory, not—like Eliot and Pound (who eventually made a pact with Whitman, having 'detested him long enough') —muffled. arhetorical, conversational.

Whitman's verse-technique is still of interest to the prosodist. His basic rhythm is an epic one— the Virgilian dactyl-spondee--and his line often hexametric : I perceive that the ghastly glimmer is noonday sunbeams reflected,

And debouch to the steady and central from the offspring great and small.

He sometimes sounds like Clough's Amours de Voyage, though it would be hard to imagine a greater disparity of tone and attitude than that which subsists between these two Victorians. Nevertheless, both Clough and Whitman saw that the loose hexameter could admit the contem- porary and sometimes the colloquial:

I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslat- able,

I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.

I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love.

If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.

When Whitman becomes 'free.' it is as though he justifies truncation or extension of the basic hexa- meter by some unspoken theory of a line-state- ment or line-image. Flouting classical procedure in refusing to allow any spill-over from line to line, he invokes a tradition older than Virgil—that of Hebrew poetry. British composers, their noses well-trained, sniffed the Bible in Whitman : If you would understand me go to the heights or water-shore, The nearest gnat is an explanation, and a drop or motion of waves a key.

There are passages of Whitman, as of Blake, which have a ring of something from the Apocrypha. This is appropriate for the age of the American Vision which produced him, or which he —and President Lincoln and Mrs. Beecher Stowe--helped to produce.

Whitman's verse-style is so consistent (he only very rarely tried strophic fo.rms and was not happy in them) that any volume of his can en- compass single-line 'inscriptions' as well as poems as long as 'Song of Myself': chippings and totem- poles attest the one tree. There is never any sense of the fragmentary. since—as his overall title in- dicates—if he is to present the American plain he must do so through its constituent blades leaves and clumps. He has only one subject— acceptance of the life-death cycle and reverence for it—and, since he uses an invariable technique, Leaves of Grass has a unity to be found in few other poets' collected volumes. The consistency of subject-matter and rhythm is also in the lan- guage. This is an idiosyncratic compound of the colloquial, the technical (but to admit the col- loquial has always been to admit the technical) and the traditionally 'poetic.' The latter some- times comes out in otiose eye-contractions like 'ebb'd' and `walk'd' and `seiz'd'; sometimes in in- versions that deliberately point the dactylic rhythm CI sing the body electric'), most often in the drawing on the common stockpot of the nine- teenth century (`. . . for well dear brother I know, /If thou wast not granted to sing thou would'st surely die'). Some of his loan-words- `allons,"eleve,"eidolons,"camerado'—are there to internationalise his material. In `To Foreign Lands' he says :

I heard that you ask'd for something to prove this puzzle the New World,

And to define America, her athletic Democracy, Therefore I send ■ ou my poems that you behold in them what you wanted.

But Whitman's aim is rather to present a universal democratic vista in terms of the American myth. The America of his poems sometimes seems as symbolic as that of Blake, and the bearded figure that strides across it with a big hello—the Answerer, all things to all men—is as much a home-made archetype as the Giant Albion.

What makes Whitman antipathetic to many Europeans is his quality of uncompromising acceptance. We take it for granted that the poet should be sick, and it is the convention to sneer at the eupeptic and wince at the possessor of the loud voice, blessing his friend in the morning. `The disease of modern life' that Matthew Arnold tried to diagnose turned into health when it crossed the Atlantic. Whitman seems to advocate anarchy, telling the States: 'Resist much, obey little, /Once unquestioning obedience, once fully enslaved'; like Blake, he accepts an antinomian universe: 'I am not the poet of goodness only. I do not decline to be the poet of wickedness also . . . Evil propels me and reform of evil propels me, I stand indifferent'; he welcomes Darwinian- ism, science, technology. More than anything, he is a flesh-glorifier—pagan rather than on the muscular-Christian pattern of Charles Kingsley :

Walt Whitman. a kosmos, of Manhattan the son. Turbulent, fleshy, sensual, eating, drinking and breeding . .

I believe in the flesh and the appetites,

Seeing, hearing, feeling, are miracles, and each part and tag of me is a miracle.

Browning, too, glorified the flesh but only by first making it remote, pushing it back into an Italian painting or an imagined song of David. Whit- man's carnality is here-and-now stuff, taking place under the sun in Kansas or Wisconsin or on fish- shaped Paumanok.

It is a sensuality omnifutuant rather than (what John Addington Symonds thought it might be) 120mo-erotic.' Whitman was always quick to assert his heterosexuality and boast of his illegiti- mate offspring: one has no reason to disbelieve him. But the mythical Answerer he makes of himself has to be androgynous. The volume of poems called Calamus rejoices in male love, but it is not a collection of love poems in the con- ventional sense. It is as if Whitman were looking for erotic symbols of an asexual union. After celebrating two simple men I saw toila!, on the pier in the midst of the crowd, parting the parting of dear friends,

The one to remain hung on the other's neck and passionately kiss'd him.

While the one to depart tightly prest the one to remain in his arms,

Whitman gives us a poem saying: I believe the main purport of these States is to found a superb friendship, exalt& previously unknown.

Because I perceive it waits, and has been always Waiting. latent in all men.

The juxtaposition is not accidental.

As one of the nineteenth-century innovators, Whitman can be ranked with Hopkins: Hopkins himself was aware of an affinity, though he did net relish it (he asked Bridges if Whitman had written anything like 'Harry Ploughman' and said that he would be sorry if he had). Whitman's vocabulary is very wide (though not from delving into the recherché so much as admitting a new— much wider than Tennysonian—subject-matter) and his rhetorical sweep is symphonic. One of the most important of his innovations—reviled in his day as a barbarism--is the rhetorical cata- logue, the enumeration in line after long line of visual phenomena, either taken from the natural world or the man-made. It required courage to list at enormous length rather than to take the conventional path of generalisation, but the cour- age has been posthumously rewarded. The cata- logues of 'Song of Myself are magnificent; the unremitting detail of 'Drum Taps' makes it prob- ably the finest long war-poem of all time. Perhaps only an American poet could see the rhetorical possibilities of this enumerative technique; the immense plurality of the United States is made for this kind of celebration, and even a plain roll-call ('Mississippi with bends and chutes, /And my Illinois fields, and my Kansas fields, and my fields of Missouri . ..) can lift the heart without much help from a poet. America herself dictated the technique to a man passionately in love with America. It is, of course, a technique that looked forward to the epic cinema of Griffiths, poetry derived from the juxtaposition of visual images.

The America that Whitman presented in his poems was a visionary country, built in an epic fantasia on the theme 'E Pluribus Unum.' Such an America, roamed by the linker, the joiner-of- hands, the Answerer, who says 'indifferently and alike How are you friend? to the President at his levee, and ... Good-day my brother, to Cudge that hoes in the sugar-field,' never existed and never could. Men are meaner and less forgivable than Whitman was willing to see, and perhaps his democratic vistas fill too many modern Ameri- cans with discomfort, making them shut their eyes to his greatness. It is different for scholars, of course : this new edition of Leaves of Grass* is one of the most beautiful books to have come recently out of America, and Harold W. Blodgett and Sculley Bradley have lavished great industry on its preparation. Also, which is right for this poet, much love.

* LEAvrs of GRASS. By Walt Whitman. Edited by Harold W. Blodgett and Sculley Bradley. (University of London Press. f4 4s.)