“(T)hese savage, wolfish parties alarm me” (p. 55).

Although the quote belongs to Whitman himself (while speaking about political parties in or around 1871), this tome from the Modern Critical Views collection (edited and with an Introduction by Harold Bloom) is about Whitman (and his work) rather than by him.

I frankly haven’t read—other than the occasional magazine or newspaper review — this kind of literary critique since college. Nor have I ever been a big fan of Walt Whitman’s poetry. Has this collection of literary essays changed my mind — or at least motivated me to pick up Leaves of Grass and/or some of Whitman’s other work? Possibly. As I now know (thanks to this collection) a bit more about Whitman — the man and not just the poet — I’m far more likely to look upon his verse sympathetically. In that sense, this tome — which I found on the street here in Brooklyn as a give-away — was a valuable find. As with any good art or music criticism, I now have a better sense of why Whitman (the poet) made the choices he did. In that sense, this book was well worth the several hours it took me to read it.

Are all of these essays easily accessible to a general reading public? No. With the exception of the essays of D. H. Lawrence and James Write, all of the contributors are academicians. And academicians — as we all so fondly remember — have a rather erudite (not to say ‘hermetic’) way of looking at the world However, if words like “anacoluthon,” “autochthonic,” “literatus,” “transumptive” and “vivification” don’t put you off, go for it! I, personally, had to look each one of these words up, however useful my ever-fading memory of Latin and Ancient Greek roots, prefixes and suffixes might’ve aided at least in putting me in some ballpark of understanding.

But I don’t mean to suggest that each and every one of these scholars will assault the chinks in your armored senses with sesquipedalian slings and arrows. Just some of them will. And while the arguments of some of these intrepid word warriors may pass as easily over your head as they did mine, there are nuggets here to be mined — and minded.

And so, read at your own risk. All in all, there are worse ways to spend a rainy afternoon. As James A. Wright wisely suggests on p. 88, “(f)or some time the features of American poetry most in evidence have been very different from Whitman’s: in short, recent American poetry has often been flaccid, obtuse and muddied, and fragmentary, crippled almost. Yet there is great talent alive in our country today, and if the spirit of Whitman can help to rescue that talent from the fate of so many things in America, that begin nobly and end meanly, then we ought to study him as carefully as we can.”

If nothing more, spend half an hour with the final essay, by Paul Zweig, titled “The Wound-Dresser” to get a real sense of Walt Whitman — the man, and not just the poet — as he tends to casualties (from both sides!) of the Civil War. Allow me to quote both Zweig and Whitman from pp. 146 – 147: “Men died while he watched. (‘Death is nothing here.’) It was an upheaval, an overthrowing of all his feelings. For a decade he had written poem-sermons on the health and youth of the flesh. The poems had reverberated with a kind of invulnerability. Yes, there had been a dark side culminating in the ‘death death death death death’ of “Out of the Cradle,” but it had been romantic and songlike. Death had been a nervous tune, edging around his song of health. But here were actual men dying; here were bodies ripped open by shrapnel, drained by disease. ‘Now that I have lived for 8 or 9 days amid such scenes as the camps furnish,’ he wrote his mother, ‘…really nothing we call trouble seems worth talking about.’”

I was reminded, upon concluding this final essay, of my first reading of MacKinlay Kantor’s novel Andersonville (published in 1955) some 45 – 50 years ago. Maybe it’s time to re-visit that novel — and that war — to “contextualize” (as our academicians/scholars/word warriors would likely put it) some of Whitman’s work.

RRB
04/27/14
Brooklyn, New York, U.S.A.

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