Review by Choice Review
Such works as Walt Whitman: The Measure of His Song, ed. by Jim Perlman, Ed Folsom, and Dan Campion (CH, Apr'99, 36-4325), and Visiting Walt, ed. by Sheila Coghill and Thom Tammaro (2003), give evidence of the long tradition of poets engaging with Whitman. Williams (Princeton), himself an esteemed poet, extends this tradition in this brief, delightful study of Whitman's Leaves of Grass. Those looking for a scholarly examination should seek elsewhere. Instead, Williams approaches Whitman from the point of view of a poet, in later life, who has read Whitman for lifetime. For Williams, Whitman defines "the project of poetry, its possibilities, its parameters, in a way that's still in effect." In this regard, Williams's reading of Whitman connects to Williams's own poetry. He sees Whitman emerging from a cocoon of loneliness in the 1850s to produce the first edition of Leaves of Grass, a work that gave him a burst of creative energy that lasted until the Civil War and the death of Lincoln. The postbellum Whitman retreated to revision and the cultivation of the image of himself as a poet. Williams's attention to thematic issues varies, but he comes back to Whitman, the text. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readers. R. T. Prus Southeastern Oklahoma State University
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
"ON WHITMAN" is the second book in Princeton's series Writers on Writers - here, a poet on a poet. Its author, C. K. Williams, enthusiastically recommends Walt Whitman, and resorts (understandably) to a great deal of quoting. Enthusiasm is an appealing quality, but it calls out for some accompanying astringency, and the exclamatory nature of Williams's prose can become excessive. He makes Whitman the ancestor to the hedonistic sexuality of the '60s, noting how he broke through "violent repressions": "Who else, even from the perspective of the sexually 'liberated' culture of America in the '60s and '70s, did it better? . . . Who else were the revolution's real ancestors but Whitman and his heirs, the Beats, the hippies, the commune-dwellers and the organizers of festivals, which tried to enact at least a semblance of a Whitmanian ecstatic communality, acceptance, communion, merge." This is a strangely scrubbed view of an era that also saw many good minds lost to drugs, red-eyed students stoned in classrooms and careless one-night stands. Whitman - an abstemious man and, for all his geniality, a loner - would not, I think, have recognized himself as the patron of the '60s. He was no good at "communality," living all his adult life in boardinghouses or alone. Although Williams calls him "compulsively gregarious," Whitman could hardly have composed his monumental poems without spending a good deal of his time not being gregarious, but rather sitting, thinking, reading, writing, revising. He did have a fluid personality that made him able to "merge" invisibly, and with great empathy, with the images of other people and events that lodged in his mind; these images provoked stunning runs of description. And Whitman's virtual empathy sometimes found real embodiment, as in his care for wounded Union soldiers in Washington hospitals -bringing them fruit, newspapers, candy, sympathizing with their distress so deeply that it affected his own health. Williams tells us that "The Portable Walt Whitman" was the first book of poetry he ever bought for himself, when he was 16. And something of his adolescent passion for Whitman governs the prose of this book: "How wildly exciting, how really exalting it must have been to him when his poetry first offered him a way to see and record so much - it can feel like everything. Just reading it, the brilliance of the moments of inspiration are like raw synaptic explosions, like flashbulbs going off in the brain, in the mind: pop, pop, pop." There is perhaps too much of this, but it is interspersed with wonderful quotations from Whitman and spirited comments on those quotations. Williams has read Whitman with passion and intuition, and lifts up, for our inspection, lines that even those who know Whitman well might not have come across, like this (inartistic) evocation of oral intercourse, real or imagined, from a draft of "Song of Myself": Williams includes almost all of the great passages from the greatest poems, and it is a new pleasure to come upon them set off by themselves, apart from the dense Whitmanian matrix in which we first encountered them. This eulogy of Whitman is divided into short chapters, each with its topic. Some are familiar (prosody, biography, Emerson, America, the body, sex, woman, homosexuality, nature, prophecy and imagination) and a few are rather baffling, as Williams interjects modernity into the book. There is an entire chapter, for instance, on Baudelaire, a half-chapter on Victor Hugo, a chapter on Eliot and Pound, one called "Lorca, Ginsberg and 'The Faggots'" and a chapter on "Others" (Neruda, Pessoa, Adonis, Mayakovsky). Although Williams, as a modern poet himself (of long Whitmanian lines), enjoys making comparisons between Whitman and the moderns, these chapters (especially the one on Baudelaire, which draws a strained parallel with Whitman) appear as interruptions rather than as amplifications or intensifications. The last of Williams's chapters is called, evangelistically, "What He Teaches Us." Beginning with poetry, Williams soon enough comes to the moral argument "generated" by Whitman's verse: "Morally, what he teaches is to be accepting, to be generous, unselfish; to refuse to reject anyone else's suffering, or pain, or joy either; to not fear sex, to revel in it, all of it, every permutation of it; to desire desire, to not mistrust the demands of the body. . . . He wants us not to be afraid of ourselves, even of our dark, darkest, most doubting selves. . . . To be tender with the young, to admire the old, to fear neither age nor death, to exalt in them both." WILLIAMS'S prose here, as elsewhere, has been raised to Whitman's own oratorical pitch, as he reaches a startling conclusion: "All great poems . . . by the way they colonize and amplify and enhance the music of our own inner voices, of consciousness and conscience, ask us to be greater than we are, and if we read them well even show us how to begin." The present sentiment for "communication" and "community" tends to obscure the fact that poets - great ones, at least - write ultimately not for any authence but for themselves or an exacting ideal (Whitman's "Camerado," Wordsworth's "Nature"). Yeats thought that good poems arose from the poet's examining of his own quarrels with himself (and there are many such poems in Whitman). As soon as the poet composed with an eye to the audience, said Yeats, he was writing "rhetoric," not poetry. Whitman cunningly incorporates his fictive auditor into his poems, throwing out countless invitations, rebukes, queries and secrets to the reader he seems so intensely to invite into his confidence: "I might not tell everybody, but I will tell you." It is an immeasurably seductive technique - a technique to make the poem come alive in the mind of the reader, to imitate a conversation. Williams knows that the real meat and drink in Whitman's work lies in the poet's unprecedented assembling of rhythm, sound, language and images. He pays lavish tribute to what he refers to as Whitman's "music," the surge and flow of the lines; he also delights in Whitman's eye for the telling detail. But in the end, for Williams, the didactic trumps the aesthetic: we are brought back to the poetry's moral demand that we be "greater than we are." This, however, cannot be the purpose of poetry, which necessarily subsumes even the ethical under whatever it has set up as the aesthetic law governing a particular construction. Ethics - like landscape, or anecdote, or history, or psychology - is part of the raw material of some (but not all) poetry. Like other ingrethents it plays a necessarily subordinate part. But if Williams's love for Whitman, so evident all through this winning book, leads him to invite the reader chiefly into a survey of Whitmanian ethics, he comes to that end through an enlightening and often moving commentary on the younger Whitman's dazzle and gloom, humor and speculation. I do wish that he had made more room for the old Whitman, lonely, Lingering, as he leaves friends in "After the Supper and Talk," reluctantly descending the steps, but still talking, "garrulous to the very last." Helen Vendler's most recent book is "Last Looks, Last Books: Stevens, Plath, Lowell, Bishop, Merrill." She teaches at Harvard.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [July 4, 2010]
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
This jewel of a book, by one poet on another in the Writers on Writers series, does nothing less than show that Walt Whitman is the very unconscious and Paraclete of all American poets working today. With generous quotes from Williams's hero, we see how Whitman's oracular largesse most certainly extended to the continental-inspired Pound and Eliot. Williams returns to the pure, original edition (out of nine) of Leaves of Grass for inspiration, finding the so-called deathbed edition along with all the Leaves in between lacking the first flush of musical and formal elements. Williams likewise always returns to Leaves to explore what inspires-beyond Dante, Shakespeare, and others who attract him. In "Song of Myself," the "I" and "you," author and experiencer, are conflated to the point where the writer is one more of his own readers; "Song of Myself" tellingly ends with the word "you." As Williams observes, Whitman "wants us not to be afraid of ourselves, even of our dark, darkest, most doubting selves." As a personal introduction to the visionary free-verse wellspring of the American poetic spirit, this book is one that no poetry lover should miss. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
