Culture Thursday: Out of the cradle, endlessly rocking

Greece had Homer. Rome had Virgil. England had John Milton. And America had Walt Whitman.

Homer, Virgil, and Milton created national epics for their respective people. These were poems which summed up national values and morés, which sang of origins and purpose. Whitman did the same for this young, boisterous, problematic nation.

Leaves of Grass was the book which he spent his poetical career writing. Unlike The Iliad, The Aeneid, or Paradise Lost, Leaves of Grass always grew. Whitman kept adding to it. All his poetic efforts poured into that tome, growing it, expanding it, adding layers of meaning and import to it.

Leaves of Grass began life as a small volume of twelve poems. By the time of the final edition, it contained well over four hundred poems. This wasn't an epic of gods and heroes. This was an epic of common men and women, of the warp and weft and woof of this improbable experiment. His life was his poetry. He sought out the matter of his work in his daily life, from a newspaper editor in Brooklyn, to a nurse for the Union army, to his latter days. Whitman's work came out of nowhere, it seemed. But the eminence grise of American letters, Ralph Waldo Emerson, had this to say when that first, slim edition came out: 

Dear Sir —

I am not blind to the worth of the wonderful gift of “Leaves of Grass.” I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed. I am very happy in reading it, as great power makes us happy. It meets the demand I am always making of what seemed the sterile and stingy nature, as if too much handiwork, or too much lymph in the temperament, were making our western wits fat and mean. I give you joy of your free and brave thought. I have great joy in it. I find incomparable things said incomparably well, as they must be. I find the courage of treatment which so delights us, and which large perception only can inspire.

I greet you at the beginning of a great career, which yet must have had a long foreground somewhere, for such a start. I rubbed my eyes a little, to see if this sunbeam were no illusion; but the solid sense of the book is a sober certainty. It has the best merits, namely, of fortifying and encouraging.

I did not know until I, last night, saw the book advertised in a newspaper that I could trust the name as real and available for a post-office. I wish to see my benefactor, and have felt much like striking my tasks and visiting New York to pay you my respects.

Whitman eschewed poetic convention, just as that other American, T.S. Eliot, would some decades later in his The Waste Land. A line of poetry was a line of thought, not bound by meter, rhyme, or length. He explored the breadth and depth of America in his work, finding wonders and terrors in it. It was an epic of the poet, and of the people about whom the poet wrote. 

If I may get personal, Leaves of Grass is what inspired me in my poetic efforts. Yes, I have had many influences since that. But reading that explosion of unbridled thought is what first awakened me to the power of not only poetry, but of language itself.

"Out Of the Cradle, Endlessly Rocking" is a component part of the epic. As with The Waste Land last week, we will have a video of a reading of the work, and then an analysis. 

***

Like what you're reading? Never miss another post! Get notified via email here.

Donate at the link below to keep us going.