Arts & Ideas: The yawp heard round the world
Did Whitman succeed in becoming America's national poet?
He is, to use an old phrase, first among equals. We have a number of great American poets, but none is more convincingly patriotic than this bohemian maverick–not even Frost or Longfellow. Whitman succeeded so well that he is not merely the poet of America but of the Americas. He is as popular in Argentina, Chile, and Mexico as he is in the United States.
You have eloquently lamented the declining influence of contemporary poetry on the larger society. Is there something that poets can learn from Whitman in order to make their verse more vital to the reading public and possibly to increase their audience?
Perhaps the most important thing poets might learn from Whitman is to love and respect their readers–not just the literary elite but also the common reader. He treats the reader as an equal. Whitman understood that poetry's place in a democracy was necessarily different from its position in an aristocratic society. It didn't bother him that the right audience didn't yet exist. His work called it into being.
Do you have a favorite poem, or favorite lines, within the larger work? Would you comment on it or them?
I find the last section of "Song of Myself" both astonishingly beautiful and perpetually surprising. Whitman imagines his own physical death and poetic immortality with humorous bravado. There is really nothing like it in previous poetry. The section begins:
The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me, he complains of my gab and my loitering. /
I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable, /
I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.
American literature really started with that untranslatable barbaric yawp. It was the yawp heard around the world.
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