Being such a slow reader I am still in the early portions of "Song of Myself" but I can't help but love it. It's been a while since I really sunk my teeth in to a long verse work and I'm enjoying the extra brain power it takes to process it all. He has this style unlike anything I've read. I guess I just read too many classics (he was so highly criticized when he was first publishing for not writing like everyone else).
The short pieces in the Inscriptions section say so much in so little. I am using a borrowed copy, but I feel that I must dig out my copy (I am told we own it, and I assume that we would) just to line it with book darts on sections that really hit me. I keep forgetting my little tin of them and can't bear to put any post-its in this 1912 copy I am using! Certain passages make me smile in spite of myself. Others seem like he was in my head when he wrote them (only my words are never as beautiful or graceful as his). In 2008 I find such meaning in these old words. That, to me, is the true power of a great writer - timelessness. I know that in his own time critics thought him crude, perverse, and near pornographic. I see passages that may have seemed that way then, but today of course seem tame. Sometimes it takes a sharp and shocking image to make an idea clear - often a tame idea, at that!
WHEN I READ THE BOOK
When I red the book, the biography famous,
And is this then (said I) what the author calls a man's life?
And so will some one when I am dead and gone write my life
(As if any man really knew aught of my life,
Why even I myself I often think know little of nothing of my real life,
Only a few hints, a few diffused faint clews and indirections
I seek for my own use to trace out here.)
This came from the man before John Burroughs read Leaves of Grass, before he wrote copious pages on the life of Whitman and defensing his work. How ironic! Barely read in his own time, Whitman today is considered such an American treasure, so beloved! How terrible, too, that at age 24 I am only reading him for the first time (save for "O Captain! My Captain!" which I should have learned in school BUt I think I read it on my own. It was in a book called What you 5th grader ought to know something that I feel should be given to public school boards. I mean, who hasn't at least heard of it?? It, too, is in this book! I never knew!)
Why isn't he more widely taught? We teach English poetry so much in schools, why not the poets of this country? While you're banging through "The Road Less Taken" add some Whitman in the mix for comparison. He lived and wrote during such a fascinating and dynamic period in our history, making his own path through the wilderness of writing. I didn't take American literature in college (Renaissance, Japanese, and Russian) but I feel like he should be covered in high school. I think that his straightforward style would be v. teachable to that age, and appealing. I don't think that "Ode on a Grecian Urn" is really the style that will inspire students in this day and age to write poetry. It is beautiful, of course. I loved it at once. But I know that any poem beginning with 'Thou' automatically makes half the students roll their eyes or fall asleep. Whitman feels, at times, like he could have written it last month, not a hundred years ago.
Now I will do nothing but listen,
To accrue what I hear into this song, to let sounds contribute toward it.
...
I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contain'd,
I stand and look at them long and long.
They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,
Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things,
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago,
Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.
So they show their relations to me and I accept them,
They bring me tokens of myself, they evince them plainly in their possession.
I will continue this journey through American poetry. It feels almost like a journey through myself.
