I wanted to read poetry as I've never been able to get into it before and an anon suggested I read Walt Whitman. I got through Malcolm Cowley's introduction just fine and was intrigued to get into the meat and potatoes, but when I got into the introduction written by Whitman himself I felt like I was in a fucking daze. Maybe I'm just too stupid or not accustomed to this style of writing, but I found it really hard to follow. There were a few segments I could parse and enjoy, particularly the early section where he talks about the importance of sincerity - Indeed, I picked up the book because I was complaining on another thread about how poetry tends to come across insincere to me and an anon told me that would feel impossible when reading Walt Whitman. His prose seems so disjointed and he struggles to keep to one topic while properly introducing it, developing an idea and moving onto a different one. Instead, he writes almost like a biblical schizophrenic, with endless conjunctions (and, and, and, and...) that make you lose track of whatever he was even talking about, long lists of similes and metaphors and several adjectives strung together. Indeed, Cowley's introduction mentions how Whitman had a mystical experience early on in his life and how he had his own version of some kind of Eastern Pandeism going on and fancied himself a bit of an oracle - which makes sense, considering Transendentalists like Ralph Waldo Emerson were so into him. I am not into Oracular Literature nor do I understand it well, so it figures that I'd find it dense, disorienting and not enjoyable to get through (with a few exceptions).I tried reading the actual poem after getting through that slog and I enjoyed it. It was much easier to parse thanks to the Malcolm Cowley introduction and I could contextualize it. It has a dream-like feel to its development and a sorta daoist quality. It even explicitly mocks the reader for trying to apply exegesis to the text. It's a pleasant read and it does indeed come across as sincere. The actual introduction was such a pain, though. What do you guys think?
>>25445275re: his prose, normally this board's problem is that they ignore their own reactions and uncritically defer to the author's celebrity status, but i'd humbly suggest you need to do the opposite and have the humility to accept that whitman is writing well and writing powerfully in a manner you're just not familiar with; that you think he jumps around because you're not following his chain of associations, you don't know the unspoken ideas he's responding to; and that your standards of good clean prose are a tiny clearing in the huge forest of what's possible, most of which is still dark and obscure to you. just go with the flow dude and don't rush to judgement.that said, it's infinitely nicer to read those genuine and well-articulated reactions of yours than it is to read people who think any 'flowery' prose is by default unimpeachable. (i'm also curious what you would make of dh lawrence's prose in his essay on whitman in his studies in classic american literature. because for me lawrence is one of the greatest prose writers of all time. and 'biblical schizophrenic' could almost describe lawrence.)
>>25445325I am by NO means a scholar regarding Whitman, the transcendentalists, the romantics or even American literature in general and I really hope that self-awareness came across. I'm sure that for some people that style of prose in his introduction has a merit that I just can't understand - for me, it was really hard to parse what the fuck he was talking about. It felt genuinely almost ergodic lmao. From my understanding, his style is deliberately grandiose and explicitly intended to mimic how a bible passage might sound. I know he had a phase (which I think came later) in his life where after he first released Leaves of Grass he developed a bit of an ego as a sorta prophet and even wrote positive reviews about his own works anonymously, but from my understanding he got over it and became humble again. That someone who speaks so highly of sincerity can also fall victim to ego and become insincere is actually reassuring in a way. Yeah, he was only a guy.Could you maybe help me understand his style better and how I can appreciate it, please? Not his poetry, moreso his prose.
>>25445325>that said, it's infinitely nicer to read those genuine and well-articulated reactions of yours than it is to read people who think any 'flowery' prose is by default unimpeachable. As a more general side-note, I think it's really important and often more interesting, too, that people can disagree with the consensus
>>25445275To get into it, read a couple of anthologies. Not the encyclopedic ones. Otherwise you won't get an idea of how many different things people have done with poetry. Don't start with one long work unless you're prepared to pass on it for the next author in your list. All of Leaves of Grass is too much of a time investment, and you're not studying, you should be skimming for something you like.
>>25445399I'm basically just reading Song of Myself for now (which is probably something I can do casually while having a drink and not burn out) and then I might move onto the Iliad. I have Edith Hamilton's Mythology as well but I feel like I'm familiar enough with Greek myth that I don't need to read all of it. I've never read it before and it's a shame because it's such a popular book that most people have read and it's also poetry, so why not?
>>25445412>I'm basically just reading Song of Myself for nowExcellent choice.
>>25445275Whitman's awesome. >>25445325 is right when he says>you don't know the unspoken ideas he's responding to; and that your standards of good clean prose are a tiny clearing in the huge forest of what's possible, most of which is still dark and obscure to you. just go with the flow dude and don't rush to judgementit's basically how Whitman explicitly asks to be read. If you're curious, compare the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass (which is what I'm guessing you read) with the Death-Bed edition -- Whitman spent his entire life revising and adding to Leaves of Grass instead of writing new books, so the poems change drastically over the course of his life. The '55 edition is generally much tighter and focused, while the Death-Bed edition does have some horrifically bad work in it ("Song of the Broad-Axe" is embarrassingly bad for such a good poet) it also contains some of the greatest poems ever written -- I recommend>The Sleeperswhich is in the '55 edition but Whitman's final revisions take it into proto-Surrealist/psychopomp territory ~50 years before Surrealism or psychoanalysis gets started. Given what you said about liking the "dream-like feel" I strongly recommend this, read both the '55 and Death-Bed versions>When Lilacs Last In The Dooryard Bloom'dwhich is Whitman's elegy for Abraham Lincoln, heartbreaking poem, easily equal to Milton's Lycidas in my opinion, far better than Shelley's Adonais>Crossing Brooklyn Ferrywhich might be my favorite poem of all time -- I genuinely get a little emotional every time I reread the part where Whitman talks about how the darkness fell on him tooThose are my favorites from his longer work; he has a lot of shorter lyrics that are worth reading if you're into Whitman. >>25445352Whitman's preface to the '55 edition of LoG is more performance than anything else. He's telling you what he really thinks about poetry and its place in nation-building/human life, but he's also trying to adopt this posture of the wise God-intoxicated democratic sage and prove he's got worldly and otherworldly wisdom. Later in his career he doesn't have much to prove and he relaxes the weird gnomic style. Strongly recommend his book titled "Specimen-Days," which is basically paragraph to a page long vignettes about walking around NYC/DC and thinking about things and noticing things and writing them down. Somewhere between prose poetry and sketches, proves Whitman is a brilliant prose writer when he wants to be one
>>25446845Yeah, that's the vibe I got from reading that introduction. Whitman was a nobody from a non-academic background and I felt like the introduction came from a performative place of insecurity, which I actually find endearing. It seems to me like the over-the-top grandiose tone of the introduction is a way for him to make a point that he can stand with his contemporaries. Unfortunately, I just found it hard to parse and convoluted to read, so I had to force myself to do it.What specifically makes you love him so much? I barely read any poetry, so I lack the experience to appreciate what makes him stand out. I am indeed reading the first edition btw.
>>25446912It's that rare blend of over-the-top grandiosity and the talent to actually back it up. Totally agree on the endearing thing. If he wasn't Whitman it would be insufferable, but because he's Whitman we get to see one of the world's great poets perform confidence in order to instill confidence in himself. But yeah, it's absolutely hard to parse -- reupping my recommendation for Specimen-Days if you want to read his prose. You don't have to read it front to back, just dip in as you want.>What specifically makes you love him so much?Good question; for me, it's a blend of a few different things. As much as /lit/ loves to rag on free verse, it represents the most fundamental transformation in poetry... probably ever, unless you're counting things like "the printing press," I guess. Whitman's lines are sort of his attempt to make a secular, democratic Bible, and I find that fantasy of world cooperation/love/understanding charming. He also lavishes a godly amount of love and attention on the world -- incredible eye for image, incredible understanding of metaphor, and his great Homeric catalogs/lists acquire this sort of hypnotic, light-soaked beauty through sheer accumulation, force, repetition. He feels like your friend, like he's actually speaking to you, you specifically, when you read him -- clean air, sunlight, good linen, happy talk with old friends, the satiety of physical exertion. This Randall Jarrell (midcentury American poet and critic, also very good) essay on Whitman is excellent and says it better than I could;>...They might have put on his tombstone WALT WHITMAN: HE HAD HIS NERVE. He is the rashest, the most inexplicable and unlikely -- the most impossible, one wants to say -- of poets. He somehow is in a class by himself, So that one compares him with other poets about as readily as one compares Alice with other books. (Even his free verse has a completely different effect from anybody else's.) Who would think of comparing him with Tennyson or Browning or Arnold or Baudelaire? -it is Homer, or the sagas, or something far away and long ago, that comes to one's mind only to be dismissed; for sometimes Whitman is epic, just as Moby Dick is, and it surprises us to be able to use truthfully this word that we have misused so many times. Whitman is grand, and elevated, and comprehensive, and real with an astonishing reality, and many other things -- the critic points at his qualities in despair and wonder, all method failing, and simply calls them by their names. And the range of these qualities is the most extraordinary thing of all. We can surely say about him, 'He was a man, take him for all in all. I shall not look upon his like again' -- and wish that people had seen this and not tried to be his like: one Whitman is miracle enough, and when he comes again it will be the end of the world. >https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~perelman/classes/english088/rj_somelinesfromwhitman.html
>>25447960Thanks for that, anon. I love how you talk about him. I definitely see Whitman as a very endearing person. Before I read him I had this idea of him being a wise sagely guy, but I actually notice a lot of flaws in him. He comes across to me more now as almost an ingenue that managed to not be spoiled by the world. There is a tenderness to him. If this thread is still up by the time I finish the poem (hopefully I'll finish it today) I'd love to discuss him with you.
Just get Waltman's complete works and read the work chronologically. Don't over think it and read the words to yourself phonetically. Enjoy the journey. You'll have a blast. Then go back to the parts that really captured you or you had difficulty with.
>>25448531>read the words to yourself phoneticallydoes this mean "read it aloud" or "pay attention to how the words sound"
>>25448515If you've finished it I'm all ears
>>25450925Hi anon, I'm only about halfway through but thought I'd stop and leave a post in case the thread 404s.I can definitely see why people say Walt Whitman fancied himself a sage. His Eastern-style thinking is definitely there. Reading the poem it almost feels like a sequence of aphorisms from the Dhammapada. The slight mocking tone at the start when he asks the reader if he's so proud of being able to understand poems is very daoist, too. He doesn't say much directly, but you can see he believes in his holistic and inclusive philosophy, because he includes a lot of lines that state implied elements of the text more explicitly, too. The line about the Ox's eyes is one of them and I think it's a bit of a microcosm for the whole poem. He spends a lot of time using very colourful language to paint various pictures of different things he experiences in his life and I think they're how he illustrates the message he's trying to convey without outright stating it. Again, the idea that there's an important universal truth that has to be understood but can't be explicitly explained to you is both very Daoist and very Buddhist.Also, I get the sense reading this that he for sure was gay.
>>25451154>Eastern-style thinkingYeah, good eye. Hindu/Buddhist philosophy had just started to make its first appearance in English right as Whitman was getting started. He engages with eastern thought his entire career, both explicitly and implicitly. Cool to watch how his own thinking changes in response -- at first he's almost awed, then he starts to have strong doubts around the time of the US Civil War (cool fact abt Whitman btw; he volunteered in Union civil war hospitals and transcribed letters for illiterate dying soldiers, occasionally US historians will find a civil war era letter and at the bottom it'll say something like "written down by WW," there's thousands of them) then re-engages with it once he discovers Hegel, which is its own conversation>he for sure was gayAbsolutely. Might've fucked Oscar Wilde, but we're not sure about that. He claimed to have fathered something like a dozen children but as far as I'm aware there's no proof he was telling the truth. The greatest love of his life was this young streetcar conductor (picrel) named Peter Doyle who he met when he was older. The Death-Bed edition of his work has an entire section titled "Calamus" that's basically lightly veiled odes to gay sex, men, etc
>>25445275is there a best edition to get or do I just read whatever I can get my hands on
>>25452242I read about 50 pages last night and I'm gonna read the rest today and hopefully if the thread is still up we can talk about the rest. I tried reading it in nature while listening to ambient music and it was a fun experience before It got cold and the ants came for me.I still don't think it's a trivial read even with all this background context and even in poetry form! I have to really stop and think about what I'm reading sometimes, even though I'm trying to keep the flow going. There are times when the lines don't seem to be saying much and then I pause for a second and think "oh, maybe he meant *this*".>>25452420Personally, I'm reading the penguin classics 1855 first edition with an introduction.
>>25452807>I tried reading it in nature while listening to ambient music and it was a fun experience before It got cold and the ants came for me.Whitman would've liked that, I think>I pause for a second and think "oh, maybe he meant *this*".What's an example?
>>25453792This, for example (although it's actually one of the most obvious ones)."A child said, What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands; How could I answer the child... I do not know what it is any more than he. I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven. Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord, a scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropped, Bearing the owner's name someway in the corners, that we may see and remark, and say Whose? Or I guess the grass is itself a child... the produced babe of the vegetation".I think the child is asking about humanity and what we are and the "handkerchief" dropped by God implies the whole Pandeist thing Whitman had going on. When he mentions the flag of my disposition I think he might be meaning God/the universe as opposed to humanity as a whole, since in a sense they're one and the same from a Pandeistic point of view. I guess he's saying maybe our nature is equivalent to the nature of the universe itself. There are better examples, but I just had a quick flick through to find the first obscure thing to illustrate my point. What do you think?
>>25454858I mean, I think that's more or less the intended reading. One complication for the straightforwardly "pandeist" reading is that Whitman says>it is the handkerchief of the Lord... bearing the owner's name someway in the corners, that we may see and remark, and say Whose?implying that God dropped it, which implies that there is a God outside of the handkerchief (grass) itself, right? A "pandeist" rendering of this would leave zero separation between the image of the handkerchief and God, but Whitman's inserting distance between the two>I guess he's saying maybe our nature is equivalent to the nature of the universe itselfMore or less; I think he's trying on a variety of perspectives in this passage, with the repeated "I guess, I guess," etc. (He's not saying "it is," right?) I don't think that Whitman's saying Grass = God = Humanity, but more endorsing a form of perspectivism; "one way I might think of the grass is the possession of/handiwork of God, just as everything is; another way I might think of the grass is that it's a sign of my living, vibrant hope, like a flag is a sign of a nation's hope; another way I might think of the grass is that it itself is a child of plant life," that kind of thing. I think you're right that Whitman's metaphors point toward a Pandeist sort of view, but he's not full-throatedly endorsing it here -- he maintains a coy flirtatiousness with it, but that's not endorsement
>>25445275reading an intro to whitman? i suppose given that i know a bit about his life and history means i must have also, but damn just read the poems.
>>25455933poetry frightens a lot of anons, they need as many guardrails and helmets and safety jackets and guiding hands as they can find
>>25455938>>25455933I think it's fair to say that reading introductions is usually pretty useful. There's no way you'd just know about Whitman as a person (his religious beliefs, his early life, the historical context he lived in) without an introduction. Besides, WHITMAN wrote the second introduction himself so he expects you to read it. You wouldn't tell someone to read the Iliad without at least the background knowledge that something like an introduction might provide
>>25445275>From an examination of Walt made twelve years ago the present writer carried away the impression that there are thirty well-written pages of Whitman; he is now unable to find them. Whitman's faults are superficial, he does convey an image of his time, he has written histoire morale, as Montaigne wrote the history of his epoch. You can learn more of nineteenth-century America from Whitman than from any of the writers who either refrained from perceiving, or limited their record to what they had been taught to consider suitable literary expression. The only way to enjoy Whitman thoroughly is to concentrate on his fundamental meaning. If you insist, however, on dissecting his language you will probably find that it is wrong NOT because he broke all of what were considered in his day 'the rules' but because he is spasmodically conforming to this, that or the other; sporadically dragging in a bit of 'regular' metre, using a bit of literary language, and putting his adjectives where, in the spoken tongue, they are not. His real writing occurs when he gets free of all this barbed wire.
>>25458336>His real writing occurs when he gets free of all this barbed wire.Does Pound give any examples?
