R. W. Flint
THE LIVING WHITMAN
Anniversary or no anniversary, Whitman is being written
about with eloquence and a sense of discovery. Randall Jarrell's "Some
Lines from Whitman"l is a landmark by which to measure the others,
although Richard Chase's more discursive and consecutive but no less
valuable book
2
was "well advanced" before Jarrell appeared, to pour
smoking brimstone on the heads of the fainthearted. Messrs. Cowley and
Arvin had written well of Whitman, but often with a needlessly apolo–
getic and even a rather finicking air about the poetry itself. Between
Emerson and Arvin rise the impassible hills of polemic and ideology.
But even so,
even so-Eliot
and Winters and the "problem" of Hart
Crane, who busied a covey of critics in saving him from himself and
hence from Whitman, notwithstanding- it is hard to think of Whitman
as having been really lost. We think of Turgenev's abortive plan, doubt–
less under pressure from James, to translate his poems. We recall La–
forgue's translations, and those striking tributes from Hopkins and
Yeats.
S
Whatever the actual filiations may be, it is no less hard to im–
agine, among others.
The Waste Land, The Cantos
or Roethke's "The
Shape of the Fire" as not owing their lives, in some way or ways, to
Leaves of Grass,
that first great phantasmagoria of the self in modern
poetry.
Of all great poetry, Whitman's is probably the least detachable
from its philosophical program, the poetry that comes closest to being,
literally, its own program; so that to sift the greater philosophy from
the lesser, you have only to choose the best poems. But in that "only"
lies an hundred years' war of unparallelled confusion, a Balzacian comedy
of voices from which we can pick at random an Edgar Lee Masters ob–
jecting to Whitman's use of "breasts" on grounds of decorum! The two
1 In
Poetry and the Age,
now in a Vintage paperbacked edition.
2
Walt Whitman Reconsidered,
by Richard Chase (Sloane, $3.75) .
3 Cited by Leslie Fiedler, in
Leaves of Grass One Hundred Years After,
edited by Milton Hindus, with essays by William Carlos Williams, Richard
Chase, Leslie Fiedler, Kenneth Burke, David Daiches and
J.
Middleton Murry
(Stanford University Press, $5.00). All subsequent references to these writers
refer to essays in this book.
