Paul Nelson
December, 2004
Walt
Whitman: Poet of Parturition
To peruse some of
the scholarship done on
Poets to come! orators, singers,
musicians to come!
Not to-day is to justify me and answer what I am for,
But you, a new brood, native, athletic, continental,
greater
than before known,
Arouse! Arouse – for you must justify me – you must answer.
I myself but write one or two indicative words for the future,
I but advance a moment only to wheel and hurry back in the
darkness.
I am a man who, sauntering along without fully stopping,
turns a casual look upon you and then averts
his face,
Leaving it to you to prove and define it,
Expecting the main things from you. (10)
Walt Whitman single-handedly
birthed one of
In his Selected Essays, William Carlos Williams said Whitman was tremendously important in the history of modern poetry because he:
“broke
through the deadness of copied forms which keep shouting above everything that
wants to get said today, drowning out one man with the accumulated weight of a
thousand voices in the past – reestablishing the tyrannies of the past, the
very tyrannies that we are seeking to diminish. The structure of the old is
active, it says no! to everything in propaganda and poetry that wants to say
yes. Whitman broke through that. That was basic and good”
(218).
Whitman broke from
inherited British notions of rhyme and meter to establish what has been called free Verse, or vers libre in the French tradition. It is
also likely that translations of Whitman helped inspire the French version of free
verse. Whitman’s poetry is rooted in place, in the speech rhythms of the
American language and, perhaps most importantly in the American tradition of
searching for transcendence or what Michael McClure calls the “hunger for freedom”
(McClure xv). The term free verse, however, is erroneous. As
Gay Wilson Allen and others have pointed out, Whitman’s structure is not
metrical, but is based on the intonation or phonological unit. Any free verse,
with investigation, can be shown to have patterns that will have been inspired
by a number of possible causations: blood pressure, the music one has listened
to, environmental factors and so on. So the term Open Form is much more
appropriate for the work of Whitman and those who have been affected by his
field or resonance. Yet not all free verse is Open Form. Open also refers to
the process by which this kind of poetry is created. Most of the free verse
that we have in American, and throughout the world is
of a closed nature. Some elements of Open Form process include spontaneous
composition, a recognition of the intelligence of
language. Charles Olson in “Projective
Verse” put it this way
From the moment he
ventures into FIELD COMPOSITION—puts
himself in the open—he can go by no track other than the one the poem under
hand declares, for itself” and a greater energy than what is found in closed
verse” (148). In other words the poem leads the way, rather than imposing a pre-conceived
form.
So where did this come from? What was the energy which propelled Whitman into this remarkable accomplishment? I’m talking not only about his work, but the field of consciousness he created and the birth of Open Form in North American poetry.
The Procreant Urge
Urge and urge and urge,
Always the procreant urge of the world.
Out of the dimness opposite equals advance, always substance and increase,
always sex (24)
According to one tantric scholar and practitioner, tantric sex is used to create the polarity charge of the cosmic union of opposites that connects with the primordial energy from which everything arises in the universe. The Tantrics believe the greatest source of energy in the universe is sexual, and sexual orgasm is seen as a cosmic and divine experience. Tantric sexual practices involve heightening sexual energy so that it can be utilized for spiritual growth and healing and to help one embrace the divine nature of sexual energy and learn to flow it to the upper energy centers of one’s body.
There is no evidence that Walt Whitman practiced tantric sex, but Whitman’s acceptance of sex and the pleasure it enables is a key theme in Leaves of Grass and may very well be the source of his spiritual awakening. The Hindus call it a Pure Heart and this is the key to Whitman’s field. Take the sexual energy, remove the lust component through the daily development of that pure heart, and you have a field that resonates deeply with a human being. Of course, the more open and less rational, the more likely one will let this field do its work.
Early critics of
Whitman were appalled by the sexual nature of his work. The Puritan heritage of
the
“the one
pioneer. And only Whitman. No English pioneers, no
French. No European pioneer-poets. In
This is not to be underestimated. The pull away from such a powerful force was difficult and Whitman understood that as his main mission. (We still feel it in the academies Williams was so dead set against, though that lack of vigor we see in most academic poetry is likely attributable to more than just the previous tradition. Certainly fear of standing out, being weird, or being judged plays a role and the lure of grants, recognition, etc.) Whitman created a field of energy that flirted with levels that suggest a Cosmic Consciousness, a one-ness with all living things, yet that first blast of Leaves of Grass was never again achieved. Williams was aware that Whitman: “…was the peak, in many ways, of his age, but his age has passed and we have passed beyond it (218).
It is clear to me
that the evolution of Open Form, which Whitman so masterfully initiated, as now
practiced, is different than what Whitman did. He took one powerful spiritual
experience and attempted to write about, or from, that state for the rest of his
writing life. Williams, on the other hand, felt a respite from hell when he
broke away from his medical practice to jot down impressions, perceptions and
other material that found its way into his poems. The poem was his epiphany, or
a series of minor ones. He, along with Ezra Pound, continued Whitman’s break
from the inherited line and stanza and fostered the transition to field poetry.
Olson and Duncan understood and
articulated the effects of Field poetry and left vibrant examples of it. (
A whole list of
North American poets were to go through Whitman’s opening, including Olson and the
Black Mountain School poets, the Beats, the San Francisco Renaissance, Michael
McClure, Robin Blaser, Jack Spicer, Anne Waldman, Diane di
Prima, Ed Sanders, Wanda Coleman, Eileen Myles, George Bowering, Victor
Hernandez Cruz, Amiri Baraka
and many more. All have a debt to Whitman, as
The cultural
situation Open Form poets find themselves in today is one where TV, consumerism
and other factors make the job of affecting positive cultural change much more
difficult, yet paradoxically, that change is needed now more than ever when our
government spends as much annually on the NEH and NEA as it does on thirty-two
hours of war in
THE ONLY WAR THAT MATTERS IS THE WAR AGAINST
THE IMAGINATION (160)
WORKS CITED:
Allen, Gay Wilson. American Prosody.
di Prima, Diane. Pieces of a Song: Selected Poems.
1993.
Gates, Rosemary, Forging an American Poetry from Speech Rhythms. Tel Aviv:
Porter Institute for Poetics, Volume 8, Issue 3/4, Pages 503-27, 1987.
Lawrence, D.H. “Whitman”
from Whitman: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. R.H. Pierce.
McClure,
Michael. Three Poems.
Olson, Charles. Collected Prose
Virato, Swami Nostradamus. Tantric Sex: A Spiritual Path to Ecstasy. Frankston,
Whitman,
Walt. Leaves of Grass.
1892 ed.
Williams,
William Carlos. Selected Essays.
6th Ed.