Inspired by Tonight's Poetry Homework

[ase]

Dear contemporary poets of America:

Words cannot describe my loathing of Walt Whitman's "confessions of an eighteenth century hippie" style. Please purge this pernicious abuse of the english language from your poetic influences, lest I compare your deathless free verse to thirteen year old girls' atavistic fan fiction.

Should said purge leave you without muses, I suggest looking up the work of Robert Frost, Tennyson, Emily Dickinson, Ezra Pound, William Shakespeare, John Donne and W. B. Yeats, all of whom can knock most contemporary poetry into a cocked hat in two stanzas or less.

Yrs,

ase

Comments

Whitman

[herewiss13.livejournal.com]

To be fair, it needs to be spoken, not read. The poets you cite structure language visually...almost like sculpture. Whitman just talks and his rhythm is the rhythym of talking.

Granted, still not to everyone's taste, but there are some nuggets there worth consideration.

Of course, I may be biased. I've sung several of Whitman's poem set to choral arrangements and they were all really good.

Re: Whitman

[ase.livejournal.com]

Of course, I may be biased. I've sung several of Whitman's poem set to choral arrangements and they were all really good.

I sang an arrangement of Robert Frost's The Road Not Taken (http://stellar-one.com/poems/road_not_taken__robert_lee_frost.htm) in middle school; that may be one of the roots of my enjoyment of his poetry. Or it could just be that Frost is a good poet.

Which of Whitman's poems did you sing? I'll grant a possible bias based on limited exposure, if you can give me better examples than the stuff I've had to read. I was afflicted with Song of Myself (http://www.vasudevaserver.com/home/sites/poetseers.org/html/earlyamericans/walt_whitman/index/leavesofgrass) in high school, and I would burn the lingering scraps out of my synapses if I could. I recently had to read When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer (http://www.bartleby.com/142/180.html), which just makes me mad: why can't one have the science and the sense of wonder? The division of the two strikes me as arbitrary and artificial. Whitman doesn't show how cool it is to be able to say, "this is beautiful, and I know how it works, and isn't it wonderful and elegant that it works that way?" He's all about the nature worship without any of the understanding of nature that gives that choice meaning. Whitman's take on the matter brings out my "yay science!" streak in a really scathing way.

Anyway. Part of the background for all this is that Whitman is one of the big transcendentalists Unitarians get all excited about, and I've been quietly, intensely not-Unitarian since I was about fourteen. I may have problems looking at Whitman in an unbiased fashion as a result.

Re: Whitman

[herewiss13.livejournal.com]

Whitman to music:

When Lilacs Last At the Dooryard Bloomed...I think. The poem about Lincoln with 'Captain, My Captain'. It was _very_ stirring. IIRC, it was one of the songs our choral director of the time, who was dying slowly of cancer, had initially picked to be sung at her funeral (though I don't recall singing it at the memorial service when it finally occured). In any case, music went with the rhythm of the words extremely well.

Song of Democracy...I think. It's been 5+ years so the details are fuzzy. The main verse was "Sail, Sail thy best ship of democracy...of value is thy freight." An invocation of America...almost literally; calling it up, evoking it's importance throughout the world.

I recently had to read When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer, which just makes me mad: why can't one have the science and the sense of wonder? The division of the two strikes me as arbitrary and artificial. Whitman doesn't show how cool it is to be able to say, "this is beautiful, and I know how it works, and isn't it wonderful and elegant that it works that way?"

You and Richard Feynman both:

"The stars are made of the same atoms as the earth." I usually pick one small topic like this to give a lecture on. Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars -- mere gobs of gas atoms. Nothing is "mere." I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them.

But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination - stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one-million-year-old light. A vast pattern -- of which I am a part -- perhaps my stuff was belched from some forgotten star, as one is belching there. Or see them with the greater eye of Palomar, rushing all apart from some common starting point when they were perhaps all together. What is the pattern, or the meaning, or the *why?* It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined! Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were like a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?"

--Richard P. Feynman (1918-1988)"

I guess my limited exposure has been more to his works on the common man, labor, and the general (if simple) enjoyment of experiencing the out-of-doors directly through the senses, unfettered. In any case, I _still_ say it's much more enjoyable if you speak it alound and don't concentrate on finding poetical techniques...since they tend to be drowned out by the sheer mass of words, compared to other poets. It's practically prose poetry.