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.
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baggyeyes
Re: Whitman
Date: 2003-11-19 05:41 pm (UTC)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.