How to Be an American Writer, Part 4: Populists and Walt Whitman

The next blog in my series on approaches that U.S. writers take to American society is about a literary stance that is in some ways the diametrical opposite of the expatriate, the subject of my last two posts. I call this type of writer the populist. The populist writes about moments in the American experience that convey a deeper truth. He or she is looking for the inspiration and epiphanies that exist even in seemingly mundane lives or moments. 

The poet Walt Whitman was a populist writer who believed that American life was the greatest possible inspiration for literature. In his preface to his book, Leaves of Grass, Whitman wrote, “The Americans of all nations at any time upon the earth, have probably the fullest poetical nature. The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem.” Whitman adds, “…the genius of the United States is… always most in the common people.” 

Walt Whitman

Whitman took his own advice in choosing subjects for his writing, for instance in “I Hear America Singing”:

I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear,

Those of mechanics, each one singing his as it should be blithe and strong,

The carpenter singing his as he measures his plank or beam...

The delicious singing of the mother, or of the young wife at work, or of the girl sewing or washing,

Each singing what belongs to him or her and to none else,

The day what belongs to the day—at night the party of young fellows, robust, friendly,

Singing with open mouths their strong melodious songs.

I like to imagine Walt Whitman coming up with the idea for this poem by taking a walk in the morning around his neighborhood in Brooklyn, hearing two or three people singing as they work. From that day on, I can imagine that Whitman was alert to the poetic possibilities of people singing, and he collected bits and pieces of other moments to create this collage of different American laborer-singers. 

How beautiful that he starts his poem with, “I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear.” We don’t often think of the word “carols” outside of the phrase “Christmas carols,” but it does have a more universal meaning of “song” that Whitman draws on, even as he assigns the sacred connotations of “carol” to work songs, as opposed to religious hymns. Who is singing? The entire continent of America, as though it were a giant folk hero, a Paul Bunyan or John Henry, but with a song instead of a hammer or axe. I like the inverted syntax of “the varied carols I hear,” putting the subject and verb of that clause after the object of the verb, the carols. Beginning and ending the first line with the words “I hear” is a formal rhetorical device that Whitman transforms by using it nonchalantly and making it feel like the most natural, American speech.

Whitman is the essential populist, believing in the goodness and beauty of the common man or woman. He celebrated the dignity of enslaved Africans in his poem “I Sing the Body Electric”:

A man’s body at auction,
(For before the war I often go to the slave-mart and watch the sale,)
I help the auctioneer, the sloven does not half know his business.
Gentlemen look on this wonder,
Whatever the bids of the bidders they cannot be high enough for it…

Whitman’s brand of populism is to describe the workingman or woman as embued with dignity, even divinity, almost larger than life. In the next blog, I’ll talk about another form of American populism, one that celebrates the small moments in life.

How to Be an American Writer

Part 1: Introduction

Part 2—Henry James and the Expatriates

Part 3: U.S. Expatriate Writers (continued)

Part 5: Thornton Wilder as a Populist

Part 6: Populist Writers: The Beat Generation, Women Fiction Writers, and African American Writers

Part 7: Internal Exiles

Part 8: Satirists and Critics

Part 9: Conclusion

Zack’s most recent book of poems, Irreverent Litanies
Zack’s most recent translation, Bérénice 1934–44: An Actress in Occupied Paris by Isabelle Stibbe

Other recent posts about writing topics: 
How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka, The Villanelle
Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer
Writers and Collaboration
Types of Closure in Poetry

Types of Literary Rebellion, Part 2: Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman

I used to think that Walt Whitman was the good guy of late nineteenth century U.S. poetry, and that Emily Dickinson was irrelevant. In what way did I think she was irrelevant? Irrelevant to the political, spiritual, and social revolutions that were churning at that time. 

Whitman, on the other hand, earned his living partly as an orator, making fiery speeches against slavery and in favor of populist American democracy. Emily Dickinson sat in a room in her father’s comfortable house in the little town of Amherst, Massachusetts and had almost nothing little to say publicly about the political storms of that period. To me, they seemed like polar opposites. Well, not exactly polar. Dickinson seemed like a frozen pond, and Whitman like a jungle during a sunshower.

Emily Dickinson

Then I read Richard Sewell’s The Life of Emily Dickinson. It’s entirely my fault that it took me so long to find this book, since I actually took a Shakespeare class with Professor Sewell when I was an undergraduate at Yale at the same time he was writing his biography of Dickinson. But I didn’t follow Sewell’s work after I finished the final paper for that class. I only read his book on Dickinson when I reluctantly prepared to teach her writing in an American poetry survey class about thirty years later.  

In his biography, Sewell reveals what a complex and interesting response the poet had to her time. He describes how Dickinson was more or less driven out of Mount Holyoke College (then called Mount Holyoke Female Seminary) because she was part of the group of students considered “hopeless” by the fundamentalists of the Second Great Awakening, which was then hurricaning through New England.

And when I read Dickinson’s poetry in that light, I started to see that she was profoundly rebellious as well:

Some keep the Sabbath going to Church –

I keep it, staying at Home –

With a Bobolink for a Chorister –

And an Orchard, for a Dome –

What more eloquent statement could there be of the individual’s right to communicate directly with the Spirit, and to see the divine directly in nature? And how similar to Whitman’s “The bull and the bug never worshipp'd half enough,” in “Song of Myself.”

Around this time I also read Adrienne Rich’s remarkable essay on Dickinson, “Vesuvius at Home.” Rich makes a convincing case that Dickinson understood the explosive nature of her rebellion, and that that Dickinson deliberately kept close to her home to protect the revelation of her poetry and her ideas. “I have a notion that genius knows itself;” writes Rich, “that Dickinson chose her seclusion, knowing she was exceptional and knowing what she needed. It was, moreover, no hermetic retreat, but a seclusion which included a wide range of people, of reading and correspondence.”

I think Rich is right that Dickinson’s reticence to share her poetry was not the withdrawal of a dry school marm but a savvy choice. Emily Dickinson's father was the local congressman. Dickinson had the shelter of his home as a writer’s retreat—so long as her work didn’t embarrass or disgrace her father and the family. Dickinson’s best choice for publishing and preserving her revolutionary poems was to turn them into a sort of time capsule. That way her poems could be read, understood, and appreciated in a future century—which they are.

Rich does not put much emphasis, though, on Dickinson’s love poems. Yes, Dickinson wrote love poems, and they can be quite sexy:

Is it too late to touch you, Dear?

We this moment knew—

Love Marine and Love terrene—

Love celestial too—

If Whitman had known that poem, I wonder if he would he have seen the parallel with one of his most sensual poems, “I Sing the Body Electric,” where he says, “If any thing is sacred the human body is sacred.”

Walt Whitman

I just wish that Emily could have met Walt, and they could have sat down together in a café in Brooklyn. I imagine that she would order Darjeeling tea and a lingonberry scone, and he would order coffee and pour some of a flask into the steaming cup. I think that if they could have bridged the enormous cultural gap between small town New England and the alleyways of Brooklyn where kids played deafening ballgames, Walt and Emily would have realized that they were both rebels in their own ways, and had more in common than they had differences. 

Zack’s most recent book of poems, Irreverent Litanies
Zack’s most recent translation, Bérénice 1934–44: An Actress in Occupied Paris by Isabelle Stibbe

Other recent posts about writing topics: 
How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka, The Villanelle
Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer
Writers and Collaboration
Types of Closure in Poetry

Writing a Fictional Plot Based on a True Story: Arthur Miller's A View from the Bridge

I recently read Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge. I enjoyed the play, and was about to put the volume back on my bookshelf when I noticed that the author had written an introduction. I’m usually not much for introductions. Cut to the chase, skip the previews—I want to get to the plot as soon as possible. But Arthur Miller’s preface fascinated me.

Miller tells how he came upon the idea for A View from the Bridge, a tragedy about a longshoreman named Eddie Carbone that takes place in the working class neighborhood of Red Hook, Brooklyn:

I had known the story of A View from the Bridge for a long time. A water-front worker who had known Eddie’s prototype told it to me. I had never thought to make a play of it because it was too complete, there was nothing I could add. And then a time came when its very completeness became appealing. It suddenly seemed to me that I ought to deliver it onto the stage as fact…

Miller describes how he tried in the original Broadway production to create exactly the story that the dockworker had told him—no frills, just the unfolding of the final calamity. 

Ben Shawn's poster for the 1965 revival of A View from the Bridge

I think most writers would respond similarly to hearing a great story, seemingly ready made. Why tamper with something so good, so perfect? In the first New York production of A View from the Bridge, Miller followed that logic. The stage was stripped of scenery, a minimal cast of actors wore little makeup. The result was not a success.

The play came into its own when it was revived a year later in London. Oddly, this happened despite, or maybe because, the naturalism possible in New York could not be achieved in the Shakespearean milieu of the U.K. stage. As Miller puts it, “the British actors could not reproduce the Brooklyn argot and had to create one that was never heard on heaven or earth.”

Removed from the roots of the original story, Miller had more freedom to elaborate on it, to develop the characters. He particularly fleshed out the role of Beatrice, Eddie Carbone’s wife. One of the most poignant aspects of the revised script is that Beatrice attempts in vain to deflect Eddie’s overly possessive behavior toward Catherine, his attractive, adopted niece. It is that tragic flaw in Eddie that leads to his downfall. With the new additions to the script, the London version was a hit, running for two years and going on to an extended run in Paris.

In the U.K. production, Miller did the first thing a writer has to do in transforming a true story—he falsified it. In writing fiction from real life, a writer has to mold it, to make it bend into a tale that works from standpoint of the audience/reader.

But Miller didn’t stop there. When a writer adapts a story that s/he hears, the temptation is lift it directly and not to meddle with it, like a fragile diorama. Miller recounts the moment when he decided to make this story into a play: “It existed apart from me and seemed not to express anything within me.” But that was the impulse that produced the failed version. Toward the end of the play’s run on Broadway, Miller realized his personal and emotional stake in the characters:

It was only during the latter part of its run in New York that, while watching a performance one afternoon, I saw my own involvement in this story. Quite suddenly the play seemed to be “mine” and not merely a story I had heard. The revisions subsequently made were in part the result of that new awareness.

Even though A View from the Bridge is about the family of an immigrant longshoreman Miller never knew, the playwright had to claim all the emotions of the story as his own before he could write them compellingly. There had to be some reason that he chose that particular tale, and he eventually discovered what it was. It’s like waking from a dream—once we realize that all the characters are all aspects of ourselves, the story starts to come into focus.

Zack’s most recent book of poems, Irreverent Litanies
Zack’s most recent translation, Bérénice 1934–44: An Actress in Occupied Paris by Isabelle Stibbe

Other recent posts about writing topics: 
How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka, The Villanelle
Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer
Writers and Collaboration
Types of Closure in Poetry

Putting Together a Book Manuscript, Part 7: Combining Pathos and Humor

The poet Kip Zegers and I were watching a mutual friend read poems, back when I lived in Park Slope, Brooklyn. The friend was reading a series of confessional poems about difficult times in his life. It was difficult to hear that much pain in one sitting. And then the poet interrupted the sequence to insert a light-hearted poem that had the audience laughing. You could feel a palpable sigh of relief among those in attendance, a physical reaction of comfort.

Kip leaned over and said to me, “Audiences need to laugh.”

I’ll never forget that, because at that moment I witnessed firsthand the way that listeners or readers relax and concentrate again when humor enters into a serious piece of writing.

It’s as if you’re at a party and a person you’ve just met starts telling you a story about something awful, like satanic cults torturing canaries. You might start to wonder if the individual recounting the story is a bit nutty, since he or she is telling you something so intense and upsetting without much introduction or warning. If that person inserts a humorous remark, though, suddenly the whole dynamic changes. You realize that even though this is a serious story, the person telling it still has perspective, and that the storyteller does not expect you to burst into tears before you fish your next beer out of the cooler, or snarf a Dorito from the bowl on the coffee table.

I’m not suggesting that Hamlet should be revised to include knock-knock jokes. But there is broad humor even in Hamlet, in the gravediggers’ scene, for instance (Act V, Scene 1, for those keeping score at home). The gravediggers are arguing about a terribly serious subject—whether suicide is a sin, in response to Ophelia’s death. One of them says, “if the man go to this water, and drown himself, it is, will he, nill he, he goes—mark you that; but if the water come to him and drown him, he drowns not himself.” Pretty silly stuff, to argue that water would come along and drown someone, but Shakespeare knew that sort of wacky comedy was necessary to hold an audience if he wanted to prepare them for the deeply tragic ending of Hamlet.

Humor has to be spontaneous for it to work, but you can leave space for humor to enter your writing. The more serious the project, the more important it is for light-hearted landings that allow us a literal breather before we climb the next flight.

Just as tragedy needs humor, humor also needs pathos. If you’re writing a comic piece, full of laughs, it’s crucial for it to have an edge of seriousness. That’s what makes it art, and not just a TV sitcom. For instance, Billy Collins has that hilarious poem “Forgetfulness” about not remembering details of favorite books and other names. It’s a wonderful send-up of the way we lose information as we age:

…one by one, the memories you used to harbor
decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain,
to a little fishing village where there are no phones.

Lots of great one-liners in this poem, but at the end, Billy Collins veers toward pathos:

No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted
out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.

The poet reminds how funny it is that we forget all these details, but the poem is also achingly poignant, because we see that we are also losing everything that matters to us as we age and move toward death.

Humor and pathos are yin and yang. One can’t exist to its fullest extent without the other. The greatest writers are the ones who know how to weave the two, tastefully and artfully.

Other recent posts on writing topics:
Putting Together a Book Manuscript, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8

How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka

Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer