Advice for Writers: I Sing the Body Electric

Friday, August 26, 2016

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

Thursday, February 25, 2016

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.