Transatlantic Wires: Walt Whitman and the Immensely Private European Reader

Despite singing the continent of America, Europeans, especially on the time of his death, have praised and welcomed Walt Whitman into the canon, before and more fervently than their counterparts in the States. Certainly, Europeans have had their share of iconoclasts who become glorious or notorious, whereas in America, the habit has been rather to create the new idols of a new nation, separate and free from European history. Whitman’s style—the anaphoric chants, the epically common catalogues, the raw sensuality—so obviously broke away from previous American poetry that we consider him the father of American literary modernism. Yet this is not at stake. More importantly, why does Whitman affect me so severely, in terms of sentimentalism, but also in terms of glory, as I read him in the Paris Metro, whereas in America, I see him as common, another name etched into the edifice of American letters?

To say I ignored Whitman is incorrect. When I first read him as an adolescent, I shuddered with inspiration when I my English teacher essentially mimicked Robin Williams in Dead Poets’ Society and proclaimed the importance of the “barbaric yawp.” I’ve taken several courses on the college level where I’ve chosen to write about Whitman. Of course that was an easy route: there is a built-in language when dealing with Whitman, abundant with such vocabulary as democratic, transcendental, and oratory. Not that I will throw these trusty words away! Nevertheless, when I reached this passage:

Have you reckoned a thousand acres much? Have you reckoned the Earth much?

Have you practiced so long to learn to read?

Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems?

Somewhere on the elevated train on the way to Montparnasse, I became absolutely myself among the crowd. Here was pleasant Uncle Walt, lover of everyman, crusader of the lowly and the lordly, accusing me, no: calling me out. There are times his repetitions blur into each other, and the reader loses the sense of his words. But these three lines, in the milieu of Whitman’s own reckoning, are a snare. He asks the reader to think of the world, and the reader is ready for some of the naturalism of Thoreau or Emerson. Instead, Whitman enters the academy. There, he challenges the literate viewer, asking the reader to call to mind the affection he places on the moment of comprehension in a poem, an utterly private act. This is Whitman as a sharp and ready blade, who raises the stakes of literature by crossing the line into the sacred space of the reader.

This move, of course, causes the reader to closely pay attention to what comes next:

Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems,

You shall possess the good of the earth and the sun....there are millions of suns left,

You shall no longer take things at second or third hand....nor look through the eyes of the

dead...nor feed on the spectres in books,

You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me,

You shall listen to all sides and filter them from yourself.

He declares reading dead, interpretation dead, but at the same time embodies another word that is everywhere in criticism of Whitman—contradiction. This section essentially begins Whitman’s tapestry of America in Leaves of Grass, wherein he invites the reader to read one last time his view of America. But before offering his rigorous definition of America, he first explains possibility: he offers a first hand account of images, that not only will he speak poetry to the reader, but that the reader will speak poetry him or herself. Whitman destroys the boundary between the reader and the poet, and it is no surprise that the reader lets him.

In the end, is it homesickness that draws me to Whitman’s poetry while I live in Paris? In truth, I feel at home here as anywhere. Perhaps, he offers me heroic inspiration: just by living I am enacting poetry, at least according to Whitman. He imbues a sense of collectivity, of mystical union, that despite massive globalization, can still be found some places. Europeans, with their megalithic historical baggage can understand this, pointing to why Whitman was so well received here 150 years ago. The most captivating aspect, however, is that he exposes us all for what we are: human, capable of beauty and horror—those two things that render poetry excruciating and magnificent.