And Another Thing

21 February 2009

A time for American poets to speak out in warning?

As for Whitman, there is no resisting the sacred monster, in certain moods. He is the Victor Hugo of the States — Hugo the poet, I mean, not the novelist. I admire Whitman’s behaviour in the Civil War, when he visited the wounded soldiers and prevented many limbs from being amputated. To anti-Americans, who often quote him, meanly, out of context, I point out that he declared, almost as a personal manifesto, ‘The Americans, of all nations at any time upon the earth, have probably the fullest poetical nature. The United States themselves are essentially the great poem.’ Whitman was in some ways a typical American — noisy, big-minded, self-promoting, a genius at advertising himself. He had courage and self-confidence, and never minded saying different things to suit different purposes: ‘Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself (I am large, I contain multitudes).’

American poetry as a whole is often contradictory. It is patriotic, at times, but also highly critical of what America is, and does. Whitman himself wrote:

Stifled, O days! O lands! In every public and private corruption!

Smothered in thievery, impotence, shamelessly, mountain-high.

The rotten side of America was also a theme of Robinson Jeffers (1887-1962), who ought to be better known on this side of the Atlantic. He was a pantheist who loved the rocky coast of California, where he lived in Carmel, warning people to beware of cities:

shine, perishing Republic.

But for my children, I would have them keep their distance from the thickening center; corruption

Never has been compulsory, when the cities lie at the monster’s feet there are left the mountains.

Good advice, perhaps, as a Chicago regime takes over in Washington, and Mafia types rub their hands.

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Fergus Pickering

February 21st, 2009 5:23pm Report this comment

Thank you for that. I am particularly glad you like Longfellow and Whittier. Not many Americans do, or not of they are literary professionals, as it were.

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