Walt Whitman: More Than A War Poet (Part One)
In Song of Myself, we're invited to come take a naked dip with Whitman and I feel it's imperative that one understands how poetry can bare you so much so that it can be sometimes painful to be so open to scrutiny. I imagine Whitman expected the scrutiny he'd face in the mid-Victorian era, due to his colorful explications of sex (such as in "Dalliance of the Eagles," where Whitman details a sexual tussle between American symbols of freedom). An expectant sense of love yet to come can be found in "A Woman Waits For Me." I admit sharing in Whitman's assertion that sexuality is something of nature and something that should viewed humanistically, rather artistically as he often did, using exacting language to drive the thrust of a heated poem.
A burning sense of passion carries our urge for procreation, as it does in the animal kingdom. How far our descriptions go on sexuality may define somehow our morality or sense of sexual shame. Whitman has as open a view on the matter as any in his time, and was considered "disgraceful" by Emily Dickinson, even though she never actually had read him. I consider Dickinson's a rather rash decision and uneducated, because I agree that sexuality is part of the spirit (part of what defines us, as people). Some might consider my creative writing, then, disgraceful. I'd find it rather a compliment that I'd made them blush.
It's easy to contrast Emily Dickinson and Whitman, if only for their physical style of poetry, being that Dickinson chose concise and classic form over Whitman's loose language and sentence-length structure (my easiest explication, anyway). I don't find that prudish views such as Dickinson's spinsterish symbolism will reveal much to readers about human issues, while she thoroughly ignored the war surrounding American life in her day. As openly as was possible, Whitman revealed to us that sex was a valid subject to be explored in depth, as baring as it can be to the author. And yes, he wrote about the war.
(Please continue to Part Two.)
Works Cited
Leaves of Grass, by Walt Whitman (With an Introduction by Justin Kaplan) ©1983, a Bantam Classic edition, NY, NY.
Thirteen Modern American Poets (Second Edition), The Classroom Presentations of Dr. Harvey Kassebaum. © Cuyahoga Community College and Dr. Harvey Kassebaum.
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