What is
“Song of Myself” about? It’s about Walt Whitman. But who and what is Walt
Whitman? Is the person who sat down at his desk to write the poem the same
person who emerged on the page in the words “I celebrate myself, and sing
myself . . .”? To a significant extent, it seems to me, Whitman creates his
“self” in the very act of describing (or rather, singing) himself: that self
didn’t exist until he described it. (As the French poet Stéphane Mallarmé put
it, “It is in front of the paper that the artist creates himself.”)
Of
course this is absurd. If Whitman’s self didn’t exist before he described it,
how did he know how to describe it? (And anyway “describing” is hardly what
he’s doing in this poem: more on this later.) Isn’t this always the way with
poets, though? In most cases, when a poet begins to write, she doesn’t know
what she’ll write about. Poeisis (the
Greek word from which “poetry” is derived) means making; poets don’t write about, they make. Say that a poet has a
feeling (not necessarily an emotion) she wishes to share with the reader. That
feeling doesn’t exist in the same way that physical objects, or even abstract
concepts, do; hence the poet can’t write “about” it as you and I would write
about a tree, a person, or an idea. Instead, she has to create the feeling
through some special combination of words. You might say the combination, the
act of combining, is more important than the words themselves. There is no one
word or one set of words that can embody or define that feeling; so Whitman
says (in one of the “Inscriptions” for Leaves
of Grass), “The words of my book nothing, the drift of it everything.”
“Drift”
is an important word for Whitman: two of his greatest poems are found in the section
of
Leaves of Grass titled
“Sea-Drift.”
So
when he speaks of the “drift” of his book he doesn’t just mean its rhythm; he’s
not just talking about linguistic
elements
of his poetry. Rather, he’s insisting that his words have a
physical force not unlike the drift of
the ocean’s tide or of a river’s current. Think of how
Song of Myself’s relentless, rambling lines—especially in the
wonderful “catalog” of section 15—exert a kind of hypnotic, lulling influence
over us, just as the motion and sound of waves tend to do. In section 15 this
effect is reinforced by the fact that Whitman’s not really saying anything;
he’s just listing things that he’s seen and heard and felt. No pressure! No
need to interpret them, just take these—these people, these things, these
lines. I give them to you, do with them
as you please; if nothing else just let them wash over you.
When
Whitman finally brings the catalog of section 15 to a conclusion, he remarks:
And these tend inward to me, and I tend outward to them,
And such as it is to be of these more or less I am,
And of these one and all I weave the song of myself.
Throughout
Song of
Myself, Whitman urges us to think of his poem—and, by extension, his self—as
part and parcel of the world it “describes.” Recall the opening lines of those
earlier epics, Virgil’s and Milton’s: “Of arms and the man I sing”; “Of man’s
first disobedience . . . Sing Heav’nly Muse. . . .” What’s strange and
revolutionary about
Song of Myself is
not just that Whitman sings of himself, but that in fact he removes the “of”
from the equation: “I celebrate myself, and
sing
myself.” (Think how dull and pretentious this line would sound if you added
“of” or “about” to it.) If the song were of or about Walt Whitman, it would be
a mere imitation, an attempt to put Walt into words; the song would be a substitute
for the man. What Whitman says, however, is that his song
is him—is a realer, truer self than the fellow who worked for
newspapers and printing presses in Brooklyn, New York.
Poetry—singing—was not so much his reason for being as his
way of being.
Song trumps singer, poem trumps
reality. Or rather, song is singer,
poem is reality. This is a radical
claim (one that we’ll encounter again in other forms); the melancholy that we’ll
find in the shorter, elegiac poems assigned for Tuesday is partly owing, I
think, to Whitman’s discomfort with some of its implications. (Consider for instance
“Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking”: why does song only arise when the singer
is abandoned, isolated? Why is “the word of the sweetest song” the word death?)
The
fact remains, though, that Whitman is a firm believer in what we might call the
primacy of poetry: its mysterious yet—to hear poets talk of it—undeniable importance.
Why do poets feel that their work is so crucially important? It’s just words
we’re talking about, right? And pretty bizarre words at that—not exactly the
building blocks of a new philosophy or religion. But remember, just because
poets
use words doesn’t mean that
their poems are
only words. Whitman
warns us that the words of his book are nothing, the drift of it everything; he
promises: “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 sun. . . .” A hundred
years later, Robert Duncan (in a poem significantly titled “Poetry, a Natural
Thing”) writes that “The poem / feeds upon thought, feeling, impulse, / To
breed itself, / a spiritual urgency at
the dark ladders leaping.” He was perhaps echoing W.B. Yeats, who, having
“sought a theme”—something to write about—“and sought for it in vain,” resolves
at the end of one poem to “lie down where all the ladders start / In the foul
rag and bone shop of the heart.” Each of these poets suggests that poetry
exists in a
place (however obscurely located),
not (just) on a page. It is a place of “origin[s],” a place of “ladders” which
inspire us with “a spiritual urgency,” a longing to climb, to ascend.
Paradoxically, each of them also hints that we must sink and descend before we
climb, must lose our power of vision before acquiring visionary powers. The
ultimate place of origin is the womb, where all is dark; those inspiring
ladders, according to Duncan, are “dark,” and according to Yeats, begin in the
dusky, “foul” inner chambers of the heart. (I’m assuming that rag and bone
shops—which by the way actually existed in Yeats’s Britain, sort of—were poorly
lighted.) Finally, let’s not forget the mysterious locale Whitman describes so
brilliantly in the final lines of
Song of
Myself, the “somewhere” in which he is forever waiting for us:
Failing to fetch me at
first keep encouraged,
Missing me one place
search another,
I stop somewhere
waiting for you.
This raises some questions that
we’ll return to repeatedly in this course: Where do we go
when we read and think about poems? What conceptual or emotional space do
we occupy when we’re pre-occupied
with a poem? And what, if anything, can we bring back with us from that space
to the space of everyday life, in order to make the latter more like the
former—more open to possibility, more captivating and enriching, less boring
and mean?
