A Dialogue with Mr. Walt Whitman
Noel Glenn
Myself: Good evening, Mr. Whitman. Thank you for joining us.
Whitman: A good evening to you as well, Miss Glenn. And good evening to you, citizens of the United States of America! And do call me Mr. Walt; Whitman is my father.
Myself: Very well, Mr. Walt. Now then, about your book of poems, Leaves of Grass. Many people were very unsettled by the things you’ve written there. Even contemporaries like Thoreau have called it beastly (Norton 447). You yourself have stated that this was a goal. What were you thinking?
W: Many things, my dear. I contain multitudes, you know? My priority was to, as many poets have, express myself. “Songs on Myself,” especially, was meant to be an affirmation of who I am. “I celebrate myself, and sing myself,” (Excerpt 1) is the very first line of the entire poem. I am not ashamed of who I am. I am not ashamed of how I live, because it is living, and who could be ashamed of that? If I were to write in any other way, it would not be the way in which I live: free.
M: No one can deny that you define yourself very well through your poems, that poem in particular. Many of your critics have taken offense to the lack of meter and rhyme, however, and others have publicly disapproved of the… frankness of some of the passages. Does their outrage contribute to what you wanted to come out of your poetry? Did they have the desired reactions?
W: Hmm, rather than say their outrage was desired, I would prefer to focus on how it manifested, to focus on what they had to say. Another primary ambition was to inspire my readers to react; anger is perhaps the best at getting people to act. Or perhaps stir them from their comfort zones, rather than outright antagonize, as the angry often make for poor listeners. I wanted people, through this uniquely American voice, to question and explore. This format, this frankness, this new way of writing poetry is supposed to free the writer from anything but their own person. There is a great deal of restraint and limitation inherent in the old way of poetry, and the subjects that people wrote about are equally as limited. Certainly, there is a growing sense of freedom among those poets who choose to write about nature; they write more each day about how nature feels rather than simply how it looks. But nothing has been written yet of humankind in that same vein. There are no odes of man unrestrained by the verse, no sonnets to the love people feel so intensely for themselves and others; nothing in any literature prior to “Songs of Myself” even comes close to openly exploring what humankind’s core is. Instead, poets of old wrote as though from a ledge, distancing and stretching to pen their thoughts, thus only permitted to do so at great effort; that is, only through accepting and conforming to meter can a person’s thoughts be seen, although they may not so accurately be heard. I reject that perceived necessity of order. “I am the mate and companion of people, all just as immortal and unfathomable as myself” (Excerpt 7). We are complex entities, and to ask, no, demand that we restrain ourselves to a definable pattern, to force us to measure our words by how they are uttered rather than how they feel, to ask us to pen ourselves down, but only pen down ourselves in one way, when we are infinitely more than a measurable, definable template, is to deny the very nature of humankind itself. It is this sort of institution that I wish to wholly upset.
M: What of Shakespeare then? What of all the great poets? Keats and Shelley, Coleridge and Blake; were their feelings any less important for how their poetry was written?
W: It’s difficult to compare me to them; they’re the poets that I have spent a great deal of time learning from, and the poets whose styles I’m rejecting. I can say, with a considerable degree of confidence, that my poetry is of me, of what I represent; I wrote as from my essence and Soul. I am the sum of a series of paradoxes that harmonize into a person, and I am at once contradictory and impossible as I am absolute and reality. “I am of old and young, of the foolish as much as the wise.” (Excerpt 16). Human beings are born as blank slates; we cry, consume, demand more of the world than we could possibly conceive of. Human beings do not, however, remain a blank slate. We are taught, and we learn. Each individual does not have to rediscover the laws of gravity, does not have to reinvent the alphabet, or redefine the law. We instead learn these things, and each young person takes what each old being has learned, and builds upon it. Every thing done right, every mistake that has been made, has resulted in you and I, all of us, as we stand here today. I write to encompass the essence of who I am and what I am a result of; I write to encompass who human beings are and what they are the result of, in turn.
M: You appear to take this notion a bit further, in the 24th excerpt. “Whatever degrades another degrades me, and whatever is done or said at last returns to me.” (24 ll 9-10). You are effectively saying that any insult to one person is an insult to you, correct?
W: Yes, because it is true. Everything that has made me who I am, everything that has allowed me to grow into the man I am today, is the same thing that every human being has learned from. Newton, Aristotle, Descartes, Locke, all of them are our teachers. From these greats and more do we learn about life and the world in general. What varies between each individual is the environment in which they grew up, and how they interpreted these lessons. Nevertheless, we all come from the same seed and origins. I have learned from them just as you have, so any insult to you is an insult to me, because we have learned the same come from the same infinitely on into the past; had our situations been different, we might’ve boarded identical trains of thought. While it’s not quite so deep as “we being one,” we could not all be called human beings without some great deal of commonality, no? Of course, it doesn’t have to be an education of those great minds alone that qualifies us for brotherhood; even cultures with no notion of western thought can be considered like us. We all belong to one brotherhood, that is, the brotherhood of man, simply because we are men of this earth and God.
M: We’re just about out of time, Mr. Walt, so I’ve one final question for you.
W: Go right ahead.
M: You constantly revised your poems to suit the political climate of the time. With the pending election, how would you revise it to best suit what people are saying?
W: That’s rather tough, because global politics are so much more immediate than they used to be, and America remains at the center of it all. As far as the election and attitudes that people have towards it, I would encourage the people to express themselves, to follow what they must say and what they feel they should do. Whatever they’re feeling, they’re feeling for a multitude of reasons, and they shouldn’t hide or confine themselves to whatever association offends them the least. They should be working towards their ideal ends. They should be building and discovering the world for their descendants, as their predecessors have done them. “You will hardly know who I am or what I mean, but I shall be good health to you nevertheless.” (52 ll 11-12). I will be your foundation, for we have a duty develop the world, because it is the generations past who can cement a foundation, and while the future may change it, it is implementation of the past that will allow growth and flourishing. Whatever happens, do not wilt and do not cower. If what happens is not to your liking, then seek the change you want. Do not let complacency keep you from using your voice, and using it well.
M: Words to live by, Mr. Walt. Thank you so much for coming to speak with us today. This has been Walt Whitman tonight. Our next interview takes us-
Whitman, Walt. "Biography and Songs of Myself." Norton Anthology 3rd ed., Volume E, edited by Martin Puchner et. al., W. W. Norton & Company, 1969, 446-453.