No sniveller, or tea-drinking poet, no puny clawback or prude, is Walt Whitman!

On 5 July 1855, the day after the publication of Leaves of Grass, literary critics began thinking about how best to imitate Whitman.  Few are the authors who inspire the flattery of imitation more than he!  Few are the critics who are able to resist the urge to flatter any else but he!  Few are the sentences in which I'll continue to enact the enthused imitations I mock!

Think I'm making this up?  The following might be far less successful than zunguzungu's found Williams, but the poemified version of the anonymous review of Leaves of Grass from the September 1855 edition of The United States Review certainly is telling.

In a way, this is an extreme version of a common critical vice: read too much of this or that to the exclusion of all else and you'll start to inhabit the voice you purport to study.  The linked example may be Derrida, but read a few books on Joyce and Faulkner and you'll see the same unhealthy attitude abounds.  But I digress. 

On to the ersatz American heart of the body poetic!

Walt Whitman and His Poems

An American bard at last!
One of the roughs, large, proud, affectionate, eating, drinking, and breeding,
His costume manly and free,
His face sunburnt and bearded,
His postures strong and erect,
His voice bringing hope and prophecy to the generous races of young and old.

We shall cease shamming and be what we really are.
We shall start an athletic and defiant literature.
We realize now how it is and what was most lacking.
The interior American republic shall also be declared free and independent.

For all our intellectual people,
Followed by their books, poems, essays, editorials, lectures, tuitions, and criticisms,
Dress by London and Paris modes, receive what is received there,
Obey the authorities,
Settle disputes by the old tests,
Keep out of rain and sun,
Retreat to the shelter of houses and schools,
Trim their hair, shave, touch not the earth barefoot,
And enter not the sea except in a complete bathing dress.

One sees unmistakably genteel persons,
Traveled, college-learned, used to being served by servants,
Conversing without heat or vulgarity,
Supported on chairs or walking through handsomely-carpeted parlors,
Or along shelves bearing well-bound volumes.

Where in American literature is the first show of America?
Where are the gristle and beards, and broad breasts, and space and ruggedness and nonchalance that the souls of the people love?
Where is the majesty of the federal mother, seated with more than antique grace, calm, just, indulgent to her brood of children, calling them around her, regarding the large and the young and the older with perfect impartiality? 
Where is the vehement growth of our cities?
Where is the spirit of the strong rich life of the American mechanic, farmer, sailor, hunter, and miner?
Where is the huge composite of all other nations, cast in a fresher and brawnier matrix, passing adolescence, and needed this day, live and arrogant, to lead the marches of the world?

Self-reliant, with haughty eyes, assuming to himself all attributes of his country, steps Walt Whitman into literature!
Talking like a man unaware that there was ever hitherto such a production as a book, or such as being as a writer,
Every move of him has the free play of the muscle of one who never knew what it was to feel that he stood in the presence of a superior.
Every word that falls from his mouth shows silent disdain and defiance of old theories and forms.
Every phrase announces new laws—not once do his lips unclose except in conformity to them.

He makes audacious and native uses of his own body and soul.
He recreates poetry with the elements at hand.
He imbues it with himself as he is,
Disorderly, fleshy, and sensual,
Lover of things,
Yet lover of men and women above the whole of other objects in the universe.

His work is to be achieved by unusual methods!

Not a whisper comes out of him of the old stock talk of rhyme and poetry,
Not the first recognition of gods or goddesses or Greece or Rome.
No breath of Europe,
Or her monarchies,
Or her priestly conventions,
Or her gentlemen and ladies,
Or her idea of caste,
Seems ever to have fanned his face or been inhaled into his lungs.
In their stead pour vast and fluid the fresh mentality of this mighty age and the realities of this mighty continent and the sciences and inventions discoveries of this present world.
Not geology, nor mathematics, nor chemistry, nor navigation, nor astronomy, nor anatomy, nor physiology, nor engineering,
Is more true to itself than Whitman is to them.

Comments

[Rich Puchalsky]

How do people forget rule #1 of poetic parody? It should be comic in intent! Rule #2 is that if you're going to do it, you have to at least try to imitate the poet's voice: e.g., if you're going to do Whitman, you should at least realize that when he uses an exclamation point at the end of a first line of a stanza it's with a short phrase that appears in a singe burst. Rule #3 is that anything goes better with a squirrel.

See, if this damned thing had been:

O American bard!
Rough, large, proud, affectionate, eating acorns, drinking, and breeding,
Not contain'd by the leafy oak
Not running merely around the tree
Not chittering out the chitter of decadent Europe
But running to left, right, left in the incoming lights

That would have been, well... still bad. But marginally less so!

[SEK]

But it's not a parody, Rich! It's an actual review, written by some anonymous literati drunk of Whitman. All I did was break the sentences up to look like the Whitman poem this person so obviously thought he was writing.

[Rich Puchalsky]

You put in the line breaks? Egad. I thought that you were quoting directly.

[SEK]

The breaks are Whitmanian par excellence, i.e. based on the repetition of the first word, no matter where it appears in the sentence. As noted, I don't think it's a good imitation of Whitman -- unlike the found WCW, which is damn near indistinguishable from the anything the man himself wrote -- but it's typical of the kind of reviews Whitman received when he (first) published Leaves of Grass. Sure, it's printed in prose form, but you can see the desire of reviewers to imitate the object of review, which is what I was getting at here. I'm sure I could, given time, come up with a better Whitman parody, but as a matter of history, I thought I'd stick with the text given.

On a completely different note, I'm on 231 of The Player of Games -- about halfway through the second round of Azad -- and I'm not seeing the bildungsroman in it. It's a damn fine novel, mind you, and I should've taken your advice years ago, but I'm not seeing whose development is being narrated. Flere-Imsaho? Because Gurgeh seems fully-formed, more like a chess player encountering a new style than an adolescent (or adolescent-minded fellow) coming into their own. Depending on how you feel about games, I could see this as a kunstlerroman inasmuch as as Gurgeh seems to be coming into his own ... but I don't see much bildung in this roman as of yet.

[Rich Puchalsky]

I had originally thought that the review was published, with breaks, as you quoted above. When you called it a poemified version, I thought that they had poemified it, not you. Pretty funny.

WRT to The Player of Games, I'm not sure if I should predispose your reading... oh, might as well. What I think is important about the book is that Gurgeh, from the viewpoint of the Culture, is rather a jerk. He's an adolescent, really (only 70 or something? and then generally live to 400) who never accepted the Culture's attitude towards power, because he had this talent for games that made him as much of a celebrity as they can have. So he uses games to try to dominate, in a way that they've rejected. And then he runs into another culture where games really are seriously used to dominate, and he's changed by the experience and finally grows up...

The key to that reading is that, yes, Gurgeh seems fully-formed. He thinks of himself as fully-formed. But he flails through the beginning and middle of the book, and finally he more or less changes. It's a highly political book, of course, and he's a sort of exemplar of what Banks seems to be trying to do with the reader. Use of Weapons is that way, too. His finally-realized adolescence is our finally-realized adolescence.

[SEK]

WRT to The Player of Games, I'm not sure if I should predispose your reading... oh, might as well.

Just so you don't think I'm ignoring you, I didn't read anything after this. I'm finishing the book tomorrow, so I'll read the rest of your comment then. Because, well, ¡!YOU KNOW!¡

[SEK]

Also, since Vance ruined the joke over there -- the joke I should've indicated via an x-post, but I didn't think my mom would be too interested in Whitman, which, if I'm not mistaken, means I'm abjuring blog responsibility in favor of not typing stuff.

Anyway, the prose I poemified up there? It's not someone imitating him, it's Himself. (As I'd say were I Irish.) Why then -- and this is where you can probably offer a much more intelligent response than Y.T. -- does his prose grind when it ain't clunking?

[zunguzungu]

It took me a second to even realize what the joke was; I cut my teeth on Whitman and I forgot that everyone doesn't already know he wrote hilarious anonymous reviews of himself. It's sort of the sine qua non of Whitman; when I've taught him, my opening line was that this guy wasn't above writing anonymous praising reviews of himself, or revising his criteria for what made a great american poet when it turned out his reception didn;t make him one.

Amazing how nicely it scans when you prosify it though.

[Rich Puchalsky]

"Why then -- and this is where you can probably offer a much more intelligent response than Y.T. -- does his prose grind when it ain't clunking?"

The problem is that there is one too many agents in this chain. Poemifying his prose doesn't make it almost the same thing -- those line breaks are important. For instance, when you have:

"Self-reliant, with haughty eyes, assuming to himself all attributes of his country, steps Walt Whitman into literature!
Talking like a man unaware that there was ever hitherto such a production as a book, or such as being as a writer,"

Whitman anonymously wrote:

"Self-reliant, with haughty eyes, assuming to himself all attributes of his country, steps Walt Whitman into literature, talking like a man unaware that there was ever hitherto such a production as a book, or such a being as a writer."

I can believe that Whitman wrote the second. I couldn't believe that he wrote the first, because (as previously said) I can't remember him ever starting a stanza with such a long, cluttered line followed by an exclamation point.

So, going back to the original, why does it appear like a bad Whitman parody, in prose? I'd guess that it's because it's self-parody. Written by someone else, it would be laughable, but he's perfectly free to advertise his style while not taking himself seriously.

[Lloyd Mintern]

For a real parody of Whitman, here is G.K. Chesterton, written in 1921:

Me clairvoyant,
Me conscious of you, old camarado,
Needing no telescope, lorgnette, field-glass, opera-glass, myopic pince-nez,
Me piercing two thousand years with eye naked and not ashamed;
The crown cannot hide you from me,
Musty old feudal-heraldic trappings cannot hide you from me,
I perceive that you drink.
(I am drinking with you. I am as drunk as you are.)
I see you are inhaling tobacco, puffing, smoking, spitting
(I do not object to your spitting),
You prophetic of American largeness,
You anticipating the broad masculine manners of these States;
I see in you also there are movements, tremors, tears, desire for the melodious,
I salute your three violinists, endlessly making vibrations,
Rigid, relentless, capable of going on for ever;
They play my accompaniment; but I shall take no notice of any accompaniment;
I myself am a complete orchestra.
So long.