Prisoner, Fancy-Man, Rowdy, Lawyer, Physician, Priest: Whitman's Brags

Summary

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Wordsworth never thought that men, rustic or civilized, habitually spoke in iambic pentameter. Here, Logan describes the brags in Walt Whitman's poetry.

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Prisoner, Fancy-Man, Rowdy, Lawyer, Physician, Priest: Whitman's Brags

Wordsworth never thought that men, rustic or civilized, habitually spoke in iambic pentameter. When he tried to turn the "real language of men" into poetry, he chose to imitate their speech in meter, as Frost did a century later. A poet may be true to how men or women talk, without parroting the clumsiness, hesitation, rupture, and breakdown of actual conversation. Poetry has often turned to "real" language-as the poetic diction of one age hardens, it is replaced by language closer to the street, the kitchen, the factory and not just by what happens to be said in middle-class drawing rooms. Poetry negotiates between a language too far removed from its time and one that merely succumbs to its time.

Half a century after Lyrical Ballads, Walt Whitman changed not just the rhythms but the language of American poetry. Leaves of Grass (1855) showed that colloquial, cross-braced American was a proper medium for our verse. Whitman wanted, as he wrote later,

to give something to our literature which will be our own; with neither foreign spirit, nor imagery nor form, but adapted to our case, grown out of our associations, boldly portraying the West, strengthening and intensifying the national soul, and finding the entire fountains of its birth and growth in our own country.

There were American poets before Whitman: some had been born in England, some made in England; but even those born and made in America (like a patriotic toaster or a box of soap flakes) wrote as if part of their audience were elsewhere. Ours was still a poetry of naïve anthropology or miserable exilenot until Emerson did we begin to lose our sense of deprivation, and not until Whitman did we know what it meant not to be deprived. If all the poetry written in America...

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