Reading Whitman, Growing Up Rock 'N' Roll

Summary

---

Blake envisions Walt Whitman as poet in the 21st century. He claims that for a poet who dreamed of pressing close to his audience and possessing their very best, rock 'n' roll would have been a natural and satisfying cultural development.

See the full content of this document

Extract

---

Reading Whitman, Growing Up Rock 'N' Roll

On the 150th anniversary of Leaves of Grass, I have a confession to make: I wonder whether Whitman would be a poet in the 21st century. I try to picture him in an MFA classroom, his salutations and self-reference left on the workshop floor, and I invariably conclude that if he were alive today, old Walt would be playing rock 'n' roll. Whether as a solitary singer or the leader of a band, he'd wish to command the stage with the same sweaty genius as the guitar heroes who now inhabit the persona he created many years ago. For a poet who dreamed of pressing close to his audience and possessing their very best, rock 'n' roll would have been a natural and satisfying cultural development. "I was chilled with the cold types and cylinder and wet paper between us," Whitman told his readers in 1855; "I pass so poorly with the paper and types. . . . I must pass with the contact of bodies." More than any of its aesthetic counterparts, rock revels in the kind of intimate, bodily sympathy Whitman envisioned between his audience and himself, and perhaps only rock has made that vision a tangible, public reality.

In contrast to Gatsby's green light, always receding before him into the past, Whitman seems to advance into a future that infinitely emanates from him. He is a virtual Rorschach test for generational experiences and values. At different points in the 19th and 20th centuries he has been a prophet of cosmic consciousness and a messiah of the natural world. He has been a good, gray wound dresser, a flag-waving patriot, and a heroic, working-class bard. We have known Whitman the champ...

See the full content of this document

---