In this section we will address the subject of renewing the craft of poetry through the invention of free verse, and how some poets and writers relate to Whitman. From our standpoint, Oswald de Andrade, already mentioned in the previous section, is the writer who most closely resembles Whitman in Brazil, given his artistic, social and political attitudes. We will also refer to Fernando Pessoas’s literary relationship with Whitman, as well as Gilberto Freyre’s, who was an admirer of the American bard. We mention these authors in our thesis because they have helped us understand Whitman and his poetry better. We will try to contextualize them and their works properly.
Speaking of re-creating the poet’s basic tool, the language, we have to mention Oswald de Andrade, Mário de Andrade and the poets that took part in the Week of Modern Art in 1922 in São Paulo. They started their movement in opposition to the Parnassian school of poetry, which they called “office poetry”, because they thought that it was detached from the real life of the Brazilian people and from our natural environment. The modernist poets, especially Oswald and Mário de Andrade, conceived of our country as originally a land of happy and free people, Indians, subjugated by invaders, who, in a process of ritual cannibalism, would metaphorically devour the foreign culture and assimilate it into our own, creating thus a new form of art and culture, liberated from their moulds and pre-fabricated forms. In this sense, we might view the modernist poets not only as artists who promoted a linguistic revitalization of our language, but also as poets who, through this process, made modern artists from other countries better understood here.
One of the key elements in modernist poetics was the invention of free verse, which released poets from “traditional metrical laws” and stanzaic forms. Poets were then free to mix and vary these traditional forms according to their poetical skills, and also according to the themes and tones used in their writing. Their relation to Whitman is by the fact that he is viewed as one of the inventors of free-verse, together with Arthur Rimbaud[1]. Trevisan[2], a Brazilian philosopher, poet, essayist, and translator, makes this statement in his book A Poesia, Uma Iniciação à Leitura Poética (Poetry, An Initiation Into Poetic Readership, 2001, p.207). He writes that Whitman’s 1855 Edition of Leaves of Grass was characterized by the “novelty” of verses without a fixed number of syllables and the use of anaphora, as in: “Twenty-eight young men bathe by the shore; / Twenty-eight young men, and all so friendly: / Twenty-eight years of womanly life, and all so lonesome.”, from section 11 of “Song of Myself” (WHITMAN, 1996, p.197). Trevisan also reminds us that anaphoras are a usual figure in biblical verses, besides parallelism and enumerations (p. 209), which agrees with our argument in the previous section on this aspect of Whitman’s poetry. Another example of poem that presents anaphoras is “To a Common Prostitute”, from “Autumn Rivulets”:
Be composed — be at ease with me — I am Walt Whitman, liberal and lusty as Nature,
Not till the sun excludes you do I exclude you,
Not till the waters refuse to glisten for you and the leaves to rustle for you, do my words refuse to glisten and rustle for you.
My girl I appoint with you an appointment, and I charge you that you make preparation to be worthy to meet me,
And I charge you that you be patient and perfect till I come.
Till then I salute you with a significant look that you do not forget me. (WHITMAN, 1996, p.512)
The poem presents the following anaphoras: “Be”, “Not till”, “and I charge you”, which indicate parallelism, varying meters (which are clearly visualized on the page), wild alliterations, “liberal and lusty”, and, above all, a reference to a biblical scene, “The Woman Caught in Adultery”, in the book of John (Chap. 8:1-11). The reference to his act of not excluding the “girl” until nature would might indicate the absence of judgment and condemnation from Jesus towards the woman, who was not stoned by any man because only he who was “without sin” should cast a stone at her. This approach to a prostitute might seem impure, immoral or sinful from a religious point of view, but not for the poet, who treated the prostitute in a respectful way, the same way he would treat any one else, especially those whose voices were not heard. This treatment reflects the poet’s modern attitude of including everyone in his poetry, his act of embracing all, socially speaking, while, at the poetic level, using biblical verse forms and figures.
Another modern poet who is a great writer of free verse is Fernando Pessoa, being also an admirer of Whitman. Pessoa, like Rimbaud, had only one book published[3] in Portuguese during his lifetime, Mensagem (Message) (1997, p.XLI). Fernando António Nogueira de Seabra Pessoa (1888-1935) was a poet and writer. Like Whitman, he was contradictory and multitudinous. According to José Augusto Seabra, who wrote the introduction to the above mentioned edition, Pessoa’s “contradiction is […] the core of the mystery in which [the poet] liked to wrap his poetry” (PESSOA, 1997, p. XXVI). His heteronyms[4], each one a singular personality with a life of his own, with ideas, tastes, books, feelings of his own, do represent his contradictions. The heteronyms had conflicting aesthetic ideas among themselves[5], and the poet was more like a medium for them. The three most famous of them are Alberto Caeiro, Álvaro de Campos, and Ricardo Reis. Of the three, the most emotional is Álvaro de Campos, the one who loved Whitman: he wrote the poem “Salutation to Walt Whitman” in 1915 (PESSOA, 1983, pp.65-71), in which he declares his cosmic love to Walt, singing his desire to walk “hand in hand” (p.65) with the “great epidermic democrat” (p.66).
In the poem “Salutation to Walt Whitman”, Álvaro de Campos calls Whitman “The forever modern and eternal, singer of absolute concretes” (p.65), a poet who deals with the concrete world, the physical world, but never separated from the spiritual world, singing “body and soul”, “Singer of the ferocious and tender brotherhood with everything” (p.66). Álvaro de Campos was so similar to Whitman that he sang: “You know that I am You and you are content with that!” (1983, p.66). He, like Whitman, knew that the world is a mirror that reflects our image to us, which is why he could say that he saw himself in the American poet. This verse by Campos echoes Whitman’s own: “In all people I see myself—none more, and not one a barleycorn less;” from section 20 of “Song of Myself” (WHITMAN, 1996, p.206), with which he defined his position as not being above or below anybody else, not better or worse than anyone, the basis of his brotherhood with everything, and especially with nature: “We are Nature—long have we been absent, but now we return;” a verse in “We Two, How Long We Were Fool’d”, from “Children of Adam” (1996, p.264). In his return to nature, the poet and his companion become “plants”, “fishes”, “hawks”, “suns”, “seas”, “atmosphere”, “rain”, in short, everything that nature is. In fact, the poet sees himself as “Nature without check with original energy.” (section 1, “Song of Myself”, 1996, p.188), the same energy that permeates the poetry of Campos in his search for originality and natural freedom, trying to break away from too much civilized civilization, desperately singing: “Let me take off my tie and unbutton my collar. / One can not have much energy with civilization around one’s neck […]” (PESSOA, 1983, p.68).
Álvaro de Campos identified himself with Whitman, with the poet of the “absolute concretes”. In this sense, concrete here is the mass formed by the coalescence of particles, the hard material used in building and the action of building as well, which is in accordance with Whitman’s idea of a modern world of great constructions, such as canals, bridges, buildings, ships, and engineers. A world that is seen from a near distance by the poet, which is a concrete world portrayed in verses, as Campos himself does, for he sings: “[…] I, Álvaro de Campos, engineer, / Sensationist poet,” (1983, p.66), showing that humanity, nature and material progress are not apart (In Portuguese, the word “sensacionista” was a neologism as much as “sensationist” is in English.). We could raise a question here: is it possible to unite technology and nature? As we have mentioned these two apparently opposed aspects of the world, with humanity in the middle, we will consider the context of the Leaves, to see how they relate to each other. First of all, the title of the book, Leaves of Grass, points to nature. Besides, there are poems and books whose content deal with or address natural life or natural elements, such as “Our Old Feuillage,” Birds of Passage, Sea-Drift, Memories of President Lincoln (whose symbols are the star, the bird, the lilac and death, the natural end to all living beings), “Proud Music of the Storm,” and many individual poems that describe natural scenes. On the other hand, Whitman established from the beginning that all his works are dedicated to the “Old Cause”, which is “the progress and freedom of the race,” specifically chanted in “To Thee Old Cause” and “To a Certain Cantatrice”, both poems from the book Inscriptions. In addition, there are other poems dedicated to progress as well, especially material progress in poems such as “Song of the Exposition,” which was written to be read at the opening of the Annual Exhibition in New York City in 1871, which held the most advanced products of technological progress of the time (it was an industrial fair), and “A Song for Occupations,” which sings the labor and also the technology used in it. Unlike the Romantics, who despised industrialization and did not like how modern cities looked, as we have mentioned above in section 2.4, Whitman was as fond of nature as he was of modernity with its entire technological advance. We have also pointed out in the same section how Whitman used technology to favor him, as in the case of photoproduction. At this point he is much closer to Modern and Futurist poets, whom he predicted in his “Poets to Come”, such as Álvaro de Campos himself, than to Romantic poets, with whom he shared some characteristics, as we have been pinpointing throughout this work. However, we must never forget that above all, he chanted the divine soul of men and women. Thus, if there is a possible synthesis between material progress, technology and nature, this synthesis must be operated by humanity, who must be able to connect one thing to the other. One thing for sure we know: the more we distance ourselves from nature, the more we distance ourselves from our own souls. We must develop technology, but not in detriment of our own nature. As we will see below, this idea is present in the life and works of Oswald de Andrade too.
Now we will offer a few more words to complete the discussion about this theme and link the idea from Álvaro de Campos to Oswald de Andrade. Whitman, in his prose work Democratic Vistas, in the last paragraphs, corroborated the word of the Portuguese poet/engineer:
[…] We see that while many were supposing things established and completed, really the grandest things always remain; and discover that the work of the New World is not ended, but only fairly begun.
We see our land, America, her literature, esthetics, &c., as, substantially, the getting in form, or effusement and statement, of deepest basic elements and loftiest final meanings, of history and man – […] – the main thing being the average, the bodily, the concrete, the democratic, the popular, on which all the superstructures of the future are to permanently rest. (WHITMAN, 1996, pp.1017-8)
This book, Democratic Vistas (WHITMAN, 1996, pp.953-1018), was originally conceived as a series of three articles, which were written and published in newspapers from 1867 on and finally appeared in book form in 1870. Allen (1955, p.394) refers to it as the “presentation of [Whitman’s] philosophy of a true democratic society.”, which equates Whitman as a poet of vision with his role as journalist and citizen who was in tune with what was happening in his country in his time, always watching and participating in the life of his nation from a near distance. We can see it in the fact that the poet uses the same words in his poetry and in his prose works: “average” (persons), “democratic”, “body”, to refer to what already exist, the “basic elements”, which reminds us of his poem “Poets to Come” (from “Inscriptions”; WHITMAN, 1996, p.175), in which he “expects the main things” from the poets of the future, as well as the citizens and politicians of the future, because the work of the New World was “only fairly begun”, and he saw himself as part of that beginning, acknowledging his life and works as entirely interwoven with the lives and works of the “dear comrades” of his time, building the nation together.
Pound, who was one of the “Poets to Come” predicted by Whitman, one of the “new brood, native, athletic, continental, greater than before known”, wrote (in 1914) about Whitman, who, at his time, could only “write one or two indicative words for the future”, leaving this same future for the new poets “to prove and define it”, “Expecting the main things” (p.175) from them:
Whitman is the best of it [American poetry], but he never pretended to have reached the goal. He knew himself, and proclaimed himself ‘a start in the right direction’. He never said, ‘American poetry is to stay where I left if’; he said it was to go on from where he started it.
(POUND, 1968, p.218)
[1] Rimbaud (1854-1891) is said to be the other inventor of free verse, and a writer who published only one book (RIMBAUD, 2003, p.13) during his lifetime, Une Saison en Enfer (A Season in Hell). In Rimbaud’s book Les Illuminations (Illuminations, 1874), not published by him, there are two poems which are considered as the first creations in free verse in France and as the “second decisive moment in the history of free verse” (TREVISAN, 2001, p.208): “Marine” and “Mouvement”. As a matter of fact, it was Gustave Kahn (1859–1936), a French Symbolist poet and art critic, who is claimed to be the one who invented the term vers libre. Anyhow, he formulated its theory, which included ideas such as: the verse should have semantic and rhythmic unity; this unity should be the shortest line with a pause and complete meaning; there would be no more traditional stanzaic forms and no more inversions or enjambments.
[2] Armindo Trevisan, former professor at UFRGS (1973-1986).
[3] Mensagem was published in 1934, his penultimate year in this vale of tears!
[4] Harold Bloom referred to Pessoa in The Western Canon (1995, pp.452-6) as “Whitman reborn, but a Whitman who gives separate names to “my self,” “the real me” or “me myself,” and “my soul,” and writes wonderful books of poems for all three of them as well as a separate volume under the name of Walt Whitman. The parallels are close enough not to be coincidences, particularly since the invention of the “heteronyms” (Pessoa’s term) followed an immersion in Leaves of Grass.” Speaking of the poem “Salutation to Walt Whitman”, Álvaro de Campos’ “fantasia”, Bloom says that the poem “surges on for more than two hundred lines and is accompanied by two longer Whitmanian extravaganzas, “Ode” and the thirty-page Maritime Ode, Campos’ masterwork and one of the major poems of the century. Except for the best parts of Neruda’s Residence on Earth and Canto general, nothing composed in Whitman’s wake compares to Maritime Ode as exuberant invention.” Pablo Neruda (1904–1973) is the penname of the Chilean writer and communist politician Ricardo Eliecer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto. Bloom (1995, p.445) considers him to be “Whitman’s truest heir” in Hispanic American Literature, for whom Whitman was “an idealized father, who replaced Neruda’s actual father […].”
[5] For example, there is a note by Ricardo Reis, which functions as an introduction to a book by Álvaro de Campos (Ficções do Interlúdio/4). In it, Reis criticizes Campos’ poetry, saying that he actually writes “[…] rhythmic prose with greater pauses marked at certain points for rhythmic purposes, and these points of greater pause are determined by the end of the verses. Campos is a great prose writer, with a great awareness of rhythm, but […] the rhythm of prose” (PESSOA, 1983, p.12-13).
