All about Walt Whitman

Alan Trachtenberg writes about Whitman’s influence on modern poets in his essay “Walt Whitman: Precipitant of the Modern” (GREENSPAN, 1997, pp.194-207).

He is amazed by Whitman’s significance to Pound, who even wrote a poem to his “father.”[1] Trachtenberg reminds us that Pound considered himself a Whitman who had learned to behave, but not always, that is, that Pound acknowledged Whitman’s hard work to clear the field for the following generation, for the “poets to come”, and especially Whitman’s humbleness and genius in knowing that he was a beginning and not an end. The critic’s purpose is to study the presence of Whitman among the American modern poets in the initial years of the twentieth-century, who considered the American bard as their “forerunner, progenitor, mentor” (p.195). Authors and artists like

Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright in architecture; Robert Henri, Marsden Hartley, John Marin, and Joseph Stella in painting; Isadora Duncan in dance; Pound, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, and Hart Crane in poetry; and Gertrude Stein, Sherwood Anderson, Jean Toomer, and John dos Passos in prose fiction – [...] William James, George Santayana, Horace Traubel, Emma Goldman, Van Wyck Brooks, and Waldo Frank [...] Henry James reading and weeping over Whitman with Edith Wharton [...] (GREENSPAN, 1997, p.195-6)

Whitman’s prophecies in “Poets to Come”[2] was correct, for a whole generation of artists in every field and many nations would receive his legacy and struggle with this influence, until they were mature enough to have an artistic existence of their own. In section 3.5 there is more information on other writers who were admirers of Whitman and who recognized how much he meant to them, like Fernando Pessoa and Gilberto Freyre.

“I MAKE a pact with you, Walt Whitman– /I have detested you long enough.

I come to you as a grown child / Who has had a pig-headed father;

I am old enough now to make friends. / It was you that broke the new wood,

Now is a time for carving. / We have one sap and one root– / Let there be commerce between us.”

A translation of this poem is included in Geir Campos’s edition of a selection from Whitman’s poems, Folhas das Folhas de Relva (Leaves from Leaves of Grass), in the introduction, which was written by Paulo Leminski: “A Pact”: “Um trato com você, Walt Whitman, / Já te detestei o bastante. / Hoje, cresci. / Já posso chegar na tua frente. // Idade eu tenho para tanto. / Você cortou a madeira nova. / Tá na hora de esculpir. / Tua seiva é a minha, tua raiz.” (WHITMAN, 2002, p.10)

[2] This poems is part of “Inscriptions” (WHITMAN, 1996, p.175), the firs book of Leaves of Grass.

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