All about Walt Whitman

WHITMAN AND THE CLASSIC PAST

—

There is a connection between Leaves of Grass and Greek poetry which leads us to link Whitman to the classic tradition. As the poet himself was a prolific reader of the classics, there are several indications of his absorbing them in the Leaves. One of them is the “reed”[1], or “kalamos” (Greek), or “calamus” (Latin), or a “blade of grass”, which is poetically called “the flute”. Although he refers to the kind of plant which is completely American, as he liked to say, referring to the sweet-flag, this perennial grass appears in many parts of the world and may be called even a cosmopolitan plant. The connection to music is that the reed is also a music instrument made of a hollow reed stalk.

Another link is what are called the “catalogues” (longs lists of items) in the Leaves. The catalogues trace back to an ancient tradition too. Parakataloge is in Greek poetry a reduced type of song sung by Greek rhapsodes[2]. And song is the origin of poetry. As we know, Whitman liked to write that he was weaving his songs[3], not writing poetry. Therefore, we might conclude that he considered himself not separated from the classic past.

Even though he was creating a new poetry, or song, to depict the modern man[4], the new nation, his country fellows, his roots were driven deep down in antiquity. Actually this is the process described by Nagy in his book Pindar’s Homer, which is the appropriation of the past by a current poet to signify that he, too, is inscribing himself into that tradition. By the way, the word “inscriptions”, which is the title of the first book in Leaves of Grass, the book that opens Whitman’s works, is historically marked, as Nagy would call it. There was in Greece a custom of making inscriptions on stones by roadsides, to announce or share the deeds of men or heroes (an inscription is a “stage of public sharing”; NAGY, p.175).

Another aspect of Whitman’s work on the Leaves is his process of recomposition of the book along his life. However, there is nothing new about this process of recomposition. He did not invent it. Again, we trace this process back to an ancient tradition of the Greeks, as we can see in the following passage from Pindar’s Homer (NAGY, p.54):

“Earlier I argued that the rhapsodes were direct heirs to earlier traditions in oral poetry. But we see that over a long period their role has become differentiated from that of the oral poet. Whereas the oral poet recomposes as he performs, the rhapsode simply performs.”

Considering that a performance for an oral poet is done when he is singing his song, we can say that, for a poet of printed words, every new edition of his works can be considered a new performance. From this standpoint, Whitman recomposed his works throughout his life, from 1855 to 1892. In this way, he was inscribing himself in the old traditions of recomposition in performance. While at the same time he called his poetry “song”, as he did with his most famous ones: “Song of the Open Road”, “Song of the Exposition”, “Song of the Rolling Earth”, etc.

---

[1] NAGY, Gregory, Pindar’s Homer, p.54: “In the same context of Panhellenic Festivals, what we have been calling song or lyric poetry is being performed verbatim by kitharoidoi ‘lyre singers’ and auloidoi ‘reed singers’.”

[2] Rhapsode, in Homeric poetry, is “he who stitches together the song.”

[3] “Song of Myself“, section 15: “And of these one and all I weave the song of myself.”

[4] “Inscriptions”, “One’s Self I Sing”: “The Modern Man I sing.”

_{»crosslinked«}