On Whitman Book

I enjoyed reading this book (while keeping Whitman's poems close at hand) - Williams' affection and admiration (even awe) for the poet and his poems is undeniable. To be honest, though, I felt like I came away with a better understanding of C.K. Williams as a poet than learning anything particularly new about Whitman. I especially appreciated Williams yoking Whitman's Leaves of Grass with Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal as the sort of root genesis of what modernism means to Williams - it puts Williams' own poetry into stark relief and helps me appreciate what his aesthetic orientation is that much better (at the same time, the way in which Williams politely but circumspectly puts Dickinson's poetry to the side and doesn't see it in dialogue with Whitman's says more to me about Williams rather than their actual influence on American poetry as a whole - I suspect Williams is not a very strong reader of Dickinson's poems even though he does humbly acknowledge her keen intelligence and I know that he has commented on her poem, "I felt a Funeral, in my brain...," in his book about poetry and psychology.)

This book is structured by sections with a sort of subject heading -- the two subjects where I found Williams particularly engaging were Whitman and "The Body," and Whitman as "Prophet." I wholeheartedly agree that one of Whitman's greatest attributes as a poet is his unabashed celebration of the human body with all its lustful desires, and Williams explores this subject with wit and intelligent appreciation. That celebration of the body combined with Whitman's voracious, all-encompassing cataloging of any and all phenomenon'no matter how lowly others might regard whatever captures his attention'are the things I love most about Whitman. I melt whenever I read Whitman inhabit and become a 28-year-old lonely spinster lustily spying on 28 young men skinny dipping, or when he inhabits and becomes noble barnyard animals. On the other hand, Whitman's tendency to sound oracular and prophetic has always made me blush - I distrust that aspect of his voice tremendously. Here is Williams interrogating his own response to that prophetic tendency in Whitman:

"…How much of my admiration for the poems has to do with their aesthetic uniqueness and grandeur, and how much with the promise they make of a new kind of consciousness, indeed a new genre of identity? As a poet, I read with boundless admiration; as a person…I don't quite know what to think. How not wish to live in a state of unrestrained acceptance the way the speaker in the Leaves does? In the early editions, anyway, before the poet seems to become conscious of being watched, being admired, adored. The way, as I say, he possesses his body, but without avarice, without greed? And puts to use the best part of his intellect not in anything like Socratic skepticism, nor in the endlessly self-dividing analytic scrutiny of our post-Freudian age? Conscious of his community with American, then with all humans, then with all gods and all their disciples, yet burning every instant with self-awareness, self-acceptance, self-enlargement?
Does it matter with all this that he is a 'great poet'? Isn't this prophetic identity, as the most fervent of his admirers during his lifetime proclaimed'even Wilde, of all people, who didn't much care for Whitman's poetics, pronouncing that his real value was a prophet'beyond all this? I don't know anymore; I really can't decide. Or even remember how I used to feel about it, because perhaps those first times I read him, it was indeed with a sense of being beyond poetry: now it's more simply that he defines some ultimate reach poetry can have into life."

I appreciate this inconclusive musing about such a fundamental aspect of Whitman's poetic legacy and find it valuable not just for understanding Williams' own reaction to Whitman (or mine, for that matter), but also for assessing how most American poetry after Whitman deals with this idea of Whitman/American-Poet-as-Prophet. Personally, this is precisely why Dickinson is a poet much closer to my own heart'her own awesome creative powers are always in a productive tension with an equally strong and profound skepticism (even a feeling of absolute futility) that I find almost entirely absent in Whitman. The omnipotent prophetic quality in Whitman has always shaded the way I read him and consider his legacy on American poetry; it is heartening to hear an intelligent poet like C.K. Williams (who clearly is very much embedded in a Whitmanesque line of American poets) acknowledge that this prophetic, oracular quality in Whitman's poetry gives him pause as well.