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4.5
"And wasn’t there, ever, a great poet who was crazy about Brooklyn or furious about war?"—June JordanWhen I was in university I took an American poetry course and was crushed when its professor imposed her views on the class so that, for every student who had not encountered Whitman before, his magic was stolen from them before they’d even gotten to read his work. I wish instead of labeling Whitman an imperialist and wrapping him up so neatly, my professor had shared with us something like this collection, Whitman Noir, making students aware of the long legacy of Walt Whitman in American literary history.He has made his mark upon writers who’ve admired him and those who’ve had a bone to pick with him. I was surprised by the variety and number of intellectuals who have praised Whitman and viewed him pretty uncritically, e.g. Paul Laurence Dunbar, Langston Hughes, C.R.L. James, and June Jordan. The essayists in this book portray Whitman as exceptional, a people’s poet, sentimental, corny, idealistic, hopeful, altruistic, racist, stuck-in-his-times, alienated from society, a sympathizer of the White South, and a critic of slavery but not an abolitionist. The portrayals were complex and deeply explored.In Ed Folsom's "Erasing Race," Folsam digs through buried archives to pull out the many, many instances when Whitman wrote about racial inequality and then never published it. In Folsom's view Whitman systematically erased race from his work, although his earliest version of Leaves of Grass—the one most printed today—contains many more references to race than later editions. It seems tragic that a man who wanted to be a voice of America could not fully address the issues at the heart of the war on democracy in his time. As Christopher Freeburg writes, "Whitman, in my view, abnegates all violence in his idealistic language ... without dealing with the pressing realities of race and social conflict that compel the bearded poet to want so desperately to move beyond violence."My favorite essays were probably by June Jordan, whose writing is always captivating, and Matt Sandler. Sandler’s was especially juicy, drawing connections between Whitman's channeling of various American voices (he writes through the eyes of dock workers, prostitutes, soldiers, etc) and the spiritual rituals of voodoo mediums. He argues that Whitman's time in New Orleans—a place I never even knew Whitman visited—was vital to the approach Whitman took in Song of Myself. Sandler paints Antebellum New Orleans vividly as a city of contradictions, where diverse neighbors lived in relative freedom even as the auctioneer's market was a central touchstone downtown; where even enslaved people, not having to perform plantation labor, could participate in a burgeoning Black intellectual culture; where Haitian revolutionaries were importing voodoo beliefs and customs; where bars were often integrated even as they served as zones where chattel slavery transactions could be negotiated over drinks. I really enjoyed reading such vividly painted snapshots of this time and imagining Walt Whitman in them.For further reading on Whitman, I recommend Sherry Ceniza's Walt Whitman and Nineteenth-Century Women Reformers and What Is the Grass by Mark Doty.
