Multitudes
Walt Whitman often
is characterized as an apotheosis of the American cult of individualism with Song of Myself presented as exhibit A –
Stephen Mitchell, for example, writes
Certainly the poem embodies an outrageous
egotism, an “I” so shamelessly naked that even a bodhisattva can admire it[i],
but I hear something different. It
may be because I have been teaching Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons at the same time that I have been rereading Song, in Mitchell’s faux version of the
1855 first publication in Leaves of Grass
that presented the text as a single unbroken long poem, in a truer version
of the first edition[ii], and in the 1891 “deathbed” edition that
replicates the 1881 final variant, broken now into a suggestive 52 sections and
using a title that did not settle on the text until 1876. Song was published in six different compositional stages during
Whitman’s life, with Mitchell’s 1993 edition representing what he himself
characterizes as a “conflated version”.
Preparing my notes
on Stein’s prose poems, I’m reminded that while Whitman was dying in Camden, an
event reported on by the US press on a daily basis, the 17-year-old Stein[iii]
was in Baltimore preparing to attend Radcliffe and certainly was aware of
America’s most famous and thoroughly out gay poet. Matt Miller has written of
Whitman’s influence, for example, on The
Making of Americans[iv],
a title that fairly screams it out and whose scope recalls the ambition of Song if not the whole of Leaves of Grass. 43 years ago, G. Thomas
Couser observed that:
two of our most eccentric writers and
autobiographers – Walt Whitman and Gertrude Stein – seem to share many
intriguing similarities.[v]
True that. But where Couser locates
these similarities in time and identity, what I hear instead is a tic in number,
very nearly a drumbeat of the plural.
In the original
1855 edition, it jumps right out in the sixth line:
Houses and roof perfumes
. . . . the shelves are crowded with perfumes
By the deathbed version, two additional stanzas had been inserted into the poem, pushing this line into the second
section while converting Whitman’s four-period ellipsis into a comma, and
trading in roof for the rhyme of rooms, a revision that spells out the
primacy of sound in this text:
Houses and rooms are full
of perfumes, the shelves are crowded with perfumes
Rooms also has the advantage of being
plural. The number of multiples in just the first few pages of the poem are
stunning:
·
Echoes, ripples, and buzzed whispers
·
green leaves and dry leaves
·
darkcolored sea-rocks
·
belched words . . . . words
·
A few light kisses . . . . a few embraces . . .
. a reaching around of arms
That is a page-and-a-half from the
Mitchell. In addition to having composed a 50-page poem that favors exposition
over narrative, Whitman has written one
in love with the plural:
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I
contradict myself,
(I am large, I
contain multitudes.)
I concentrate toward them
that are nigh,
The conversion of roof to rooms is fortuitous, as Rooms
is the title of the third and final section of Tender Buttons, the chapter of Stein’s book that is not a series of
short, witty prose poems but very nearly an
essay (in Stein’s unique manner) on method. Buttons likewise concentrates “toward them that are nigh” as the
world it conveys is very much that of bourgeois women of pre-First World War
Paris, poem titles filled with hats, coats, umbrellas, and “a long dress,” with
relatively few references to men beyond soldiers and that “white hunter.”
Plurals categorize
right where creative writing workshops argue that one should focus on the
specific. In theory the singular is concrete, the plural general. It’s not an
accident that we target in on the wheelbarrow, sensing a softer, almost fuzzy
focus on the chickens. Yet as that shipwreck of the singular, George Oppen,
reminds us at the start of Of Being
Numerous,
There are things
We live among ‘and to see
them
Is to know ourselves’.
That is very much what Stein is
getting at with her invocation of familiars throughout Tender Buttons. And it is also what I hear throughout Song of Myself.
Whitman’s language
in this sense is the antithesis of Pound’s, whose preference is for specifics
drenched in historical & sometimes mythological connotation. Which also was
what Williams heard in The Waste Land:
Eliot returned us to the classroom just at
the moment when I felt we were on a point to escape to matters much closer to
the essence of a new art form itself – rooted in the locality which should give
it fruit[vi]
O stars of heaven,
O suns . . . . O grass of graves . . . . O perpetual transfers and promotions
O suns . . . . O grass of graves . . . . O perpetual transfers and promotions
Lists like this from the 49th
canto of the deathbed Song lack
Stein’s percussive alliteration, but, once stripped of the romantic “O,” the major
difference is between Stein’s invocation of an interior world, household
objects and food, over Whitman’s wider ranging, often more abstract or
“transcendental” categories. Whitman’s plurals can be concrete, as with the
twenty-eight young men observed splashing in the water in the 11th
section or the
Blacksmiths
with grimed and hairy chests […]
The
lithe sheer of their waists plays even with their massive arms
Overhand the hammers swing, overhand so slow, overhand so sure,
They do not hasten, each man hits in his place
Overhand the hammers swing, overhand so slow, overhand so sure,
They do not hasten, each man hits in his place
He’s closer here to Williams than Stein, employing the plural to set
up a close-up. Looking at the following famous stanza, you will see that even
the singular nouns other than “I,” categorize. They may be singulars but
they’re plurals at heart.
Patriarchs sit at supper with sons
and grandsons and great-grandsons around them,
In walls of adobie, in canvas tents,
rest hunters and trappers after their day’s sport,
The city sleeps and the country
sleeps,
The living sleep for their time, the
dead sleep for their time,
The old husband sleeps by his wife
and the young husband sleeps by his wife;
And these tend inward to me, and tend
outward to them,
And such as it is to be of these more
or less I am,
And of these and all I weave the song
of myself.
First presented at the Five Up on Walt pre-birthday celebration at Kelly Writers House, Feb. 5, 2019
[i] “Editor’s Preface,” Song of Myself, edited by Stephen Mitchell, Shambhala, Boulder,
2018, p. xi.
[ii]
Online in a Roslings Ditgital Publications PDF available from the Western
Illinois University website: http://faculty.wiu.edu/M-Cole/WaltWhitmanLeavesofGrass1855.pdf
[iii] The same age I was when William Carlos Williams died
in 1963. It was Williams who opened the door of poetry to me through his poem
“The Desert Music.”
[iv] Miller, “Making of Americans: Whitman and Stein’s
Poetics of Inclusion,” Arizona Quarterly,
Vol. 65, No. 3, Autumn 2009
[v] Couser, “Of Time and Identity: Walt Whitman and
Gertrude Stein as Autobiographers,” Texas
Studies in Literature and Language, vol. 17, no. 4, Winter 1976