Walt Whitman is quintessential to American poetry and literature alike, so one can expect to see the massive amounts of thinkers and critic engaging with the author. Normally when Whitman is brought up in a text, he is named specifically and his views criticized directly; so it is a fresh change of pace to read a work where an author simply talks back to Whitman. Two authors that stood out to me out of the most recent readings were Langston Hughes and Ross Gay. Too often will there be a critic of Whitman that mocks Whitman’s idealism about America by simply mocking his words, or even altering a title of his poem for their own use in parody. While reading Ross Gay’s poem “Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude,” I could not help but feel like Gay is engaging a nameless Whitman by mocking his style of poetry. Although there were several points in Gay’s poem that feel extremely Whitman-esque the part that really made me do a double-take was the beginning of the second stanza, “Hear ye! Hear ye! I am here / to holler that I have hauled tons – by why I don’t mean lots, / I mean tonsof cowshit.” Just in those three lines Gay is doing a lot in terms of talking about Whitman without saying it. Whitman will often yell at his readers in much of the same way as Gay does when saying “Hear ye! Hear ye!” perhaps the best example is Whitman’s “O Captain! My Captain!” Next, however, Gay discusses “cowshit” and that’s only the start of a Whitman-like stream-of-consciousness view of unideal, but realistic, American life. I think what Gay is doing with his denouncement of American life is to say that maybe Whitman got it wrong, and things are not as inspiring as early Americans thought, but Gay assures that it “makes me squirm like a worm I am so grateful…” Which harkens back to Gay’s “Gratitude” title, that I feel he sarcastically addresses throughout the poem in sections such as stanza two.
Another poet discussed frequently throughout this past week of reading was Langston Hughes, and his poem “I, Too”. Unlike, Gay, Hughes approaches Whitman’s work in a way that captures part of what make Whitman so powerful as a poet. In much of Whitman’s work, Whitman will list things for sake of emphasis with the repetitive use of “and” before each word; for example, in one of Whitman’s most famous poems, “I Sing the Body Electric” he writes, “And if those who defile the living are as bad as they who defile the dead? / And if the body does not do fully as much as the soul? / And if the body were not the soul, what is the soul?” Especially on the page, the repeating “and” stands out. Similarly, in “I, Too” Hughes writes “But I laugh, / And eat well, / And grow strong.” It is these subtle emphasizing cues that the poets use in their writing, mixed with their ability to speak in broad philosophic terms that make their poetry read much of the same way.
I Included a link to a reading of “I, Too” and from what I read online it seems to be one of the few recordings widely available of Langston Hughes reading the poem. The recording adds another dimension to the poem in my opinion, as Hughes reads it with so much emotion, enjoy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rti7vmujaL4
I’m interested in your reading of Gay–when hearing him in class, and reading his book as a whole, I sense a deep earnestness and gratitude. What is most striking about his work is, perhaps, its earnestness. It tosses aside that knee-jerk irony that accompanies so many engagements with Whitman. Instead, Gay risks a similar kind of Naïveté, though his powerful blending of joy and sorry keeps his poem grounded even in its flights of fancy. The moment where describes shoveling shit and squirming like a grateful worm he’s literally describing working with compost at his community garden, so this seems again a more authentic bridge to Whitman (a poem, whom we know, war rather compost-obsessed).
I think Gay, because his sense of gratitude can seem so over-the-top, is easy to misread in terms of his tone, but I’d argue that there’s a real earnestness to his project, and a desire to envelop his reader in a similar sense of gratitude.
It’s interesting to see Whitman’s influence, not only from a poetic dialogue standpoint, but a poetically influential standpoint as well. I feel critics and followers of Whitman tend to address him more directly in their poetry and prose, rather than allude to his influence with their own styles and themes. I also find it interesting how Langston Hughes does directly address Whitman in his work (“The Ceaseless Rings of Walt Whitman”) and also alludes to his style in other pieces of his (“I, Too”). Perhaps, in order to suggest Whitman’s power as the quintessential poet, Hughes puts more emphasis on Whitman’s influence and decides to show his gratitude towards Whitman through his constant allusion towards Whitman’s character and style in his own work.