Looking at the three poets— Whitman, Williams, and O’Hara—together in the context of the same poetic tradition, similar themes become apparent: a deliberately crafted local idiom, a celebration of the immediate, a semi-pastoral mode. However, more importantly, it is the digressions on such themes, the different types of iterations that make their relationship interesting. Each of them seemed to have had a subtle understanding of the nature of realism in the context of an image as a means of understanding both the tangible, material world of the senses and the abstract world of ideals (of beauty, of art, of truth). The different ways in which each poet went about a constructing such a realism produces interesting insights into not only their historical moments, but also their (historically- and culturally- influenced) understanding of reality. Whitman sought a poetics that would “speak…with the perfect rectitude and insousiance of the movements of animals and the unimpeachableness of the sentiment of trees in the woods and grass by the roadside” and such a poetics moreover would “compete with the laws that pursue and follow time” because the poet himself must “bring the spirit of any of all events and passions and scenes and persons some more and some less to bear on [one’s] individual character…without effort and without exposing in the least how it is done” (12-13).Thus for Whitman the highest truth is the material of the senses and the highest art renders these images precisely with the added dimension of lived experience of an “individual character.”
In the same way, Williams sought a poetics that would be defined by “direct treatment of a thing” but in order to accomplish this, he had to also define exactly the nature of his “things.” Like Whitman his greatest goal was to render images of lived experience into poems that then become their own little artistic realities. Interestingly for Williams these images interestingly took on a much sparser quality, perhaps indicating an evolution of what can be viewed as the pastoral mode in the context of historical and cultural developments taking place in the early twentieth century.
O’Hara, the most recent of the three poets, is also very Whitmanian in the sense that his poetry rendered to language his organic encounters with life. He notes in his poetic manifesto “Personism” that “Personism has nothing to do with philosophy, it’s all art. It does not have to do with personality or intimacy, far from it! But to give you a vague idea, one of its minimal aspects is to address itself to one person (other than the poet himself), thus evoking overtones of love without destroying love’s life-giving vulgarity, and sustaining the poet’s feelings towards the poem while preventing love from distracting him into feeling about the person.” Whitman declares in his introduction to LEaves of Grass that the great poet :sees eternity less like a play with a prologue and a denouement… he sees eternity in men and women… he does not see men and women as dreams or dots” (9). Thus O’Hara. like Whitman, also locates the meaning of poetry within the volatility and materiality of human person, and like Williams, finds the variations in human experience of reality to be paramount to great art.
Thus, perhaps, taken together in the context of their variously defined understanding and use of realism, the three poets’ work can be looked at as a sort of evolution of the pastoral mode. They all operate to varying degrees within the pastoral tradition in that they seek to render images of their lived environment in the precise manner (whether ecstatic, mundane, sarcastic) in which they are experienced.
It’s a challenge, certainly, to hold these prose statements together in a certain thematic arc. The pastoral link is certainly there in Whitman and Williams, but I don’t follow it as clearly in Ginsberg and O’Hara. Re-reading these, I kept thinking of the idea of contact and communication, the idea of interpersonal connection through poetry. The scale of that connection seems to change quite drastically as we move from Whitman to Williams to Ginsberg to O’Hara. What does that mean for the fate of Emerson’s “Poet” as the nineteenth century gives way to the twentieth and beyond?
I like how you anticipate these kinds of questions when you address the analogous diminution of the pastoral, for example, in Williams when you write that “Interestingly for Williams these images interestingly took on a much sparser quality, perhaps indicating an evolution of what can be viewed as the pastoral mode in the context of historical and cultural developments taking place in the early twentieth century.” Great observation!