With Ode to Walt Whitman, Neruda draws on the image of Walt Whitman as the prophet-bard to evoke the kind of liberating tradition with which Whitman the celebrant of an ideal democracy is often associated. He calls Whitman “the bard,” “nocturnal healer” who “dug up not only/ earth/ into light” but “unearthed/a man/ and the slave/ humiliated/ with you” and “who knows/ the sound/ of breathing during death pangs/ and waits with dawn/ for the silent/ return/ of life.” It is In this manner that the Whitman conjured in Neruda’s essay “We Live in a Whitmanesque Age” is identified as “a lyric moralist” who “Was both a torrential and didactic singer” and “had no fear of either moralizing or immoralizing.” Whitman can become the voice of the oppressed in this sense precisely because of the tone, the multivocality, of his poetic voice. Interestingly, Neruda mentions in the essay that the age is Whitmanesque because “new men and new societies rise and grow, despite their birth-pangs.” Neruda’s poem qualifies Whitman as a hearer of “death-pangs,” and this it is Whitman’s liberating tradition which constantly provokes creativity, growth, construction by why of destruction or collision of contradictions that enables what Neruda saw as “an age of sufferings and liberation” a voice with which to sing.
It’s interesting that you understand those lines as democratizing for the oppressed in particular. In class, Max often talks about our ambivalent readings of Whitman, and I think a lot about that can be said here. Yes, Whitman is the voice of the oppressed, but in the spirit of multivocality it can also be posited that he represents the oppressors, as his poetry has in the past aligned him with both the slave and the slave owner. Overall, though, I do think we can make a stronger connection to our modern Whitmanesque age from the lens of the oppressed; those who experience oppression seems to be represented by the vast multitudes while the oppressors are both few in number and largely homogenized. It would be interesting to see what Whitman would make of our age, considering his time sported widespread overt oppression, creating a fine line between sides. Today we find ourselves swimming in the gray, mostly unaware of the forces that suppress our growth as well as the forces we exude upon others.
I can certainly see where the oppressed stand out to Ellen in Neruda’s work. However, what Nick points out about the duality of Whitman also applies. This is one of the major components of Whitman that makes him so compelling, since Whitman can represent such a multitude of individuals. Neruda points out that Whitman consciously chose the hard path of being both a torrential and didactic singer, which are opposed, and suit the qualities of a leader more than a writer. Many would agree with this, since writers more frequently than not will take once stance or another, whereas Whitman wears multiple hats. Neruda also brings up the fact that Whitman “had no fear of either moralizing or immoralizing, nor did he seek to separate the fields of pure and impure poetry.” Neruda claims that Whitman was the first totalitarian poet, saying, “his intention was not just to sing, but to impose on others his total and wide-ranging vision of relationships of men and nations.”
I find Neruda’s Whitman so interesting in part because his interpretation makes of whitman that “totalitarian poet,” whereas Whitman himself often seems at pains to not impose his will, but to let others decide for themselves. Neruda’s Whitman is what we might call Whitman on his good days–his most confident, his most completely recovered, his most laden with potential. That’s a Whitman we see so rarely in US poets, and I often wonder why. Why do these poets feel so compelled to cast Whitman’s promise in elegiac terms? Why can’t they, as Neruda does trust in a very particular Whitman: the Whitman as political revolutionary, as radical egalitarian?