Nevermore the Reverberations: (for Alan Dawley)

Abstract

Nevermore the Reverberations (for Alan Dawley) Janet Gray (bio) During the summer of 1988, camped along the Colorado River in a blazing desert canyon on my way to graduate school, I listened to actor Dan O'Herlihy on tape reading Whitman's "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking," in which the poet remembers himself as a boy hearing a male mockingbird call to its lost mate. In the following passage, I heard Poe. . . . never more shall I cease perpetuating you,Never more shall I escape, never more the reverberations,Never more the cries of unsatisfied love be absent from me . . . . (ll. 151-53) Brit, an Irish setter, died of heatstroke, and the 1966 Barracuda's engine blew along the way, but once I reached a research library, I scoured biographies and notebooks and satisfied myself that Poe was there. For the hundred-fiftieth anniversary of the first Leaves of Grass, although my curiosities had long since turned elsewhere, I revived this project and found that a succession of critics had noticed "The Raven" in "Out of the Cradle." Each critic made more or less of the echoes.1 Milton Hindus found, as I did, that "the longer we consider the matter, the more parallels between the two celebrated poems emerge," but he resisted seeing the parallels as intentional on Whitman's part because Whitman told himself not to refer to other poets or poems (5). Ned Davison compared and contrasted the two poems and concluded that, whether consciously or not, Whitman "derived artistic stimulation" from Poe (6). Joseph M. De Falco argued that Whitman's extensive revisions of the poem for the 1867 edition of Leaves of Grass demonstrate Whitman's struggle [End Page 27] against the cultural morbidity of which, to him, Poe was representative (22-27). M. Jimmie Killingsworth claimed that, with these revisions, Whitman tried to "obscure" his allusions to "The Raven" (92). Betsy Erkkila noticed that the mockingbird's loss changes him from a joyous, communal singer to something "closer to the neurosis and solipsism" of a Poe character, a change that Whitman's poetic voice underwent in the years leading up to the Civil War. Kenneth M. Price suggested the echoes of Poe represent Whitman's effort to use Poe's notoriety to attract attention to his own work and benefit from the contrast between his own healthfulness and Poe's morbidity (65-66). Daneen Wardrop highlighted the successful embrace of the oedipal loss that occasions the birth of language in Whitman's poem in contrast to paralytic failure in Poe's (88-89). These commentaries emerge from different phases of ferment in literary theory and intervention in the American canon, but they all tend to use the similarities between the poems to reinstate differences between the poets. None challenges what we're already supposed to know: "Out of the Cradle" is a better poem than "The Raven," and Whitman is the better poet—and better for us. Why connections between the two poems matter remained for me an open question. In the canyon, finding Poe in "Out of the Cradle" mattered to me because "The Raven" was the stuff of my childhood and I didn't get Whitman. I'd started a journey, and to finish it, I needed to get him. "Nevermore" was an entry. My initial library quest left me mystified about the differences between the two poems—about how literary critics and historians could hold them apart. I had the uneasy feeling that when they were separated and ranked, something that matters gets left out. What if one were to view what we are already supposed to know with suspicion and pursue the poems' common ground? During formative decades in the making of American literary culture, both of these American poets chose imitative birds that somehow speak English for their entries in the Romantic bird lyric—think of Shelley's "To a Skylark" or Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale."2 That's interesting. Neither Poe nor Whitman relies on the supposedly "truthful relation between word and world" (Diamond 363); both supplement mimesis with mimicry. The raven delivers English from a vague elsewhere, stripped of source and context, so that it...