Three Poems on Whitman

Abstract

N VIEW of recent Whitman studies such as the biographies of Henry Seidel Canby and Newton Arwin, Professor Allen's Walt Whitman Handbook, and Louis Untermeyer's anthology, The Poetry and Prose of Walt Whitman, one might well pause to consider the case of Whitman as theme in poetry, the manipulation of that theme, and its peculiar relations to the poets who have applied themselves to it.' Poems about Whitman that are neither parodies nor stylized imitations are rare, but at least three poets in our day have each contributed a poem of merit on the subject. We have the two Whitman odes of Stephen Vincent Benet and Garcia Lorca, and the Cape Hatteras section of Hart Crane's The Bridge, which is virtually an ode, in the loose generic sense of the moderns, within the structural sequence of the bridge mythology.2 The poems to be considered are as varied in quality and achievement as the poets individually differed from each other. In temperament and practice Crane stood closer to Lorca than to Benet, whose epic breadth, for all its narrative felicity and historical fullness, belongs to an older and more derivative school of poetry than any at present fashionable. All three poets were contemporary inheritors of a world between two wars and all three absorbed and responded differently to its spiritual climate. Benet harks back to Browning and the dramatic monologue, Lorca and Crane to either the French Symbolists or the old Spanish deep song (cante jondo) of Andalusia. We should like to know just what specifically induced each in turn to select Whitman as a theme in poetry. Was it the life or the work, or a combination of both, that stimulated their interest ? We wish also to inquire concerning the use made of the Whitman theme by each and, finally, the degree of success obtained in transforming the theme into organic poetry. The problem of Whitman's appeal is perhaps best approached by plac-