Walt Whitman, Clarence Major, and Changing Thresholds of American Wonder

Abstract

Although Walt Whitman never ventured further into the West than his 1879 trip to Colorado, his imagined Western landscapes play central role in the distinctively American poetic voice that energizes the multiple editions of Leaves of Grass. Contemporary African American poet, novelist, and painter Clarence Major has lived and worked for much of his adult life in the West, so it not surprising that its material and figurative landscapes are also central to his multiple artistic projects. In addition, Major consciously engages Whitman's imagined West in his essays and poetry, and his poem set on the coast of Northwestern California, September Mendocino, direct response to Whitman's better-known Song of the Redwood-Tree. Whitman's poem, composed in the year after his paralytic stroke on January 23, 1873, was first published in Harper's New Monthly Magazine in 1874. September Mendocino, written in 1995, was first published in Configurations, 1998 anthology of Major's poetry. Although over one-hundred years separate their imaginative encounters with the Western landscape, both poems map the contours of the national imaginary onto that territory. Considered together, Song of the Redwood-Tree and September trace the trajectory of changing thresholds of American wonder.When Song of the Redwood-Tree was published, Mendocino County, California, was just twenty-four years old, one of the original twenty-seven counties that were established with statehood in 1850. The pre-historic home of Native Americans, estimated to have lived in the area from 7,000 BC, Mendocino saw the first long-term Spanish settlements in the mid-1600s and the first non-Spanish, European American settlements in 1852-just four years after gold was discovered at Sutter's Mill. In the same year newspapers across the country ignited the nation's imagination with reports of the of giant redwoods in the Sierra Nevada. Only scant year afterwards, traveling redwood exhibits began to make the four-month journey from San Francisco to the Eastern seaboard, and by 1856 exhibits traveled all the way to the Crystal Palace in London.1 For most Americans in Whitman's lifetime, their first contact with an actual redwood tree would in fact not be in its natural habitat but through these traveling bark exhibits and within the context of the nineteenth-century discourses of discovery and progress to which they contributed.2When Major published his late twentieth-century poem, the Mendocino coastline had taken on rather different character. Perched high on cliffabove the headland where the Big River empties into the Pacific, the scenic town of Mendocino now one of the favorite stops for wine tourism on the northern California coast. While the quaint village far separated from the rough-and-tumble logging area to which Whitman tied his hopes for the nation's future, it clear that the discovery of Whitman's poetry played an important role in Major's conception of poetic possibility. In an essay entitled, Discovering Walt Whitman, Major describes his amazement when, as young black man growing up on the South Side of Chicago, he first came across Whitman's Leaves of Grass in a Catholic Salvage Store.3 As he explains, there was never any Whitman in school. There was Shakespeare. Whitman was too revolutionary for South Side high schools (ND, 30). Finding special importance in Whitman's struggle against social restrictions, Major groups his discovery of the poet with those he made of Paul Laurence Dunbar and Phillis Wheatley. Later, when working on the Dictionary of Afro-American Slang, Major found Whitman's comments about language instructive, especially his observation that language is not an abstract construction of the learned, or of dictionary-makers, but . . . has its basis broad and low, close to the ground (qtd. in ND, 30). Long before he wrote September Mendocino, then, Major's of Whitman seemed to capture the aspiring writer's growing sense of the capabilities of language and the promise of his own artistic future. …