Collective Loss: "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd" and the poems of September 11, 2001

Browsing through this collection of 9/11 themed poems, my first impression is that none of them can match the sheer vast scope of "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd"--that comforting universal quality Whitman has of digesting everything that comprises reality and imagination at once into a beautiful order of disorder. It's not fair to dismiss other poets simply for not being Whitman, but poem after poem I click on strikes me as barely comparable to "When Lilacs...," usually because the speaker is using a modest sort of first-person, recounting something very specific. I expect that with more time and attention I will find more appropriate contenders, and I'm still digesting "When Lilacs..." too, but so far only Adam Zagajewski's "Try to Praise the Mutilated World" echoed something of Whitman's approach. At first I balked at writing about "Try to Praise the Mutilated World" because I can only read it in translation, but since it still stands out in my memory after twenty or so other poems, it's worth considering. Here is the text as translated from Polish by Clare Cavanagh:

Try to Praise the Mutilated World

Remember June's long days,
and wild strawberries, drops of wine, the dew.
The nettles that methodically overgrow
the abandoned homesteads of exiles.
You must praise the mutilated world.
You watched the stylish yachts and ships;
one of them had a long trip ahead of it,
while salty oblivion awaited others.
You've seen the refugees heading nowhere,
you've heard the executioners sing joyfully.
You should praise the mutilated world.
Remember the moments when we were together
in a white room and the curtain fluttered.
Return in thought to the concert where music
flared.
You gathered acorns in the park in autumn
and leaves eddied over the earth's scars.
Praise the mutilated world
and the gray feather a thrush lost,
and the gentle light that strays and vanishes
and returns.

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The significance to me of this poem in relation to "When Lilacs..." is that both of them present the natural environment as infused with loss, and include vivid images which are both personal and communal. I imagine the presence of the thrush in both poems is not a coincidence. This poem was not written on the same scale as Whitman's, but perhaps it is a comparable contemporary approach to collective grief. It seems that Whitman was also praising the mutilated world when he wrote "Prais'd be the fathomless universe / For life and joy, and for objects and knowledge curious / And for love, sweet love--but praise! praise! praise! / For the sure-enwinding arms of cool-enfolding death."

Continuing Project Preparations

While I find the subject of the reviews to be interesting and it generates a fair amount of questions for further research, I haven't made much progress this week in narrowing those down into something useful for the purposes of a project, and on top of that, I'm not confident that they would demonstrate enough learning specific to Leaves of Grass, as opposed to general musings about poetry, criticism, and the public. The subject also seems more suited to essays than more creative media, though I suppose it could be done. Perhaps the only thing I am less efficient at completing than essays are art projects, in spite of the fact that I prefer them. I prefer them too much; they mean too much to me to not be some version of perfect which I never achieve. Part of the reason I am an eternal senior English major is that I was originally attempting a second major in art as well, and I have plenty of classes for both but not enough for a degree in either. Someday I will purge my artistic demons, but I doubt that day will come within the span of a month or two. I am considering doing more with my motif entry on hair instead, which potentially has the opposite problem of being too specific. We shall see.

Peter Doyle

Walt Whitman's friend and lover, Peter Doyle, was the son of Irish immigrants, grew up in Alexandria, Virginia, and fought in the Confederate army. He was working as a streetcar conductor when he met Whitman, and the two hit it off right away. Doyle was at Ford's Theater during Lincoln's assassination and might have inspired Whitman's Memoranda During the War. Most of their relationship is understood through their correspondence, and Doyle permitted the publication of Whitman's letters to him. Whitman and Doyle enjoyed spending time with each other's families and often shared poems and limericks. According to Ed Folsom and Kenneth M. Price in their biographical essay "Walt Whitman," to Whitman, "Doyle represented America's future: healthy, witty, handsome, good-humored, hard-working, enamored of good times, he gave Whitman's life some energy and hope during an otherwise bleak time." Doyle even nursed Whitman when his health was failing.

Sources:
The Walt Whitman Archive
Gay History Project: http://www.eriegaynews.com/news/article.php?recordid=200910whitmandoyle

Further Exploration: Reviews

The post I intend to develop further is the one pertaining to reviews. There is a great deal of criticism available to analyze, and I am interested in how such an initially controversial work became part of the canon and changed our expectations of poetry. I've considered approaching this chronologically, just tracking shifts in the reception of Leaves of Grass over the years to recognize patterns, etc. but that approach isn't set in stone yet. In my first entry about reviews, what stands out to me the most is Whitman's conviction about the importance of his work to the future of American writing, and the equally strong conviction on the part of the naysayers that his work threatens the definition of poetry. History appears to have vindicated both of these judgments, so the question I most want to answer is "what does this mean?" but it's far too broad in scope for both my time constraints and my expertise. Considering the reactions of reviewers, including Whitman himself, what's more radical, his form or content? Once he demolished the boundaries between high culture and low culture, language and song, intellectual labor and manual labor, writer and reader, individual and multitude, nature and culture, could there be any going back? On a somewhat related note, I wonder whether Whitman's work is so celebrated now that people judge other poetry by his standards, to the exclusion of other traditions or innovations; has his approach been swallowed up and regurgitated by the very literary establishment he defied?

"What does it mean?!"