Whitmania: Round IV, Sight & Sound

What is a poet?...He is a man speaking to men.

Wordsworth, “Preface to the Second Edition
of ‘Lyrical Ballads’”

He is a seer….the others are as good as he, only he sees it and they do not.

Whitman, Preface 1855- Leaves of Grass.

In his article “Whitman vs. Wordsworth: Visual and Aural Differences between American and English Poetry” William E.H. Meyer, Jr. argues that in trying to completely break from the British both politically and culturally, the American poets (esp. Whitman) turned to the sense of sight and away from the sense of hearing.

According to him the Americans had only one chance to break from the dominance of such writers as Shakespeare, Bunyan and Spenser and their influence. The American writers had to go through two revolutions: one to gain political independence and one to gain cultural supremacy. Thomas Paine wrote, “Independence is the only bond that can tie and keep us together. We shall then see our object, and our ears shall be legally shut against the schemes of an intriguing, as well as a cruel enemy” (77). One of the ways to gain this independence was to stress the importance of sight.

This attention to the visual can be seen in Whitman’s poem “Poets to Come” in which the reader can see the value that Whitman places on the future generations of poets.

“Poets to Come”

Poets to come! orators, singers, musicians to come!
Not to-day is to justify me and answer what I am for,
But you, a new brood, native, athletic, continental, greater than before known,
Arouse! for you must justify me.

I myself but write one or two indicative words for the future,
I but advance a moment only to wheel and hurry back in the darkness.

I am a man who, sauntering along without fully stopping, turns a casual look upon you
and then averts his face,
Leaving it to you to prove and define it,
Expecting the main things from you.

Whitman’s charge is for future poets to prove and define this casual look. Whitman wants the primacy of sight to be preserved in the minds of future generations and he does this by figuratively giving them an enigmatic “casual look” not with an oration or a speech.

Interesting to note here is that Whitman equates orators, singers and musicians with poets. Meyer writes that for Whitman and the other American Romantics the definition of what a song is changed. He writes of “Song of Myself” which was changed from its original title “Poem of Walt Whitman, an American,” “the concept of the work as a ‘song’ did not occur to the poet at the time of its inception or even during its maturation but only as a final ‘redefinition’ of the very concept of ‘song’ at all” (84). He then goes on to quote Whitman himself: “what I am after is the content not the music of words. Perhaps the music happens- it does no harm: I do not go in search of it” (85). For Whitman music is incidental. His main focus is to capture sight and content in his words. The music that may accompany it is coincidental. Also, if there appears to be any song like quality in his works, it is because he has changed its definition.

Works Cited

Meyer, William E.H., Jr. "Whitman vs. Wordsworth: Visual and Aural Differences between American and
English Poetry." The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association, Vol. 20, No. 1. (Spring,
1987), pp. 76-98.