Arthur Goldwag on the perplexing prejudices of Walt Whitman and Mark Twain

Guest blog post by Arthur Goldwag, author of The New Hate: A History of Fear and Loathing on the Populist Right

American letters has had more than its share of haters. Henry Adams, T. S. Eliot, H. L. Mencken and Ezra Pound leap immediately to mind; there are countless other examples as well. Though most merely reflect the prevailing attitudes of their time, class, and place, it’s natural for a reader to feel a sense of disappointment when she comes up against their prejudices. We want our literary writers to be, if not necessarily ahead of their times, at least outside of them. Faulkner’s racial politics were disappointingly retrograde and boilerplate when he expressed them in his own voice, but the characters in his novels, black and white alike, were, in Allen Tate’s words, “characters in depth, complex and, like all other people, ultimately mysterious.” Walt Whitman and Mark Twain’s attitudes about Catholics and Jews are at once offensive and well-intended; neither could be described as a hater, though both employed hateful tropes.

Fanny Fern, America’s first female newspaper columnist, was one of the early reviewers of Leaves of Grass. “The world needed a ‘Native American’ of thorough out and out breed,” she wrote in The New York Ledger on May 10, 1856, “Something beside a mere Catholic-hating Know-Nothing.” The Know-Nothings, of course, were members of the explicitly anti-Catholic political movement that arose in the 1840s.

Whitman might have celebrated “the nation of many nations” in his poetry, but what Fanny Fern didn’t know was that as a young newspaperman in the early 1840s, he had been something of a Know-Nothing himself, editorializing in The New York Aurora about the “gang of false and villainous priests whose despicable souls never generate any aspiration beyond their own narrow and horrible and beastly superstition…dregs of foreign filth—refuse of convents.” But as ethnocentric as his rhetoric undoubtedly was, it wasn’t inconsistent with his ethos. Whitman hated the authoritarianism of the Catholic hierarchy, not the Catholic immigrants themselves. Writing in Democratic Vistas in 1871, he envisioned a democracy that would supplant the “old belief in the necessary absoluteness of establish’d dynastic rulership, temporal, ecclesiastical, and scholastic” with the “doctrine or theory that man, properly train’d in sanest, highest freedom, may and must become a law, and series of laws, unto himself.”

“I have no race prejudices,” Mark Twain averred, “and I think I have no color prejudices nor caste prejudices nor creed prejudices. Indeed, I know it. I can stand any society. All that I care to know is that a man is a human being—that is enough for me; he can’t be any worse. I have no special regard for Satan; but I can at least claim that I have no prejudice against him. It may even be that I lean a little his way, on account of his not having a fair show.”

Huckleberry Finn critiqued antebellum southern norms from a vantage that was outside the verge of respectability; its racial politics are profoundly subversive—probably more so than its author intended. Though Twain has been rightly celebrated as a philo-Semite (one of his daughters would marry a Jew), he would perpetuate some of the most invidious—and inflammatory—Jewish stereotypes. While living in Vienna in the late 1890s, Twain wrote about the rise of Karl Lueger, who was elected the city’s mayor in 1895, and the anti-Semitic political movement he spearheaded. When an American Jew, responding to the article, asked Twain to speculate on the causes of Jew hatred, he ventured an elaborate, five-part answer. “Concerning the Jews” appeared in Harpers Magazine in 1898. As biographer Justin Kaplan has noted, “in his very attempt to extol the race in question, he ratified the most inflammatory pretext for resentment.”

The Jew “has made a marvellous fight in this world, in all the ages; and has done it with his hands tied behind him,” Twain wrote. “He could be vain of himself, and be excused for it.” But in Twain’s telling, there is scant mystery as to why Jews have been the objects of such enmity, going all the way back to the beginnings of history. In his decidedly eccentric take on Genesis 41, Joseph cornered the grain market and charged exorbitant prices when famine struck, beggaring the Egyptian nation. The real problem with Jews, Twain goes on, is that they’re too clever by half. If a Jew “entered upon a mechanical trade, the Christian had to retire from it. If he set up as a doctor, he was the best one, and he took the business. If he exploited agriculture, the other farmers had to get at something else. Since there was no way to successfully compete with him in any vocation, the law had to step in and save the Christian from the poor-house.”

Twain’s take on the idea of political Zionism is chilling. “Have you heard of [Dr. Herzl’s] plan?” he wrote. “He wishes to gather the Jews of the world together in Palestine, with a government of their own—under the suzerainty of the Sultan, I suppose . . . I am not the Sultan, and I am not objecting; but if that concentration of the cunningest brains in the world were going to be made in a free country (bar Scotland), I think it would be politic to stop it. It will not be well to let the race find out its strength. If the horses knew theirs, we should not ride any more.”

As dark as Twain’s view of humanity might have been, Hitler and the Holocaust were beyond his capacity to imagine. “Among the high civilizations,” he wrote, the Jew “seems to be very comfortably situated indeed, and to have more than his proportionate share of the prosperities going. It has that look in Vienna. I suppose the race prejudice cannot be removed; but he can stand that; it is no particular matter.”

For all that, Twain’s admiration for the Jews was genuine; it is to his credit that he wrote and published a postscript in 1904, “The Jew as Soldier,” in which he corrected his animadversions on the Jews’ “unpatriotic disinclination to stand by the flag as a soldier.” Far from avoiding military service, he wrote, the Jews “furnished soldiers and high officers to the Revolution, the War of 1812, and the Mexican War. In the Civil War he was represented in the armies and navies of both the North and the South by 10 per cent of his numerical strength—the same percentage that was furnished by the Christian populations of the two sections.” The Jewish capacity for “fidelity, and for gallant soldiership in the field is as good as any one's,” he added.

Still, it is a testament to Twain's wrongheadedness in other respects that “Concerning the Jews” sparks lively discussions on white nationalist websites to this day. What they focus on aren’t his suppositions about Jewish intellectual superiority. It is his off the cuff observations like this one: “the Jew is a money-getter. He made it the end and aim of his life. He was at it in Rome. He has been at it ever since. His success has made the whole human race his enemy.”

Also of interest:

• “Mark Twain and the Jews” on Jewish Virtual Library discusses the reaction of contemporary American Jews to “Concerning the Jews” 
• In “Walt Whitman & the Irish” on The Walt Whitman Archive Joann Krieg tracks how Whitman’s attitudes toward Catholics and the Irish evolved 
• "A Presidential Candidate" by Mark Twain, this week's Story of the Week
• "Mark Twain and William Dean Howells: the friendship that transformed American literature," a previous Reader’s Almanac post

Related LOA works: Walt Whitman: Poetry and Prose (includes Democratic Vistas); Mark Twain: Collected Tales, Sketches, Speeches & Essays 1891-1910 (includes “Concerning the Jews” and the 1904 postscript “The Jew as Soldier”)

Writers in love: walking in New York and the light of Los Angeles

In the past two months Flavorwire has collected bouquets of literary love letters to America’s two largest cities—and we couldn’t let them go unrequited. In May Kathleen Massara assembled memorable quotes from F. Scott Fitzgerald, E. B. White, Ralph Ellison, Gary Shteyngart, Colum McCann, Joseph O’Neill, Patti Smith, John Steinbeck, Don DeLillo, and Zadie Smith on different facets of New York City. The quote from Patti Smith’s Just Kids conjures with “Frank O’Hara territory” and reminds us of the long tradition of New York “walking around” poems that began with Walt Whitman. Phillip Lopate traced some of this history in his introduction to Writing New York: A Literary Anthology, the LOA’s motherlode of New York love:

Once Whitman perfected the catalogue or list, it became a favorite technique among New York poets for conveying sensory saturation. Whitman’s impact on later peripatetic city poets (such as Frank O’Hara, Charles Reznikoff, and James Schuyler) was vast, partly because the all-embracing, synthesizing persona he developed offered a solution to the problem of integrating the random stimuli of modern life. The walk poem is a species of travel literature in which the writer puts himself through culture shock in his own city.

Here is Whitman not just walking but traversing time in a passage from “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”:

It avails not, time nor place—distance avails not,
I am with you, you men and women of a generation, or ever
        so many generations hence,
Just as you feel when you look at the river and sky, so I felt,
Just as any of you is one of a living crowd, I was one of a crowd,
Just as you are refresh’d by the gladness of the river and the bright
        flow, I was refresh’d,
Just as you stand and lean on the rail, yet hurry with the swift
        current, I stood yet was hurried,
Just as you look on the numberless masts of ships and the thick-
        stemm’d pipes of steamboats, I look’d.

In poems like “A Step Away from Them” and “The Day Lady Died,” Frank O’Hara built on Whitman’s walk poem to create “diary poems” that, in Lopate’s words “found some larger resonance in the trivia and detritus of the passing moment. You can hear Frank O'Hara, Patti Smith, and others read some “walking around” poems on this Poetry Foundation UbuWeb podcast.

Last week Massara paid homage to the other coast’s big city with Literary Love Letters to Los Angeles. Enjoying quotes from Joan Didion, Christopher Isherwood, Raymond Chandler, Steve Erickson, Karen Tei Yamashita, Charles Bukowski, Bret Easton Ellis, James Ellroy, Nathanael West, and the bicoastal F. Scott Fitzgerald, we were delighted to find that seven of these ten are among the seventy-seven contributors to Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology. One commenter found “all of [the quotes chosen by Massara] pretty damning” and, for a corrective, we immediately turned to Lawrence Weschler’s luminous essay “L.A. Glows” in which he interviews artists, poets, scientists, cinematographers, environmental engineers, art gallery directors, and even Vin Scully, the veteran Dodgers announcer, to probe the ethereal quality of L.A.’s light. Here’s a taste from his session with writer and public information officer D. J. Waldie, author of Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir:

It seems to me, actually, that there are four—or, anyway, at least four—lights in L.A. To begin with, there’s the cruel, actinic light of late July. Its glare cuts piteously through the general shabbiness of Los Angeles. Second comes the nostalgic, golden light of late October. It turns Los Angeles into El Dorado, a city of fool’s gold. It’s the light William Faulkner—in his story “Golden Land”—called “treacherous unbrightness.” It’s the light the tourists come for—the light, to be more specific, of unearned nostalgia. Third, there’s the gunmetal-gray light of the months between December and July. Summer in Los Angeles doesn’t begin until mid-July. In the months before, the light can be as monotonous as Seattle’s. Finally comes the light, clear as stone-dry champagne, after a full day of rain. Everything in this light is somehow simultaneously particularized and idealized: each perfect, specific, ideal little tract house, one beside the next. And that’s the light that breaks hearts in L.A.

Also of interest:

• San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles: Discovering your own infinite city, a previous Reader’s Almanac post
• The students at Mount St. Mary’s College in Los Angeles have been compiling an online bibliography of literature about Los Angeles
• Wikipedia’s ongoing listing of books set in New York City
• What is the best novel about Washington?, a previous Reader's Almanac post

Related LOA works: Writing New York: A Literary Anthology (includes “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” and the two O’Hara poems); Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology—ON SALE: $9.95 (includes William Faulkner’s “Golden Land,” Lawrence Weschler’s “L.A. Glows,” and an excerpt from D. J. Waldie’s Holy Land)

Christopher Benfey on Lincoln’s Gettysburg sonnet

Guest blog post by Christopher Benfey, author of American Audacity: Literary Essays North and South and editor of Stephen Crane: Complete Poems and Lafcadio Hearn: American Writings, both published by The Library of America.

A couple of months ago, I was asked to speak at Deerfield Academy about Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman. The subject of the Civil War, during this 150th anniversary year, came up repeatedly, most pointedly in the contrast between Whitman’s open engagement with the war, both in the poems of Drum-Taps and in his nursing of wounded soldiers in Washington, and Dickinson’s less explicit response—in poems that seem, however cryptically, to register the distant fighting and dying. “War feels to me an oblique place,” she wrote her friend Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who was leading an African-American regiment in Florida. Inevitably, we talked about Whitman’s elegies for Lincoln: the stilted allegory “O Captain! My Captain!” (which reads as though protean Whitman was trying to squeeze himself into Dickinson’s tight meters) and the grand and mysterious masterpiece “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.”

One bright student raised his hand and asked, “Would you say that Lincoln was just a failed poet?” Well, no, I wouldn’t say that, I replied. In fact, I found myself saying instead that Lincoln was the third of the great American poets of the nineteenth century. Based on his three greatest speeches alone—his Gothic “House Divided” speech, the Gettysburg Address, and the Second Inaugural—Lincoln, for the sheer pressure of his language and the surprising new uses he found for the rhythms and buried eloquence of our ordinary speech, stands above any American poet of his time other than Dickinson and Whitman.

Lincoln’s greatest poem is the Gettysburg Address. Scholars have teased out its echoes from Thucydides and noted its Biblical grandeur. But I think that beneath its artistry lie the formal skeleton and the verbal machinery of the sonnet. (I should note that there have been attempts to “translate” the address into the traditional 14-line structure of a sonnet.) For Shakespeare, Milton, and Keats, the sonnet provided a small field for exploring the shifting meanings of a few words. It generally had a simple, two-part structure, with a so-called “turn” signaling the seam. The two parts often fused an emotional subject with an analytic treatment, summed up in an epigram at the end.

At this point, someone will want to object that Lincoln’s sonnet is in prose. Well, so it is! But Emerson wrote “Woods: A Prose Sonnet,” in which he asked the woods to give him something new to say, “along with “the tune wherein to say it.” Lincoln finds a new tune for the sonnet in the sinewy prose of the Gettysburg Address. The specific words he “worries” include simple ones like “here,” used nine times, and most beautifully in the contrast between words and deeds: “The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but can never forget what they did here.”

The more elaborate word of course is “dedicate,” used six times, which shifts from abstract (“dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal”) to more literal (“to dedicate a portion of” the battlefield). After the great “turn” of the sonnet, which occurs with the reflection “But in a larger sense we can not dedicate…” Lincoln proclaims that “It is for us, the living, rather to be dedicated here…” Then comes the closing, cinching epigram: “this government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” What poet could have said it better?

Also of interest:

• H. L. Mencken, Adlai Stevenson on Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, a previous Reader’s Almanac post
• Lincoln as storyteller: “Remarkable Case of Arrest for Murder,” a previous Story of the Week
• A recent LOA interview with Chrisopher Benfey about Stephen Crane: Complete Poems

Related LOA works: The Lincoln Bicentennial Collection (3-book boxed set); Abraham Lincoln: Selected Speeches and Writings (paperback)

Celebrate the first day of spring with a favorite poem

“A little madness in the Spring,” Emily Dickinson once wrote, “Is wholesome even for the King.” Decades later, in “Mending Wall,” Robert Frost echoed the sentiment, “Spring is the mischief in me.” What better mischief to kick off the change in seasons than to share a favorite poem about spring?

“May-Day,” a thirty-five page paean to spring, opens Ralph Waldo Emerson’s second collection of poems. His close observations of nature lead to intimations of an underlying, transcendent, transformative power, as this excerpt demonstrates:

For thou, O Spring! canst renovate
All that high God did first create.
Be still his arm and architect,
Rebuild the ruin, mend defect; . . .
Not less renew the heart and brain,
Scatter the sloth, wash out the stain,
Make the aged eye sun-clear,
To parting soul bring grandeur near. . .
In city or in solitude,
Step by step, lifts bad to good,
Without halting, without rest,
Lifting Better up to Best;
Planting seeds of knowledge pure,
Through earth to ripen, through heaven endure.

Writing around the same time, Emily Dickinson’s experience of spring is more ethereal and foreboding, as these first four lines of her twenty-line meditation show:

A Light exists in Spring
Not present on the Year
At any other period—
When March is scarcely here

In the 1891–1892 edition of Leaves of Grass Walt Whitman delights in something as simple as discovering “The First Dandelion”:

Simple and fresh and fair from winter’s close emerging,
As if no artifice of fashion, business, politics, had ever been,
Forth from its sunny nook of shelter’d grass—innocent, golden,
     calm as the dawn,
The spring’s first dandelion shows its trustful face.

For Robert Frost, a sense of the fleeting nature of discoveries like Whitman’s prompts “A Prayer in Spring,” which begins:

Oh, give us pleasure in the flowers today;
And give us not to think so far away
As the uncertain harvest; keep us here
All simply in the springing of the year.

The Poetry Foundation features links to a number of other splendid poems about spring. Won’t you share your favorite?

Related LOA works: Ralph Waldo Emerson: Collected Poems & Translations; Walt Whitman: Poems and Prose; American Religious Poems (includes “A Prayer in Spring”)

Oscar Wilde visits Walt Whitman in Camden, New Jersey

It was on this day in 1882 that twenty-seven-year-old Oscar Wilde, on his first lecture tour of America, paid a visit to the ailing sixty-two-year-old Walt Whitman at Whitman’s brother’s home in Camden, New Jersey. Whitman was delighted with the meeting, as he told a reporter from The Philadelphia Press who came to interview him that evening. To Whitman “[Wilde] seemed . . . like a great big, splendid boy.”

After they shared a bottle of home-brewed elderberry wine (made by Whitman’s sister-in-law Louisa) in his parlor, Whitman took Wilde to his “den” on the upper floor of the house and found his guest surprisingly unaffected. “I imagine that he laid aside any affectation he is said to have, and that I saw behind the scenes.” In discussing his aesthetic philosophy, Wilde reportedly said, “I can’t listen to anyone unless he attracts me by a charming style or by beauty of theme.” Whitman disagreed:

Why, Oscar, it always seems to me that the fellow who makes a dead set at beauty by itself is in a bad way. My idea is that beauty is a result, not an abstraction.

Wilde had eagerly arranged the meeting through his Philadelphia publisher and claimed a familiarity with Whitman’s work “almost from the cradle” owing to his mother having regularly read to him from one of the first copies of Leaves of Grass published in Ireland. Wilde reported his impressions to the Boston Herald ten days later:

I spent the most charming day I have spent in America [with Whitman] . . . He is the grandest man I have ever seen. The simplest, most natural, and strongest character I have ever met in my life. I regard him as one of those wonderful, large, entire men who might have lived in any age, and is not peculiar to any one people. Strong, true, and perfectly sane: the closest approach to the Greek we have yet had in modern times. Probably he is dreadfully misunderstood.

Wilde frequently mentioned his fondness for Whitman in his lectures and reminisced at length about the visit in an interview in February:

The room which has most impressed me [in America is] a little bare whitewashed room . . . [upstairs at 431 Stevens Street] in Camden town, where I met Walt Whitman, whom I admire intensely. . . There was a big chair for him and a little stool for me, a pine table on which was a copy of Shakespeare, a translation of Dante, and a cruse of water. Sunlight filled the room, and over the roofs of the houses opposite were the masts of the ships that lay in the river. But then the poet needs no rose to blossom on his walls for him, because he carries nature always in his heart. This room contains all the simple conditions for art—sunlight, good air, pure water, a sight of ships, and the poet’s works.

Also of interest:

• In the November 1882 issue of Century Magazine Helen Gray Cone published a parody “Narcissus in Camden,” which reimagines the conversation between the two poets as a poetic dialogue.
• Gary Scharnhorst’s biographical note (PDF) includes more information about Whitman and Wilde, who met again in May.
• In 2010 the University of Illinois Press published Oscar Wilde in America: The Interviews, edited by Scharnhorst and Matthew Hofer, which includes annotated transcriptions of forty-eight of the ninety-eight interviews Wilde gave during his 1882 tour.

Related LOA works: Walt Whitman: Poetry and Prose

Whitman’s first thoughts on Lincoln

Today on The New York Times’s Disunion blog, which tracks the day-by-day events of the Civil War, writer Adam Goodheart describes his recent visit to the Library of Congress. There he perused Walt Whitman’s notebooks and found, in the entries dating from 1860–61, Whitman’s first thoughts on Abraham Lincoln.

In one entry, Whitman conjures a mythic Lincoln to mirror his hopes for the perfect President: “I would be much pleased to see some heroic, shrewd, fully-informed, healthy-bodied, middle-aged, beard-faced American blacksmith or boatman come down from the West across the Alleghanies [sic], and walk into the Presidency, dressed in a clean suit of working attire, and with the tan all over his face, breast, and arms; I would certainly vote for that sort of man, possessing the due requirements, before any other candidate.” (Last week on Reader’s Almanac, we explored the significance of Lincoln’s new beard for American letters). The Disunion blog has posted some remarkable scanned images from the inside of Whitman’s notebook.

Also of interest:

• For more Civil War multimedia, visit the Library of Congress’s Flickr page to see a collection of recently scanned “Civil War Faces,” ambrotype and tin type portraits of Civil War soldiers.

• The Library of America is getting ready to publish The Civil War: The First Year Told By Those Who Lived It, the first of a four-volume set collecting letters and diaries from the heat of battle, along with speeches, articles, poems, songs, military reports, legal opinions, and memoirs. The contents of the volume were posted  yesterday on our website, the books will arrive from the printer in early January and will be available in bookstores on February 3.

Oliver Wendell Holmes observes the Transit of Venus and finds a “working creed”

The American Literary Blog reminds us that December 6, 1882, was one of only six occurrences in modern times when humans have witnessed the Transit of Venus, the cosmic moment when the second planet comes between the Earth and the sun. It’s an event rarer even than the return of Halley’s comet every seventy-six years. Observations have been recorded in 1639, 1781, 1769, 1874, 1882, and 2004. One more will occur in our lifetime: June 6, 2012, after which the next will be on December 11, 2117.

In the nineteenth century scientific expeditions were mounted to observe the events of 1874 and 1882 from the best vantage points. Walt Whitman recorded in his daybook for December 6, 1882, that he “saw the transit of Venus over the Sun, 11 a.m. through a piece of smoked glass, furnished me by a boy at the Camden ferry,” but no further mention of the event occurs in his prose or poetry.

Oliver Wendell Holmes waited in line on Boston Common to pay a dime to observe the event through a telescope. He memorialized the event in “The Flaneur” and in his autobiography. According to charts of the event, the 1882 transit took a little more than six minutes, so Holmes’s turn on the “tube” must have been propitiously timed—and perhaps dangerous for his eyesight:

The sun and I are face to face;
He glares at me, I stare at him;
And lo! My straining eye has found
A little spot that, black and round,
Lies near the crimsoned fire-orb’s rim.

The sight changed Holmes’s view of the universe, as a later verse captures:

A black, round spot,—and that is all;
And such a speck our earth would be
If he who looks upon the stars
Through the red atmosphere of Mars
Could see our little creeping ball
Across the disk of crimson crawl
As I our sister planet see.

Holmes mused on the experience in greater detail in his autobiography:

Ever since I paid ten cents for a peep through the telescope on the Common, and saw the transit of Venus, my whole idea of the creation has been singularly changed. . . . In looking at our planet equipped and provisioned for a long voyage in space,—its almost boundless stores of coal and other inflammable materials, its untired renewal of the forms of life, its compensations which keep its atmosphere capable of supporting life, the ever growing control over the powers of Nature which its inhabitants are acquiring,—all these things point to its fitness for a duration transcending all our ordinary measures of time. These conditions render possible the only theory which ‘can justify the ways of God to man,’ namely, that this colony of the universe is an educational institution so far as the human race is concerned. On this theory I base my hope for myself and my fellow-creatures. If, in the face of all the so-called evil to which I cannot close my eyes, I have managed to retain a cheerful optimism, it is because this educational theory is the basis of my working creed.

Of related interest:

• View a re-animation of the 1882 Transit of Venus.
• Read Amy Lowell's 1915 poem "Venus Transiens".
• Listen to John Philip Sousa’s 1883 Transit of Venus March. (In 1920 Sousa also wrote a novel entitled The Transit of Venus.)
• Read about Walt Whitman and the Meteor of 1860 (a previous Reader's Almanac post).

Related LOA works: American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century, volume one: Freneau to Whitman (includes "The Flaneur" and ten other poems by Holmes)

C. K. Williams, heir to Whitman, ponders prayer

Even though he turns seventy-four today, C. K. Williams continues avidly to ply his craft, writing new poems and inspiring listeners with his readings. In October the online-only The Manchester Review published “Writers Writing Dying” and Jonathan Timbers just blogged about the impact of a recent Williams reading.

Charles Simic once described Williams as “a poet of rundown neighborhoods, greasy spoons, gas stations, semi-abandoned children, Vietnam veterans in wheelchairs, miserable women married to unhappy men.” Anne Sexton called him “the Fellini of the written word.” Repair (1999) won the Pulitzer Prize and The Singing (2003) the National Book Award.

Williams is best known for his long line, so long it frequently runs past the margin of the page. Reviewing With Ignorance in 1977, James Atlas commented: “The lines are so long that the book had to be published in a wide-page format, like an art catalogue.” Yet this expansive line suits Williams’s penchant for philosophical investigations and qualifications.

Harold Bloom selected “The Vessel” from Williams’s 1992 collection A Dream of Mind for inclusion in American Religious Poems, an anthology that identifies Walt Whitman as “our prime shaman of the American Religion.” In “On Whitman: Mortality,” Williams affirms the importance of Whitman in the tradition of spirituality: 

... when I give myself over to Leaves of Grass, I come marvelously close to having something like an intuition of deathlessness, an experience that blossoms out of the fusion of that primitive instinct to go on forever, with the poetic force of the matter of Whitman’s song.

In “The Vessel” Williams explores and questions the meaning of prayer even as he tries to pray:

I’m trying to pray; one of the voices of my mind says, “God,
     please help me to do this,”
but another voice intervenes: “How conceive God’s interest
     would be to help you believe?”

Commenting on the inspiration for “The Vessel” in Jewish American Poetry: Poems, Commentary, and Reflections, Williams wrote:

But then comes this other thing, this prayer-thing, which seems in some absurd way to have nothing to do with anything else, but still brought with it moments, though I think perhaps they’re all over now, when I would long towards the god I knew had to hover out beyond questions of theodicy, beyond issues of theology: I called on him to resolve that bleak, obsessive question the yes-no mind of the mortal has to ask because we can never have a yes without a perhaps or a no; the question of why existence at all, and if so, why then the twice why of the nonexistence of being dead?

Of related interest:

• Watch a 2008 interview with C. K. Williams
• Read and listen to other poems by C. K. Williams at the Poetry Foundation

Related LOA works: American Religious Poems: An Anthology by Harold Bloom; Walt Whitman: Poetry and Prose

Joel Barlow, Joaquin Miller, Walt Whitman, Trumbull Stickney, Hart Crane, Robert Frost: poets appraise Columbus

Many poets have evoked Columbus over the years. In 1787 one of the “Hartford Wits,” thirty-four-year-old Joel Barlow, published his long epic poem The Vision of Columbus by subscription; his readers included George Washington and Thomas Paine. Twenty years later he revised it extensively and republished it as The Columbiad. In this excerpt Columbus first sees the New Land:

High moved the scene, Columbus gazed sublime,
And thus in prospect hail'd the happy clime:
Blest be the race my guardian guide shall lead
Where these wide vales their various bounties spread.
What treasured stores the hills must here combine!

In 1892 Joaquin Miller composed “Columbus” for the 400th anniversary of the discovery of America. For decades this poem, memorized by millions of schoolchildren, rivaled the Gettysburg Address in popularity. “Sail on” memorably closes each stanza, leading to the climax:

Then, pale and worn, he kept his deck,
    And peered through darkness. Ah, that night
Of all dark nights! And then a speck—
    A light! A light! A light! A light!
It grew, a starlit flag unfurled!
    It grew to be Time’s burst of dawn.
He gained a world; he gave that world
    Its grandest lesson: “On! sail on!”

The same anniversary year moved Walt Whitman to write “Prayer of Columbus.” Here Columbus is not one of the heroic voyagers of Whitman’s 1870 “Passage to India” but “A BATTER’D, wreck’d old man” composing a last desperate prayer that isn’t answered until the last stanza:

And these things I see suddenly, what mean they?
As if some miracle, some hand divine unseal’d my eyes,
Shadowy, vast shapes, smile through the air and sky,
And on the distant waves sail countless ships,
And anthems in new tongues I hear saluting me.

Ten years later Trumbull Stickney would adopt a much more critical stance in a fifteen-line broadside:

You say, Columbus with his argosies
Who rash and greedy took the screaming main
And vanished out before the hurricane
Into the sunset after merchandise,
Then under western palms with simple eyes
Trafficked and robbed and triumphed home again:
You say this is the glory of the brain
And human life no other use than this?
I then do answering say to you: The line
Of wizards and of saviours, keeping trust
In that which made them pensive and divine,
Passes before us like a cloud of dust.
What were they? Actors, ill and mad with wine,
And all their language babble and disgust.

In the late 1920s Hart Crane found in Columbus’s journals the solution to how he would begin his epic 1930 poem, The Bridge. Columbus’s descriptions resonated with Crane’s own experiences of the Caribbean and in the “Ave Maria” section of The Bridge Columbus appears as one mystically redeemed by his first experience of the new continent:

I thought of Genoa; and this truth, now proved,
That made me exile in her streets, stood me
More absolute than eve—biding the moon
Till dawn should clear that dim frontier, first seen
—The Chan’s great continent . . . Then faith, not fear
Nigh surged me witless . . . Heaving the surf near—
I, wonder-breathing, kept the watch,—saw
The first palm chevron the first lighted hill.

In “America Is Hard to See” (1951), Robert Frost contrasts how as a youth he viewed Columbus when he would have “had Columbus sung / As a god who had given us / A more than Moses’ exodus.” Now older and more sardonic, he realizes:

But all he did was spread the room
Of our enacting out the doom
Of being in each other’s way,
And so put off the weary day
When we should have to put our mind
On how to crowd but still be kind.

Listen to N. Scott Momaday read “You say, Columbus with his argosies” in Segment Five of The Republic of Verse.

Related LOA works: Four Centuries of American Poetry (5 volumes); Walt Whitman: Poetry and Prose; Hart Crane: Complete Poems and Selected Letters; Robert Frost: Collected Poems, Prose, and Plays

Walt Whitman and the Meteor of 1860

The Richmonder blog is commemorating the sesquicentennial of the American Civil War with a series of posts following the history of the war as it occurred 150 years ago. This week’s post revisits the week of July 15 to July 21, which included campaign stops by Horace Greeley stumping for Abraham Lincoln and by Stephen A. Douglas, who broke with tradition by campaigning for himself.

But perhaps the most striking occurrence was the “Meteor of 1860,” what astronomers call an “Earth-grazing meteor procession,” a string of fireballs that began over Michigan late in the evening of July 20, 1860, and passed over New York and New Haven before disappearing over the Atlantic Ocean. An article in the July issue of Sky & Telescope describes how an English professor and an astronomer at Texas State University used the Frederic Church painting, The Meteor of 1860, to identify this event as the inspiration for Walt Whitman’s “Year of Meteors” (1859-1860).

Year of meteors! brooding year!

I would bind in words retrospective some of your deeds and signs,

I would sing your contest for the 19th Presidentiad,

I would sing how an old man, tall, with white hair, mounted the scaffold in Virginia,

(I was at hand, silent I stood with teeth shut close, I watch'd,

I stood very near you old man when cool and indifferent, but trembling with age and your unheal'd wounds you mounted the scaffold;)

I would sing in my copious song your census returns of the States,

The tables of population and products, I would sing of your ships and their cargoes,

The proud black ships of Manhattan arriving, some fill'd with immigrants, some from the isthmus with cargoes of gold,

Songs thereof would I sing, to all that hitherward comes would welcome give,

And you would I sing, fair stripling! welcome to you from me, young prince of England!

(Remember you surging Manhattan's crowds as you pass'd with your cortege of nobles?

There in the crowds stood I, and singled you out with attachment;)

Nor forget I to sing of the wonder, the ship as she swam up my bay,

Well-shaped and stately the Great Eastern swam up my bay, she was 600 feet long,

Her moving swiftly surrounded by myriads of small craft I forget not to sing;

Nor the comet that came unannounced out of the north flaring in heaven,

Nor the strange huge meteor-procession dazzling and clear shooting over our heads,

(A moment, a moment long it sail'd its balls of unearthly light over our heads,

Then departed, dropt in the night, and was gone;)

Of such, and fitful as they, I sing—with gleams from them would gleam and patch these chants,

Your chants, O year all mottled with evil and good—year of forebodings!

Year of comets and meteors transient and strange—lo! even here one equally transient and strange!

As I flit through you hastily, soon to fall and be gone, what is this chant,

What am I myself but one of your meteors?

Related LOA works: Walt Whitman: Poetry and Prose; Abraham Lincoln: Speeches and Writings 1859–1865