Whitman in Europe

Whitman recalls how, lying down one rainy day in Missouri, he took up a book of poems by Milton, Young, Gray, Beattie and Collins, then gave it up 'for a bad job'. He regaled himself for a while with some Walter Scott, but then reflected how

One's mind needs but a moment's deliberation anywhere in the United States to see clearly enough that all the prevalent book and library poets, either as imported from Great Britain, or follow'd and doppel-gang 'd here, are foreign to our States, copiously as they are read by us all. But to fully understand not only how absolutely in opposition to our times and lands, and how little and cramp'd, and what anachronisms and absurdities many of their pages are, for American purposes, one must dwell or travel awhile in Missouri, Kansas and Colorado, and get rapport with their people and country.

'Will the day ever come,' he asks, ' - no matter how long deferr'd - when those models and lay-figures from the British islands - and even the precious traditions of the classics - will be reminiscences, studies only?' He longs for

the pure breath, primitiveness, boundless prodigality and amplitude, strange mixture of delicacy and power, of continence, of real and ideal, and of all original and first-class elements, of these prairies, the Rocky mountains, and of the Mississippi and Missouri rivers - will they ever appear in, and in some sort form a standard for our poetry and art?

By the time he died, American poetry had begun to make itself; what is more, poets resting on rainy days somewhere along the River Tyne, or the Mersey, or the Thames, or the Severn, or the Clyde, were taking up his book and finding their way into the present tense.

Whitman was seven years Browning's junior and outlived him by three years, dying (as Tennyson did) in 1892. Yet they are so wholly remote from one another that they seem to exist in different languages.

We were originally asked by our host to focus our reflections on Whitman in the year 1862, when he came to Washington and worked in this very building. Had I followed this injunction my lecture would have been blessedly short because in 1862 Whitman was quite unknown in Britain. Indeed, he did not properly arrive there, except as hearsay, for another six years, when William Michael Rossetti, brother of Dante Gabriel and Christina, published his work in a judicious, though some might say Bowdlerised, selection carefully designed so as not to give moral offence to the British or editorial offence to Whitman himself. Rossetti and his group hailed the American poet as a comrade, sharing as he seemed to them to do the 'Pre-Raphaelite revolutionary sentiment'.¹ Their approach, common in the British cultural world then and now, was to appropriate and partly assimilate rather than to acknowledge the explosive otherness of Whitman's work. The Cadmus poems might not have appealed so unambiguously. The Pre-Raphaelite Whitman is conventionally wholesome.

In the later nineteenth century he attracted a number of British advocates beyond William Michael Rossetti, and several serious poetic debtors. One of his early and most committed devotees was Anne Burrows Gilchrist, widow of Alexander Gilchrist with whom she wrote the first Life of Blake. She fell deeply under Whitman's spell, writing 'A Woman's Estimate of Walt Whitman' in 1870. He sent her a ring which she misunderstood and came to the United States in 1876 with her children, hoping to bear the poet some offspring of his own. In the event they became close but not intimate friends. She stayed in the United States for a year and a half, her children grew to love the poet, and her son Herbert sketched and painted him, once sitting naked by Timber Creek in New Jersey, where he used to repair to after his stroke. The fact that she came to Whitman through the portal, as it were, of William Blake, who bears so many resemblances to Whitman and whose work Whitman knew, though he did not emphasise the knowledge, is illuminating. Most British poets who come to Whitman are rebelling against something in their culture. They turn to him as to a liberator.

For Robert Louis Stevenson, as a Scot who found the contemporary British poetry world narrow and enervated, Whitman was a kind of road to Damascus. In an essay entitled 'Books which have Influenced Me' he calls Leaves of Grass

a book of singular service, a book which tumbled the world upside down for me, blew into space a thousand cobwebs of genteel and ethical illusion, and, having thus shaken my tabernacle of lies, set me back again upon a strong foundation of all the original and manly virtues. But it is, once more, only a book for those who have the gift of reading. [...] The average man lives, and must live, so wholly in convention, that gun-powder charges of the truth are more apt to discompose than to invigorate his creed. Either he cries out upon blasphemy and indecency, and crouches the closer round that little idol of part-truths and part-conveniences which is the contemporary deity, or he is convinced by what is new, forgets what is old, and becomes truly blasphemous and indecent himself. New truth is only useful to supplement the old; rough truth is only wanted to expand, or to destroy, our civil and often elegant conventions...

Stevenson knew more of Whitman than William Michael Rossetti's scrubbed-up version. It was the poet and the prose-writer he celebrated. In his book of essays Familiar Studies of Men and Books, written earlier than the passage I just quoted, Stevenson was more politic in his advocacy, trying to persuade rather than cajole doubting readers to consider the writer who had limbered him up to write a new kind of verse.

Seeing so much in Whitman that was merely ridiculous, as well as so much more that was unsurpassed in force and fitness, - seeing the true prophet doubled, as I thought, in places with the Bull in a China Shop, - it appeared best to steer a middle course, and to laugh with the scorners when I thought they had any excuse, while I made haste to rejoice with the rejoicers over what is imperishably good, lovely, human, or divine, in his extraordinary poems.

To a British reader in the second half of the nineteenth century lines such as these must have taken him by the throat because of their unalloyed, unliterary directness, as in Leaves of Grass 12:

The butcher-boy puts off his killing-clothes, or sharpens his knife at the stall in the market,
I loiter enjoying his repartee and his shuffle and break-down.

Blacksmiths with grimed and hairy chests environ the anvil,
Each has his main-sledge, they are all out, there is a great heat in the fire.

From the cinder-strew'd threshold I follow their movements,
The lithe sheer of their waists plays even with their massive arms,
Overhand the hammers swing, overhand so slow, overhand so sure,
They do not hasten, each man hits in his place.

Yet in the end it is Whitman's 'philosophy' that Stevenson recommends, taking almost for granted his clear eye, which sees boldly and celebrates from heart and groin.

Stevenson's third chapter in Familiar Studies is given over entirely to Whitman. He acquits readers of not enjoying the poet's language. He's not up there with Shakespeare or Milton, he concedes. But it is a failure of intelligence or arrant prejudice, he says, that blinds readers to what he has to say. He falls in with the Whitman as Prophet ('for lack of a more exact expression') claque: 'Whether he may greatly influence the future or not, he is a notable symptom of the present.' He is 'like a large shaggy dog, just unchained, scouring the beaches of the world and baying at the moon'. Fortunately, he does not mention the 'barbaric yawp'.

But, as against D.H. Lawrence's view, which we will come to in a moment, Stevenson senses in Whitman less spontaneity, more design and intent, more deliberate form and fiction:

The whole of Whitman's work is deliberate and preconceived. [...] He conceived the idea of a Literature which was to inhere in the life of the present; which was to be, first, human, and next, American; which was to be brave and cheerful as per contract; to give culture in a popular and poetical presentment; and, in so doing, catch and stereotype some democratic ideal of humanity which should be equally natural to all grades of wealth and education, and suited, in one of his favourite phrases, to 'the average man'. [...] He does not profess to have built the castle, but he pretends he has traced the lines of the foundation. He has not made the poetry, but he flatters himself he has done something towards making the poets.

Both Stevenson and Lawrence constructively misread Whitman, just as Sandburg and Ginsberg were to do. It is impossible for a poet not to misread him: he is tremendously useful in formulating different selves who, in the end, use him as a partial mirror rather than a writer of poems. For Stevenson, Whitman is as close as a dear friend, almost as close as himself. So he asks,

Now, how is the poet to convince like nature, and not like books? Is there no actual piece of nature that he can show the man to his face, as he might show him a tree if they were walking together? Yes, there is one: the man's own thoughts. In fact, if the poet is to speak efficaciously, he must say what is already in his hearer's mind. That, alone, the hearer will believe; that, alone, he will be able to apply intelligently to the facts of life. Any conviction, even if it be a whole system or a whole religion, must pass into the condition of commonplace, or postulate, before it becomes fully operative.

This is an extraordinary notion, high and ridiculous, and it took the afflatus of Whitman, and the clownishness of Whitman, to elevate Stevenson to this altitude. Yet here perhaps we do get close to something peculiar to Whitman as it is to Frost, and Sandburg, and Jeffers, and Oppen and Reznikoff in some of their phases, and certainly to Stephen Crane, a sense that the poet creates templates and that each reader invests those templates with his or her own experience, that the poet shapes a space in rhythmic language in which the imagination and the memory of the reader are activated. And activated in an affirmative sense. 'Whitman [...] sees that, if the poet is to be of any help, he must testify to the livableness of life.' The poet arranges those templates so that we as readers invest them with a personal content, and yet at the end of the reading each of us, because of the ordering and arrangement, reaches a similar end - not a conclusion, because positive inconclusiveness is Whitman's strategy; but a sense that with our different luggage we have all travelled the same road and reached the same crossroad.

And it interests me greatly that his sense of freedom consisted in part in leaving the text firmly on the page, available to any voice, and not projected by his own. Though he lectured, he did not give poetry readings, except to recite 'O captain', a poem he came to dislike. He was not a public performer of his verse, any more than Lawrence was. We remember the abashment of Lawrence when asked to read at the Poetry Book Shop: he insisted on turning his back on the audience to read. Whitman creates a written form, and those who insist on his orality commit a serious mistake. The poem has its orality, a template; the poem is not 'spoken by a voice' and does not generally follow the patterns of speech. What Sandburg and Ginsberg and in a different spirit Jeffers do with this open legacy is to close it, or enclose it, into distinctive personal voices and rhythms. The impersonality of Whitman's I, borrowing the cadences of the Bible, could hardly be more emphatic; his I could hardly be more universal. Instead of his name, in the first edition of Leaves of Grass, Whitman placed a daguerreotype: the poet in proletarian garb. He required a big page for the long lines - eight by eleven inches.

Mark Strand speaks of the poet's 'democratic' syntax, by which he means 'the nonsubordination of the clauses', and this is surely the key to his even, accruing power and to the way he repels poets reared in Browning's dramatic, climaxing school. Whitman is all about access: to experience, to language, to one another. The poetry spreads in space, into vistas, and the movement is in space. The isolating monologue would have chilled his blood.

So when Stevenson says Whitman he means Whitman's great poem, an entity in itself. 'Whitman [...] sees that, if the poet is to be of any help, he must testify to the livableness of life.' Liveable even when most painful, most strained. Stevenson goes on:

And perhaps, out of all his writings, the best and the most human and convincing passages are to be found in 'these soil'd and creas'd little livraisons, each composed of a sheet or two of paper, folded small to carry in the pocket, and fastened with a pin,' which he scribbled during the war by the bedsides of the wounded or in the excitement of great events. They are hardly literature in the formal meaning of the word; he has left his jottings for the most part as he made them; a homely detail, a word from the lips of a dying soldier, a business memorandum, the copy of a letter - short, straightforwar, to the point, with none of the trappings of composition; but they breathe a profound sentiment, they give us a vivid look at one of the sides of life, and they make us acquainted with a man whom it is an honour to love.

The Whitman he loved issued a Crede: 'This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks... read these leaves in the open air in every season of every year of your life..., dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem.' The poem happens before us, giant and inclusive. We ride as much as read the long-cadenced lines. There are the great lists that itemise America, the continuous repetitions of phrase and syntactical structure, the unhallowed liturgy of love and desire.



In the declining years of his life, Whitman's most devoted readership was British, not American. The working men of Bury and Bolton took him as their visionary high priest, part of a socialist movement informed by Morris and Ruskin but given body and soul by Whitman. A real priest, Gerard Manley Hopkins, was disgusted by his own deep response to Whitman. In 1882 he wrote to Robert Bridges: 'I might as well say what I should not otherwise have said, that I always knew in my heart Walt Whitman's mind to be more like my own than any other man's living. As he is a very great scoundrel this is not a pleasant confession. And this also makes me the more desirous to read him and the more determined that I will not.'

The fin de siècle poets and dramatists had other reasons for reading him, the novelists too. Most people who declare an interest in poetry, Auden reminds us, are usually interested in something else: politics, religion, gossip... Few read Whitman for his prosody or formal invention. What drew them was his vatic tones, his huge confidence, his blithe taking of risks, and his unalloyed matter, and also his 'exuberant homo-eroticism', as the English poet, critic and historian of gay literature Greg Woods puts it. He 'sent shock waves through the furtive gentility of Britain's Uranian community', transforming their nostalgic classicism into something forward-looking, affirmative, visionary: a sensual world that included them in modern terms. They were no longer surrounded by broken columns, classical togas or classical nudity; they donned metaphorical working clothes and went gratefully among common men, locomotives and factories and fields and ships, got their hands dirty and their faces ruddy and smudged, in the present tense, the 'urgent insurgent now' as D.H. Lawrence calls it.

When Oscar Wilde was thirteen his mother had read him passages from Leaves of Grass. At Oxford in his exams in 1878, one of the questions asked what Aristotle might have made of Whitman. Behind Wilde's caustic wit, over-refinement and drollness lay concealed the touchstone of Whitman. Four years after Oxford, visiting and lecturing in the United States, he went to call on the poet in Camden. The old and young man regarded one another with respectful misunderstanding. Whitman thought Wilde 'manly' as well as 'frank and outspoken'. Wilde insisted that Whitman made no secret of his homosexuality, an odd statement given the lengths to which the poet went to refute the claim. Wilde declared: 'The kiss of Walt Whitman is still on my lips.'

After Wilde was convicted in 1895, three years after Whitman died, homosexual impropriety of the kind Wilde represented was no longer tolerated. A stigma attached not only to it but to all the mannerisms that went with it - the aphoristic wit, the campness and effeminacy that previously seemed a property of a certain social class. Whitman's quite other voice came into its own: an alternative idiom and manner to the one Wilde had disfigured, an alternative rhetoric, a collective and manly and comradely rather than an exclusive, witty and decadent voice. This was the end of the 'great refinement' of which Robert Louis Stevenson speaks disparagingly in 1887:

The great refinement of many poetical gentlemen has rendered them practically unfit for the jostling and ugliness of life, and they record their unfitness at considerable length. The bold and awful poetry of Job's complaint produces too many flimsy imitators; for there is always something consolatory in grandeur, but the symphony transposed for the piano becomes hysterically sad. This literature of woe, as Whitman calls it, this MALADIE DE RENE, as we like to call it in Europe, is in many ways a most humiliating and sickly phenomenon. Young gentlemen with three or four hundred a year of private means look down from a pinnacle of doleful experience on all the grown and hearty men who have dared to say a good word for life since the beginning of the world. There is no prophet but the melancholy Jacques, and the blue devils dance on all our literary wires.

The century turned, and the Great War followed the many wars of the nineteenth century. There is no social refinement at all about D.H. Lawrence's approach to Whitman. He keeps calling him 'Walter', wagging a finger at him and taking him to task .² So, you pretend to encompass all man- and womankind. In that case, you have no I, no first person singular, no lyric presence, no accountable authority. 'There can't be much of you left when you've done. When you've cooked the awful pudding of One Identity.'

If he could 'be' everything he knew and named, then of course he couldn't be the things he didn't know, so his encompassing I, in Lawrence's view, is too literal-minded and fails to cross the bar into the twentieth century. But that's not the issue: what troubles Lawrence is that what he did know he pretended to assimilate. 'As soon as Walt knew a thing, he assumed a One Identity with it. If he knew that an Eskimo sat in a kyak, immediately there was Walt being little and yellow and greasy, sitting in a kyak.' Lawrence's reductive racial stereotypes apart (and he returns to them several times), his Whitman is like the protagonist of Süskind's Perfume, a man without any body odour of his own, and who thus craves the reek of the human, especially ultimate smells. If Whitman is not a serial murderer like Süskind's perfumier, he is a metaphorical cannibal. His arrogation of universality, and his prophetic pitch backed by an Emersonian fog of good will rather than by the monitory sternness or the apocalyptic rage of the Biblical prophets, leaves Lawrence cold. The dilation of self in a generalised, democratic air makes Whitman's stance often meretricious and always suspect. Because he is everyone he is no one, and we cannot hold him to account.

After his impatience in the Whitman essay, the final, climactic chapter of Studies in Classic American Literature, Lawrence suddenly changes key. 'Whitman, the great poet, has meant so much to me. Whitman, the one man breaking a way ahead. Whitman, the one pioneer. And only Whitman. No English pioneers, no French. No European pioneer-poets. In Europe the would-be pioneers are mere innovators.' But alas, Lawrence says, there is nothing beyond Whitman because - he's a dead end. He is Moses staring from Pisgah at a land neither he nor his followers will ever reach. We remember how in Moby-Dick the minister climbs into the high 'Pisgah of his pulpit' to deliver his great Jonah and the Whale sermon. Thus Whitman, American through and through, though unlike Melville or his minister he has no sense of evil, only of bad. Whitman is on the face of it affirmative and benign, what overshadows his world is generally man-made and therefore susceptible to human correction, and the light that blazes out of his poems is a human light, not demonic and not divine.

Well, he does have heirs in Britain, true heirs and false heirs. D.H. Lawrence himself is a true heir, writing in the spirit of Whitman, with a similar assurance. For Lawrence, as for Whitman, the purpose of art is moral before it is aesthetic, the moral outweighing the aesthetic category. Art teaches, but it does not teach directly or conventionally: it effects a change 'in the blood' which becomes a change in the mind. Poetry, contrary to what Auden suggests in his elegy to Yeats, does make something real happen in the reader or auditor. Whitman breaks with the duplicity of earlier American and most British writers, in whose work the mind gives allegiance to a morality which the body resists and tries to repudiate, though it fails and suffers the consequences. In Whitman mind and body come together, with the balance tipped in the body's favour, famously in the lines:

Camerado, this is no book,
Who touches this touches a man,
(Is it night? are we here together alone?)
It is I you hold and who holds you,
I spring from the pages into your arms...

A century later Greg Woods imagines two lads, call them Peter and Walt, leaning lightly together in a doorway, eating a melon. They have the melon, they have their melon and they eat it, and the passers-by pass by. They either don't see at all or look askance. The soul, says Whitman, says Lawrence, lives in the body and ought to be grateful to it; and the body lives upon earth and ought to be grateful to it. 'A morality of actual living, not of salvation,' says Lawrence .³ Some modern poets, not all of them in the free verse camp, have learned the lesson. The hope of salvation no longer displaces the present; Whitman celebrates the present and its comradeship, the single aria and the joyful duet:

Two together!
Winds blow south, or winds blow north,
Day come white, or night come black,
Home, or rivers and mountains from home,
Singing all time, minding no time,
While we two keep together.

That is why there is a paradoxical feel about the form his poems adopt, the Biblical echoes we hear in his cadences, the pulpit voice, especially when, carried away, he strays from the road of particular sympathy back to the realm of One Identity or, worse, generalised, reflex love and charity. His sympathy acknowledges otherness and forms a relation with it; but his empathy is easier, in effect colonising otherness, assimilating it, depriving it of physical and moral particularity. That is Lawrence's objection to 'I am everyone'; the authentic spirit of Whitman ought to be 'everyone is, and I am'. Often, in the poetry, this is indeed what happens, as in Leaves of Grass 9:

The big doors of the country barn stand open and ready,
The dried grass of the harvest-time loads the slow wagon,
The clear light plays on the brown gray and green intertinged,
The armfuls are pack'd to the sagging mow.

I am there, I help, I came stretch'd atop of the load,
I felt its soft jolts, one leg reclined on the other,
I jump from the cross-beams and seize the clover and timothy,
And roll head over heels and tangle my hair full of wisps.

Lawrence contrasts sympathy, which discriminates between 'good' and 'bad' prostitutes, for example, or which with the leper acknowledges and loathes the disease and does not embrace it, with the self-effacing empathy which insults the soul within its very house by refusing to discriminate. Lawrence tries to find in Whitman an invitation, not to complicity with all things, good and bad, but to an acknowledgement of all things, a very different matter. He loves the great catalogue of America that Whitman assembles, the pluri bus, but deplores rather the unum of the intended salad.

For Lawrence Whitman, the moral teacher, at his most responsible releases serious readers and other writers from the trammels of Christian and Utilitarian orthodoxy and empowers them to live in and with the present. It is not a peaceful place, this 'urgent, insurgent Now'; it is a place of happenings, changes. Freedom within it entails finding ways of writing remote from the conventions of the day. The Biblical and Blakean inheritance (for he was conditioned by the Authorised Version in his early years and knew the writing of Blake, whose cadences and strategies his so often resemble) are less original than they might at first seem. They have long roots, back into a British vernacular tradition which, sporadically, animates whole zones of English poetry: Langland, for example, and the alliterative poets of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries; then in the eighteenth Christopher Smart, maybe MacPherson of the Ossianic forgeries, and (again) William Blake...

There is however a more conventional thread in Whitman's prosody, though many American poets don't like to acknowledge it. His originality is in the variety of his resources rather than in their novelty. For he has deep roots in a conventional prosodic tradition. 'Out of the cradle endlessly rocking' is clearly a complex counterpointing of dactyls and trochees, and this subtle regularity informs the whole poem. As in Biblical verse, as in Blake, there are careful repetitions of syntactical structure and parallelisms - the opening lines starting Out Out Out Over Down Up, then eight lines starting with From, and all through a dynamic, breathing caesura... This is not speech in any sense, and this is not 'free verse' in the manner of Laforgue or Eliot or Pound. Again I turn to Stevenson who read Whitman with such lucid attention:

Something should be said of Whitman's style, for style is of the essence of thinking. And where a man is so critically deliberate as our author, and goes solemnly about his poetry for an ulterior end, every indication is worth notice. He has chosen a rough, unrhymed, lyrical verse; sometimes instinct with a fine processional movement;often so rugged and careless that it can only be described by saying that he has not taken the trouble to write prose. [...] According to Whitman [...] 'the time has arrived to essentially break down the barriers of form between Prose and Poetry... for the most cogent purposes of those great inland states, and for Texas, and California, and Oregon;' - a statement which is among the happiest achievements of American humour. He calls his verses 'recitatives', an easily followed allusion to a musical form. 'Easily-written, loose-fingered chords,' he cries, 'I feel the thrum of your climax and close.' Too often, I fear, he is the only one who can perceive the rhythm; and in spite of Mr. Swinburne, a great part of his work considered as verses is poor bald stuff.

But then Stevenson by sleight of hand proposes a way of reading remote from the actual language of the poetry itself:

Considered, not as verse, but as speech, a great part of it is full of strange and admirable merits. The right detail is seized; the right word, bold and trenchant, is thrust into its place. Whitman has small regard to literary decencies, and is totally free from literary timidities. He is neither afraid of being slangy nor of being dull; nor, let me add, of being ridiculous. The result is a most surprising compound of plain grandeur, sentimental affectation, and downright nonsense. [...] And one thing is certain, that no one can appreciate Whitman's excellences until he has grown accustomed to his faults. Until you are content to pick poetry out of his pages almost as you must pick it out of a Greek play in Bohn's translation, your gravity will be continually upset, your ears perpetually disappointed [...].

As Stevenson is Whitman's greatest nineteenth-century British advocate, so Lawrence is his twentieth-century champion. Thanks to Lawrence, Whitman had his decisive impact on W.H. Auden, who was fascinated both by Whitman and by Lawrence's essay on him, which he read, or re-read, when he emigrated to the United States before the Second World War. And through Lawrence Whitman came to affect (not that fancifully, I think, given what he admits about his early years, and the ghosts of Yeats and Dylan Thomas in his adolescent poetic machine) Philip Larkin. Larkin in 1964 confessed, 'Actually, I like the Beat poets, but again I don't know much about them. That's because I'm fond of Whitman; they seem to me debased Whitman, but debased Whitman is better than debased Pound.'⁴ Pound was one of Larkin's three unspeakable bête noir Ps, alongside Picasso and Charlie Parker, artists who perverted, as he saw it, the course of the arts they practised.

'There is a Higher Furtiveness in Whitman,' says James Fenton in one of his Oxford lectures (and he too, so much in Auden's and Larkin's debt, owes something to Whitman). He contrasts how, for Lawrence, Whitman writes as a man, while for Auden he writes as a persona. Two contradictory takes, stemming from different artistic interests and each plausible, neither complete. I will come back to this, and to how getting this right, if it can be got right, is a key to getting Whitman right, if he can be got right. And how not many of his British or American readers, deploying him as a clause in a cultural argument about nationality and literature, sexuality and literature, orality and literature, or technical 'freedom' and literature, have managed to do.

Through Lawrence, too, Whitman reaches Ted Hughes, and differently Thom Gunn, his most lucid expositor in the second half of the twentieth century, and through them he affects following generations of poets. Whitman was clearly no dead end: he was a various, though not a prescriptive, progenitor. As they do with Emerson, writers take what they want or need for their art or argument and disregard passages that contradict (he is nothing if not paradoxical: 'I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself').

Lawrence and Stevenson as the main conduits for Whitman's poetry and prophecy: a working-class Nottingham writer, out of love with the Establishment, and a Scot who rebelled against the constraints of English orthodoxies; and then another camp, of homosexual writers looking for some kind of validation... The Antigones, not the Creons, turn to him. And who are these Antigones upon whom Whitman leaves his mark?

His work appealed to composers, Charles Ives of course but in Britain notably to Vaughan Williams in the Sea Symphony and to Delius setting 'Sea Drift', finding in the flow of Whitman's richly vocalic cadences an effective libretto, with arias and duets. Whitman was after all a lover of the opera, and images from that art occur frequently in his poems. Franz Kafka regarded him as a supreme formal innovator. Thomas Mann regarded Song of Myself as 'a great, important, indeed holy gift'. E.M. Forster takes the title Passage to India from Whitman, a deliberate encoding of a crucial, unstated theme. Van Gogh admired him as one admires a healer, promising 'a world of healthy, carnal love, strong and frank' under a benign overarching starlit sky (the sky of some of Van Gogh's paintings). Henry James and Melville and Swinburne responded to him; rather tetchily even Tennyson nodded in his direction, and of course the Rossettis, and through them Yeats. The curmudgeonly Hugh MacDiarmid, the great Scottish poet, father of the Scottish Literary Renaissance, proclaimed in 1923 that Whitman was, with Byron, 'the profoundest influence on subsequent and contemporary poetry in every country in Europe'.

In the time that remains I'd like to concentrate on Whitman's twentieth-century British beneficiaries, in particular Christopher Middleton, Thom Gunn and Edwin Morgan. His direct impact on British women writers appears to me to have been less marked.

In his finest single essay, 'Notes on the Viking Prow', Christopher Middleton sees Whitman as part of a wider European phenomenon that needs bringing to consciousness and then, perhaps, attenuation. 'The liberating force of poetry as we know it today derives much from volcanic expressions in the recent past. From Whitman to Artaud - crises in the guts, psyche and voice, oceanic feeling, democracy, elaborate invention of human interiors, not excluding the anguish of Artaud's anus. The great confessional crowing, at its most intense, can show what reckless and savage stuff a creative individual is made of.' Donald Davie, too, takes the confessional to task, seeing in Whitman the confession of virtue, as opposed to the more vulnerable confessions of Lowell and Plath, for example: yet for him, as for Middleton, Whitman is at the root of their theatrical candour. Yet surely Whitman's work decisively displaces the 'personality' of the author.

To recapture poetic reality in a tottering world, we may have to revise, once more, the idea of a poem as an expression of the 'contents' of a subjectivity. Some poems, at least, and some types of poetic language, constitute structures of a singularly radiant kind, where 'self-expression' has undergone a profound change of function. We experience these structures, if not as revelations of being, then as apertures upon being. We experience them as we experience nothing else.

Middleton's argument is hortatory rather than polemical, pulling back the corner on a creative possibility which looks new but is in fact the fons et origo.

If Middleton's analysis of the state of the British and American imagination is correct and if poets had the subtlety and tenacity of mind to take his arguments on board, even if only to reject them consciously, it would mark the beginning of a change in the creative environment. Middleton has much in common, in terms of outlook, with the New York School poets, but there is a severity in him, a trained philologist, scholar and translator, a luminous critic. Perhaps that is why he rather misreads Whitman, who is on his side in this matter.

Thom Gunn's love for Whitman is part and parcel of his love for Lawrence. In his essay 'Forays against the Republic' in Shelf Life he takes issue with Lawrence and commends Whitman's All Oneness:

Whitman's self is both exceptional and average, representative and individual, a rich young lady and Walt Whitman, one of the roughs and Jesus Christ. Each merges into the other, like leaves of grass into the prairie or individuals into a visionary democracy. A democracy is supposed to be a society of free association, as opposed to one in which there is hierarchical subordination. Thus the poem proceeds in a loosely associationistic manner, its very structure promiscuous and democratic, and Whitman transforms the early Romantic practice of a rather mild associationism into an assured and extreme narrative disjunctiveness that we must look forward some sixty years to equal.

He applauds Whitman's 'juxtaposition and improvisation' as though he anticipates modernism and jazz and much else, and approvingly quotes di Piero's formulation, that Whitman's verse is 'revelatory (and even interpretative) but not explanatory'. Not explanatory. Poetry is a language different in construction from prose, different in purpose and usage. Poetry is process, even when it is written down, printed, and folded inside a book.

The Scottish poet Edwin Morgan finds his point of departure in the preface to November Boughs (1888), where Whitman, an old man with his poetry written, reflects on a critic's comment that science with its 'all-devouring force' was bound to displace poetry within fifty years. On the contrary, Whitman says:

Only a firmer, vastly broader, new area begins to exist - nay, is already form'd - to which the poetic genius must emigrate. Whatever may have been the case in years gone by, the true use for the imaginative faculty of modern times is to give ultimate vivification to facts, to science, and to common lives... Without that ultimate vivification - which the poet or other artist alone can give - reality would seem incomplete, and science, democracy, and life itself, finally in vain.

Morgan subscribes to this declaration without realising that Whitman doesn't quite. The statement is a benign Emersonian sentiment which is not borne out in the poetry itself.

'Language,' Stevenson says, 'is but a poor bull's-eye lantern where-with to show off the vast cathedral of the world; and yet a particular thing once said in words is so definite and memorable, that it makes us forget the absence of the many which remain unexpressed; like a bright window in a distant view, which dazzles and confuses our sight of its surroundings.' I hope you will not forget 'the many which remain unexpressed' here: Whitman's legacy to Europe, and to Britain in particular, is deep: deeper than that of any other American writer of the nineteenth century, for the legacies of Emerson and Longfellow and Cooper, of Dickinson and Melville and Hawthorne, are real enough but of their time, whereas Whitman's spell is still almost palpably upon us.

Notes

1 Hugh Kenner, The Sinking Island, p. 3.
2 Studies in Classic American Literature, pp. 17 1- 87.
3 Ibid., p. 181.
4 Conversation with Ian Hamilton, 1964, Further Requirements, p. 26.