A proof may be found in the fact that he kept on republishing the book, enlarging it, and always calling it Leaves of Grass. He wanted the whole thing to be read as an epic poem.
#WHITMAN LEAVES OF GRASS SAIL FORTH SERIES#
We always think of Leaves of Grass as being a series of short poems, but I don’t think he intended that to be our reading of them. Whitman thought, “No, this, it won’t do,” and so he set out to write an epic. Whitman thought in terms of democracy there should be no central hero, because that stood for what he called feudal poetry, and when he spoke of feudal poetry he would think of Tennyson for example. That doesn’t matter, there’s always a central hero: Roland in the Song of Roland, Beowulf in Beowulf, the old English epic, in The Cid in Spain and so forth. For example, we have in The Iliad the hero who was supposed to be Achilles but was really Hector. Now all epic poetry has had a central hero. Walt Whitman began by the idea of democracy and also by the wish, by the will to write an epic poem. I think that of all literary experiments Leaves of Grass is the most successful and far more daring than the others, for example Joyce’s Ulysses or even Finnegan’s Wake, but the success has been so great that nobody thinks of it as being experimental and nobody has attempted the same thing. In 1855 two epic poems were written: one altogether forgotten is Longfellow’s Hiawatha, and the other of course, is Leaves of Grass. The following is an excerpt taken from a seminar given by Jorge Luis Borges to the students in the Graduate Writing Division at Columbia University on September 30, 1982. As a poet, I know myself that the attempt to write a “democratic” poem is one of the challenges that most animate many poets. Some (all?) writers need lifelong preoccupations Borges had several, and one of them was Whitman, and, here, he explains why Whitman deserves such an honor. I think that Borges’s argument-published in our eighth issue and transcribed by Kirsten Dehner-is genius. The Argentina of Borges was and is no stranger to the fraught nature of democracy in a world ideologized in favor of hierarchy: so the juxtaposition of Dante and Whitman is very neat.) In the face of such a difficulty, many fall silent not Whitman. (The picture above was taken by yours truly from a balcony of the Palacio Barolo, a Dante-themed building in Buenos Aires. Such a poem had never been attempted before and has not been attempted since.
Forty years ago, Jorge Luis Borges (writer of poems, essays, and “fictions”) spoke to an assembly of Columbia Writing students and made a beautiful claim: that Whitman’s Leaves of Grass is the most daring and the most successful of all literary experiments, because it is an epic poem of democracy. At least, in 2022, a lot of people seem to believe so. If one age believes too much it is natural that another believes too little.įraternity among nations, however, touches the deepest desire of human nature.Democracy is difficult to think about, difficult to write about, and difficult to live. The art of being a good Web designer is getting yourself into that middle ground and treating it as a final destination instead of as a compromise. You can have information and ease of use and have artistic integrity at the same time. Readers Who Like This Quotation Also Like: Based on Topics: Soul Quotes And we will risk the ship, ourselves, and all. For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared go.
Sail Forth- Steer for the deep waters only. I accept reality and dare not question it.
#WHITMAN LEAVES OF GRASS SAIL FORTH FREE#
Other lands have their vitality in a few, a class, but we have it in the bulk of our people.įreedom - to walk free and own no superior. ( "Leaves of Grass") More Quotes from Walt Whitman:I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars. Clear and sweet is my soul, clear and sweet is all that is not my soul.
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