by John Lithgow
Whitman was born in West Hills, on New York’s Long Island. Like William Blake, he was trained at a young age to be a printer, a trade that turned him into a voracious reader and lover of words. He worked as a shopkeeper, a teacher, and a journalist before he turned to poetry; Whitman was thirty-five years old when he started to write the poems he would self-publish anonymously in 1855 as Leaves of Grass.
After reading the poems, the author and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote a private note to Whitman saying he found the work to be the “most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed.” Whitman shamelessly used the Emerson letter to promote Leaves of Grass, causing Emerson to shy away from his initial praise. Whitman’s audaciousness—both poetical and political—would cost him the unqualified recognition he deserved in his lifetime. Undaunted by criticism and lack of financial success, he continued to revise and rework Leaves of Grass, publishing eight different editions over forty years. It was pronounced complete by the author in the “Death-bed Edition” published in 1892.
In an essay published in 1844, Emerson had called for a poet to emerge and sing the virtues of our new country: “Our logrolling, our stumps and their politics, our fisheries, our Negroes, and Indians, our boasts, and our repudiations, the wrath of rogues, and the pusillanimity of honest men, the northern trade, the southern planting, the western clearing, Oregon, and Texas, are yet unsung.” Walt Whitman read Emerson’s essay and consciously set out to sing America’s song and to become our national poet.
Favorite Poems
“Song of Myself” “I Hear America Singing”
“O Captain! My Captain!” “Song at Sunset”
“The Wound Dresser”
There Was a Child Went Forth
There was a child went forth every day;
And the first object he look’d upon, that object he became,
And that object became part of him for the day or a certain part
of the day,
Or for many years or stretching cycles of years.
The early lilacs became part of this child,
And grass and white and red morning-glories, and white and red
clover, and the song of the phoebe-bird,
And the Third-month lambs and the sow’s pink-faint litter, and
the mare’s foal and the cow’s calf,
And the noisy brood of the barnyard, or by the mire of the pond-
side,
And the fish suspending themselves so curiously below there, and
the beautiful curious liquid,
And the water-plants with their graceful flat heads, all became part
of him.
The field-sprouts of Fourth-month and Fifth-month became part
of him,
Winter-grain sprouts and those of the light-yellow corn, and the
esculent roots of the garden,
And the apple-trees cover’d with blossoms and the fruit afterward,
and wood-berries, and the commonest weeds by the road,
And the old drunkard staggering home from the outhouse of the
tavern whence he had lately risen,
And the schoolmistress that pass’d on her way to the school,
And the friendly boys that pass’d, and the quarrelsome boys,
And the tidy and fresh-cheek’d girls, and the barefoot negro boy
and girl,
And all the changes of city and country wherever he went.
His own parents, he that had father’d him, and she that had
conceiv’d him in her womb and birth’d him,
They gave this child more of themselves than that,
They gave him afterward every day, they became part of him.
The mother at home quietly placing the dishes on the supper-
table,
The mother with mild words, clean her cap and gown, a whole-
some odor falling off her person and clothes as she walks by,
The father, strong, self-sufficient, manly, mean, anger’d, unjust,
The blow, the quick loud word, the tight bargain, the crafty lure,
The family usages, the language, the company, the furniture, the
yearning and swelling heart,
Affection that will not be gainsay’d, the sense of what is real, the
thought if after all it should prove unreal,
The doubts of day-time and the doubts of night-time, the curious
whether and how,
Whether that which appears so is so, or is it all flashes and specks?
Men and women crowding fast in the streets, if they are not flashes
and specks, what are they?
The streets themselves and the façades of houses, and goods in
the windows,
Vehicles, teams, the heavy-plank’d wharves, the huge crossing at
the ferries,
The village on the highland seen from afar at sunset, the river
between,
Shadows, aureola and mist, the light falling on roofs and gables of
white or brown two miles off,
The schooner near by sleepily dropping down the tide, the little
boat slack-tow’d astern,
The hurrying tumbling waves, quick-broken crests, slapping,
The strata of color’d clouds, the long bar of maroon-tint, away
solitary by itself—the spread of purity it lies motionless in,
The horizon’s edge, the flying sea-crow, the fragrance of salt
marsh and shore mud,
These became part of that child who went forth every day, and
who now goes, and will always go forth every day.
Walt Whitman is surely the most glorious poet to read aloud, and this poem proves it. You read and become a part of the exuberance of the poem, an active participant without whom it would not be so fully alive. Not all poetry—even some great poetry—accomplishes that.
Whitman once said that the “proof of a poet is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it.” This poem is a near-perfect reflection of the absorbing of life, which was an idea Whitman came back to again and again. The child in the poem absorbs and becomes everything he looks upon in a day and in a lifetime. The universe is full of life (“the song of the phoebe-bird”) and meaning (“the curious whether and how”). Whitman offers this sparklingly brilliant composite of impressions—the “flashes and specks”—so that we might open ourselves to experience.
This is typical of Whitman’s spectacularly ambitious verse. He fearlessly creates a construct that encompasses all of life. You could pick out any single chunk from this poem and be reminded of a moment in your own existence. “The early lilacs,” the “grass, and white and red morning- glories” or “the streets themselves, and the façades of houses, and goods in the windows”—all these objects, these memories, “became part of that child who went forth every day, and who now goes, and will / always go / forth / every day.” To Whitman, this is how we become ourselves, by truly connecting with our own experience, by realizing, I am that child that went forth.
Whitman was a singer of words, a divine one-man chorus who celebrated his country and the human experience. He is considered the inventor of contemporary American literature, the first to forge a style that broke from traditional European forms and expressed the uniqueness of the American spirit. Underappreciated in his own time, elevated to a literary godlike status in ours, Walt Whitman is the voice of America.
from “Song of Myself”
I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.
And your very flesh shall be a great poem.
—Walt Whitman
William Carlos Williams
The Doctor Poet
(1883–
1963)
William Carlos Williams may have had one of the most unexpected day jobs of any poet included in this book. When he wasn’t swanning around Europe with Ezra Pound, or roaming the streets of New York with Wallace Stevens and Man Ray, or mentoring Allen Ginsberg and the other Beat poets, he was conscientiously tending to his busy practice as a pediatrician in Rutherford, New Jersey.
Born in Rutherford, he returned after traveling in Europe following medical school and settled there with his wife and two sons. Williams used his experience in medicine as material for his poetry. In 1938, he told Ezra Pound, “I’ve met a hell of a lot more of all kinds of people than you’ll ever get your eyes on and I’ve known them inside and out in ways you’ll never know.” He listened carefully to his patients, who mostly came from modest means and mixed ethnic backgrounds. Their stories, hopes, and dreams were reflected back in tiny fragments and momentary glimpses in his poetry. Oddly, most of his patients were unaware of his career as a poet. To them, he was the small-town doctor who delivered and tended their children. To the literary world, he was to become one of the most original poetic voices of the twentieth century.
Favorite Poems
“Spring and All” “At the Ballgame” “To Asphodel”
“These” “The Young Housewife”
Like Walt Whitman, Williams consciously sought to make a new poetry that was reflective of the tone and rhythms of American speech and everyday life. He wanted to redefine what it meant to be a poem, not for the sake of experiment but in the interest of authenticity. He was one of the leaders, with Ezra Pound, of the imagist movement, which sought to pare poetry down to its essence, to things, not ideas. He had a deeply felt understanding of what being an American meant, and focused on the details and objects of ordinary daily life to show his readers how poetic their own lives were. He had a hardy optimism that ran counter to the grim perspectives of T. S. Eliot and some of the other modernists. He didn’t want readers to see how bad things were; he wanted them to see how beautifully real they could be.
The Red Wheelbarrow
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens.
According to his friend Kenneth Burke, Williams was “the master of the glimpse. What Williams sees, he sees in a flash.” In “The Red Wheelbarrow,” Williams turns one glimpse of a scene into a still life. He finds a single image and removes all of the clutter around it. The poem makes use of the page—the white space is refreshing, the words like drops of rain. He breaks up the words and gives them mystery; he doesn’t let you skip over them too quickly. With only two colors in this sixteen-word poem, the scene is bright and clear. He gives us room and space to consider what, exactly, depends on the red wheelbarrow. By stripping this down to its most basic elements, he takes away the clues we might seek to figure out what it “means.” Which is fine by Williams, who believed in “no ideas but in things.”
Every corner of his daily life was fodder for Williams’s work. He wrote about dancing naked around his house, “the salt ocean,” the ice-man, plums, fire trucks, and “white summer days.” He compares a young housewife to a fallen leaf and he speaks of “the tall grass of your ankles” and “flamegreen throats.” His poems have collage effect; there is a sense of him seeing the whole world, plucking at the most real and most interesting bits to assemble into a tight little picture.
And what of the plums in “This Is Just to Say” and “To a Poor Old Woman”?
A poem is a small (or large) machine made out of words.
—William Carlos Williams
This Is Just to Say
I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox
and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast
Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold
To a Poor Old Woman
munching a plum on
the street a paper bag
of them in her hand
They taste good to her
They taste good
to her. They taste
good to her
You can see it by
the way she gives herself
to the one half
sucked out in her hand
Comforted
a solace of ripe plums
seeming to fill the air
They taste good to her
These two poems are the very definition of poetry, the captured moments that connect us through our senses and memory. The plums are “so sweet / and so cold,” you can understand the indulgence for which the narrator apologizes. And your heart goes out to the poor old woman, sucking at a plum. Perhaps we can’t know her hunger or the pains of her age or her poverty, but we share with her the “solace of ripe plums.”
I am entranced by the phrase “They taste good to her,” which is repeated four times in this short poem. In the second stanza, look at how it is broken at different junctures from line to line. By doing this, Williams is forcing us to consider very carefully that phrase, “They taste good to her.” It also reminds me a little of how older people sometimes begin to repeat themselves.
Williams is the master of glinting, painterly little impressions that stick with you long after you’ve read the last word and put the book back on the shelf.
William Wordsworth
The Lake Poet
(1770–1850)
The defining moment of William Wordsworth’s career as a poet was the day he met Samuel Coleridge in 1795. The creative combustion that occurred between them would turn the two men into the founders of the Romantic movement of English literature.
Wordsworth was born in the scenic Lake District of northwest England. Orphaned at the age of thirteen, he and his four siblings were raised by uncles. Wordsworth parlayed his excellent primary education into an appointment to Cambridge, where he studied without distinction and with little apparent motivation. In the summer of 1790, before his final year at the university, he took a walking tour of Europe, which seemed to awaken his poetic sensibility. He returned to France for a year after graduating and came back to England enamored of the idea of the French Revolution. He dallied for a while with political radicals like Thomas Paine and Mary Wollstonecraft, but it was meeting Coleridge in 1795 that marked the birth of Wordsworth the poet.
In July 1797, Wordsworth and his sister moved from London to a house in the Lake District not far from where Coleridge lived. They began a period of extraordinary collaboration, meeting daily to write and discuss poetry and critique each other’s work. The result of this intense year was the publication of Lyrical Ballads, a collection of verse by both of them published anonymously, without attribution of the work to either poet. This volume amounted to a revolution against the literary establishment of the time, and featured some of the best work of both men, including Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey” and Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” A subsequent edition of the work included a preface by Wordsworth that described a new type of poetry and gave a vocabulary to the Romantic vision. With this pronouncement, Wordsworth laid claim to the birth of a movement.
Favorite Poems
“Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey”
“Ode: Intimations of Immortality” “The Solitary Reaper”
“The Daffodils” “The world is too much with us; late and soon”
Lyrical Ballads was indeed groundbreaking, but it also revealed an imbalance in the relationship between Wordsworth and Coleridge. Wordsworth was very conscious of his purpose by this point; he intended to be a standard-bearer for his burgeoning literary philosophy, while Coleridge only wanted to keep writing poetry. Wordsworth was not as generous with credit as he might have been; the newly prefaced edition of Lyrical Ball
ads featured his name alone on the cover. Coleridge was developing an addiction to opium, of which Wordsworth sternly disapproved, and by 1804 their brilliant friendship and creative collaboration was all but finished.
Wordsworth, Coleridge, and fellow poet Robert Southey became known as the Lake Poets. Wordsworth stayed in the area for most of his life, and as his reputation grew to grand proportions, the Lake District became a kind of mecca for adoring fans and literary wannabes. Wordsworth continued to work, but it was clear he had his heyday in the years writing with Coleridge and just after. He took as a matter of fact his role as the dean of the Romantic movement, which kept him busy for the remainder of his life. His autobiographical poem The Prelude, which was written and revised several times early in his career and was dedicated to his friend, Coleridge, was published after his death in 1850. This work was later acknowledged to be his undisputed masterpiece.
Wordsworth was an intensely serious person who had an almost religious belief in his own purpose. His best poetry reflects a sympathy for the common man that is poignant in its simplicity: “We have all of us one human heart.”
I wandered lonely as a cloud
I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.
The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed—and gazed—but little thought
