INSPIRED BY LEAVES OF GRASS
Whitman poems on every subject—war, love,
travel, compassion—continue to inspire artists in many
genres.
POETRY
In “Poets to Come” Walt Whitman addresses future
generations of poets, commanding, “Arouse! for you must justify
me.” They have done so. Among them is Ezra Pound, whose poem “A
Pact” (1913) begins, “I make a pact with you, Walt Whitman—/ I have
detested you long enough.” Other notable poems invoking Whitman
include “Retort to Whitman” (late 1920s), by D. H. Lawrence, and
“Old Walt” (1954), by Langston Hughes (who also edited a collection
of Whitman’s verse in 1946). T. S. Eliot and Carl Sandburg both
published essays in the 1920s addressing the importance of Whitman
in American poetry. Though Eliot found the poet’s style to be
primitive and even distasteful, Sandburg’s Chicago Poems
(1916) and The People, Yes! (1936) reflect Whitman’s
style.
In his “Cape Hatteras” (1920) Hart Crane asks:
“Walt, tell me, Walt Whitman, if infinity / Be still the same as
when you walked the beach / Near Paumanok.” The last lines of the
poem envision Crane and Whitman together on the beach, walking hand
in hand. Crane summons his venerated predecessor into the future,
attempting to carry his legacy onward.
Two important post-World War II American poets,
William Carlos Williams and John Berryman, also took Whitman as an
artistic guide. Williams’s essay “The American Idiom” (1967)
addresses Whitman’s impact on language. Likewise, Beat-generation
poets Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg often cited Whitman as the
major influence in their work. In “Supermarket in California”
(1955), Ginsberg imagines his predecessor roving among modern store
aisles, examining meats and vegetables, darting desirous glances at
the grocery boys. Kerouac, too, invokes Whitman, in his poem “168th
Chorus” (1959). Louis Simpson named his collection At the End of
the Open Road (1963) in reference to Whitman’s “Song of the
Open Road,” and in some of his closing verse he carries on a
lengthy dialogue with the older poet regarding new problems in a
modernized America. Across the Atlantic, Whitman has been the
subject of poems by Spanish writers Pedro Mir, Pablo Neruda,
Federico Garcia Lorca, and Jorge Luis Borges.
Walt Whitman: The Measure of His Song
(edited by Dan Campion, Ed Folsom, and Jim Perlman; see “For
Further Reading”) an thologizes works of the many poets Whitman has
influenced and includes Whitman-related letters and essays by such
writers as Ger ard Manley Hopkins, Matthew Arnold, Henry David
Thoreau, Sherwood Anderson, Henry Miller, and Robert Bly. In
Whitman’s Wild Children, Neeli Cherkovski provides in-depth
discussions of twelve poets who represent the Whitmanic tradition,
and The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry begins and ends with
Whitman’s verse.
FICTION
Willa Cather took the title of her novel O
Pioneers! (1913) from the Whitman poem “Pioneers! O
Pioneers!” Set on the Nebraska prairie, the novel chronicles the
struggles of Swedish immigrant Alexandra Bergson, whose father’s
death leaves her with a plot of sickly farmland that she transforms
into a thriving enterprise. The novel includes this Whitmanesque
line: “The history of every country begins in the heart of a man or
a woman.” British novelist E. M. Forster took the title of
Whitman’s poem as that of his masterpiece A Passage to India
(1924).
Jack Kerouac refers directly to Whitman as his
muse in the freewheeling On the Road (1957), the title of
which echoes Whitman’s “Song of the Open Road.” Perhaps the seminal
text of the Beat generation, the novel details the adventures of
writer Sal Paradise and recent jailbird Dean Moriarty as they
hitchhike and travel by bus across America, smoking marijuana,
drinking heavily, and visiting jazz clubs and brothels.
Another incarnation of Whitman hit the road in
1989, in Max ine Hong Kingston’s novel Tripmaster Monkey.
The protagonist, a young Chinese-American poet named Wittman Ah
Sing, recites poetry to fellow passengers on the buses of San
Francisco.
PAINTING
Whitman’s rich imagery translates well into
painting. The poet has been a favorite among artists since the time
of Vincent van Gogh, who praised Whitman vigorously in letters to
his family while he painted Starry Night (1889). Indeed, van
Gogh may even have taken his title from Whitman’s poem cluster
“From Noon to Starry Night,” which was published in France just
before the artist began work on the famous painting.
Realist painter Thomas Eakins enjoyed a close
friendship with Whitman. While the poet was frequently photographed
and painted, he most admired his portrait by Eakins, saying it
represented him truly, without glossing over his physical
imperfections. Eakins’s best-known work, The Swimming Hole
(1889), is widely thought to be a response to “Song of Myself” in
which “twenty-eight young men bathe by the shore.”
Inspired by the poem “I Hear America Singing,”
Whitman’s ode to the noble and tireless workers of the country, in
1939 Ben Shahn and Bernarda Bryson Shahn painted the epic series
Resources of America for the walls of the Bronx County Post
Office in New York City. The eighteen-foot-high frescoes depict
ordinary Americans performing the everyday tasks that keep the
country running. Several panels focus on people engaged in such
jobs as harvesting wheat and reading construction blueprints. Other
panels depict technology, including hydroelectric dams and
electrical blast furnaces, and one panel shows Whitman himself
reciting poetry to citizens gathered below.
MUSIC
Weda Cook, a popular singer, friend of Whitman,
and model for painter Thomas Eakins, was the first musician to set
“O Captain! My Captain!” and other Whitman poems to music.
Classical music has also strongly favored Whitman. Composer Charles
Ives, deemed the “Walt Whitman of American Music,” provided a
setting of one of the outspoken passages of “Song of Myself”: “Who
goes there? Hankering, gross, mystical, nude...” (from “Walt
Whitman”). In the early twentieth century, the good gray poet
sparked the interest of three important British composers:
Frederick Delius, Ralph Vaughn Williams, and Gustav Holst. Delius
set Whitman’s poems to music in “Seadrift” (1904), “Songs of
Farewell” (1930), and “Idyll” (1932). Williams’s “Toward the
Unknown Reason” (1906) sets the poem “Darest Thou Now O Soul” to
music; his “Sea Symphony” (1910) uses words from “A Passage to
India” and several Whitman poems about ships; and his “Dona Nobis
Pacem” (“Grant Us Peace,” 1936) is an antiwar piece incorporating
Whitman’s Civil War poems. Holst set Whitman’s “When Lilacs Last in
the Dooryard Bloom‘d” to music in “Ode to Death” (1919), which
memorialized friends killed during World War I. In the years
leading up to World War II, a number of anti-Nazi composers set
Whitman to music. Among them were Kurt Weill, Paul Hindemith, Hans
Werner Henze, Friedrich Wildgans, Franz Schreker, and Karl Amadeus
Hartmann.
Whitman’s immense influence on folk and
progressive music by the likes of Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan is
discussed by Bryan Garman in A Race of Singers: Whitman’s
Working-class Hero from Guthrie to Springsteen.