`Walt Whitman Was Right About Everything'

If we’ve raised them properly, our offspring will remember this benighted era as the Age of Marilynne Robinson, or perhaps the Age of Geoffrey Hill. Literature has entered a slough of despond in which vision is dim, benign resolve is rare and joy among writers and readers, not to mention the general populace, is nearly extinct. Robinson’s work, especially Gilead, encourages me to experiment in believing that better times are at hand. For more such encouragement, read her recent essay, “Waiting to Be Remembered,” adapted from the commencement address she delivered last spring at Amherst College. Her thinking and prose are too rich to be quickly digested, and every sentence sparks a clutch of thoughts. For instance:

“I’ve always felt that people somehow immortalize themselves in a landscape, that the mere fact of a specific human presence in a place leaves it changed…Walt Whitman was right about everything, never more so than when he celebrated the epic and melancholy beauty created in a place by all the transient multitudes and generations that passed through it. Anonymity is beautiful, and names are beautiful. The universal is beautiful, and so are the particulars.”

I love that: “Walt Whitman was right about everything.” And I love a solitary celebration of hopeful Walt in so grim an age. In “A Backward Glance O’er Travel’d Roads,” Whitman said his goal was “to give ultimate vivification to facts, to science, and to common lives, endowing them with the glows and glories and final illustriousness which belong to every real thing, and to real things only.” That resolve to endow lives – and language – with “glows and glories” is at the heart of Robinson’s own work. Another American artist who looked to Whitman for inspiration and encouragement was the photographer Walker Evans. In the catalogue for his 1971 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, Evans chose these lines from Whitman’s “Assurances” as his epigraph:

“I do not doubt but the majesty and beauty of
the world are latent in any iota of the world…

“I do not doubt there is far more in trivialities,
insects, vulgar persons, slaves, dwarfs, weeds,
rejected refuse, than I have supposed…

“I do not doubt interiors have their interiors, and
exteriors have their exteriors—and that the
eye-sight has another eye-sight, and the hear- ing another hearing, and the voice another
voice.”

In On Photography, Susan Sontag acknowledges Evans’ debt to Whitman, a debt he shared with Lewis Hine, Paul Strand, Margaret Bourke-White and others in the same tradition:

“American photography has moved from affirmation to erosion to, finally, a parody of Whitman's program. In this history the most edifying figure is Walker Evans. He was the last great photographer to work seriously and assuredly in a mood deriving from Whitman's euphoric humanism.

“Evans' project still descends from Whitman's: the leveling of discriminations between the beautiful and the ugly, the important and the trivial...but this was a leveling up, not down…Since photography cut loose from the Whitmanesque affirmation...what we have left of Whitman's discredited dream of cultural revolution are paper ghosts and a sharp eyed witty program of despair."

For once, Sontag is right: Evans wasn’t an aesthetic iconoclast. He wasn’t saying photographs of tattered billboards possess the same degree of beauty as a Rembrandt portrait. I don’t think Evans would have even recognized such an argument. Rather, following Whitman’s example, he would have us perceive new forms of beauty, beauty that previously had been ignored or scorned, the beauty imminent in Whitman’s “trivialities.” In Robinson’s essay, a celebration of the still-unfulfilled promise of American democracy, she returns, fleetingly, near her conclusion, to Whitman:

“In the absence of the romance of the individual, the Emersonian celebration of consciousness, the Whitmanesque openness to the beauty and grandeur of the mortal throng, we slide back toward that dark world whose testaments I read in Frost Library. Now we speak of the great mass of people as workers who must be conditioned and pressed toward always-greater efficiency, toward accepting lives they do not define or control, lived in service to some supposedly greater good that is never in any humane or democratic sense their own good or their children’s good.

“Those who are ignorant of the past are condemned to repeat it, and society does indeed seem to be reverting to a dismal past, which, in our ignorance, we call an inevitable future. But this is true, too: those who are ignorant of history deprive themselves of the hope that they would learn from what is best in it, and are condemned to finding hope an aspect of a past they can not repeat. Generous hope is embedded in this landscape, and in the national landscape, waiting to be remembered.”

Whitman still appeals to our best instincts as Americans. He could be goofy, and too much of his work – like Wordsworth’s, like Tennyson’s – can be read only with concerted effort, if at all. He is part of the history we owe our children. Even so sick and unhappy a man as John Berryman, in “Despair” (from Love & Fame, the last book he published before committing suicide), could acknowledge Whitman’s power:

“Walt! We're downstairs.
Even you don't comfort me
but I join your risk my dear friend & go with you.”