[at-l] I was reading.....

[cballs@mindspring.com (cballs@mindspring.com)]

And says so much more than most understand, although they may have dreamed it and fantasized it.  Too bad so much of it is expurgated or "interpreted" in High School Literature class until no one is exactly sure what he was writing about except it is all about the great "democratic people," somehow.  Ahhh, EDUCATION!  No wonder we hate poetry as a nation, and we must protect the children, of course.  Is Whitman even "taught" in school anymore or has he been replaced by Rod McKuen? 

Many American poetry readers (before schooling killed them all off) were scandalized by "Leaves of Grass" when it was first published, as were most of those who never read it (an American pattern).  And not without good reason.  It sweats, it sings, its bleeds, it sighs, it moans and cries in sexual desire and ecstasy (mostly homosexual), it gets in the nostrils and under the fingernails, it laughs, roughly, from the belly, grieves straight from the heart and hollers above the din of human enterprise "Arise comrades and lovers! The great American landscape calls us! Let's go!"  It's muscular and virile (both male and female) and rough and untamed and full of soul-embracing caresses and lip-locked, deep-tongue kisses and its unbelievably democratic in its whoop and warf. Stunning poetry that broke free not just of the conventions of subject matter but of the conventions of rhyming lines.  "Leaves of Grass" influenced not only all American poets to come afterward but the poets o!
f so many other places in the world.  Nearly all Latin America poets and writers acknowledge their creative debt to Whitman.     

No doubt if Whitman had lived in the 20th century, he would have hiked on the Appalachian Trail.  He at least stands there today.  There is an outdoor sculpture of him in the Trailside Museum and Zoo at Bear Mountain, New York.  It seems perfectly right that it should be there.  He invites his readers, in every line, to love nature, not only in its grandeur but also in its smallest detail.  That included other human beings and, of course, himself.  He loved the city too.

He was America's first and really only Poet Laureate, at least as close as we've ever come.  He was a tireless self-promoter.

Prof. Balls



On 24 Apr 2002 04:30:21 GMT Lugnut <cdc43@juno.com> wrote:

>From "Leaves of Grass". Walt's best (and only) book. This is a great
book to take hiking because it says so much more in the open air.



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