É sabido que a DK gosta de poesia… tanto, que publica no The Friends of America Club.
Para vos poupar de lá ir, coloco aqui:
“Arguing with Whitman” (or a very short introduction to American poetry)
By Daniela Kato
Where are Whitman’s wild children,
where the great voices speaking out
with a sense of sweetness & sublimity,
where the great new vision,
the great world-view,
the high prophetic song
of the immense earth
and all that sings in it
and our relation to it….
Lawrence Ferlinghetti, “Popular Manifesto: For Poets, With Love”
In his ground-breaking study The Continuity of American Poetry , Roy Harvey Pearce argues that “all American poetry since [Whitman] is, in essence if not in substance, a series of arguments with Whitman.” Whether as an inspiration or a burden, the author of Leaves of Grass (1855) haunts indeed the American poetic psyche.
Every poet has had to come to terms with his presence, by accepting, challenging or rejecting him.
And why does Whitman’s presence still loom in the American psyche? Whitman defined what became the obsessive impulse in the American poet: the desire to write the epic of America . From Ezra Pound to Charles Olson, through Hart Crane, William Carlos Williams, Robert Duncan, John Berryman, Allen Ginsberg, and many more – all these poets embody the quest for “the Supreme Fiction,” a set of beliefs and ideals, a particularly American way of conceiving, perceiving and receiving the world, a summation of the essence of what it means to be an American.
In his act of epic defiance – the famous “barbaric yawp” – Whitman violated all the rules of traditional epics, by creating a personal epic whose style and themes are not literary or elevated, but common and vital, personal and familiar. An epic whose hero is the poet himself as a representative figure, illuminating the age, and embodying in his very being the fate of a whole society:
I match my spirit against yours you orbs, growths, mountains, brutes,
Copious as you are I absorb you all in myself, and become the master myself,
America isolated yet embodying all, what is it finally except myself?
These States, what are they except myself?
“By Blue Ontario’s Shore”
This was Whitman’s greatest legacy: a simultaneously personal and collective poetry. Ever since, few American poets have conceived their task in purely private terms; their words, however personal, express the consciousness of their fellow Americans and struggle to alter the national destiny.
estava aqui.
