Whitman Goes Global

By TONY PERRY

March 3, 1998 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

These are boom times for Walt Whitman, America’s most influential poet.

A century after his death, Whitman, the poet of democracy, the poet of the body and soul, commands a loyal and expansive following from his birthplace on Long Island to the literary circles of Nepal.

His rough, rigorous, unrhymed verse, informal and impassioned, appeals to both genders, all ages and numerous nationalities.

“Whitman is the poet of liberty, of individual freedom,” said Carol Muske-Dukes, a poet and creative writing professor at USC. “As the world heads toward a new millennium, Whitman speaks more loudly and directly to people than ever.”

Whitman may even have a fan in the White House. If the daily leakage is to be believed, his masterpiece, “Leaves of Grass,” has a cameo in the investigation involving President Clinton and former White House intern Monica Lewinsky.

Whitman’s poetic themes--themes that Americans in their ethnocentric way thought were uniquely American--turn out to be so energetically universal that they are increasingly being assimilated into different cultures.

In China, a new Mandarin translation of his entire 400-poem canon has become a bestseller. The Communist government tried to suppress its publication in recent years but abandoned that effort in the face of widespread opposition.

Whitman has long been popular in China--although his works were banned as subversive by Mao Tse-tung during the Cultural Revolution. In an earlier decade, the revolutionary followers of Sun Yat-sen were devoted Whitman readers. (“My call is the call of battle/I nourish active rebellion,” Whitman said in “Song of the Open Road.”)

In August, Polish National Radio broadcast a marathon Whitman reading. A year earlier, 23 Hungarian translators finished translating 73 Whitman poems. A professor at the University of Wales completed a translation of Whitman into Welsh.

A Brazilian scholar has surveyed Whitman’s influence on Brazilian writers, and a scholar at a university in Katmandu, Nepal, just finished “Whitman’s System of Dynamic Meditation: A Tantric Guide to His Work.”

The domestic and international spread of Whitmania--the term used by his fans to describe their devotion--has been spurred by new editions, new critical studies, new translations, ever larger symposiums and an increasing number of reading circles.

One of the most active is at Leisure World in Laguna Hills. It is run by Robert Strassburg, an emeritus professor of music at Cal State L.A. Each month for seven years, 50 or so fellow retirees gather to parse Whitmanian lines and debate their meaning.

“By the 21st century, Whitman will be as well-known around the world as Shakespeare or Beethoven,” Strassburg predicted after last month’s meeting.

Strassburg, a Whitman scholar of international reputation, debuted his choral symphony using Whitman’s poetry in Tokyo in 1992 as part of a Japanese national celebration of the poet. Now he is writing an opera exploring Whitman’s adventures in New Orleans as a young journalist--set to open this fall at Cal State L.A.

When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, residents of East and West Germany were delighted to find that during decades of separation Germans on both sides of the barbed barrier had shared a love of Whitman--although with different ideological slants.

In the East, he had been praised as a good socialist, a stalwart of the workers and devoutly asexual; in the West, he was the voice of democracy, unfettered individualism and gay liberation.

Increasing numbers of literary-minded tourists are flocking to the Whitman boyhood home at Huntington Station, N.Y., and the Whitman old-age home and tomb, both in New Jersey.

The poet, who died at age 72 in 1892, even popped up as a character on the television show “Dr. Quinn: Medicine Woman.” And the New Yorker recently ran a fictionalized account of Whitman’s service in the Civil War as a volunteer nurse.

Unlike many a poet, Whitman has never fallen from popular favor, even when his work was attacked for its sexual frankness and publishers shunned him. He self-published his work and was a relentless self-promoter (including writing glowing reviews anonymously for New York papers).

In the early part of this century, his poetry was disparaged by poet and critic Ezra Pound, dismissed by the formalist school of poetry and snubbed by powerful academicians offended by its apparent lack of structure and hyper-emotionalism.

Whitman and his shaggy “barbaric yawp” of a style survived those buttoned-down decades and came roaring back in the 1950s when the cultural winds began howling from a different direction. To the Beat Generation, Whitman was a god-come-to-Earth, a genuine poet of the people.

So devoted are modern-day Whitman lovers that the University of Iowa Press--a major publisher of Whitman scholarship--is compiling the ultimate day-by-day account of the poet’s life. As well, a 2,500-page Whitman encyclopedia is set to be published this year.

And a major Whitman conference is set for fall at the Rutgers University campus in Camden, N.J., the poet’s adopted hometown.

The size and international scope of the Whitman boom outpaces that of other poets swept up in a renaissance of American poetry now in full flower, scholars agree.

And Whitman has even been injected into the current White House controversy by reports that the president gave Lewinsky a copy of “Leaves of Grass.”

Although its contents have changed with varying editions, the 1855 collection generally includes 12 of Whitman’s earliest poems, including “Song of Myself”--much-celebrated, highly lyrical but controversial because of its sexual content.

This is not the first time Whitman’s works have caused a stir in the nation’s capital. He was fired from a clerk’s job at the Office of Indian Affairs because of the uproar over sexual references in “Song of Myself.”

If ever a previous White House controversy has had a poetic tie-in, it has escaped the attention of historians. The nation’s literary professoriate has been quick to use this unique turn of events to whet the undergraduate appetite.

“The scandal has been great for us,” said UCLA English professor Barbara Packer. “I tell my students, ‘Here’s the book that the president gave Monica, read it and see if you can figure out why.’ ”

Fred Moramarco, poet-professor at San Diego State University, whose book “Containing Multitudes” tracing Whitman’s influence on 20th century poetry is set to be published this month, thinks the controversy can only help Whitman’s appeal among students.

“Imagine that: Monica Lewinsky influencing the future of American literature,” Moramarco said.

The news from Washington has also set off a rush among journalists and literature lovers to find exact passages that might unlock any secrets about the true nature of Clinton’s relationship with Lewinsky.

“It’s become kind of a parlor game here,” said UCLA’s Packer.

University of Iowa professor Ed Folsom, who edits the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, said that a Washington reporter called him to ask what Whitman lines deal with oral sex. Folsom--who is organizing a conference of Chinese scholars on Whitman--was ready with several citations.

If the reporter had only consulted the index to Edwin Haviland Miller’s “Walt Whitman’s ‘Song of Myself’: A Mosaic of Interpretations,” he could also have found citations for bisexuality, erethism, heterosexuality, homosexuality, incest, masturbation, narcissism, Oedipal sexuality, phallicism, “procreant urge,” sodomy and voyeurism.

Delighted as they are that poetry is making news, there are those in the literary world who worry that the media are giving a skewed impression of Whitman, portraying him as a quasi-pornographer.

“The way some of the media is treating Whitman is absurd,” said J.D. McClatchy, poet, critic and editor of the Yale Review. “It’s like those people who take a few lines from ‘Song of Songs’ and say the Bible is smutty. Whitman’s poetry is frank about sexuality, but the poetry is about much, much more than sex.”

In his syndicated poetry column, Robert Hass, UC Berkeley professor and former poet laureate of the United States, defended Whitman--in the wake of the current controversy--against those who would reduce the poet to a dirty joke.

Although scandalous by 19th century standards, sex in Whitman may seem tame today. There are no four-letter words and no explicit references to genitalia or detailed descriptions of sexual acts.

Still, to the amorous-minded, the lyricism and suggestiveness of his poetry inspires passion.

“When I was 17 or 18, I gave my girlfriend ‘Leaves of Grass,’ in hopes it would help me seduce her,” said Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Gary Snyder, who teaches at UC Davis. “Whitman speaks out for the joyous possibilities of physicality, of acceptance of ourselves as natural beings.”

Even before the issue of the gift surfaced, Clinton was on record as a Whitman enthusiast.

At a gay rights dinner in November, Clinton quoted from one of the “Calamus” poems, a collection known for homoerotic references. Illustrated volumes of the poems are often sold as gifts in bookstores with gay clientele.

Clinton’s selection that night was from “Song of the Exposition”:

And thou America,

Thy offspring towering o’er so high, yet higher thee above all towering.

With Victory on thy left, and at thy right hand Law;

Thou Union holding all, fusing, absorbing, tolerating all,

Thee, ever thee, I sing.

Fittingly perhaps, Whitman was fascinated with presidents and the presidency. He covered presidential campaigns and politicking as a newspaperman, mentioned the presidency in “Leaves of Grass,” and wrote four elegies on the assassination of Lincoln.

(He was less enamored of Congress: “Much gab, great fear of public opinion, plenty of low business talent, but no masterful man.”)

Like some modern politicians, Whitman rewrote his own biography to fit the moment, shading some incidents, fabricating others (like the whopper about fathering six children by a brothel madam in New Orleans). A famous promotional picture shows Whitman with a butterfly on his finger; the butterfly, it turned out, was cardboard.

Whitman’s private life and alleged sexual adventures were much debated and discussed during his life and considered quite scandalous.

Still, a century of snooping by biographers, critics and newspaper reporters has failed to conclusively confirm a single instance of coital contact, and there are scholars who now suggest that he may have been, erotically speaking, all talk.

Whitman lovers were dismayed by reports that “Leaves of Grass” was not among gifts the president’s secretary allegedly asked Lewinsky to return, lest they be seized by independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr.

Gifts not sought for return were, according to news reports, considered “inconsequential.” Ouch.

His fans are adamant that Whitman’s poetry will be in demand long after the tale of Clinton, Starr and Lewinsky has faded.

“Whitman will do just fine,” said professor Folsom. “He’ll be the only one to come out of this scandal with his reputation untarnished.”

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Poetic Themes

Long before television, the movies and the recording industry, the poetry of Walt Whitman was influencing the American self-image and the image of America abroad.

Some critics suggest that even with those newer popular art forms, Whitman’s poetry remains the single most dominant cultural force in defining America to itself and others as a land of muscularity, infinite promise, optimism, individualism and restless movement.

A Nation announcing itself,

I myself make the only growth by which I can be appreciated,

I reject none, accept all, then reproduce all in my own forms.

A breed whose proof is in time and deeds,

What we are we are, nativity is answer enough to objections,

We wield ourselves as a weapon is wielded,

We are powerful and tremendous in ourselves,

We are executive in ourselves, we are sufficient in the variety of ourselves,

We are the most beautiful to ourselves and in ourselves.

We stand self-poised in the middle, branching thence over the world,

From Missouri, Nebraska, or Kansas, laughing attacks to scorn.

--From “By Blue Ontario’s Shore,” 1860