A Whitman Sampler

On Whitman
by C. K. Williams
Princeton, 208 pp., $19.95

Back in the 1840s, when he still called himself Walter Whitman Jr., the future poet of Leaves of Grass composed verse such as this:

O, beauteous is the earth! and fair

The splendors of Creation are:

Nature’s green robe, the shining sky,

The winds that through the tree-tops sigh, All speak a bounteous God.

Not bad, really, but entirely conventional, no different from a thousand other poems published at the time. How in the world did we get from that to this in 1855?

You sea! I resign myself to you also—I guess what you mean,

I behold from the beach your crooked inviting fingers,

I believe you refuse to go back without feeling of me;

We must have a turn together, I undress, hurry me out of sight of the land,

Cushion me soft, rock me in billowy drowse,

Dash me with amorous wet, I can repay you.

When Ralph Waldo Emerson received those lines in the mail, he blinked in amazement and wrote to Whitman the famous congratulations, wondering what miraculous “long foreground” could have produced it. The same question is the starting point for C. K. Williams in this readable little commentary, the second entry in a series by Princeton University Press entitled Writers on Writers. Williams is a distinguished poet and creative writing professor at Princeton, winner of Pulitzer and National Book awards, amply qualified for the series format which “seeks to pair two esteemed literary luminaries together in print to create a personal dialogue.”