Transcript for the Piece Audio version of RN Documentary: Whitman - The Good Gray Poet

AURAL TAPESTRY
“Walt Whitman: Father of Modern Poetry”
PART II: “The Good Gray Poet”

MUSIC: “String Quartet No. 1” - Charles Ives

ID TAPE - “Weaving…an Aural Tapestry” (9”)
DAVID: In December of 1862, Walt Whitman left New York and traveled to Virginia to search for his brother George who had been wounded in the bloody conflict between North and South called the Secession War. A doctor, describing the carnage, wrote of soldiers “wounded in every conceivable way, men with mutilated bodies, with shattered limbs and broken heads, men enduring their injuries with stoic patience, and men giving way to violent grief…” For the next two years, the poet no longer sang “songs of himself” but reached out to his fellow Camerados, tending the wounded and dying.
TAPE IN AT 00.52
TAPE - FW: “With the coming of civil…
LW: …America’s poet, you might say.” DUR: 44”
MUSIC UP TO 01.49 - CUT TO 04.17; DAVID IN FAST!
DAVID/POEM: “The Wound-Dresser” (excerpt)
“Bearing the bandages, water and sponge,
Straight and swift to my wounded I go,
Where they lie on the ground after the battle brought in,
Where their priceless blood reddens the grass the ground,
Or to the rows of the hospital tent, or under the roof’d hospital,
To the long rows of cots up and down each side I return,
To each and all one after another I draw near, not one do I miss.
…
I onward go, I stop,
With hinged knees and steady hand to dress wounds,
I am firm with each, the pangs are sharp yet unavoidable,
One turns to me his appealing eyes- poor boy! I never knew you,
Yet I think I could not refuse this moment to die for you,
if that would save you.
…
(Many a soldier’s loving arms about this neck have cross’d
and rested,
Many a soldier’s kiss dwells on these bearded lips.)
MUSIC ENDS (05.18)

DAVID: Whitman’s moving poem “The Wound-Dresser” is one of a series called “Drum Taps” - the first new work he published after his experience of the Civil War. It was just over ten years since he burst forth with his first edition of “Leaves of Grass” but Gary Schmidgall, author of “Walt Whitman: A Gay Life” believes this was an important turning point in the poets career.

TAPE - FW: “Well, if you consider…
LW: …few and far between.” DUR: 1’25”
MUSIC: “Dirge for Two Veterans” - Kurt Weill DUR: 1’01”
Track 16 - From 01.41-01.02.42 (fade in 5”!)
DAVID: Thomas Hampson singing German composer Kurt Weill’s musical setting for Whitman’s “Dirge for Two Veterans” from “Drum Taps” which is followed in “Leaves of Grass by a series of poems called “Memories of Abraham Lincoln.”
“When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d,
And the great star early droop’d in the western sky in the
night,
I mourned, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.”

Lilacs did bloom in the yard of Whitman’s house in Camden, New Jersey and curator Margaret O’Neill guided me to further evidence of his ardent admiration for America’s assassinated president.
TAPE - FW: “Here in the back parlor…
LW: …picture honoring Lincoln.” DUR: 58”
DAVID/POEM: “Oh, Captain! My Captain! Our fearful trip is done,
The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won,
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exalting,
While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring;
But O heart! heart! heart!
O the bleeding drops of red,
Where on the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.”
TAPE - FW: “Oh Captain…
LW: …a very popular poet.” DUR: 1’53”

DAVID: Whitman may have lacked appreciation in his own country but, according to Gary Schmidgall, he was widely read in Europe.
TAPE - FW: “In fact, he was widely loved…
LW: …this mystery about him.” DUR: 1’51”

MUSIC: “If you’re anxious…” - from “Patience” DUR: 49”

DAVID (over intro) The New York premiere in 1881 of a British operetta set the stage for one of Whitman’s most famous visitors.
MUSIC UP (to 00.49 - FADE OUT IN 5”!)

DAVID: The popularity of Gilbert & Sullivan’s “Patience” - spoofing Oscar Wilde’s posing aestheticism - led to an American speaking tour for Wilde. One of his first stops was Philadelphia, but he made time to cross the river to Camden for a private meeting with Whitman. What wouldn’t we give to have been a fly on the wall as Walt and Oscar conversed between glasses of elderberry wine and hot toddies on that January afternoon in 1882.
TAPE II: CONVERSATION - WALT & OSCAR (DUR: 54”)
OSCAR: In England when people describe a work of art as grossly immoral, they mean that the artist has said or made a beautiful thing that is true.
WALT: When I see the harm that morals do I almost hate seeing people good. Here in America, everything is toned down, veneered, hidden, lied about, ‘pruded’ away- note that word! I think wickedness is most likely the absence of freedom and health in the soul.
OSCAR: Wickedness is a myth invented by good people to account for the curious attractiveness of others.
WALT: The boy I love becomes a man not through derived power, but in his own right - wicked, rather than virtuous out of conformity or fear. What would we do without sinners? Take them out of literature and it would be barren.
OSCAR: Without sin the world would stagnate, or grow old, or become colorless.
WALT: Here’s to sin!
OSCAR: And wickedness! (They laugh together)

TAPE - FW: “We’ll never know what…
LW: …both expert at it.” DUR: 1’50”
DAVID: The word “homosexual” may not have been coined until 1892, the year Whitman died, but his poetry certainly struck a chord with those who had experienced “the love that dare not speak it’s name.” Many young men wrote to Whitman about the feelings his poetry stirred within them. One of the most interesting was written by a 24-year-old student at Dublin’s Trinity College named Bram Stoker - 25 years before he became known as the author of “Dracula.”
TAPE II: LETTER OF BRAM STOKER, 1872/76 (DUR: 1’01”)
“I hope you will enjoy this letter from a younger man, a stranger across the world- a man living in an atmosphere prejudiced to the truths you sing. I write this openly because I feel with you one must be open. “Leaves of Grass” contains the most candid words that ever fell from lips of mortal man. A man cannot in a moment break the habit of comparative reticence that has become second nature to him; but I know I would not be long ashamed to be natural before you. You are a true man, and I would like to be one myself, so I would be towards you as a brother and as a pupil to his master… You have shaken off the shackles and your wings are free. I have the shackles on my shoulders still-but I have no wings. Sometimes a word or a phrase of yours takes me away from the world around me and places me in an ideal land. I thank you for all the love and sympathy you have given me in common with my kind.”
DAVID: It took Stoker four years to get the courage to actually post the letter. And Whitman’s reply, though brief, speaks volumes.
TAPE II: REPLY FROM WHITMAN (15”)
“Your letter was most welcome to me- welcome to me as Person and as Author- I don’t know which most. You did well to write me so unconventionally, so fresh, so manly, and so affectionately, too.
MUSIC: “Dracula” soundtrack DUR: 52”
Track 10 - From Start; David in & Hold Under
DAVID/POEM: “Trickle drops! my blue veins leaving!
O drops of me! trickle, slow drops,
Candid from me falling, drip, bleeding drops,
From wounds made to free you whence you were
prison’d,
From my face, from my forehead and lips,
From my breast, from within where I was concealed,
press forth red drops, confession drops,
Stain every page, stain every song I sing, every word
I say, bloody drops…”

DAVID: Literary experts have noted Whitman’s profound influence on Bram Stoker’s “Dracula” - at times the vampire even resembles the poet: long white hair, a heavy moustache, great height and strength. (MUSIC ENDS) A wonderful portrait of Whitman hangs in the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. It was painted by Thomas Eakins, former head of the Academy and, according to archivist Cheryl Leibold, a close friend of Whitman’s.
TAPE - FW: “They were introduced…
LW: …dramatic and wonderful.” DUR: 1’06”
DAVID: A year after Eakins painted Whitman’s portrait, another man entered the life of the aging poet. His record of their conversations would become invaluable to our understanding of the father of modern poetry.
TAPE - FW: “I guess you could call it…
LW: …knowing what the secret is.” DUR: 2’53”
WIND FX)
DAVID/POEM: “When I read the book, the biography famous,
And is this then (said I) what the author calls a man’s life?
And so will some one when I am dead and gone write my life?
(As if any man really knew aught of my life,
Why even I myself I often think know little or nothing of my real life,
Only a few hints, a few diffused faint clues and indirections
I seek for my own use to trace out here.)
FADE FX
TAPE: - FW: “Being this is the house…
LW: …I do think of that- yes.” DUR: 2’00”
TAPE: - FW: “He often moped…
LW: …Whitmanesque poems of all.” DUR: 42”
DAVID: To this end, Gary Schmidgall has edited a new edition of Whitman’s poems - including many that the poet had removed from “Leaves of Grass” before his so-called “death-bed edition.”
TAPE - FW: “This is just a four line…
LW: …on the ground before them.” DUR: 1’01”
DAVID: D.H. Lawrence called Whitman “a pioneer…ahead of all poets; In one of his poems, Ezra Pound “makes a pact” with Whitman; Federico Garcia Lorca wrote an “Ode to Walt Whitman” and Allan Ginsburg imagined meeting him in the supermarket. Whitman is the “father of modern poetry” less for freeing verse from the strictures of meter and rhyme, but because he made the personal poetical. He expressed this metaphorically in an essay, perhaps inspired by his Netherlandish heritage of which he was so proud.

FROM: “Annals of Old Painters” by Walt Whitman (DUR: 35”)
“Rubens, the Flemish painter, in one of his wanderings through the galleries of old convents, came across a singular work. After looking at it thoughtfully for a good while, and listening to the criticisms of his suite of students, he said to the latter - in answer to their questions as to what school the work belonged - ‘I do not believe the artist, unknown and perhaps no longer living, who has given the world this legacy, ever belonged to any school, or ever painted anything but this one picture, which is a personal affair - a piece out of a man’s life.’”
MUSIC: “Rocky Hill” - Banjo DUR: 1’45”
DAVID/POEM: from end of “Song of Myself”

“The past and present wilt- I have fill’d them, emptied them,
And proceed to fill my next fold of the future.
Listener up there! what have you to confide to me?
Look in my face while I snuff the sidle of evening,
(Talk honestly, no one else hears you, and I stay only a minute longer.)
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
…

The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me, he complains
of my gab and my loitering.
I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable,
I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.
…
I depart as air, I shake my white locks at the runaway sun,
I effuse my flesh in eddies, and drift it in lacy jags.
I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,
If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.
You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,
But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,
And filter and fibre your blood.
Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,
Missing me one place search another,
I stop somewhere waiting for you.
DAVID: The end of “Song of Myself” brings us to the end of the story of “The Good Gray Poet” - my thanks to technician JN - I’m DS …as Walt Whitman would say “So Long!”