Poets to Come
POETS to come! orators, singers, musicians to come!
Not to-day is to justify me and answer what I am for,
But you, a new brood, native, athletic, continental, greater than be-
fore known,
Arouse! for you must justify me.
I myself but write one or two indicative words for the future,
I but advance a moment only to wheel and hurry back in the darkness.
I am a man who, sauntering along without fully stopping, turns a
casual look upon you and then averts his face,
Leaving it to you to prove and define it,
Expecting the main things from you.
Walt Whitman is the man. Nearly a decade before reader-response arose as a prominent literary theory, Walt Whitman not only predicts it, but demands it, as he will not accept quietism, no matter who wears it. A poem, a novel, any writing, is living and must change as it travels from bosom to bosom. Part of Walt Whitman's peculiar genius is his perpetual looking ahead in anticipation of the reader; in fact, waiting ahead is one of the fundamental motifs in his work. One gets the feeling that he's so forward-thinking, his imagination so proleptic, that he's very often leaving his own pages. They say that what's best in poetry is what's elliptical, that is, what's written between the lines; Whitman, and reader-response, slightly tweak this formulation by bringing to bear the reader who brings his/her fundamental personality into the fray, enlivening what is effectively scribbled markings on a dead leaf of, well, grass (or a dead screen these days.) If there is a poem about a freight train that really MOVES, in the sound or syntax or meaning, that movement is still as nothing until a reader comes to it and starts shoveling coal. This doesn't mean that the text loses its weight to the reader - what it means is that the poet leaves "indicative words," fundamental figures to twist around like the poem were a spool, something to ignite the cognitive conditions that Kant describes. In many ways, reading and writing, although fundamentally lonely activities, are built to make our own fundamentally lonely conditions more bearable; you are there to build on the poets promontory, and somebody will build on yours, even if your output is only criticism or a paper in college, and meaning keeps moving this way. If I were to talk to you in the street, I'd have to be polite and only speak for so long, many comments about the weather, and our conversation would be pierced with phenomena occurring around us, and our fundamental anxiety about each other. From afar, when you only have the skeleton of my idea, the language of it, you can make it fundamentally your own and become closer to me and yourself a) because of the amount and density of content, and b) because you fundamentally make that content your own, and so, if not become me, at least stand in my lettered shoes. Also, in a fascinating way, reader-response posits classic texts as timeless, or at least those that last a long while - if a person can't wade through a text tomorrow, it must've been too strictly confined to its own to-day that Whitman describes, and that text becomes what's known as a period piece. A text that interacts with its readers or characters in fundamentally elliptical ways (Barthes describes the hermeneutic code, that of enigma, to be the privileged code of fiction) will sustain their investigation, and their search will often spill over into their own efforts, which is how many schools of literature are created. If any thing is for certain, though, it is that Walt Whitman is the man.
And so is Toru Takemitsu. Translate away -
Works Cited:
Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass. New York, New York: The Heritage Press, 527. Print.
No comments:
Post a Comment