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Merwin Recollected: Echo-Futures With or Without Us
Essays

W.S. Merwin’s Search for Walt Whitman, Whoever He Was

Ed Folsom

Résumés

Cet essai se souvient des conversations que son auteur a pu avoir, des décennies durant, avec W.S. Merwin à propos de Walt Whitman. Les critiques sont longtemps partis du principe que Merwin avait une attitude négative envers la poésie de Whitman qu’il considérait comme le porte-parole de la destinée manifeste portée par les États-Unis et de son impact écologique catastrophique. Le dédain de Merwin envers Whitman était en partie hérité de deux de ses éminents mentors, Ezra Pound et T.S. Eliot, qui avaient, l’un et l’autre, des réserves quant à l’auteur de Leaves of Grass – ce qui était le cas aussi de Merwin. Cet essai examine, à rebours, les aspects de Whitman qui ont influencé Merwin, et qui l’attiraient : les moments où « Whitman parle de l’herbe », ceux où il se confronte au silence, quand les mots viennent à manquer. Deux poèmes de Merwin, en particulier, « A Contemporary » et « Whoever You Are », sont lus ici comme des réponses directes à Whitman, des traces de l’engagement profond et intime qu’avait Merwin avec Whitman et sa poésie.

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1When I was asked to give a keynote address at the “Merwin Across Borders Conference,” I knew that, in accepting the invitation, I would need to take a long and strange journey—a personal one and a professional one—that would carry me back through fifty years of encounters with W.S. Merwin’s work and with Merwin himself—Bill’s work, as I began to think of it back in the early 1980s when I got to know him, and then William’s work as he preferred it later. I needed to indulge in some retrospection in order to explain my complex relationship to both W.S. Merwin and to Walt Whitman, the poet I have ended up devoting most of my scholarly life to. Merwin and Whitman—Bill and Walt—became in some key ways inseparable for me, even as Merwin himself resisted the association for many years. I welcome the opportunity in this essay to think through that relationship—or those relationships—once again.

  • 1 William Rueckert’s “Into and Out of the Void: Two Essays” (1978) introduces the term “ecocriticism” (...)

2I first met Merwin in the mid-1970s, soon after I had initially encountered his poetry in the first graduate seminar devoted to his work, taught by William Rueckert, one of the first—and I still think one of the finest—critics to write about Merwin. Bill Rueckert is the critic who coined the term “ecocriticism” in an essay he wrote about Merwin and other writers with ecological concerns.1 I was doing my graduate work at the University of Rochester, where, in addition to Bill Rueckert, the poets Anthony Hecht and Jarold Ramsey taught. Tony Hecht and Jerry Ramsey both knew Bill Merwin, as they then called him, and Jerry was a particularly close friend who shared Merwin’s deep ecological concerns. They invited Merwin to Rochester, and, thanks to Jerry Ramsey and Tony Hecht and Bill Rueckert, I was invited to join them for a wonderful evening of conversation with this very genial writer whose works I had just studied and begun writing about. Merwin was in his late 40s then, I in my late 20s. He had recently purchased his twenty acres on Maui, and we talked of his early plans for preserving a vast variety of plant species there. I treasured that meeting and remember thinking, after it ended, that “whatever else happens to me, at least I’ve met W.S. Merwin.”

3My doctoral dissertation was on American poetry, with a long section on Whitman and a chapter as well on Merwin. It was about how American poets represented the American continent and the American experiment as a palimpsest, as thick and deep overlays of writing on top of earlier writing, just as the culture itself was an ongoing overlay of many cultures, and what many American writers thought of as the tabula rasa—the original blank sheet—was in fact a shimmering surface of vast and shifting layers of native cultures that were overwritten again and again. Bill Rueckert and Jerry Ramsey directed the dissertation, and then I was hired at the University of Iowa as a twentieth-century American poetry scholar, and, in my first few years there, I taught only twentieth-century literature.

4It was my very good fortune to end up at Iowa, where I taught for nearly fifty years. The presence of the Iowa Writers Workshop in the English Department tinged everything for me when I was a young literature faculty member there. Over the years, I came to know and become friends with a large number of poets who either taught in the Workshop or visited frequently: I’ve had endless long discussions with many of them about both Whitman and Merwin, and they have enriched my thinking about both writers. I think of Marvin Bell and Donald Justice and Jorie Graham and James Galvin and Robert Hass and Brenda Hillman and Galway Kinnell and Gerald Stern and Robert Creeley and Allen Ginsberg and Robert Duncan and Ed Dorn and Yusef Komunyakaa, and, of course, the Director of Iowa’s International Writing Program and Merwin’s close friend and mine, Christopher Merrill. Chris and I have taught two international massive online open courses on Whitman, one of them with Bob Hass, and Chris and I have co-written two books on Whitman. Chris, Bob, and most of the poets I’ve mentioned have all discussed with each other Merwin’s persistent reservations about Whitman, and most of us at some point had long and fascinating discussions with Merwin about Whitman. I really came to Whitman via the responses modern and contemporary poets had to him: those poets led me back to Whitman, the poet I had never studied and had to teach myself about before I could begin teaching him to others.

  • 2 The conference on Merwin was part of Beloit College’s “Festival of the Lively Arts,” held on April (...)

5After I had been at Iowa for just a few years, in 1981, Beloit College held the first symposium on Merwin’s work and invited me to join Cary Nelson and Merwin himself for two days of discussion.2 Cary Nelson had been a graduate student at the University of Rochester and was leaving Rochester just as I was arriving. It was in Beloit that we got to know each other and both got to know Bill Merwin. The three of us began planning to do an interview, which we conducted in the fall of 1981, as well as to work on two books that Cary and I co-edited—the first collection of essays on Merwin’s work (W.S. Merwin: Essays on the Poetry, 1987), and a collection of his uncollected prose writings (Regions of Memory, 1986). I include here a photograph of Cary and Bill and me in Champaign, Illinois, at Cary’s house (fig. 1).

Fig. 1. Cary Nelson, W.S. Merwin and Ed Folsom in Champaign, Illinois, 1981

Fig. 1. Cary Nelson, W.S. Merwin and Ed Folsom in Champaign, Illinois, 1981

6The picture was taken just after I had driven Merwin four hours across the prairies from Iowa City and talked continuously with him about the landscapes we were driving through, about the hogs that we saw fewer and fewer of as they were increasingly locked away and caged indoors in hog-containment facilities that have now made it likely that you can drive clear across Iowa and not see any of the twenty-five million hogs that currently live in the state, eight times as many hogs as humans. Bill and I talked about the disappearance of the native tall-grass prairies that once covered 80% of the state and now have shrunk to less than one-tenth of one percent of the land. This led, of course, to talk of pineapple plantations in Hawaii, and eventually to the landscape palimpsests we all inhabit. I remember mentioning at one point to Merwin that it amused me that most readers, when they thought of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, pictured a manicured and chemically treated lawn of identical blades of grass, when what Whitman himself always pictured were the vast variety of tough tall prairie grasses, like those he illustrated on the cover of his first edition (fig. 2).

Fig. 2. Cover of the first edition of Leaves of Grass, Brooklyn, New York, 1855.

Fig. 2. Cover of the first edition of Leaves of Grass, Brooklyn, New York, 1855.

7“That’s a wonderful clarification,” I remember Merwin saying to me, and then he said, almost as if to himself, “I like it when Whitman talks of the grass.” I often have returned to that quiet remark, which made me rethink any number of Merwin’s poems, like “A Contemporary” in The Compass Flower:

What if I came down now out of these
solid dark clouds that build up against the mountain
day after day with no rain in them
and lived as one blade of grass
in a garden in the south when the clouds part in winter
from the beginning I would be older than all the animals
and to the last I would be simpler
frost would design me and dew would disappear on me
sun would shine through me
I would be green with white roots
feel worms touch my feet as a bounty
have no name and no fear
turn naturally to the light
know how to spend the day and night
climbing out of myself
all my life (1977 15)

8As I read that 1977 poem again and again in the 1980s and 1990s, I would hear more distinctly each time what Merwin meant when he said he liked it when Whitman talked of the grass, and I heard Whitman’s voice echoing behind the poem more and more, those moments when he sensed what it might be like to be a blade or spear or leaf of grass, speaking now from the ground he is bequeathed to:

I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass. (Whitman 29)

This is the grass that grows wherever the land is and the water is,
This the common air that bathes the globe. (Whitman 43)

I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars [...] (Whitman 53)

Behavior lawless as snow-flakes, words simple as grass, uncomb’d head, laughter, and naivetè [...] (Whitman 65)

[...] O grass of graves—O perpetual transfers and promotions,
If you do not say any thing how can I say any thing? (Whitman 77)

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. (Whitman 78)

Again the deathless grass, so noiseless soft and green [...] (Whitman 366)

(The herbs of the morning sprout no fresher and sweeter every day out of the roots of themselves, than it sprouts fresh and sweet continually out of itself.) (Whitman 124)

9The title of Merwin’s poem, “A Contemporary,” suddenly opened to the possibility that William was channeling that other poet of the grass, long dead, as nonetheless his “contemporary” who was now quite literally part of the grass that Merwin was imagining becoming. This was Merwin leaning and loafing and observing his own spear of summer grass and celebrating its profound simplicity, its rhizomatic existence, its ability to “climb out of itself all its life.” I pictured again those roots on the cover of the 1855 Leaves, an actual copy of which I had shown Merwin in Iowa City, when he seemed particularly fascinated with those roots dangling from the letters of the grass font on the cover of Whitman’s book. Bill was finding Walt under his bootsoles, growing from the grass he loved. I thought, too, of “The Hydra,” in The Lice, a poem that takes place in a graveyard where the dead become the engravings on their headstones, where they “go into those names you go on you never / Hesitate / You go on”: “I was young and the dead were in other / Ages / As the grass had its own language” (Merwin, 1967 5). Whitman, too, thinks of the grass in the graveyard, where it “seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves,” rising up from “the faint red roofs of mouths” of the dead, speaking its own cryptic language of rebirth: “O I perceive after all so many uttering tongues, / And I perceive they do not come from the roofs of mouths for nothing” (Whitman 33). This faith in, and fascination with, the grass as the emergence of life out of death is what makes Merwin, in M. Wynn Thomas’s words, “the unmistakable heir of the Emerson and Whitman who so ecstatically hymned flux”: “Like them he wonders constantly at how ‘all that I did not know went on beginning around me.’”

10In the car driving to Champaign, Bill and I talked more about Whitman, the landscape, and other poets. It was the most memorable and illuminating four hours I’ve ever spent in an automobile. Looking over my own correspondence with Bill at the time, I’m struck now by how brazen I was in telling him I wanted him to read more Whitman and asking him to talk with me about him, even giving him a facsimile of Whitman’s Blue Book, Walt’s working copy of his 1860 edition of Leaves, in which he had made thousands of manuscript alterations to his work, and I remember Merwin’s fascination with Whitman’s handwriting, with the way his script crossed out and wrote above and into the margins. I’m struck too by how kind Bill was in telling me he had in fact done the reading of Whitman’s poetry but had not yet written anything about him: “And as for Whitman,” he wrote me, “I did read through the poetry during the past months, but have written nothing, and we can talk more about that, I trust, in Iowa.” (fig. 3)

Fig. 3. Letter from W.S. Merwin to Ed Folsom, September 1981

Fig. 3. Letter from W.S. Merwin to Ed Folsom, September 1981

11Merwin is responding to my having asked him to write something about Whitman that I might include in Walt Whitman: The Measure of His Song, a book I co-edited with two of my (then) grad students and that was published in the same year as this letter (Perlman, Folsom and Campion). This book, which has now gone through two revised and expanded editions, collects responses to Whitman by writers from his time to the present. This book grew out of the first graduate seminar I offered on Whitman, in 1980; Iowa graduate students had come to me to request that I teach a seminar on Whitman, since no one at Iowa at that time taught him. They knew I was a twentieth-century scholar, but they knew too that I was fascinated with the long American tradition of poets at some point in their careers having to come to grips with Whitman and to talk back to him—in the sense of talking back through time, but also in the sense of arguing with him, challenging his ideas of American poetry and America itself. So, I read my way back to Whitman, through all the various written encounters that modern and contemporary poets had with him, and then, finally a deep reading of Whitman’s work, his biography, and the voluminous criticism on him. I’ve never stopped. Just as my grad students had had no one to teach Whitman to them, so I never had had Whitman taught to me. He thus was the only major American writer I never had presented to me in a pedagogical frame, so I never had to break out of the frame I was given that was put around every other American writer I studied. When, as an undergraduate, I signed up for American Romantics, the professor began the course by announcing that we would not be reading Whitman because we would get him in American Realists. When I signed up for American Realists, that professor said we wouldn’t be reading Whitman because we’d get him in American Romantics. I thought this Whitman guy must be an interesting case, belonging everywhere and nowhere. So, Whitman for me was always messy, a kind of mystery, seeping out from any borders I tried to put around him, leading me to endless surprising niches in the culture that I could not have imagined going before I read him—and he’s still leading me to new places, much as Merwin is.

  • 3 Merwin has described this postcard from Pound in several places; see, for example, his account of h (...)

12This is all to explain why, in that interview Cary Nelson and I did with Bill back in 1981, I kept pressing him on his thoughts about Whitman. He told me on that long drive across the prairies that he had not written anything on Whitman because he would rather talk about his reactions to Whitman’s writings than try to put them down in prose. So that’s what we did—both on the car trip and in the interview, where Bill made it abundantly clear just what his reservations were about Whitman and his poetry. We are thus all familiar by now with his cautions about Whitman—as he told me then, “I’ve tried over the years to come to terms with Whitman, but I don’t think I’ve ever really succeeded [...] the positivism and the American optimism disturb me.” Whitman, he said, was “basically a rhetorical poet [...]: you decide on a stance then you bring in material to flesh out that stance, to give details to your position.” (Folsom and Nelson, 1982 30-33; republished in Wutz and Crimmel 45-46). Referring to the now-famous advice Ezra Pound sent him on a postcard after Merwin had visited him in St. Elizabeth’s: “Read seeds not twigs,”3 I remember Bill saying at one point that “Whitman is certainly not a twig, but I’m not sure he’s a seed either; he wants to be, I think, but he isn’t.” “Maybe he thinks of himself more as the soil,” I suggested. “Or a special kind of seed—grass seed, maybe, something to be scattered widely to see what comes up.” Well, Bill said, Whitman’s is “not a poetry that develops in a musical or intellectual sense [...] doesn’t move on and take a growing form—it repeats and finds more and more detail” (Folsom and Nelson, 1982 30-31). He was amused when I told him of how his preferred American literary ancestor Henry David Thoreau responded to his own reading of Whitman’s poetry: though Thoreau found the poems “awfully good,” he noted how they made him feel “a little imposed upon. [Whitman] puts me into a liberal frame of mind prepared to see wonders,—as it were, sets me upon a hill or in the midst of a plain,—stirs me well up, and then—throws in a thousand of brick” (Perlman, Folsom and Campion 68-69). When I suggested to Merwin that, while Thoreau’s style was to pause and look deeper, Whitman’s was to move on and look wider, he nodded in agreement; it was clear which technique he preferred and practiced.

13As Bill talked about Whitman all those decades ago, I certainly heard in his comments clear echoes of Pound’s and T.S. Eliot’s dislike of Whitman. Pound wrote of how Whitman’s “crudity is an exceeding great stench,” how Whitman “is disgusting […] an exceedingly nauseating pill”: “Whitman IS America. His crudity is an exceeding great stench, but he IS America.” But in Pound’s talking back, he comes to realize that Whitman is a poetic father whom he finally cannot deny, that “Whitman is to my fatherland [...] what Dante is to Italy,” so, Pound finally admits, “Mentally I am a Walt Whitman who has learned to wear a collar and a dress shirt (although at times inimical to both),” and he even at one point makes the striking claim that “we have not yet paid enough attention to the deliberate artistry of the man” and admits that “when I write of certain things I find myself using his rhythms” (Perlman, Folsom and Campion 100-101). We can understand now how Pound’s Cantos are in some sense only conceivable with the guiding model of Leaves of Grass, a book that Whitman kept opening and rethinking and adding to and rearranging over twenty-five years. We are all familiar with the well-known “pact” Pound makes with Whitman: “I have detested you long enough” (Perlman, Folsom and Campion 99).

14Pound’s oft-expressed disdain for Whitman was perhaps only outdone by his friend and collaborator T.S. Eliot, another expatriate American who resisted the idea that his own poetic paternity could be traced to the much-too-American Whitman. In 1928, a year after Eliot had joined the Church of England and become a naturalized British citizen, he did his best to distance not only himself from Whitman, but to protect his friend Pound as well: “I did not read Whitman until much later in life, and had to conquer an aversion to his form, as well as to much of his matter, in order to do so. I am equally certain—it is indeed obvious—that Pound owes nothing to Whitman” (Pound 8-9). By the time Eliot published The Waste Land in 1922, he had dismissed Whitman not only for what he called his “clap-trap” but also found him a “pathetic creature,” a bad model for young writers, who, Eliot cautioned, should “more profitably go to writers of another country and another language” to find “styles from which to learn” (Eliot, 1965 56). There are, though, two oblique references that Eliot made about Whitman, and they have direct bearing on how he managed to hide some very deep positive feelings about Whitman. The first is a truly remarkable statement for Eliot, who fastidiously avoided intimate personal reminiscences in his public discourse. He was reviewing a book in Criterion, a book about Paris just before the war, and Eliot could not resist writing: “I am willing to admit that my own retrospect is touched by a sentimental sunset, the memory of a friend coming across the Luxembourg Gardens in the late afternoon, waving a branch of lilac, a friend who was later (so far as I can tell) to be mixed with the mud of Gallipoli” (Eliot, 1934 452). This “friend” is Jean Verdenal, a young French soldier with whom Eliot had an intense affair, one that we can now see formed the occasion for The Waste Land, published just over one hundred years. This memory of desire with a branch of lilac helps explain why the “hyacinth girl” in the published version of The Waste Land was, in the manuscript, a hyacinth boy. And it also helps explicate another uncharacteristic sentence in another review Eliot wrote a few years earlier. In an essay on Whitman and Tennyson, he ends the piece with a seemingly unrelated sentence: “When Whitman speaks of the lilacs or of the mockingbird, his theories and beliefs drop away like a needless pretext” (Eliot, 1926 426). This conflation for Eliot of Whitman, Verdenal, and the power of lilacs and birdsong all illuminate what is going on in The Waste Land, where the lilacs mix with “the hermit-thrush sing[ing] in the pine trees,” evoking Whitman’s “shy and hidden bird” in “Lilacs”: “Solitary the thrush, / The hermit withdrawn to himself [...] / Sings by himself a song” (Whitman 256). These two elegies for an unnamed loved one’s death that comes to be a metonym for the mass deaths and ruined cultures wrought by the Civil War and First World War both begin with the recognition that April is the cruelest month because it breeds lilacs out of the dead land—Whitman always associating the aroma of lilacs with Abraham Lincoln’s death, since that was the smell he inhaled when he first heard the news of the assassination, Eliot always recalling his last encounter with Verdenal approaching him with a branch of lilac. And both long poems end with the gathering of fragments to shore against the ruin—Whitman’s poem ending literally on a sentence fragment, a syntactic image of the shattered “retrievements from the night” that he gathers in order to try to build a future (262).

15Pound makes a pact with Whitman; Eliot complains about him but hides the power he finds in Whitman—a force that, we can now see, helped to generate The Waste Land. I have gone on at such length about these two modernists—both of whom Merwin met and admired—because I think his own complex career-long reactions to Whitman derive from these two writers, and I think too he ultimately shared their ambivalence, an ambivalence that was most often expressed with the negative reactions far outweighing the positive. So, in recent years, as I’ve gone back over my conversations with Merwin about Whitman, I find among his denunciations of what he calls Whitman’s “specietal chauvinism”—his “momentary, rather sentimental view” that “just wipes out” “the buffalo and the Indians […] as though they were of no importance” (Folsom and Nelson 31)—I find him again and again pausing, and saying something like this: “So many of the moments in Whitman that I really love are exceptions to this” (32), the this being Whitman’s rhetorical stance or his naïve optimism or his cheering for democracy or whatever. Wait!, I remember thinking many times—the moments you love in Whitman? What are these moments? Or he would say “I find passages of incredible power and beauty” (30). Quote me one, I’d think. I’d ask him about Whitman’s Civil War poems, and Merwin would say yes, “they’re some of my favorite passages” because “he is simply paying attention to what he sees in front of him” (32). And as we met again and again in the 1990s, I would bring to him passages in Whitman that I wondered if he liked. Gradually I came to think Merwin had made his own kind of pact, having detested Whitman long enough. William’s own version of Eliot’s “When Whitman speaks of the lilacs or of the mockingbird, his theories and beliefs drop away like a needless pretext,” was that quiet affirmative comment he made on our trip across the American prairies: “I like it when Whitman talks of the grass.” Just as was the case for Eliot, Merwin liked the Whitman passages where, as he said, Whitman’s “theory won’t support him”—those places where theory and rhetoric drop away and he focuses on the grass or the air or the clouds or the water.

16I had made the case in a couple of essays I had written in the late 1970s and early 1980s that The Lice is Merwin’s “anti-song of the self”: “instead of the Whitmanian self expanding and absorbing everything, naming it in an ecstasy of union, we find a self stripped of meaning, unable to expand, in a landscape that refuses to unite with the self, refuses to be assimilated, in a place alien and unnameable” (Folsom, 1978 60). Merwin, Wynn Thomas has suggested, is the “American Noah” to Whitman’s “American Adam,” “launching a porous ark of language” in his “quiet imagination of the apocalypse.” “Song of Myself” ends with the Whitmanian self confidently looking outward toward ever-expanding journeys even in death—“If you want me again, look for me under your boot-soles [...] / Missing me one place search another, / I stop somewhere waiting for you” (79). The Lice ends in a muted echo of those final words, with the Merwin-self divided, unsure, tentative, looking not for “you” but rather for himself: “Where else am I walking even now / Looking for me” (1967 80).

17Poet and novelist Ben Lerner has trenchantly written that Merwin’s genius is in “representing absence—with making a presence felt as a loss.” His work, Lerner says, “mourn[s] the very conditions of possibility for the transmission of culture,” and “the Merwin canon can be read as an elegy for canonicity, as a poetic investigation of extinction.” This is where, it seems to me, Merwin most fully diverges from Whitman, whose great faith was in the “you whoever you are” (Whitman 69), the you that is you, the living human body and embodied person who reads Leaves of Grass today, here, now, wherever you are in whatever year it is. He knew you would be here; he had faith that we who are alive in the third decade of the twenty-first century would have bodies and eyes to read lines and breath and tongue to give voice to words and fingers to turn pages. That was his faith in the afterlife—that we would be his afterlife, just as he was the afterlife of all who had died before him: “No doubt I have died myself ten thousand times before” (Whitman 77). The indiscriminate you is what Whitman’s poetry is based on, and it is precisely that future “you” that Merwin has no faith will be there a hundred or two hundred or five hundred years hence. So, he is never sure who his poetry is addressed to: as he famously wrote in “Elegy”: “Who would I show it to” (1970 137). As Ben Lerner says of that one-line poem: it is “an elegy for elegy, [...] mourning the very conditions of possibility for the transmission of culture.” Where Merwin often communicates with the dead, with those bodiless voices from the past that come to him on the air and through the transmission of language, Whitman turns his poetry toward the unborn—those who do not exist when he writes his poems, but those whose existence, whose bodies, Whitman has the faith, will exist at a time when his democratic poetry will make more sense, when its hopes and promises have been more fully realized.

18Merwin and I on several occasions had an opportunity to discuss Whitman’s odd form of address—his “you whoever you are,” a phrase of address that he uses some forty times in Leaves of Grass. Merwin once commented to me that one of the things he most admired about the “Whitman tradition” was “the ease of address [...] which sometimes I would very much like to have been able to use more familiarly myself” (Folsom and Nelson 49). Here, then, in Whitman’s signature phrase of address—“you whoever you are”—we feel that ease that Merwin was in some ways drawn toward. William heard me talk with international writers at Iowa about the difficulty of translating Whitman—I have worked with numerous translators of Leaves over the years, and they all agree that translating Whitman’s two main characters—his “I” and his “you”—present challenges, especially, of course, his you, since in English that pronoun is wildly promiscuous, the word we use to address both a stranger and our most intimate lover, the word we use to address a single close friend and a crowd of strangers. By line three of “Song of Myself”—“And what I assume you shall assume”—translators from virtually every language have to begin making choices about familiarity and number of that second-person pronoun, thus limiting the proliferating ambiguity that Whitman thrives on: Whitman’s poetry in English continually works precisely because of the you’s ambiguity, its ability to make an intimate of a perfect stranger, to make a single specific reader become simultaneously all readers who may ever encounter Whitman’s poetry. And so “you whoever you are” became particularly fascinating to Merwin as a form of address, because it sounded like it could only be referring to a stranger (I’m not sure who you are reading this) and yet Whitman would so often attach the distancing form of address to an act of pure intimacy: “Whoever you are, now I place my hand upon you, that you be my poem” (186) or “As I glance upward out of this page studying you, dear friend, whoever you are” (251).

19Sometime in the early 1990s, during one of his visits to Iowa’s International Writing Program, as we discussed with a group of writers Whitman’s promiscuous you, William commented that he thought the ambiguity went farther than just whether the you is singular or plural, intimate or formal. “I’m not sure we can so easily distinguish Whitman’s I from his you,” he said at one point. I was delighted to hear him say this, because I had come to believe that Whitman’s ultimate challenge to his reader was to understand that the first word of “Song of Myself”—“I”—and the final word—“you”—traced out a transference of energy and identity through time: “Every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you” (29). It’s Whitman’s ultimate metaphor: “I am you,” but, through his composting faith, his proto-ecological understanding of the endless cycles of life, death, decay, and new birth out of the decay, he sees the relation of “I” and “you” not so much as metaphor but rather as metonymy: in the breakdown and recycling of all the physical matter that composes an embodied self, the “I” is “you.” But William’s point was, I think, a different and more profound one.

20By this time, long after William had expressed surprise and not a little disdain at my growing interests in Leaves of Grass, I noticed some subtle changes in his attitudes as he re-read Whitman at very different points in his life, and so I remember my initial shock and then deep satisfaction when he sent me, back in 1997, a copy of Poetry containing his most direct response to Whitman, a poem called (of all things) “Whoever You Are” (1997 28), a poem that the poet Mary Ruefle says “sends shivers down my spine” whenever she reads it (59). It sends shivers down my spine too, and I’d like to conclude by taking a look at this poem with you. The poem was eventually included in Merwin’s 1999 The River Sound. “Whoever You Are” takes confident lines from Whitman and responds to the final lines of “Song of Myself” by hauntingly tuning them to Merwin’s insistently questioning voice, allowing us to see how a distorted or perhaps hidden version of Whitman has been playing through Merwin’s work from very early on right through to the end. From the time I first met Merwin, I had wondered how he could not love those final lines of “Song of Myself,” since it seemed to me they captured Whitman’s great disappearing act, wildly and surrealistically portraying the decomposition of the speaker’s body and self as it diffused itself back into the natural world out of which it came, becoming the clouds, the air, the moving waters of the river (with “eddies” as Whitman’s own River Sound), and, ultimately and importantly, becoming you, whoever you are:

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.

The last scud of day holds back for me,
It flings my likeness after the rest and true as any on the shadow’d wilds,
It coaxes me to the vapor and the dusk.

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. (78)

21When I had talked to Merwin of Whitman’s ending of “Song” in the early years, he had trouble getting beyond “the barbaric yawp”: “the barbaric yawp didn’t particularly appeal to me when I was eighteen,” he told me, “which is an age when it is supposed to” (Folsom and Nelson 30). But in “Whoever You Are,” Merwin probed much more deeply into Whitman’s concluding lines, into the nature of Whitman’s dispersion. Note the form of two and three-line stanzas in Whitman’s poem, with the anaphoric “I” lining the left-hand margin, disintegrating into “It” before reappearing only to depart and effuse and move into the interior of the lines, less and less a subject and more an object, a me dispersed into the dirt, until it makes its last lefthand margin appearance to position itself in relation to the you. Merwin’s form in his response poem takes up that last word, the you that Whitman’s poem leaves us with, and puts it over to the right-hand margin, letting it ring out there in ten of the sixteen lines, in paired lines that both echo and discipline Whitman’s sixteen paired and tripled lines, and that on the page look remarkably similar to Whitman’s form:

By now when you say I stop somewhere waiting for you
who is the I and who come to that is you

there are those words that were written a long time ago
by someone I have read about who they assure me is you

the handwriting is still running over the pages
but the one who has disappeared from the script is you

I wonder what age you were when those words came to you
though I think it is not any age at all that is you

stopping and waiting under the soles of my feet
this morning this waking this looking up is you

but nothing has stopped in fact and I do not know
what is waiting and surely that also is you

every time you say it you seem to be speaking
through me to some me not yet there who I suppose is you

you said you were stopping and waiting before I was here
maybe the one I heard say it then is you (2006 23)

22Whitman’s anaphoric “I” ringing out at the front of line after line has been reduced by Merwin to a single “I” at the beginning of one line, just as Whitman’s single lefthand “you” has been proliferated by Merwin. Merwin was always concerned with pronouns, who the “I” and the “you” were or could be—think, for example, of his introduction to his translation of Jean Follain, where he worries about the slipperiness of the “I”: “Who is the ‘I’ who is thinking those exact things about the puddles and the shadows,” Merwin writes of Follain: “Is it the child of eleven or so, or the man who left when that war was over, and has gone to Paris and the legal profession, and the literary world? It is more than both: it is the suspended regard which they share, and the evocation of this ‘impersonal,’ receptive but essentially unchanging gaze often occupies, in Follain’s work, the place of the first person” (1969 vi). Merwin brings this same sharp translator’s sensibility to his response to Whitman, complicating the “I” and the “you” that Whitman the writer posits and mixing it with the “I” and “you” of the reader and complicating it again with the Merwinian always divided and unsure “I” who frequently addresses its own self-divisions as “you.” Who is speaking when we read a poem: I or you, or both, or neither? Once I read Merwin’s direct response to Whitman, I have never again heard the ending of “Song of Myself” in the same way: Whitman’s confidence in us as his future readers is now for me always underwritten by and melded with the Merwinian doubt of who the “I” is as it searches for the self that wrote the words that were seeking another self to be. Merwin has a way of emptying out the sure sense of presence that Whitman assures us of and filling it with absence: “The more present you try to make the moment,” Merwin once said, “the more absent it becomes” (Thompson and Weinert 114).

23I think, too, of Merwin’s amazing concluding poem of Present Company where he offers a kind of envoi called “To the Book”:

Go on then
in your own time
this is as far
as I will take you
I am leaving your words with you
as though they had been yours all the time
. . .
I will not be
listening when they say
how you should be
different in some way
you will be able to tell them
that the fault was all mine

whoever I was
when I made you up (2005 134)

24Whoever I was, Whoever you are. There’s the balance of Merwin and Whitman, the two poets I’ve orbited for fifty years. It’s not so much that Merwin has rejected Whitman’s self-confidence, but rather that he has revealed the self-doubt that murmurs beneath Whitman’s bravado. Merwin revealed that to me, and I’m pleased to be able to acknowledge that gift here.

Postscript

25I discovered soon after I met William that we shared the same birthday, September 30. But it was not until we happened to be together in September of 1982 and celebrated our birthdays together, that he mentioned it was his fifty-fifth birthday. It happened to be my thirty-fifth. We shared the same birthday precisely twenty years apart, and we realized we were destined to exist in this odd twenty-year gyred relationship, me spiraling up to his age twenty years after he had reached it, while he had gyred on 20 years further. In 1997, we once again celebrated our birthdays together, his seventieth and my fiftieth. As I finished writing this essay you are now reading, in September of 2022, I turned 75, and I experienced that absence that Merwin had always written so powerfully about: some cycle I had come to live by was now broken. The anniversary of William’s death now seemed to eclipse the anniversary of his birth, as he knew it would. We are all haunted by that poem now, as we all have known for decades we someday would be:

Every year without knowing it I have passed the day
When the last fires will wave to me
And the silence will set out
Tireless traveler
Like the beam of a lightless star (Merwin, 1967 58)

26Those lightless stars, which are no longer there but whose light continues to travel through time and space to our present so that they seem to be there, are often for Merwin those voices in the air that he can still hear though their source is now gone. Words themselves are the beams, like the Merwin books we hold in our hands whose words have come from an embodied self that is gone, a presence now an absence. March 15 is the anniversary that he unknowingly passed by for ninety-one years until his death in 2019, two hundred years after Whitman’s birth. The news of his death came over my cell phone as I was in the Iowa Library, holding a copy of the 1855 Leaves of Grass, preparing for a bicentennial exhibit of Whitman’s books.

27When I last saw William, in 2011, a year or so after The Shadow of Sirius had appeared, I talked with him about the obliqueness of the title of his book, as so many others had. A year or so later, I ended up writing about Merwin again, thanks to Aaron M. Moe and his brave attempt to begin, nearly a decade ago, a journal devoted to Merwin studies. I wrote about Merwin’s relationship to the air and that word’s multiple connotations for Merwin. I told Merwin then, when he was 84 and I was 64, that as I had worked through my own thoughts about the Shadow of Sirius title, I had come to think of William’s and my twenty-year-to-the-day cycles as something like the Sirius binary star-system, since Sirius, the brightest star in the sky, has a relatively tiny star called Sirius B, a white dwarf, that cycles around the vast Sirius every fifty years or so. On the Hubble Space Telescope image of Sirius, there’s a tiny spot of light in the lower left: that is Sirius B, nearly invisible but nonetheless dutifully cycling. I showed Merwin the image, and he smiled.

28Whitman, too, thought a lot about the silence of the stars, and, as he contemplated his own death, he imagined entering the silence of eternity, the place of wordlessness. One of his finest late-life poems, “A Clear Midnight,” first published in 1881, captures this precisely, and Merwin was moved by this poem when I showed it to him in 2011:

This is thy hour O Soul, thy free flight into the wordless,
Away from books, away from art, the day erased, the lesson done,
Thee fully forth emerging, silent, gazing, pondering the themes thou lovest best,
Night, sleep, death and the stars. (369)

29Whitman’s “free flight into the wordless” anticipates Merwin’s imagining how “silence will set out / Tireless traveler / Like the beam of a lightless star.” Merwin was always fascinated when I would ask him about those moments in Whitman when he came up against wordlessness, as in “A Song for the Rolling Earth,” in which, like Merwin, he questions the value of language itself, since the “real words” are the things that our spoken and written words point to but can never say or be: “Air, soil, water, fire” (Whitman 176). “Night, sleep, death and the stars.” I think Merwin, toward the end, would affirm that not only did he like it when Whitman talked of the grass, he liked it when Whitman doubted his own certainties, when he came up against the silence, whatever it was.

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Bibliographie

ELIOT, T.S. “Whitman and Tennyson.” Nation and Atheneum, vol. 40, December 18, 1926, p. 426.

ELIOT, T.S. “A Commentary.” The Criterion, vol. 13, April 1934, p. 452.

ELIOT, T.S. To Criticize the Critic and Other Writings. London: Faber and Faber, 1965.

FOLSOM, Ed. “Approaches and Removals: W.S. Merwin’s Encounter with Whitman’s America.” Shenandoah, vol. 29, no. 3, 1978, p. 57-73.

FOLSOM, Ed, and Cary NELSON. “Fact Has Two Faces: An Interview with W.S. Merwin.” The Iowa Review, vol. 13, no. 1, 1982, p. 30-66.

FOLSOM, Ed. “The Quality of the Air: Merwin’s Ongoing Ecological Song.” Merwin Studies, vol. 1, no. 1, 2013, p. 5-19.

LERNER, Ben. “The Emptiness at the End.” Jacket, vol. 28, October 2005. jacketmagazine.com/28/lern-merw.html. Accessed 28 November 2024.

MERWIN, W.S. The Lice. New York: Atheneum, 1967.

MERWIN, W.S. “Foreword.” Transparence of the World. Jean Follain. Selected and translated from the French by W.S. Merwin. New York: Atheneum, 1969, p. v-viii.

MERWIN, W.S. The Carrier of Ladders. New York: Atheneum, 1970.

MERWIN, W.S. The Compass Flower. New York: Atheneum, 1977.

MERWIN, W.S. Regions of Memory: Uncollected Prose 1949-82. Eds. Ed Folsom and Cary Nelson. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986.

MERWIN, W.S. “Whoever You Are.” Poetry, April 1997, p. 28.

MERWIN, W.S. Present Company. Port Townsend: Copper Canyon, 2005.

MERWIN, W.S. The River Sound. New York: Knopf, 2006.

MERWIN, W.S. The Mays of Ventadorn. Port Townsend: Copper Canyon, 2019.

NELSON, Cary, and Ed FOLSOM, eds. W.S. Merwin: Essays on the Poetry. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987.

PERLMAN, Jim, Ed FOLSOM, and Dan CAMPION, eds. Walt Whitman: The Measure of His Song. Revised editions 1998, 2019. Minneapolis: Holy Cow!, 1981.

POUND, Ezra. Selected Poems. Ed. with an introduction by T.S. Eliot. London: Faber & Gwyer, 1928.

RUECKERT, William. “Into and Out of the Void: Two Essays.” The Iowa Review, vol. 9, no. 1 1978, p. 62-86.

RUEFLE, Mary. “Could We Invent a Question for this Answer?: An Interview with Mary Ruefle.” Crazyhorse, no. 63, 2003, p. 58-62.

THOMAS, M. Wynn. “Written in Water.” The Guardian, June 1, 2007. www.theguardian.com/books/2007/jun/02/featuresreviews.guardianreview16. Accessed 28 November 2024.

THOMPSON, Jeanie, and Jonathan WEINERT. “Raw Shore of Paradise: A Conversation with W.S. Merwin.” Until Everything Is Continuous Again: American Poets on the Recent Work of W.S. Merwin. Eds. Jonathan Weinert and Kevin Prufer. Seattle: WordFarm, 2012, p. 113-127.

WHITMAN, Walt. Leaves of Grass. Camden: David McKay, 1891-1892. whitmanarchive.org/published/LG/1891/whole.html. Accessed 22 November 2024.

WUTZ, Michael, and Hal CRIMMEL, eds. Conversations with W.S. Merwin. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2005.

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Notes

1 William Rueckert’s “Into and Out of the Void: Two Essays” (1978) introduces the term “ecocriticism” in the second essay, “Literature and Ecology: An Experiment in Ecocriticism,” an experiment that involves both Merwin’s poetry and Whitman’s, as well as writings by Adrienne Rich, Gary Snyder, Theodore Roethke, and William Faulkner, among others.

2 The conference on Merwin was part of Beloit College’s “Festival of the Lively Arts,” held on April 3-4, 1981, and directed by Mary Slowik.

3 Merwin has described this postcard from Pound in several places; see, for example, his account of his meetings with Pound in The Mays of Ventadorn (3-11); the postcard is described on p. 10.

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Table des illustrations

Titre Fig. 1. Cary Nelson, W.S. Merwin and Ed Folsom in Champaign, Illinois, 1981
URL http://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/docannexe/image/23791/img-1.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 108k
Titre Fig. 2. Cover of the first edition of Leaves of Grass, Brooklyn, New York, 1855.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/docannexe/image/23791/img-2.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 66k
Titre Fig. 3. Letter from W.S. Merwin to Ed Folsom, September 1981
URL http://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/docannexe/image/23791/img-3.png
Fichier image/png, 932k
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Ed Folsom, « W.S. Merwin’s Search for Walt Whitman, Whoever He Was »Transatlantica [En ligne], 2 | 2024, mis en ligne le 01 décembre 2024, consulté le 09 février 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/23791 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/134gm

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Ed Folsom

University of Iowa

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