song of myself walt whitman

Lorine Niedecker, Walt Whitman, & Vladislav Khodasevich

The three May birthdays for this month's column belong to Lorine Niedecker, Walt Whitman, and Vladislav Khodasevich. Niedecker and Whitman have both written major poems about American presidents: Niedecker on Thomas Jefferson, and Whitman on Abraham Lincoln. Meanwhile, Whitman and Khodasevich have staked out opposite ends of the poetic spectrum in their approaches to nationalism and mystical transcendence.  

1 – Lorine Niedecker: Thomas Jefferson

I did part of my studies at the University of Virginia, the school Thomas Jefferson designed and founded, and two of my friends there were total Jefferson fanatics. It’s always interesting to hear fanatics on a subject where you’re not fanatical yourself, and I now have a greater respect for all those volumes of Jefferson’s writings that my friends pressed on me at the time. If nothing else, learning about Jefferson gave me a much fuller impression of his great rival, Alexander Hamilton, the Michael Corleone of the Founders, a thrillingly contradictory leader. It still seems to me that we’ve inherited Hamilton’s America much more than Jefferson’s, and that Hamilton’s dark complexities tell us more about our culture than Jefferson’s demagoguery does. It was Hamilton, after all, who believed we needed to create a national free-market economy where everyone would always feel a little desperate to keep up with everyone else. In true Enlightenment fashion, he thought politics should be about controlling people through their self-interest. He then concluded that a great way to fix our self-interest to a tight leash was to hold us all in constant fear of financial humiliation. Hamilton created the modern American economic system, and to the extent that our system has shaped countries everywhere, he created much of the modern world. This has made him a hero to neoconservatives, who’ve engaged in a lot of revisionist doubletalk about him in recent years. The rest of us, though, should probably take a closer and less propagandistic look at this most confounding of our national figures.

Song of Myself #32 (excerpt) — Walt Whitman « Ninure da Hippie's Blog

So here I am, waiting for the magical mystery tout, seeing the neighbor cats playing in the back yard, hearing the birdies singing, and wondering..