60 for 60: Borges on ‘Leaves of Grass’
By Zachary Erickson
View of the Argentine National Congress: 25 May 2019
Democracy is difficult to think about, difficult to write about, and difficult to live. At least, in 2022, a lot of people seem to believe so. Forty years ago, Jorge Luis Borges (writer of poems, essays, and “fictions”) spoke to an assembly of Columbia Writing students and made a beautiful claim: that Whitman’s Leaves of Grass is the most daring and the most successful of all literary experiments, because it is an epic poem of democracy. Such a poem had never been attempted before and has not been attempted since. (The picture above was taken by yours truly from a balcony of the Palacio Barolo, a Dante-themed building in Buenos Aires. The Argentina of Borges was and is no stranger to the fraught nature of democracy in a world ideologized in favor of hierarchy: so the juxtaposition of Dante and Whitman is very neat.) In the face of such a difficulty, many fall silent; not Whitman.
I think that Borges’s argument—published in our eighth issue and transcribed by Kirsten Dehner—is genius. Some (all?) writers need lifelong preoccupations; Borges had several, and one of them was Whitman, and, here, he explains why Whitman deserves such an honor. As a poet, I know myself that the attempt to write a “democratic” poem is one of the challenges that most animate many poets. So, may the challenges continue.
Jorge Luis Borges on Leaves of Grass
The following is an excerpt taken from a seminar given by Jorge Luis Borges to the students in the Graduate Writing Division at Columbia University on September 30, 1982.
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In 1855 two epic poems were written: one altogether forgotten is Longfellow’s Hiawatha, and the other of course, is Leaves of Grass. I think that of all literary experiments Leaves of Grass is the most successful and far more daring than the others, for example Joyce’s Ulysses or even Finnegan’s Wake, but the success has been so great that nobody thinks of it as being experimental and nobody has attempted the same thing.
Mr. Walt Whitman began by the idea of democracy and also by the wish, by the will to write an epic poem. Now all epic poetry has had a central hero. For example, we have in The Iliad the hero who was supposed to be Achilles but was really Hector. That doesn’t matter, there’s always a central hero: Roland in the Song of Roland, Beowulf in Beowulf, the old English epic, in The Cid in Spain and so forth. But Mr. Whitman thought in terms of democracy there should be no central hero, because that stood for what he called feudal poetry, and when he spoke of feudal poetry he would think of Tennyson for example. Mr. Whitman thought, “No, this, it won’t do,” and so he set out to write an epic.
We always think of Leaves of Grass as being a series of short poems, but I don’t think he intended that to be our reading of them. He wanted the whole thing to be read as an epic poem. A proof may be found in the fact that he kept on republishing the book, enlarging it, and always calling it Leaves of Grass. He thought of the whole thing as a single poem.
Now, since the epic had to be an epic of democracy, of course, the easiest thing would have been to say, “O Democracy…” and then go on, a kind of allegory, but that did not suit him. He said, “No, since this is an epic of democracy, the hero must be everybody, including the reader.” A very strange idea. I think that Walt Whitman’s results have been copied all over the world. Neruda told me that he thought of himself as being a minor South American Mr. Whitman, and we have very fine poets, Edgar Lee Masters and Carl Sandburg, who are evidently begotten by Whitman.
What Whitman did was to create a trinity. We have Mr. Walter Whitman, a Brooklyn journalist who wrote quite bad verses. Then we also have Walt Whitman who seems to be a glorified Walter Whitman, who, if you read the “Song of Myself” or whatever you like, you find that he’s born all over America. He speaks of “Texas, in my early youth;” he was from Long Island. Or, “As I have walk’d in Alabama, my morning walk.” He never got to Alabama, but he wanted to be born all over America. Walt Whitman, of course, is better liked than Walter Whitman:
Walt Whitman, a kosmos, of Manhattan the son
Turbulent, fleshy, sensual, eating, drinking and breeding,
A divine vagabond was not at all the sort of man Whitman was. He was a rather shy man, an unhappy man, but thought it his duty to be happy; he thought it an American duty. And then he also added, very consciously, a third character, and that character was his reader, present or future. When we read the book we are partly Walt Whitman and we even address Walt Whitman. For example, in a poem called “Salut au Monde!”, it begins by saying “O take my hand Walt Whitman,” and then later says, “What do you hear Walt Whitman?” and ‘What do you see Walt Whitman?”. It’s supposed to be written or intoned by the reader and addressed to the writer. So really, when we speak of Walt Whitman we are not talking of a real individual, but of a hero of an epic and that hero is a trinity.
But besides that very strange intention of being a trinity, he was a very real poet, a true poet, and I think that perhaps what is private in his book is better than what is loud and public. For example, when he writes “camerado,” that’s very uncouth. I suppose he meant “camerada,” but he wrote “camerado”:
Camerado, this is no book
Who touches this touches a man,
(Is it night? are we here together alone?)
It is I you hold and who holds you,
I spring from the pages into your arms — decease calls me forth.
Then:
I love you, I depart from materials,
I am as one disembodied, triumphant, dead.
Now such lines are wonderful, I should say. You see the words get shorter, and then you get that hammerstroke, the last syllable, the last lovely syllable.
Then there’s also the case of verse. He wanted free verse and he was, I suppose, the inventor of free verse, and that free verse is something different from what has been done after him—far more living. For example, poets pride themselves on being singular, as did Baudelaire, but Whitman prided himself on being like everybody else. That was democracy:
This is the grass that grows wherever the land is and the water is
This is the common air that bathes the globe.
So instead of being like most poets today tend to be—that began with Byron I suppose, then taken over by Baudelaire and so on—he insisted on being quite commonplace, on being everybody.
I know little about Whitman. I read him many, many times over, ever since I discovered him in Switzerland in 1917 or thereabouts. I was reading a German anthology and there in it I found a poem translated—the German title was for “Alabama Morning”—and then came the name “Whitman” that rang a bell. I thought, “How absurd to be reading Walt Whitman in German,” so I ordered a copy of Leaves of Grass from London. Well, I was swept off my feet. Since then I’ve gone on reading Walt Whitman, but I could never attempt it—I don’t know if anyone had attempted- the strange idea of a book whose hero is a trinity, whose hero is a private man, a glorified public man, let us say a kind of demi-god, and also the reader. And the reader, of course, would be changing since he spoke. He spoke much to his future readers, to those who would read him when he was dead. He said to them, “How sorry you must feel that I am dead, and yet perhaps here I am, next to you in a ghostly way.”
I have propounded a theory, maybe a new one, maybe an old one, but I think it’s a true theory concerning Walt Whitman, perhaps one of the most important gifts America has contributed to the world. Whitman, and Emerson. Emerson wrote a very generous letter to him and he said that he rarely went to New York, but that when he went he wanted to shake hands with “my benefactor,” and he said also that Leaves of Grass was perhaps the best piece of wit and wisdom contributed by America. And Whitman was an unknown journalist.
Now, the book began by being a rather thin volume; I think it was only one hundred pages long. Then, in the third edition came those poems devoted to sex. Emerson urged him not to publish them, to leave them out, and Whitman answered, “If I leave sex out, I leave the universe out,” and I think he was right. So he indulged in those poems of heterosexual and homosexual love. Well, that kind of thing hardly matters. But when the Civil War came, Whitman forgot what he said to the States: “Resist much, obey little,” and he sided with the North which was unavoidable. In a sense he betrayed Walt Whitman since he was born all over America, since Whitman in the first edition stood for the South and for the North.
Now as to the circumstances of the book, I know but little. I know that he had been a very commonplace writer, quite a bad writer. I think he wrote in favor of slavery and also against drunkenness; those were mere tracts. He began a novel and then he wrote articles for the Brooklyn Eagle, partly politics and that sort of thing. Then he went to New Orleans and there he had an experience. What that experience was nobody knows, but he speaks about it, or he refers to it in a dim way—the experience of loving and being loved; that wonderful experience that happens to most of us—the idea that there is but one person in the world, and that she’s the other and you are that other person to her. I suppose Whitman had that kind of experience, but biographies of Whitman are very disappointing, because when we go to them we expect to find Walt Whitman the hero of Leaves of Grass, but we don’t, we find a rather middling kind of life; we find him to be rather a sad man. There is no happiness to be found in his life, but still happiness is there for us and we’ll go on. I think of Whitman as one of the great gifts of America to the whole world, and I’m duly grateful to Walt Whitman and to America, of course.
Transcribed & Edited by Kirsten Dehner
