The high modernist reaction to Whitman would take other strange forms. D.H. Lawrence would write an admiring essay of Whitman published in 1821, excerpted as follows:
Whitman has gone further, in actual living expression, than any man, it seems to me. Dostoyevsky has burrowed underground into the decomposing psyche. But Whitman has gone forward in life-knowledge. It is he who surmounts the grand climacteric of our civilization.
After exalting Whitman to the “grand climacteric of our civilization”, a couple of years later he would revise this essay towards its final publication in Lawrence’s
Studies of Classic American Literature (1923). In the essay’s final form, a more critical disposition is struck, for example, as his attack on Whitman’s concept of sympathetic merging, excerpted as follows:
As soon as Walt knew a thing, he assumed a One Identity with it. If he knew that an Eskimo sat in a kyak, immediately there was Walt being little and yellow and greasy, sitting in a kyak. Now will you tell me exactly what a kyak is? Who is he that demands petty definition? Let him behold me sitting in a kyak. I behold no such thing. I behold a rather fat old man full of a rather senile, self-conscious sinuosity.
I owe much of my appreciation of Whitman’s poetry through Lawrence’s criticisms and believe ‘ol David Herbert has a valid point here. But does he have to call him fat? Is it really necessary to bring in the issue of his size? Eskimos don’t seem to fair any better through Lawrence’s critical eyes. Lawrence eventually comes to see the image of Whitman, with its disenchantment, in his poor dog “Bibbles” – the subject of a great poem by Lawrence but one can’t help but wince at the vitriol of this spurned love. While Lawrence may have a valid point, there's something else going on with this high modernist reaction to Whitman's poetry.
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