Poetry and War

WAR IS IN THE PSYCHE these days, in the way that things like plastics get into the water. There have been several nights, over the past week or so, when the last images that have flashed across my mind’s eye as I drift off into sleep are images from the news: cars flooding the highways outside of Beirut as people flee, burning clouds billowing over oil storage facilities in Tehran.

It’s not that I am in denial about the world as it is, or that I feel I deserve to escape it, but I will admit that I recently went looking for some existential comfort food. A book, I thought, will offer me something different. An old book. One that’s buoyed me in some way, perhaps a long time ago. This is one of the things that we’ve always asked books to do: to help us surface, so we can breathe again.

For some reason (perhaps, in part, because it’s been nagging me from the shelf for a couple of months now), I opened Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. It’s a text that I associate with optimism—the sort of American optimism that feels like a bygone relic of my 1990s childhood, and the earlier eras that fed it. But it was also, at least during some phases of my life, rather like a sacred text to me. It seemed like it would be existential comfort food.

I felt almost offended, then, to re-encounter that second inscription in the book, right there on the first page: “Know’st thou there is but one theme for ever-enduring bards? And that is the theme of War.”

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WHEN I WAS AN UNDERGRAD at the University of Michigan, I spent a spring semester in Maine. It was part of a program in the English Department that (for decades now) has been bringing students to live an isolated existence—without cell phones or computers—in the New England woods for six weeks, so they can read old books.

I was already familiar with many of the figures we read (Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and Ralph Waldo Emerson among others). But reading them in that place, in that particular way, with that particular group of people turned them into very different texts. We existed in a rugged little bubble where our books, and our conversations about them, became the most important thing happening in our world. We talked about these books while we cooked our meals, and ate them. We wrote about them in our little paper journals that we carried everywhere and scribbled in constantly. The writers became the subjects of running jokes, as if they were a living part of our makeshift community.

Those six weeks, in the Maine woods, were probably the closest thing I’ve ever had to a monastic experience. We’d all taken a vow to leave our technologies behind for six weeks which (even in the early 2000s) felt quite ascetic. We’d also vowed not to introduce socially divisive intoxicating substances (though I do recall that cigarettes were very much a part of the experience). This too felt quite ascetic, after the years I’d already spent in a university that was notorious for its party scene.

I don’t know how many others felt this way, but at the end of the six weeks I was probably, effectively, a transcendentalist convert. Some of those books, like Leaves of Grass, had become like religious objects to me. The woods were like a chapel, to me. And I felt like I understood why Whitman believed that democracy needed a beautiful, pulsing, messy, earthy, queer, ecstatic song with a thousand different entry points, if it was ever going to matter to people. That became, I think, part of what I understood democracy to be: a pulsing, messy, ecstatic idea that was as fragile as a lacy black verse on a white page. It, too, felt sort of like a religious phenomenon. I suppose that’s not especially comforting, but for some reason I ended up filing this poem away in my memory as existential comfort food.

WHITMAN DIDN’T REALLY think that Leaves of Grass was a war poem. Not exactly. He’s having a bit of a face-off with the poets of the past in that inscription I’ve referenced (“As I Ponder’d in Silence”). They come to him like a singular phantom, chiding him for his strange, wandering, political poem that attempts to sing about the people as if they were somehow one. And yet also, somehow, beautiful. How could you have convinced yourself that this thing is poetry? They seem to be asking him. It’s not even about war. All good poetry is about war. Whitman knows that he’s doing something else. And yet, he also claims to be waging a war of sorts.

Perhaps it’s because he felt the Civil War brewing, as he sat down to write the initial draft of Leaves of Grass. Whatever the reason, he responds to the phantom poet: “I too haughty Shade also sing war, and a longer and greater one than any.” It’s a war “For life and death, for the Body and the eternal Soul.” And he’s looking to promote, he writes, “brave soldiers.” He knew that his book was a battle for hearts and minds. It mattered, in some ultimate sense. It was an attempt to fill a political form up with something that would keep it alive, and it needed spiritual material for that—the sort of material that is most difficult to gather, and that people are most reticent to sacrifice. He knew it was a book of political theology.

It’s difficult to read Leaves of Grass today without feeling as if Whitman lost that war. In his inscription “To Foreign Lands” he speaks to a world beyond the US that appears to be asking for “something to prove this puzzle of the New World”, something to help them understand America’s “athletic democracy”. America is still a puzzle to the world today, perhaps, but in a very different—much more horrifying—way. There’s something pointless about reading Leaves of Grass in the midst of whatever is happening around us right now. I will say that it doesn’t actually feel like existential comfort food.

And yet, I’ve been reading it. I’ve felt oddly drawn in. It feels like an old text that’s worth revisiting right now, though I haven’t yet settled—with myself—why that is. I am planning to write something else about it; something a little more thought out. Perhaps I will even end up writing more than one thing. Read it with me (Project Gutenberg has a version online). In the poem, Whitman describes it as a “history of the future”. Now it’s the future and the world is caught up in a different sort of war. Perhaps the poem can be a kind of mirror, where we can study the ugly blemishes without mistaking them for the whole face.