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No wonder, then, as Gaur proceeds section by section to dissect
Song of Myself, even Whitmanian profundities turn into
platitudes, flights of the imagination into a futile exercise in
kite-flying. And the great poet emerges as a huge poseur, a
braggart who in aggrandising his self becomes a vendor of
vanities. Gaur does refer to the Freudian—Jungian studies
which help throw a lot of light on his shaggy undergrowth and
his dark impulses, but these critiques only enlarge our
understanding of Whitman’s contradictions and ambiguities.
Whitman, as Gaur avers, was not unaware of such slidings in his
poetry, and he quotes the famous lines: "Do I contradict
myself?" "Very well then...I contradict
myself"..."I am large...I contain multitudes, but Gaur
and his kind remain unconvinced. They tend to put such
pronouncements down as crude rationalisations.
Several critics
have, accordingly, failed to realise that the Whitmanian
dichotomy is structured into the very fabric of his nativity and
being. The betrayal of the Great American Dream, a legacy of the
Mayflower "pilgrim fathers," and the retreat from a
religious and righteous pursuit into a rapacious capitalism were
bound to cause distress to all American creative writers in one
way or another. The thesis of the German philosopher, Martin
Buber, which linked the doctrinal Protestantism to Capitalism
umbilically, brings out in a profound manner the deep divisions
within the American corporate psyche.
Before I turn to
the personal "connection" with Walt Whitman, I must
acknowledge Gaur’s endowments which are considerable. He
vigorously and relentlessly pursues his line of thought, and
within those self-confined parameters, he moves with ease, even
elegance. His prose is expressive, and his idiom felicitous.
But, as I’ve maintained in the ongoing argument, an adversary
position does not warrant sweeping generalisations in which Gaur
indulges rather too frequently. To say that the poet "is
merely a champion of imbecile loneliness" is to disregard
the true critical canon.
My own initial
response during my younger days to Whitman’s poetry was
negative, for being under the influence of poets like Y.W. Yeats
and T.S. Eliot, I could not react sympathetically to the type of
poetry Whitman had pioneered with so much power. And there’s a
moral in that story. All great writers, it appears to me, strike
the true note in you only when your mind is equipped to receive
such grand symphonies. And my "discovery" of Whitman
materialised via Prof Puran Singh whose poetry and critical
essays first brought me "to the boil". He himself had
been completely bowled over when in 1901 during his Tokyo stay,
he chanced upon a copy of Leaves of Grass. He was never the same
man or poet again. And he went on the pronounce Whitman
"Guru’s Sikh born in America". He saw in his muses
the same light, the same energies which, in his view, were
embedded in gurbani. My own new readings finally resulted in a
couple of critical essays on the remarkable affinities between
the two poets — "the Master" and the
"Chela." And this finally, resulted in an invitation
from the Whitman Society in Humtington to address the poet’s
birth anniversary celebrations. I was in the company of America’s
National Poet for the Year, Stanley Kunitz, and my address later
appeared in full in The Tribune when I returned home from a
Visiting Professorship at New York University (1988-90).
One most striking
thing that I wish to record here is the change in the attitude
of two great American writers, Henry James and T.S. Eliot,
towards Whitman in their later years. Both recognised the
immense power of Whitman’s sonorous verses, and this is best
reflected in Eliot’s Swan Song, Four Quartels, which has some
distinct Whitmanian echoes.
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