The Poet Resigns: Essays on Poetry in a Difficult Time

My Laureates

306 My Laureates it was a summer day in 2010 when it hit me: it was Coleridge now, and had probably been for a year or more. The ‘it’ in question is something I suppose I’d call my personal laureate: the poet with whom I feel the strongest connection, but also something more than that. My laureate is also the poet who serves as a kind of private patron saint. It’s not a lifetime appointment like the British laureateship—nor does it, like that storied office, come with a butt of sack. The term of service is variable, but generally longer than the single-year renewable appointment of the American laureate, whose demeaning position, with its low pay, uncertain possibility of coming back, and its chorus of constant subtle derision from one’s peers, seems to mirror that of the American adjunct instructor. I can count half a dozen personal laureates since I was 18, plus two contenders of equal influence and merit whom I must disqualify for different reasons. On average the term seems to be about four years. I remember exactly the moment when Walt Whitman became my first personal laureate, because I discovered two dubious pleasures right around the same time: hero-worship and reading while smoking marijuana . I’d encountered both Whitman and the herb earlier, of course, but it was only toward the end of my first undergraduate year that I put them together. My dad was a professor at an enormous, provincial university , and I’d long had the run of the place, particularly enjoying it in 307 Poetry in a Difficult World the summer, when I’d go there to spelunk in the underground tunnels connecting the buildings, to hang out in the big, brutalist student center, to shoplift those little Loeb Classical Library editions from the campus bookstore and—best of all—to sneak, by secret paths, up onto the roofs of the buildings, where I could feel like the only person in the world. It was on the roof of one of the science buildings that I pulled my brickthick Norton Critical Editions copy of Leaves of Grass out of one compartment of my backpack, and a pair of tightly-rolled joints out of another, and spent a good four hours poring over the pages. I remember being impressed by “The Ox-Tamer,” and especially by “The Last Invocation,” and feeling very clever for thinking that “What Place is Besieged” must be a poetic reply to John Donne’s “Batter My Heart, Three-Person’d God” (I’m sure, now, I was wrong). I suppose what really got to me, though, what made Whitman my hero and my laureate, was his mysticism , or perhaps I should say the callower side of Whitman’s mysticism. There’s profundity in Whitman, of course, but what I took from him, up on the roof on that clear-skied prairie day in 1987, wasn’t the profundity. It was almost a kind of innocent’s mysticism, something I’d recognize some fifteen years later when I read William James’ comments on Whitman in The Varieties of Religious Experience. In a chapter called “The Religion of Healthy-Mindedness” James says Whitman has a powerful sense of the goodness and unity of existence, that he rejects the “old hell-fire theology” of America’s Puritan past for a sense that “evil is simply a lie, and any one who mentions it a liar” (107). There’s a kind of Dr. Pangloss quality to the Whitman I loved back then. James gets it exactly when he says: Whitman is often spoken of as a ‘pagan.’ The word nowadays means sometimes the mere natural animal man without a sense of sin; sometimes it means a Greek or Roman with his own peculiar religious consciousness. In neither of these senses does it fitly define this poet. He is more than your mere animal man who has not tasted of the tree of good and evil. He is aware enough of sin for a swagger to be present in his indifference towards it, a conscious pride in his freedom from flexions and contractions, which your genuine pagan in the first sense of the word would never show. (85–86) 308 The Poet Resigns James then quotes from and comments on Whitman’s “Song of Myself”: I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and...