Lived Experience: The Lyric First Person in Three Recent Poetry Collections

Walt Whitman read of his brother George’s injury at the Battle of Fredericksburg in the New York Herald on December 16, 1862. Fredericksburg was but one battle among many, though it lasted five days, and nearly ten thousand Union army soldiers were injured there. Each day, another long list. Whitman left New York hurriedly to find his brother, knowing that many of his readers scanned the same paper each day for the same worrisome reason. Many scanned every paper, everywhere in the country. To be alive in that moment—not just to be a person named Walt Whitman, but to be a person at all—was to know the public, social, and emotional burden of war.

It’s impossible to imagine the term “identity poetics” without Whitman, who devoted himself to experience-as-self-as-subject with a convert’s zeal. Whitman remained in Washington for the duration of the Civil War, holding a government sinecure while volunteering in hospitals and writing. When in “Song of Myself” he describes “The malform’d limbs…tied to the surgeon’s table, / What is removed drops horribly in a pail,” he draws detail from first-hand experience; these lines aren’t acts of imagination but of documentation. His contemporary readers also knew all too well the horror of field medicine, not because they themselves had necessarily suffered an amputation, but because of the procedure’s ubiquity in their historical moment. So, too, with scenes in “Song of Myself” featuring enslaved people working in cane fields, held captive by overseers, and bought and sold at public auction. He witnessed such scenes during his 1848 sojourn in New Orleans, and knew his readers would have experienced slave auctions as current events advertised in the newspaper, not as historic abstractions. Rendered with the privilege of direct experience—not from the overarching, cinematic perspective of the historian in a study, but from the claustrophobic, narrow point of view of the soldier in a trench—the poems generate meaning because readers recognize their subject matter from their own lives.

Poets since Whitman leverage the particulars of individual experience in service of the lyric first person: that knowing, seeing poetic “I” that speaks to us as if the poem were an intimate letter. What matters most in this way of writing is the poet’s understanding of the curiosities, anxieties, preoccupations, and cultural background of the reader. Arguably, all writing depends on a shared vocabulary between author and reader; consider, though, the difference between Whitman’s thicket of nouns and Dickinson’s comparative desert. (To visualize a Whitman poem, one must have lived amply and attentively; for Dickinson, one need only understand glass, a bee, light, death, and the idea of God.) These poems rely so heavily on contemporary experience that we need to remind ourselves of the temporal gulf between them and us. It’s one thing to feel, as we do, shock and horror at the idea of a slave auction. It’s quite another to have witnessed one, or seen them regularly advertised—as Whitman knew a great many of his readers would have.

Three recent books exemplify the current thinking around this issue of readership: Leila Chatti’s Deluge, Stephen Sexton’s If All the World and Love Were Young, and Leah Naomi Green’s The More Extravagant Feast, winner of last year’s Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets. These collections refer explicitly to the tensions between the lives of their authors and the concerns of contemporary readers. It’s impossible to discern the extent to which any poet writes intentionally for her own time or for posterity; not all poets expect to be read in perpetuity, as Whitman clearly did. We can know, however, that the power...