[New-Poetry] Re: One sap and one root

[Anny Ballardini]

This is excellent
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: JforJames at aol.com 
  To: new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu 
  Sent: Sunday, May 25, 2008 7:02 PM
  Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Re: One sap and one root


  Probably there is always 6 (or fewer) degrees of critical separation that can drawn between any two poets. But Stevens is some much more a poet of the mind. Walt a poet of the body and life. Stevens the inner paramour. Whitman the effusive self at large in the world. Stevens the lover of vocabulary because of its strangeness and 'essential gaudiness'. Whitman a lover the words for their wildness and bombast. Stevens affection (or affectation) toward foreign words and phrases. Whitman with an eye and ear for the naked, native expression. Whitman the street-level journalist. Stevens the aloof executive. I could go on. 

  Emerson, despite his early important praise of Whitman, didn't really have abiding faith in Walt's project.
  Emerson recognized genius; but he was not really able to embrace the manner in which Whitman embodied it.

  Finnegan

  In a message dated 5/25/2008 7:33:37 AM Eastern Daylight Time, cstroffo at earthlink.net writes:
    Compared to those other USA male modernists (Eliot, Pound, WCW, I'll even include Frost), Stevens definitely identified more with Whitman (at least when he thought of the 'figure' of the poet)-- 
     in terms of an expansiveness...    Yeah, Bloom's argument seemed counter-intuitive to me too, but in his full-book-length study of Stevens he backs it up with enough comparisons of similar passages in W and S

       

    On May 24, 2008, at 8:41 PM, David Graham wrote:


      I believe the link between Whitman and Stevens is Emerson.  
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