{"id":107287,"date":"2017-02-01T13:00:21","date_gmt":"2017-02-01T18:00:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=107287"},"modified":"2017-02-17T12:00:19","modified_gmt":"2017-02-17T17:00:19","slug":"whitman-stevens-co","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/02\/01\/whitman-stevens-co\/","title":{"rendered":"Whitman, Stevens, & Co."},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I haven\u2019t checked, but I\u2019m confident someone before me will have remarked on the similarity between the beginnings of Walt Whitman\u2019s \u201cOut of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking\u201d and Philip Levine\u2019s \u201cThey Feed They Lion.\u201d<\/p>\n

Exhibit A:<\/p>\n

Out of the cradle endlessly rocking,
\nOut of the mocking-bird\u2019s throat, the musical shuttle,
\nOut of the Ninth-month\u00a0midnight,
\nOver the sterile sands and the fields beyond, where the child leaving
\nhis bed wander\u2019d alone, bareheaded, barefoot,
\nDown from the shower\u2019d halo,
\nUp from the mystic play of shadows twining and twisting as if they
\nwere alive,
\nOut from the patches of briers and blackberries,
\nFrom the memories of the bird that chanted to me,
\nFrom your memories sad brother, from the fitful risings and fallings I heard,
\nFrom under that yellow half-moon late-risen and swollen as if with
\ntears,
\nFrom those beginning notes of yearning and love there in the mist,
\nFrom the thousand responses of my heart never to cease,
\nFrom the myriad thence-arous\u2019d words,
\nFrom the word stronger and more delicious than any,
\nFrom such as now they start the scene revisiting,
\nAs a flock, twittering, rising, or overhead passing,
\nBorne hither, ere all eludes me, hurriedly,
\nA man, yet by these tears a little boy again,
\nThrowing myself on the sand, confronting the waves,
\nI, chanter of pains and joys, uniter of here and hereafter,
\nTaking all hints to use them, but swiftly leaping beyond them,
\nA reminiscence sing.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Exhibit B:<\/p>\n

Out of burlap sacks, out of bearing butter,
\nOut of black bean and wet slate bread,
\nOut of the acids of rage, the candor of tar,
\nOut of creosote, gasoline, drive shafts, wooden dollies,
\nThey Lion grow.
\nOut of the gray hills
\nOf industrial barns, out of rain, out of bus ride,
\nWest Virginia to Kiss My Ass, out of buried aunties,
\nMothers hardening like pounded stumps, out of stumps,
\nOut of the bones\u2019 need to sharpen and the muscles\u2019 to stretch,
\nThey Lion grow.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The relationship is obvious enough, yet I\u2019ve known these two poems all my life without ever observing the overlap … that is, until just now, when I was fussing with Richard Ellmann’s\u00a0New Oxford Book of American Verse<\/em>\u00a0(1976). In that venerable anthology, which you can get for nothing online, Whitman\u2019s poem \u201cI Saw in Louisiana a Live-Oak Growing\u201d and the beginning of \u201cOut of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking\u201d happen to occupy the same page. Because I had gone to that very page in a spirit of tracing poetic influence, I suddenly saw \u201cOut of the Cradle\u201d in this new light, today.<\/p>\n

Whereas, to me, \u201cI Saw in Louisiana\u201d (the other poem on the page, and the thing I was actually looking for) has\u00a0always<\/em>\u00a0seemed to me the prompt for Wallace Stevens\u2019s \u201cAnecdote of the Jar.\u201d The Stevens answers the Whitman. Have a look for yourself:<\/p>\n

I saw in Louisiana a live-oak growing,
\nAll alone stood it and the moss hung down from the branches,
\nWithout any companion it grew there uttering joyous leaves of dark
\ngreen,
\nAnd its look, rude, unbending, lusty, made me think of myself,
\nBut I wonder\u2019d how it could utter joyous leaves standing alone there
\nwithout its friend near, for I knew I could not,
\nAnd I broke off a twig with a certain number of leaves upon it, and
\ntwined around it a little moss,
\nAnd brought it away, and I have placed it in sight in my room,
\nIt is not needed to remind me as of my own dear friends,
\n(For I believe lately I think of little else than of them,)
\nYet it remains to me a curious token, it makes me think of manly love;
\nFor all that, and though the live-oak glistens there in Louisiana solitary
\nin a wide flat space,
\nUttering joyous leaves all its life without a friend a lover near,
\nI know very well I could not.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

cf\u2014<\/p>\n

I placed a jar in Tennessee,
\nAnd round it was, upon a hill.
\nIt made the slovenly wilderness
\nSurround that hill.<\/p>\n

The wilderness rose up to it,
\nAnd sprawled around, no longer wild.
\nThe jar was round upon the ground
\nAnd tall and of a port in air.<\/p>\n

It took dominion everywhere.
\nThe jar was gray and bare.
\nIt did not give of bird or bush,
\nLike nothing else in Tennessee.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Stevens\u2019s poem is almost a photographic negative of Whitman\u2019s. Whitman takes a piece of wild Louisiana and puts it in his room\u2014a kind of jar. Stevens takes the jar and puts it in wild Tennessee. (\u201cTennessee,\u201d \u201cLouisiana\u201d\u2014for these guys, pretty much the same thing.) In both cases, the displaced object transfigures its new locale. The magic and dignity and meaning-making of the object is reflected upon. But in Whitman, nature (in all its lusty, garrulous self-sufficiency) is admired; in Stevens, nature is a lazy slob and it\u2019s the human artifact that exerts the fascinating and impressive semiotic magnetosphere.<\/p>\n

The only verbal correspondence between the Whitman and Stevens poems is the way the names of those Southern states are deployed. It\u2019s hard to explain why it sounds so much grander to say \u201cI placed a jar in Tennessee\u201d than to say \u201cI placed a jar on the ground at a campsite, in Pickett State Park, about three miles northeast of Jamestown, Tennessee\u201d\u2014but anyhow it\u2019s obvious the less-specific version savors of the sublime, whereas the other version lets all the air out of it.<\/p>\n

Isn\u2019t the Whitman\/Levine connection much more obvious, though, compared to the Whitman\/Stevens\u2014? Yet, to me the latter was a no-brainer, and the other evaded me for almost thirty years. I asked Michael Robbins to check for me and he says apparently nobody has drawn the \u201cLive-oak\u201d\/\u201cAnecdote\u201d connection before. Perhaps someone reading this knows better.<\/p>\n

Speaking of Robbins. He did a different kind of photographic negative of \u201cI Saw in Louisiana a Live-Oak Growing,\u201d a few years ago. His piece, titled \u201cFrom\u00a0Karpos<\/em>,\u201d it is one of my favorite items from his first book; I dare not omit it here. Note that the ellipsis at the end is present in the original. I am quoting the piece in full, partly in acknowledgment of its comic merit but also observing in it a strange note of prophesy:<\/p>\n

I glance at a twig, I take the twig to my bed, I tell it of manly love.
\nI tell my twig of the migratory song of the goose.
\nI tell it of the new form of companionship I propose in its name.
\nAnd now it seems to me I walked with my twig upon the brown earth
\na thousand years ago, and a thousand thousand, before men were,
\nor women. It seems to me that a twig might sup with the president of
\nthe United States,
\nand become president in its turn. And I will drop my twig in the gutter,
\nfor I know other twigs in their hour will fall into my uncharted path
\nforever.<\/p>\n

And I have said I am a brother to twigs, and I say I belong to their
\nnation,
\nand together we embrace the hay \u2026<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Anthony Madrid<\/a> lives in Victoria, Texas. <\/em>His second book of poems is called <\/em>Try Never\u00a0(Canarium Books, 2017). He is a correspondent for the\u00a0<\/em>Daily.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On the similarity between the beginnings of Walt Whitman\u2019s \u201cOut of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking\u201d and Philip Levine\u2019s \u201cThey Feed They Lion.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1005,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[22700],"tags":[27045,27046,17952,27043,27044,21562,1022,27042,3199,165,2047,27041,7585,792,264],"class_list":["post-107287","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-our-correspondents","tag-american-poetry","tag-comparison","tag-contrast","tag-i-placed-a-jar-in-tennessee","tag-i-saw-in-louisiana-a-live-oak-growing","tag-michael-robbins","tag-nature","tag-out-of-the-cradle-endlessly-rocking","tag-philip-levine","tag-poetry","tag-poets","tag-they-feed-they-line","tag-verse","tag-wallace-stevens","tag-walt-whitman"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nConnecting Walt Whitman and Philip 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