Inspired by Margaret Charlston’s recent week of posting book covers, I’m going to do a week of posting stuff that’s currently important or of interest to me. But whereas Margaret just posted the covers, I’m going to say a little about whatever it is I choose to post each day.
I can’t recall with any great certainty when I first heard of Walt Whitman. I suspect it might’ve been via a documentary on Jack Kerouac (Whatever Happened to Kerouac?). I was in my teens, that’s all I can recall with any degree of certainty. Consequently, during my studies for A-levels I bought a cheap American mass-media paperback version of Leaves of Grass at Heffers, in Cambridge. Truth be told, to this day I’ve read only portions of that book. There were two quotes I’d heard from Whitman that really spoke to me: the first and most potent was ‘Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes’, from Song of Myself. This still resonates with me today, not as ‘pure poetry’ per se, but as pure truth. This idea is, in my view, a fundamental part of being human that’s at odds with the modern tendency to specialise. The other quote, this time as poetic as it is true, I first encountered as an album title via Weather Report; I Sing The Body Electric. I actually discovered this bit of Whitman before the ‘multitudes’ thing, and at the time I didn’t know it had been taken from Walt’s works. Rather like William Burrough’s ‘Soft Machine’, I like the way this phrase captures something seemingly eternal and organic in combination with other seemingly more modern ‘techy’ notions, making a whole of them. Thanks to Margaret’s posts I recalled how important Walt Whitman had been to me way back when. I’m resolved to revisit that old paperback and more fully immerse myself in his writings.