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Precipitant of the Modern
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 May 2006
“As for Whitman,” confessed the young Ezra Pound in England in 1909, “I read him (in many parts) with acute pain, but when I write of certain things I find myself using his rhythms.” In the same essay, “What I feel about Walt Whitman,” Pound pronounced a judgment already shared by his generation about the redoubtable figure who had died just seventeen years earlier: “He is America. His crudity is an exceeding great stench, but it is America. . . . I honour him for he prophesied me while I can only recognize him as a forebear of whom I ought to be proud.” And he added, “Mentally I am a Walt Whitman who has learned to wear a collar and a dress shirt (although at times inimical to both).”
Whitman had his own ideas about collars and dress shirts. “Undrape,” hecries in “Song of Myself,”
Undrape! you are not guilty to me, nor stale nor discarded, I see through the broadcloth and gingham whether or no, And am around, tenacious, aquisitive, tireless, and cannot be shaken away.
As if taunted by the call, Pound called back, naming and renaming Whitman “our American keynote” in 1913 in Patria Mia (123)the, “pig-headed father” in the poem “A Pact” of 1915 and, in the 1909 essay, the American “genius”:
Entirely free from the renaissance humanist ideal of the complete man or from Greek idealism, he [Whitman] is content to be what he is, and he is his time and his people. He is a genius because he has vision of what he is and of his function. He knows that he is a beginning and not a classically finished work.
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