Major influence on Walt Whitman and Henry David Thoreau NYT?

华人网 2024-9-11 19:20

Walt Whitman, with his “barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world” has influenced multitudes of poets, writers, songwriters, composers and artists around the globe, including notably:

Ezra Pound, the most influential of the early English language modernists, admitted his debt to Whitman in his poem “The Pact.”

T. S. Eliot, the best of the early English language modernists, abandoned rhyme or employed it sporadically in some of his most acclaimed poems such as “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and “The Waste Land.”
Carl Sandburg was a direct heir of Whitman.
Allen Ginsberg was a later direct heir of Whitman.
Hart Crane
Wallace Stevens
José Julián Martí Pérez, more commonly known as José Martí, was a Cuban poet and revolutionary. His 1887 essay El poeta Walt Whitman celebrated the Good Gray Poet and introduced his work to Spain and Spanish America. According to the Walt Whitman Archive: “Walt Whitman's presence in Spain and Spanish America began when the exiled poet José Martí (Cuba, 1853-1895) witnessed Whitman's 1887 Lincoln address and wrote El poeta Walt Whitman. Published in Argentina's La Nación and disseminated throughout the Spanish-speaking world, this letter of introduction set the tone for the ‘Whitman cult’ in Hispanic letters. While Martí begins his essay citing a portrait of Whitman as aged prophet-bard, the composite he draws is of the New World ‘natural man’ of relation who is transcendental brother and lover, spawn of ‘man on a new continent" with a ‘robust philosophy.’ Martí hears Whitman's charging verse as ‘sounds [that] ring like the earth's mighty shell when it is trodden by triumphant armies, barefoot and glorious’ (Martí 211). It is Whitman the bearded bard, the all-embracing liberator, who arrives in Spain and Spanish America in Martí's essay.”
Pablo Neruda, the great Chilean poet who won the Nobel Prize for Literature, translated Whitman’s poems into Spanish.
Fernando Pessoa translated Whitman’s poems into Portuguese.
Jorge Luis Borges, a celebrated Argentine poet and author, admired and championed Whitman. His first published poem, "Hymn to the Sea," was written in the style of Whitman.

Federico Garcia Lorca, a notable Spanish poet, wrote an ode to Whitman that first appeared in a 1934 collection of poems published in Mexico.
Derek Walcott, a Saint Lucian poet and playwright who won the 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature, has been compared to Walt Whitman as a free verse poet.
Pedro Mir, a Dominican poet.
Why has Whitman been so popular and influential in Spain and Spanish America? As Gilberto Freyre noted, as a “poet of the Body and Soul,” Whitman sounds like a Latin translated into English.
Other poets and writers influenced by Whitman include Charles Bukowski, William Least Heat-Moon, John Dos Passos,

In the dense mist of dawn, where verdant whispers dance,
Two souls, with hearts aglow, sought nature's grand expanse.
Walt Whitman and Thoreau, kindred spirits drawn,
Were sculpted by a voice, in Emerson’s poetry and song.

Whitman roamed with boundless verse, where grasses sighed and swayed,
His lines, like rivers free, through American landscapes played.
In "Leaves of Grass," a tapestry of human and divine,
He etched the pulse of nature's heart in every line.

Thoreau, with quietude, retreated to the woods,
In Walden's peaceful embrace, he found his truths and goods.
Where Emerson’s vision of self-reliance did ignite,
Thoreau’s life became a testament to simplicity and light.

Emerson’s words, like seeds, in fertile minds did grow,
Planting notions deep where the inner rivers flow.
The call of nature’s grandeur, of self and soul’s embrace,
Gave Whitman his vast cosmos and Thoreau his tranquil place.

Through Emerson’s lens, the world was wide and free,
Where the self was not a cage, but boundless as the sea.
In every leaf and stream, in every breath and thought,
Whitman’s epic verses and Thoreau’s quiet dreams were wrought.

Thus, in the shadow of transcendence, in the echo of the trees,
Whitman and Thoreau danced to the music of the breeze.
And in their verses, deep and grand, their spirits still remain,
Carved by Emerson’s influence, in nature’s sweet refrain.