Walt Whitman and the Beats

Last year, I got pretty into Walt Whitman. Upon reading Leaves of Grass and many of his other poems, I came to realize the striking similarities between Whitman and the Beats, especially between him and Ginsberg, who even references Whitman in at least one of his poems.

In both structure and content, Whitman's work is synchronous with some of the main concerns of the beat writers, as the beats and Whitman were seeking enlightenment in similar ways through similar experiences and in the same locations. Two poems that I feel bear the most similarities are Ginsberg s Sunflower Sutra, and Whitman s Passage to India, which I will post a link to because it is incredibly long, and share a journal I wrote that contains brief analysis of the two poems:

http://www.bartleby.com/142/183.html


In both of the aforementioned poems, the speakers romanticize the idea of returning to the appreciation of the beauty of nature as it is observed being juxtaposed with the rapidly expanding progress of industrialization and modernization of the western world. "I see over my own continent the Pacific railroad surmounting every barrier, I see continual trains of cars winding along the Platte carrying freight and passengers, I hear the locomotives rushing and roaring, and the shrill steam-whistle, I hear the echoes reverberate through the grandest scenery in the world,"(Whitman). Throughout his poem, Whitman uses the locomotive and the railroads in California to symbolize the modernization and industrialization of the western world. Through doing so he acknowledges, and even stands in awe at the progress of humanity. However, the main point of Whitman's poem is the importance of returning to and acknowledging humanity's roots through the characterization of the Eastern and Western worlds juxtaposed against each other. This is evident as the speaker of his poem reaches for the past when he says ." In the Old World the east the Suez canal, The New by its mighty railroad spann'd The seas inlaid with eloquent gentle wires; Yet first, to sound and ever sound , the cry with thee O soul, The Past! the Past! the Past! The Past- the dark unfathom'd retrospect! The teeming gulf-the sleepers and the shadows! The past- the infinite greatness of the past! For what is the present after all but a growth out of the past?" (Whitman).

Just like Whitman, Ginsberg uses the image of the locomotive in his poem “Sunflower Sutra” to represent the industrialized western world and to highlight the beauty he finds in a sunflower or the more simplistic things of the past that one might overlook in the industrialized world. The title of his poem in itself also alludes to Sanskrit, and to the return to the values of the Old World, or the east which is exactly what Whitman is doing with his poem as well. “Poor dead flower? when did you forget you were a flower? when did you look at your skin and decide you were an impotent dirty old locomotive? the ghost of a locomotive? the specter and shade of a once powerful mad American locomotive?” (Ginsberg). The image Ginsberg creates here suggests the forgetting of ones roots as he suggests this sunflower has as it has died, and lost its identity in the shadow of this locomotive. This is comparable to what Whitman does in his poem, as he suggests that the erection of the new westernized society has made the old world obsolete in the eyes of many.