Pouring out, just pouring out.
Well, it's very kind of the rest of you to stay with me.
I know what it means.
I'd now like to read the poem from Two-Part Inventions.
I'm going to try to do it sitting in this chair
if the microphone will admit.
Does the microphone admit?
Can I be seen now?
The two speakers in this poem identify themselves
rather rapidly and I don't think there's much need for me
to explain who they are.
You will perhaps be pleased to know that they
did actually indeed meet.
The poem is called "Wildflowers"
and it's dated Camden, New Jersey, 1882.
Oh it's not funny yet.
"Is it raining, Mary?
Can you see?
I hear rain.
Is the road black?
Is it shining?
It's dark.
I can see for myself.
Put on my red tie, red has life in it
Most men I know dress like undertakers making sure
they look mournful enough to manage their own funerals.
No accounting for taste.
They should be grateful for that.
Help me get to the window, I want to see Mickle Street.
Don't you hear it now?
Something like rain off in the distance.
To my ear maybe, it's playing me tricks again.
There was a rushing like rain when
it moves closer and starts a milestone in the mill
stream in the trees.
No?
I guess my senses must be losing their touch.
It was nothing then, nothing more
than a tantrum of the boneyard, best for me
to hold still in this chair and listen to my beard grow.
Now if hair was poetry then your Walt Whitman
would be a great success.
I wear out trying to come to terms
with the wrong weather, what you might call speaking terms.
I don't want to talk to much else.
You tell them to go home, Mary, no visitors today.
Oh, one, just one.
What else is a red tie for?
Some English poet keeps me up, coming all the way here
from California, Colorado, coming
to ask the usual questions.
I don't like questions that require answers.
English questions.
That's a country of things answered,
London's a city of things done with.
Brooklyn is different.
New Orleans, Washington, they're my cities of romance,
all the cities of things begun.
I may have been deliberate, even laborious
but I never looked for finish.
Here, here where's his name.
Bucke wrote about him after hearing one of his lectures.
I had it here somewhere.
Well, you let him in, Mary.
No one else, no one.
I'm slipping.
Oh here it is, here is the name.
Slowly maybe but slipping.
Who can say he has hold of what might be called a standing.
It's what they do say though, all these visitors.
They write, they call, and they stay, makes a problem.
Doctor says, bar them.
I can't, I won't.
Still they bother me.
One young fellow walks in says, Walt, I
should like to read you my epic and have
your opinion of its worth.
Thank you, say I, but I've been paralyzed once already.
Suppose someone took it into his head to come here
and sit and say nothing.
Someone who knows even the first syllable
of the great speech of silence.
Today's visitor maybe will mind his tongue,
maybe spare you the trouble of putting his latest tribute
on the shelf with all the rest.
Give me enemies rather than these disciples of mine.
Best thing I ever heard of Browning
is how he disapproves of all those societies.
Not that I quote Browning, or care for him, or read him.
I've tried Browning on every way but he don't fit.
Tennyson, he has his place, local English place.
I don't see how the world could make much use of him elsewhere.
Not the others.
The others, I conclude most literature
was written on all fours and the rest on stilts.
Now there, Mary, that's the bell.
I did hear that.
I know my own bell, don't I?
Go on, go on down.
Bring the man up.
In here, Mr. Wilde.
This room is not such a ruin as it seems.
I find most things I search for without much trouble.
Found Dr. Bucke's letter with your name, for instance.
Found my red neckties.
Well, come in, come in.
You cast a shadow where you stand.
Come in, the chaos is more suspected than real.
Though I suspect no chaos.
I am convinced of the cosmos in your company, Walt Whitman.
I greet you sir as America's great voice.
Well, you have come to be disillusioned, have you?
Disillusioned?
Not after Colorado.
Red Rocks are a foolish place in which to look for inspiration.
But a fine one in which to look to forget you ever had any.
Disillusion here.
There is no one in this wide America of yours
whom I love and honor half so much.
I came to see you without the illusion of a ground glass
lens between us, Walt Whitman.
Look your fill.
Look close enough and you may even see my beard growing.
I fear I've been photographed until the cameras themselves
are tired of me.
The real man by now is a poor replacement.
You and a good proofreader must puzzle me out.
I don't feel worth my weight in feathers.
Not even quills.
Not pinions, but pens.
It must be so for every prophet I discover reads his proofs.
Do I disturb you when you are not yourself?
Your health is not all it might have been today?
My health is hell and heaven is the first moment
after constipation.
There is no purgatory.
Here, come around here.
Now this way, stand where I can see you.
Yeah.
Dr. Bucke gave me no clue.
Oh, doctors are all very well when you are.
But only they then they can offer comfort.
When one is ill doctors are most depressing.
Bucke is not that breed.
He tends the mad in Canada.
Kind of a medical mystic, he lets me call him.
His letter gave me no hint you were such a great boy.
I feared a man wizened by the frost of worldliness
but for all that fur--
it is fur, isn't it?
Not a mane.
You are the lion, sir, between the two of us.
Well, you're no lamb judging by the look of you.
From the set of your shoulders, one
would say you had the American I am in you somewhere.
In Boston, sir, they took me up for Irish,
in Baltimore for British.
In each city they seem ready to take me for what I am
but I am not a boy, sir.
Is it my fault if I seem young because I look behind me
and you as old as you do because you look so far ahead?
Future of mind, you have that, where presence
is the most one hopes for.
You know I saw a man in the West whose twig bends near water.
I call on you as one consults such a man.
You know how to say the remembered if not
the right thing.
If I can't speak poetry, I can inspire it.
I swim in your flattery, son.
Oh better swim than drown in any element.
Never heed our ages Walt. May I call you Walt?
I must be Oscar to you.
We meet here as prophets at ease in Zion,
without age, without agitation, and I
hope to find you feeling the better for that.
I am as you see incarcerated in this one chair.
What is prophetic about that?
What we share.
The gift of prophecy is given to all
who do not know what will happen to themselves.
You may be as right.
I know.
Day by day I learned.
The trouble with me is not what I do but what I don't feel.
My fingers are dead.
Oh put them in mine, Walt. Doctors prate of chills
but I think any man who has survived
your American newspapers is impregnable.
And your decor, I have been dashing between coyotes
and canyons only to discover one is
a ravine and the other a fox.
I don't know which, I believe they change about.
So it would have been with me, a like confusion
if I had ventured in the broad foreign landscape,
foreign livestock.
I'm homesick enough right here in Camden.
America is the one country you can be homesick
for while you're in it.
One big case of homesickness.
I would have frozen solid if I had taken Tennyson's offer.
You would have discovered that Lord Tennyson believes
himself constituted to protest against
all modern improvements.
He regards-- I think I should warn you, Walt, he
regards America as a modern improvement, one of the worst.
You give the literary man a touch of frostbite over there
and he's never quite the man he was after London has set in.
I don't regret never getting myself to England.
How would England have helped or hurt the Leaves, for instance.
The leaves-- Oh yes, Leaves of Grass.
You know, I've always thought spears your word
my dear, Walt. Spears of Grass.
You are a naked man, you know, bearing a naked spear.
Leaves is what I wrote and what I wear if my nakedness must
be covered.
Spears, I want no defenses.
All this fear of indecency, all this noise about purity
and the social order is nasty, too nasty to compromise with.
I never come up against it but I think
of what Heine, the poet Heine, said
to a lady who had expressed some suspicions about the body.
Madame, Heine said to her, are not all of us
naked under our clothes.
I say so.
I got it all set in the Leaves, Oscar.
Sex is the word when you mean sex, discredited here with us.
Rejected from art but still the root of our life.
A life below the life.
You are with the prophets, Walt, when you speak so.
I can imagine Isaiah hearing you.
In Idaho, Isaiah would have been as you appear.
Isaiah in a red cravat.
Spare me Isaiah, spare me the responsibility.
The Leaves is a this side book, Oscar.
As for landscape, all we need is grit,
the body's grit not to fall like Emerson fell short of Earth.
After the shadow, not the fact.
Grit is the guarantee of the rest.
Coyotes here, canyons, castles there.
A this-side book.
Some love it on their side, Walt. Some worship.
In the scriptures of modern Europe I can cite no verses.
Well, I brought you mine.
Bound to order in grass green.
I have noticed that the public is largely influenced
by the look of a book.
So are we all.
It is the one artistic thing about the public.
These are our first poems, an offering
honored to be held between your hands.
Warmer now, are they not?
We're seeing, Walt, before vanity
came between us though I do not wish
to appear to run vanity down.
I was seeing that I can conceive of no Bible worthy, save yours
and Baudelaire's, to prepare mankind
for an identical body and soul.
Leaves of Grass, Flowers of Evil, our sacred botany.
Is that meant to be a joke, Oscar?
Flowers of Evil.
What grows out of the ground.
That's a mystery and had better remain so.
I'm glad to have your book.
Don't apologize for first poems.
Books are like men, the best of them have flaws.
Thank God for the flaws.
If not for the flaws, Oscar, love would be impossible.
Life, it continues, Walt. Flaws and all,
unless you link the temperament of a vampire
to the discretion of an anemone.
Is that the evil flower you speak of?
Anemones.
Even sea anemones.
Les Fluers du Mal.
Poems by Charles Baudelaire, Walt. The greatest moralist
to sing in France since Villon was imprisoned.
Do moralists sing?
I thought they expurgated poems.
French or Hebrew, it's all one to me.
Prophets, moralists, bibles, they make me uneasy.
I want picnics and the freedom to loaf,
jolly all round good time with the parsons
and police uninvited.
I've always been a first-rate aquatic loafer,
could float on my back forever.
The indecency is always invoked against floating and growing.
What kind of a gardener is your Baudelaire?
Are his flowers indecent like mine,
were some plucked up by the roots?
The book was censored.
The poems were called obscene when they appeared
a short while after yours, Walt. Their interest is not
that they were suppressed by a foolish official
but that they were written by a great artist.
Foolish officials can be interesting too, Oscar.
I found that out.
Secretary Harland took the Leaves
so seriously he abstracted them, the proof sheets, it
was not the book yet, from my desk drawer at night after I'd
gone.
Put them back again neat and the next day discharged me.
Will not do to fly in the face of courts and conformity.
It did not do at all well for me, Oscar.
I usually cross that bridge after I've burned it behind me.
They knew it is not my past people so much object to,
I do not yet have a past, but my future.
They objected to Baudelaire.
What was it he wrote, Oscar?
Can you say it out?
I never could say mine.
I never commit poems to memory.
They'd be in my way.
If I cannot hear Walt Whitman's "Calamus" from his lips,
I am happy to be the first to bring Baudelaire's artistry
to his ears.
I've heard a good deal with these ears, son.
I find it hard to imagine a shock in that direction.
Even the Leaves are no longer said to be lewd.
Nothing is harder to keep up than a bad reputation.
Try a flower on me, Oscar.
Try me with a bloom from my wicked bed.
Speak it in English though, I can neither hear
nor read a Frenchman's language.
Speak your piece, Oscar.
I am all ears to meet my fellow evangelist.
And I all eagerness, Walt. Not until you permit a poet
a mask does he dare tell you the truth.
I dared.
Do not suppose that the Leaves is a mask.
It is the man, the life a man can live in language.
He must tell it himself.
No disciple can.
Is it not incredible then that the prospect
of having a biographer has tempted no one
to renounce having a life?
There can be no renouncing.
You have to get on with it.
Do get on with it, Oscar.
My memory will serve to recite but not to recreate the music.
I translate line by line trusting the mystery.
It is an early piece and no less perfect than the late.
Only mediocrity is progress, masters revolve.
I was never so certain of myself, Oscar,
that I could afford to revolve, to write on and on to the end
even if in senility.
To make a complete record.
There's more to say, always more.
Let me hear if this crudity of your Baudelaire.
It is a poem entitled "Spleen."
Spleen?
In the way of resentment, anger?
They're not forever patted on the back.
Sometimes we're kicked in the behind.
Spleen then, say on.
I am even as the king of a rainy country,
rich but impotent, senile but still young,
who wearies of his courtiers' flattery nor hunts with hawk
or hound, nor heeds the while his subjects starve
outside the palace walls.
His favorite fool no longer brings a smile
to cruel eyes incredulous of doom.
The royal bed becomes a royal tomb.
And ladies who might find all princes fair game no longer
gaud themselves enough to win a glance from this cold skeleton.
His alchemist turns lead to gold yet fails
to draw the dark corruption from his soul.
And even bloodbaths in true Roman style such as old
warriors regard with shame cannot relume a living corpse
whose veins no blood but Lethe's livid absinthe stains.
King of a rainy country.
I know what that means, Oscar.
I lived by the sound of rain, imaginary rainfall.
And I'm used to defections.
How often young enthusiasts grow old.
Yes, old and cold too.
Still if the world's unjust to you,
you must take care not to be unjust to the world.
I don't get much beyond that with Spleen.
What I hear is a sickly sensuality in it.
The sensuality of convalescence you
might call it that, you might.
I don't care, it's all too bad to be true.
Livid absence.
No, no, no, no, absinthe.
Absinthe, Walt. A liquor brewed from wormwood.
Oh I know absinthe.
In New Orleans, a man drank it or said he did.
I saw him dip his fingers in, wet his eyebrows, eyelids,
faint dead away.
So his Lethe is real.
It is a way of getting rid of the real.
Bad riddance.
Sounds as if the man could pity himself alone, not
seriously pity other men.
And is it not verse written of malice prepense, all laid out,
rhymed, designed on mathematical principles.
Is it not a machine, Oscar?
A kind of enslavement.
Here.
Yes, it is art.
It bears the fetters of art.
No, Walt. And you make no slaves, only lovers.
I shall not be so foolish as to defend one genius from another.
Disaffection is inseparable from faith.
I often betray myself with a kiss.
Surprising, though, you are not more taken by the criminal.
The morbid, you mean?
I'm not taken by that.
The Americans I have met are certainly great hero
worshippers and always adopt their heroes
from the criminal classes.
Leaves is a book written for the criminal classes.
How on Earth do you come to such a notion, Walt?
I don't come to it, it's the case.
The others have no need for a poet.
Are you in the criminal classes yourself?
Certainly.
Why not?
Well, I was hoping you might get me in as well.
Only the utterly worthless can be reformed.
I feel beyond reform.
I want only form.
Is it not form, Walt, that keeps things together?
I keep nothing together.
Look around.
Have I ever kept anything together?
Body and soul, that's all I keep together.
You keep them splendidly.
That simplicity has been the great enclosing secret for you.
All the same along the way I should
suppose there were distinctions, even in criminal classes.
Our failure is we form habits.
In Idaho, Walt, they took me to visit their prison, apparently
a model one.
There was all the odd prey of humanity
in hideous striped suits making bricks in the sun.
I saw one man, a murderer, with steel eyes,
spending the interval before he was hanged in reading novels.
A poor apprenticeship I thought for facing either God
or nothing.
It was for just such a man I wrote Leaves of Grass.
A man reading in a jail, as well as any other man
who cares to read me.
No one was ever bad enough to be put in jail.
He was.
Or might be, bad enough to be put in a hospital.
But all this judging is not a habit,
more likely it's a disease.
I don't hold with judging, measuring,
weighing this offense against that penalty.
Breaking loose is the only thing, opening new ways.
Once a man breaks loose though or starts to or even thinks
he'll start he should be sure he knows what he's undertaken.
I expected hell, I got it.
Nothing that's occurred came as a surprise.
Probably more is to come and that won't surprise me either.
To me, Walt, it must come as a surprise.
Life is so often nothing more than a quotation.
Most people are other people.
Surprises change life.
I have more, I'm sure, than I deserve.
But it is always nice to have a little more than one deserves.
There is no deserves, Oscar.
I never weighed what I gave for what I got.
And I'm glad of what I got.
But did I get enough?
Well, I got the boys for one thing.
The boys, hundreds of them.
They were, they are, they will be mine.
I gave myself for them, myself, and I got the boys.
And I got the Leaves, not spears, but leaves of grass.
Without the boys-- if it hadn't been for the boys
I never would have had the Leaves, the consummated book,
the last confirming word.
Oscar, what are you doing down there?
You lost your seat or your senses?
Oh, Walt, you've gained another boy.
It will not give you another poem for the Leaves
but I want to ask something of you,
a favor, Walt. I reckon there must be a reason for you
to visit another kind of model prison,
more than to give me your book and more than to get me down
to Baudelaire's level.
I think I know the reason.
I usually can guess why a man comes to see me.
You want more than a handshake with Walt Whitman.
You want to know what you must give up.
You see me here alone in this chair at this window,
you take my hands to ward off the chill,
and you wonder how to go about giving yourself away.
Walt, you must bless me.
I want to take your blessing with me.
I cannot leave you my book.
It is not the book I must write for Walt Whitman.
That poem will come.
Oh, bless me and it will come from a deeper place than these.
Let me have my book again.
What?
Indian giving.
You know the sense of that boy, taking back what you give.
I have nothing to give you yet.
Here for now, Walt. My buttonhole,
the tribute of a flower.
Not an evil one I trust.
Even on your knees, Oscar, not a flower of evil.
One harmless heliotrope, Walt, for your hand on my forehead.
I dressed many a wound, Oscar, with this hand
which can feel nothing now.
But the boys I nursed had suffered their fate.
Yours is yet to come.
Take my blessing with your book, boy, they're both yours.
Oh, you have instructed me.
Past hopes, past fears, in you, Walt, I
discover how a desire becomes a destiny to give myself away.
Well, not to make sacrifices but to be one.
To be somehow wholly like you, Walt.
What else does sacrifice mean?
I am a sick old man on Mickle Street, boy.
I am not a holy man.
Or all men are.
Then you understand me?
Or maybe I understand you now.
To me you see, the Leaves is an essential poem
that needed making like an essential life needs living.
Maybe yours will be an essential life,
one needing to have been lived.
Give me the best man over the best books.
Books are not facts, merely the effort to master facts.
Let's say effort.
I'm not sure of much else.
Life, Walt. You make me sure of life.
Your hand, I am truly your boy.
Kiss me and catch your trolley.
I've lectured long enough.
You must read the writing on the wall, or the page,
or the face, Oscar.
For yourself you must find it, you can't be told it.
My own preference is for texts that
can be carried in the pocket
Oh, Walt. Walt, you have scored a triumph for America.
I came, I saw, I was conquered.
Not by fame though anything is better
than a virtuous obscurity, not fame conquered but life.
Your life, your immortality.
Not immortality, Oscar, identity.
Call it that and we are one.
Oh, you've won, Walt. I am with you and so I leave you
with gratitude, and honor, and all my love.
Goodbye.
Goodbye, son.
Mary Davis, show Mr. Wilde how to go the trolleys
at the end of Mickle Street.
Give him one of our umbrellas if it's raining still.
Thank you, Mary.
That's enough.
No, I don't want you fussing.
I want to empty this room.
I can still see him in front of the window.
A dim reflection of Oscar talking about art.
I can still hear him as if he's there.
The north his needle points to, his only art.
Art it is always only art.
But a great boy still, a great manly boy.
Well, he was here.
I think I found the haystack in his needle.
Did you notice if he left a green book downstairs
on the table by the door?
Nothing.
Well, that's the right thing.
They put this in water, this harmless heliotrope,
leave it by the bed.
There are some things too big for the world.
They crowd it out at the sides.
They need more room than Camden can supply them,
or Canada either.
Look at that color.
Can anyone state the whole case for the universe?
I need a nap, Mary.
Get me back into bed.
I want time to myself now."
[APPLAUSE]