Invisible Listeners

Lyric Intimacy in Herbert, Whitman, and Ashbery

Helen Vendler

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780691134741, 9780691116181
• eBook ISBN: 9781400826711
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Poetry
• Index: Literature

When a poet addresses a living person—whether friend or enemy, lover or sister—we recognize the expression of intimacy. But what impels poets to leap across time and space to speak to invisible listeners, seeking an ideal intimacy—George Herbert with God, Walt Whitman with a reader in the future, John Ashbery with the Renaissance painter Francesco Parmigianino? In Invisible Listeners, Helen Vendler argues that such poets must invent the language that will enact, on the page, an intimacy they lack in life.

Through brilliantly insightful and gracefully written readings of these three great poets over three different centuries, Vendler maps out their relationships with their chosen listeners. For his part, Herbert revises the usual "vertical" address to God in favor of a "horizontal" one-addressing God as a friend. Whitman hovers in a sometimes erotic, sometimes quasi-religious language in conceiving the democratic camerado, who will, following Whitman's example, find his true self. And yet the camerado will be replaced, in Whitman's verse, by the ultimate invisible listener, Death. Ashbery, seeking a fellow artist who believes that art always distorts what it represents, finds he must travel to the remote past. In tones both tender and skeptical he addresses Parmigianino, whose extraordinary self-portrait in a convex mirror furnishes the poet with both a theory and a precedent for his own inventions.

By creating the forms and speech of ideal intimacy, these poets set forth the possibility of a more complete and satisfactory human interchange—an ethics of relation that is uncoerced, understanding, and free.

TWO Walt Whitman and the Reader-in-Futurity

Whitman certainly began not as a poet interested in the invisible but rather as a poet of strong bodily response expressed in a daring language of physicality. In the 1855 Leaves of Grass he invents a poetry of far-reaching symbolic resource in its description of the conjunction of bodies, as in his strikingly original rendition of fellatio:

. . . What is this flooding me, childhood or manhood. . . . and the hunger that crosses the bridge between . . .

The cloth laps a first sweet eating and drinking,

Laps life-swelling yolks. . . . laps ear of rose-corn, milky and just ripened:

The white teeth stay, and the boss-tooth advances in darkness,

And liquor is spilled on lips and bosoms by touching glasses, and the best liquor afterward.

“The Sleepers” [LG 1855, lines 66–70; p. 726]¹

It was his early intimacies with other bodies that made possible for Whitman that intimacy of voice so intoxicating to lovers, as he revels in the first-person plural “we” that releases the sexual self from its physical loneliness. Bodily intimacy appears in the “we two” of the 1860 Enfans d’Adam and Calamus poems, as Whit-man joins himself to another to become “we two boys together clinging” on the open road, or, more powerfully, the “we two” who, when together, equal the whole created universe. “We are Nature,”

says the speaker of himself and his lover, as they undergo, in theirsexual companionship,multiple metamorphoses into essences both inanimate and animate:

We become plants, trunks, foliage, roots, bark,

We are bedded in the ground, we are rocks. . . .

We prowl fang’d and four-footed in the woods, we spring on prey,

We are two clouds forenoons and afternoons driving overhead,

We are seas mingling, we are two of those cheerful waves rolling over each other and interwetting each other,

We are what the atmosphere is, transparent, receptive, pervious, impervious. . . .

We have circled and circled till we have arrived home again, we two,

We have voided all but freedom and all but our own joy.

“We Two,How Long We Were Fool’d” [p. 92–93]

This companionate physical intimacy is so necessary that without it, as another Calamus poem tells us, the poet fears he would not be able to write his poems:

I saw in Louisiana a live-oak growing,

All alone stood it and the moss hung down from the branches,

Without any companion it grew there uttering joyous leaves of dark green,

And its look, rude, unbending, lusty, made me think of myself,

But I wonder’d how it could utter joyous leaves standing alone there without its friend near, for I knew I could not.

“I Saw in Louisiana a Live-Oak Growing” [p. 108]

Only after the physical fails does Whitman become a poet of intimacy with the invisible. Sometimes unable to secure, and always unable to sustain, actual sexual intimacy,Whitman is driven to invent an intimacy with the unseen; the poet is cast toward the lover-infuturity by the faithlessness of the lover-in-the-present. The heartbreak that generates an invisible lover to replace the visible one is seen most clearly in the 1860 lyric “Hours Continuing Long” [520], a poem suppressed by Whitman from all subsequent editions of Leaves of Grass. Forsaken by his actual lover, the speaker, distracted and ashamed, withdraws “to a lonesome and unfrequented spot, seating myself, leaning my face in my hands.” In these “sullen and suffering hours” he wonders “if other men have the like [hours] out of the like feelings?” As his misery seeks company, he reduces the number of men potentially resembling him to a single one:

Is there even one other like me—distracted—his friend, his lover, lost to him?

And that other conjectured man, also a forsaken lover, is then made into a reader of Whitman’s own poem:

Does he see himself reflected in me? In these hours, does he see the face of his hours reflected?

Two forms of intimacy are conjured up here—a subjective psychological one (“himself reflected in me”) and a more objective representational one (“In these hours, does he see the face of his hours reflected?”).Whitman is not yet directly addressing this imagined other who might not only resemble him but become his reader, nor is he yet projecting this alter ego into a far-off future: the hope of finding an actual lover, permeating the 1855 Leaves of Grass, still lingers in the 1860 edition. Yet between those two editions, in 1857, Whitman wrote a poem,“Full of life now” [116], in which he admits, with resignation, that the reader-in-futurity is the mostlikely lover he will have. He contrasts himself “full of life now, compact, visible” with the reader-in-futurity, who will at that time be the one who will be “compact, visible.” On the supposition that two things equal to the same thing—being “compact, visible”—are equal to each other, the poet can construct an identity-exchange within a topological temporality in which past, present, and future tenses intermix, and indicative, subjunctive, and jussive moods intertwine.“Full of affection” (the original reading),² the poet speaks, imagining that his poems, after his death, continue to seek an envisaged comrade of the future who is in turn seeking them:

Full of life now, compact, visible,

I forty years old the eighty third year of the States,

To one a century hence or any number of centuries hence,

To you yet unborn these, seeking you.

When you read these I that was visible am become invisible,

Now it is you, compact, visible, realizing my poems, seeking me,

Fancying how happy you were if I could be with you and become your comrade;

Be it as if I were with you. (Be not too certain but I am now with you.)

The cost to the poet of finding an actual visible lover is the rendering of himself invisible.He becomes a ghost so that the camerado can become real. “Full of life now” bears three of the unmistakable marks of Whitmanian intimacy with the invisible: the poet’s direct remarks to an invisible addressee of future time (“When you read these”); the poet’s capacity to intuit his invisible listener’s thoughts (“you . . . seeking me, / Fancying how happy you were if I could be with you”); and a faith in the mysterious power of poetry to convey presence (“Be not too certain but I am now with you”), the presencepreceded by the ordaining power of the shaman: “Be it as if I were with you.”Yearning toward someone who may not be born for some years or even hundreds of years hence is, as we have seen from the examples of Hopkins and Dickinson, a feeling not uncommon in lyric, but Whitman carries it further than any poet before or since. The problem is to give such a future listener tangible materiality on the page, and we will see Whitman experimenting with this task in many of the poems in Leaves of Grass.

Among the causes of Whitman’s invention of a comrade-infuturity, one was, as I have said,Whitman’s love-disappointments in life, and his fear that without companionship he would cease to write. But his messianic tendencies also played a part in drawing his eyes toward the future, as did his belief in scientific and evolutionary progress. Whitmanian intimacy with the invisible, because it is so overdetermined, takes on many tonalities. A forsaken lover, speaking to an ideal lover yet to appear, does not use the same tone as a messiah speaking to his future followers, or a teacher to pupils as yet unborn, or a scientist publicly proclaiming natural events to come.“One of the roughs” speaking from the open road to an envisaged camerado takes yet another tone.The fluid Whitmanian self becomes,when oriented toward a future listener, unusually expansive and porous, and one of the attractions of Whitman’s intimacy with the invisible is the discovery of the many Whitmans it brings forth (“I am large. . . . I contain multitudes. . . . / I resist anything better than my own diversity”

[“Song of Myself,”LG 1855, lines 1315–16; p. 347].

Whitman had begun his career as a balladeer and populist exhorter of others. But as he turned his gaze inward and discovered his true material—himself and his relation to the world and to language—he had to decide what tone to give the self-exposure he had promised in “You Felons on Trial in Courts” (“I exposé!”). Although he continued to resort, often enough, to either the homiletic tone of the preacher or the rhetorical tone of the orator,his genius was to prefer, to these more public modes of the pulpit and the rostrum, a private tone m...

Table of contents

• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• INTRODUCTION Invisible Listeners
• ONE George Herbert and God
• TWO Walt Whitman and the Reader-in-Futurity
• THREE John Ashbery and the Artist of the Past
• CONCLUSION Domesticating the Unseen
• NOTES