Whitman and Neruda as Grassroots Poets
“The familial bond between the two poets [Walt Whitman and Pablo Neruda] points not only to a much-needed reckoning of the affinity between the two hemispheres, but to a deeper need to establish a basis for an American identity: ‘roots,’ as Neruda referred to his fundamental link with Whitman” (Nolan 33).
Both Walt Whitman and Pablo Neruda have been referred to as poets of the people, although it is argued that Neruda with his city and country house, his extensive travels, and his political connections, was never really “one” of the mass. Nonetheless, his work and energies went into supporting the common working man, and not the elite. By the late 1940’s Neruda had openly defined himself as a communist, looking for the equal treatment of all citizens of Peru. Whitman, though not overtly political like Neruda, did emphasize the equality between all in his writing. The appellation, “poet of the people,” is used to indicate their sympathies towards a commonality in humans, if not the “common man”. As the term “commoner” carries various connotations and needs much explaining, I prefer to discuss the two authors as grassroots poets. “Poets of the people” and “grassroots poets” have many similarities, but by using the term grassroots I draw on grassroots theater studies which illuminate certain artistic purposes and themes. Thinking of Whitman and Neruda as grassroots poets can deepen our understanding of their personas and their work, and especially indicate a similarity of purpose between the two poets who employed different structural styles of writing.
First and foremost, the term “grassroots” hinges on a sense of community. It implies a political motivation from the bo...
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...nity theatre is to create a dialectic between the present state and future possibilities of particular communities, moderated by a knowledge of, and an identification with, those communities” (Kershaw, 61).
With this basic understanding of “grassroots” with in the context of community theater, let us proceed to a comparative study of grassroots sentiments in excerpts from Neruda’s The Heights of Macchu Picchu, and Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself. Go to analysis
Works Cited:
Kershaw, Baz. The Politics of Performance. Radical Theatre as Cultural Intervention. New York: Routledge, 1992.
Nolan, James. Poet-Chief. The Native American Poetics of Walt Whitman and Pablo Neruda. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1994.
Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass (1855). in Walt Whitman Poetry and Prose. New York: The Library of America, 1996.
American Bards: Walt Whitman and Other Unlikely Candidates for National Poet. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2010. Print.
Moritz, Michael. Walt Whitman and Allen Ginsberg: Singing and Howling their American Selves. Diss. University College Dublin, 2002.
What follows is a contemporaneous review of his work that speaks of the esteem that much of the world extended Whitman as patriot and poet of Drum-Taps:
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