Walt Whitman and the Making of Jewish American Poetry

It is a fact long accepted by critics that there are many Walt Whitmans. Depending on the critical lens and the time period, we might find ourselves with egalitarian, democratic Whitman; anti-racist Whitman; proto-queer power Whitman; patriarchal Whitman; or, even, unthinking patriot Whitman. In Walt Whitman and the Making of Jewish American Poetry, poet and critic Dara Barnat makes a complex and important contribution to this list of epithets by examining the genealogy of critical and creative responses to the poet in Jewish American poetry and poetics.Before embarking on her exploration of twentieth- and twenty-first century Jewish American responses to Whitman, Barnat provides an encyclopedic overview of the poet’s place in a variety of other discourses. She considers, first, how poets of color have alternately embraced Whitman as a figure of and for marginalization and refuted him as a symbol of precisely the white patriarchal identity against which they seek to write. From her brief analysis of how poets such as June Jordan and Sherman Alexie experience Whitman, Barnat moves to look at the nineteenth century progenitors of the poets she will discuss in Walt Whitman and the Making of Jewish American Poetry. Particularly, she explores how Jewish American women poets Adah Isaacs Menken and Emma Lazarus saw Walt Whitman “as a poet of outsider identity, the body, and politics, with a mission to advance democratic ideals” (17). This vision, in turn, reappears in the work of many later Jewish American women poets “including Rukeyser, Rich, Ostriker, and Piercy”—writers foundational to Barnat’s monograph (17).Following in the footsteps of critics such as Rachel Rubinstein, Barnat also provides an overview of Whitman’s profound influence on Yiddish-language poetry and his role as a figure mediating between Americanization and marginalization for Yiddish writers. She then launches into a fascinating look at how Whitman has shadowed Jewish American prose writers, including well-known literary critics such as Harold Bloom and Leslie Fiedler. Barnat writes that “Bloom’s and Fiedler’s commentary on Whitman is in keeping with Jewish American poets like Reznikoff, Shapiro, Koch, and Rukeyser, who have employed Whitman as a mode to challenge conservatism in society, in the context of High Modernism, precisely as a ‘weapon’ against the High Modernist forces of which Fiedler speaks” (23).Barnat also provides a long list of the many other poets and critics who have been influenced by Whitman in her introduction. Although this panoramic view of the poet’s reception in Jewish American letters is useful for contextualizing Barnat’s narrower focus on a discrete group of more contemporary Jewish American poets, it can feel a bit overwhelming to the reader. Some of the extensive information about Whitman’s interlocutors could have resided in the book’s footnotes, rather than in its introduction.Nonetheless, Barnat’s introduction is successful at introducing her chief argument: that Whitman provides a mediating force for writers in search of a buffer against both the pressures of High Modernist aesthetics and of Americanist assimilation. This argument particularly structures chapters 1 and 2. Chapter 1 explores Whitman’s influence on Jewish Objectivist poets of the early to mid-twentieth century, with a particular focus on Charles Reznikoff. Barnat makes an effective argument that the Objectivists utilized the image of Whitman as simultaneously democratic and experimental to navigate their own role in High Modernist aesthetics while rejecting the anti-Semitism of some of its chief proponents, such as Ezra Pound. As he has in so many critical discourses, Whitman functions here as a mediating figure between different poles of identity: in this case, not just Americanization vs. marginalization, but also High Modernism vs. the more democratic modes of aesthetics and address he embodies. In chapter 2, Barnat again features Whitman’s role in negotiating the effect of High Modernism on Jewish American poets—this time Karl Shapiro and Kenneth Koch. Barnat’s analysis of Koch is particularly fascinating as it highlights both how Whitman marked Koch’s role in the New York School (which was preoccupied with Whitman), but also how the poet helped Koch make sense of his own Jewishness.Chapters 3 and 4 further develop Whitman’s symbolic role as a figure for democratic forms of poetic address that challenge High Modernism by delving into even more complex territory. In chapter 3, Barnat analyzes Whitman’s profound influence on the Jewish American poetics of witness in the poetry of three very different poets, Muriel Rukeyser, Allen Ginsberg, and Gerald Stern. An analysis of these three poets allows Barnat to further develop the family tree of Whitmanian Jewish American poetry. Her focus on Rukeyser, Ginsberg, and Stern, all of whom have connections both to earlier poets (Reznikoff) and later poets (Rich), allows her to note “a Whitmanian poetic strategy of witnessing—casting a humanist gaze on his most vulnerable subjects—which can be detected in the work of the poets individually and collectively” (78). Barnat’s work on Rukeyser and Whitman as political poets is particularly rich and invokes the work of other great critics of Jewish American poetry, such as Maeera Shreiber. Barnat argues that “Rukeyser, at the core, embarked upon a project of humanist poetry that can be compared to Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, with a mission to counteract elitism and injustice in sites such as the High Modernist milieu, the conservative culture of her parents’ Judaism, and American society at large” (80).Barnat builds on the insights of chapter 3 and its focus on Whitman as political poet in chapter 4, one of the strongest in the volume. Here, she looks at how Jewish American women poets, including Adrienne Rich, Marge Piercy, and Alicia Ostriker, found a powerful site for exploring and voicing protest in Whitman. At the same time, as she points out in her nuanced readings of poems, essays, and interviews with the three writers, Whitman’s role in Jewish American women’s poetry remains complicated and contradictory, emphasizing the larger complexity of feminist women poets’ relationship to the poetic canon.Dara Barnat’s Walt Whitman and the Making of Jewish American Poetry makes significant contributions to a number of discourses, from critical reception studies to Jewish American literary history and feminist poetics. Perhaps her most significant contribution, however, is her insistence that poetry does not stand apart from culture, but instead both shapes and reflects larger cultural currents. As for many previous critics, Barnat’s Whitman wears many hats, acting as an arbiter of culture and a conduit for Jewish American poets intent on joining the secular to the spiritual, experimentation to democratic ideals, and American identity to a politics of difference.