Do not listen to the ministers of failure, who promise redemption for their imagined sins.
Did Walt Whitman really write these words? In a sense, yes, because, whether those of us engaged in literary pursuits are aware of it or not, his influence is so great and so profound that it’s inevitable, at one time or another, we take up the pen in his name. Not only Whitman, of course; we each proceed within our established culture; but the message holds, and goes back to our very roots in language, to our one common tongue, which is Nature. In this light, we should never feel it necessary to explain our poems; in so doing, we will explain the life right out of them. It’s something like relying solely on the weather report, when all we have to do is step outside and read the signs; and when we do, we enter the realm of creative response. Day in and day out, we write our own perceptual weather, which illuminates and defines us every which way.
~
[ 1995 ]
Categories: Annotations and Elucidations
Tags: Creativity, Language, Letters, Nature, Poetry, Walt Whitman, Writing
William Michaelian 