Ode to Walt Whitman

Both Lorca and Whitman are considered part of the romanticism literary movement. The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics classifies Lorca as “Spain’s greatest twentieth century poet [and] also its greatest romantic” (1218). While Lorca’s romanticism is saturated with duende, Whitman exemplifies the classic romantic qualities of sublime nature—sometimes called the pastoral—divorced from humanity. Lorca references Whitman’s descriptions of “blue Ontario’s shore” which is “untamed by human interference” (Princeton 1224). It is the absence of human death and darkness in Whitman’s work which, according to Lorca, causes a lack of duende.

Whitman lived and wrote during the 1800s, which predates Lorca’s writing of the poems in Poet in New York during the late 1920s. Walt Whitman is considered a key bridge between poetic transcendentalism and poetic realism, with his hazy and metaphoric language mingled with detailed and immediate descriptions of people. Whitman lived in New York City for most of his life and composed most of his work there. The earlier work from this period (periodicals and the earliest versions of Leaves of Grass) fixated on poor white men as objects of identification. Over time, Whitman began to expand to more diverse views, occasionally including women and ethnicities other than his own and using American Indigenous names for locations. At the same time, Whitman was a broad supporter of not just American imperialism, but imperial projects at large, with glowing praise for destructive efforts like the Suez Canal and Transcontinental Railroad. It is this worshipful view of imperial engineering Lorca condemns in “Ode to Walt Whitman.”