The birthday today of Walt Whitman  (born West Hills, New York, May 31, 1819)

Here’s Allen’s appreciation of Whitman that first appeared in Sulfur 31, Fall 1992 (and was subsequently reprinted in Deliberate Prose (2000))

Whitman’s Influence – A Mountain Too Vast To Be Seen

Like Poe, Whitman’s breakthru from official conventional nationalist identity to personal self, to subject, subjectivity, to candor of person, sacredness of the unique eccentric  curious solitary personal consciousness changed written imaginative conception of the individual around the whole world, and … Read More

From Allen’s 1980 Basic Poetics lecture at Naropa

AG: “My ambition was to write a sort of Promethean twentieth-century poem, using all of the ancient meters that build up to some kind of  grand chorale.  And there’s a little sample of that in Journals Early Fifties, Early Sixties, a little thing called “Rhythmic Paradigm”, which goes on for half a page with a series of meters that are more complicated than the ones in “Kaddish” or “Howl” “

from “Rhythmic Paradigm  – National Anger” (1961)

Blasted be Congress and doom on the White House and cursed are the works of … Read More