Writer/Reviewer Appreciation Week

A well respected writer/friend complained about a reviewer who never liked anything the writer had written. He received a number of comments to brush it off, while others had stronger words for the reviewer. An editor told a story about how writers at a convention panel complained about reviewers who disliked their work (even admitting to trying to get revenge) but in the end they admitted that the field needed reviewers. Sort of.

Enter W.S. Merwin, a favorite poet of mine. The famous poet he kept dragging out to pummel is Walt Whitman with his support of Manifest Destiny. Some bad things were done in the name of Manifest Destiny. Merwin names ecological damage as well as destruction of native populations. Merwin thought that Whitman should have questioned these things.

But Merwin's view is ensconced in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It ignores Whitman's love of everything and everyone. While it is hard to nail down what someone from the past might have thought from twenty-first century perspective, it seems more probable that a lover of all things would not favor destruction. This seems a fatal flaw in Merwin's critique. Maybe Whitman wanted to share the advantages he had with his style of government.

The other critical factors left out of Merwin's judgement are 1) Emerson called for an American poetry, which Whitman delivered by looking around him, and 2) Europe looked down at American literature at the time. Whitman did what he had to do when others trammeled down his country: He lifted it up. Otherwise, (this may be overstating the case), Merwin might not have walked down the road to writing had Whitman not already paved the road.

This is just to say that even intelligent, insightful people fail to understand the world from another's perspective/literary work. People can be too mired in their own swamp to give an objective perspective. As Salman Rushdie said, "To see the picture, you have to step out of the frame." This isn't to say that Merwin did not have good critiques of Whitman, but his primary distaste is problematic.