An Old Flame

by Brett Rutherford

On the eve of this dreaded holiday
I scanned the mailbox for pink fringes,
heart-shapes and scarlet arrows.

None, the gods be thanked.
I am well past pursuing, loth
to imagine myself the object
of any being's affection.

I glanced at internet beauty,
spectator sport. And look!
an urgent email
from someone who knew my name,
a mystery "old flame," he wrote me.
"How old?" I queried skeptically.
"You were my first," he teased back.

A date was made. The hour came,
and as expected, no one arrived.
I listened to Bach for an hour
then drifted off to sleep.

Sunrise on Valentine's Day
my eyes rolled open. Some
one was in the bed with me.
We turned to face each other.

It was a Trilobite.

{Revised May 2019].

By A Roman Road Forgotten

I started this translation many years ago and stopped after three stanzas, feeling not up to the complex challenges posed by this powerful poem of protest. This is Yevtushenko's equivalent to Shelley's "Ozymandias." The poem resonates not only with its time, but with the present. The poet was in Syria in 1966 and was taken to see a stretch of a Roman road. No one knew who built it or when.
We know a great deal more now. The road was called the Strata Diocletiana, and was built under the order of the Emperor Diocletian from 284 to 305 CE. So it is a late addition to the vast road system that ran all over the Empire, some of it maintained for more than 800 years. Talk about infrastructure! This stretch of Roman roads held the Syrian territory, which included Judea, together connecting Palmyra and Damascus all the way down to Arabia.
Yevtushenko wrote this in 1966. Brezhnev was in power. Every word he said and wrote was carefully watched by the state, ever since he wrote his famous poem about "Babi Yar" five years earlier. Things had to be said carefully, by indirection, or not at all. The sight of the ruined road of a forgotten Roman regime may have seemed a gateway into a poem that could say much, yet seem to be about a remote time and place, about "imperialists" the Soviet authorities could not object to his portraying as corrupt and evil.
The poem resonates now, too, since Syria is once again a battle ground over which sinister and arrogant empires and faux-empires are fighting. Fighters may be creeping along this 1700-year-old road at night. As as we have to deal with a wanna-be Emperor of our own, the poem is an urgent warning about hubris from these parts.
I have translated this fairly close to the original. But it is an adaptation, with such liberties as the moment induced. I have also added a few lines here and there to add factual details about the road's identity and Diocletian's name. Since it is known now, we had might as well name the Emperor and place the road in its historical moment, not Rome in its glory but Rome a hundred years from its end.

Enough said: here is the poem, in my first draft translation.


*** ***
BY A ROMAN ROAD FORGOTTEN

Translation by Brett Rutherford

Adapted from a Russian poem by Evgenii Yevtushenko

By a Roman road forgotten,
not far away from Damascus,
dead-faced mountains wear away
like masks of an ancient emperor.

Fat snakes that warm themselves
draw back their heads in coils,
bask their scales in the sunlight,
keeping their self-important secrets,
as if they had been with Cleopatra!

This was a road of damascene,
that rarest of steels for swords,
trade route for pearls and rubies,
rubbed clean by the bodies of slaves.

Legions marched in to invade,
profiles like Roman coins,
breast plates of bronze concealing
the venereal plagues of the armies.

Wheeled chariots once swayed
(before their wood was torn for cook-fire),
leaning beneath their drivers
like the crested coifs of empresses.

Laying the flagstones was the death
of slaves untold, each stone the back
of one fossilized workman,
an easy-ridden-over cenotaph.

Grown tired of his hot and Syrian exile
(too warm to even think in Latin),
the elegant patrician puts down
his lemon ice, to swab himself
in the finest Etruscan oil.

"Who cares if we crush this rabble
till nothing is left but skull and bones?
We Romans will not die like worms,
and the road will always save us."

Words not heard by the Arab mason,
dutifully pounding his hammer
to a slave-song obstinate,
a Syriac slave-song full of cunning.

"Thinking only about the flesh,
you have forgotten the gods.
Your death I hammer here,
and the road's death too."

Empire, decayed at the roots,
crept on, agape with gore;
veined, not like a tree,
but as a patchwork of blood.

Against resisters the Romans did
what they did best: the fire and tongs,
but torture victims sewn together
can only hold out so long.

The Romans took to sleeping naked,
their haughty togas put aside,
and so it was the Empire died,
and as well the ruined road I stand on.

They passed off their crimes to others
with the ease of the forger's art.
Some mile stones have only
the distant Emperor's name,
and some say nothing since
Diocletian had many worries,
least among them those awful Christians.
Who dies making the road is no one's
business. The road is not to blame.

But generations of wild grass
have had their way with it.
Only ghosts and goatherds walk
the dead Strata Diocletiana.
The road that engendered crime
Is now itself outlaw and criminal.

Let all the roads to executions,
and all the highways to tyrants' follies
come at the end to this ultimate payment:
forgotten, forever, in the highest weeds.

Damascus-Moscow 1967-68.

The Poet Who Starved

by Brett Rutherford

After Uhland

Such was his lot — each dismal day
was short and marked with sorrow,
and just as a poet ought, he withered
and quite forgotten, passed away.

He was an ill-starred baby
with only a muse hag for a nurse-maid,
and she it was who taught him
to sing whether supper came or no.

His mother, if one could call her that,
crisped early to her unmarked urn,
and so she marked his doom,
an anonymous and unread vessel
unfit for holding and keeping gold.

When all around passed pewter mugs,
flagons and cups and champagne flutes,
he was the one they scorned to cheer,
pouring the dregs on the cindered ground.

He knew the names of their vintages,
the lineage kings who had trod the valleys;
he could tell the rise and fall of empires,
but not one sip was for him!

Still, smiles came to him every Spring,
his dreams of blossoms woven,
but others hewed the trees to splinters,
boots muddying his purple stream.

When others orgied on holidays, game days
and feasts, and victory parades,
he raised his proud cup from afar —
his clear cold water; their groaning boards.

The others watched as he walked on by,
between his study and the library shelves,
thought him a being of scarcely flesh.
He must have inherited some money, of course.

"He's almost a ghost, an other-worldly man.
He doesn't live like us. Ambrosia and mead,
strange fruits and berries, a millet stew
must be the provender of his monkish days."

Dead! dead! they found him there
over the crumbs of the last saltine, the pot
of weak tea too many times infused
until it was but shaded water.

There was nothing in his house! Just papers!
Cupboards zig-zaggedy with spiderwebs,
refrigerator unplugged, a gasless stove,
plates in the sink too far gone for even mould.

At least it was easy to carry him, pine box
not much heavier than a pine box and a suit
of clothes. No hearse for him: a handcart
sufficed to roll him off to the graveyard.

His weak tread had scarcely marked the dust
when he walked of nights. Now may the earth
rest lightly on his shoulders. May someone find
those papers he left behind, and publish them.
May someone remember those words were his.

Sarah Helen Whitman Book Goes to Press

After six months of furious research, annotation, and editing, Break Every Bond: Sarah Helen Whitman in Providence has gone to press. Here is the full description of the book:
BREAK EVERY BOND: SARAH HELEN WHITMAN IN PROVIDENCE. Literary Essays and Selected Poems. Edited and Annotated by Brett Rutherford.

Sarah Helen Whitman (1803-1878), poet and critic, is best known for her brief engagement to Edgar Allan Poe in 1848, and for her role as Poe's posthumous defender in her 1860 book, Edgar Poe and His Critics. She is seldom treated as more than an incidental person in Poe biography, and no books of her own poetry were reprinted after 1916. As critic, she was a ground-breaking American defender of Poe, Shelley, Byron, Goethe, Alcott, and Emerson, yet none of her literary essays other than her defense of Poe have ever appeared in book form. She and her friend Margaret Fuller are credited with being the first American women literary critics.

This volume presents Whitman's literary essays with more than 500 annotations and notes, tracing her literary sources and allusions, and revealing the remarkable breadth of her readings in literature, philosophy, history, and science. Brett Rutherford's biographical essay is rich in revelations about Whitman's time and place, her family history, and her muted career as poet, essayist, and den mother to artists and writers. Exploding the standard view of her as the secluded "literary widow," we can now perceive her as a literary radical pushing against a conservative milieu; a suffragist and abolitionist who dabbled in séances; and a devotee of the New England Transcendentalists and the German Idealists who inspired them.

The complete text of Edgar Poe and His Critics presented here, includes the opposing texts by Rufus Griswold, whose libels provoked her landmark defense of Poe's writing and character. This annotated version identifies all the contemporary press reviews and books Whitman read and critiqued, making it indispensable for students of Edgar Allan Poe.

The selected poems in this volume include the hyper-Romantic traversal of rival mythologies in "Hours of Life," her most ambitious work; her poems to and about Edgar Allan Poe; sensitive and atmospheric nature portrayals; a defense of the then-reviled art of the drama; a love poem from Proserpine to Pluto; an occasional poem about Rhode Island penned in the after-shadow of the Dorr Rebellion; and translations from French and German poets, most notably the most famous of all European ghost ballads, Bürger's "Leonora." Whitman's allusions and unattributed quotations from other poets are all annotated, making this book a must for scholars and students.

ISBN 0-978-0-922558-00-1. 302 pp., 6 x 9 inches, paperback. Published February 2019. $18.95.
AVAILABLE NOW:
ORDER FROM AMAZON NOW.

Across the Sublime Divide: Dryden and Handel

Back in 2006, I created a web page template for presenting short academic papers in an easy-to-read format. I took a paper that I had written about Handel's Ode for Saint Cecilia's Day and formatted it. It's been sitting on my website for a while, and to my surprise it's even been cited by a couple of scholars. Take a peek if it interests you, not just for its Introduction to Handel's work, but also for my web design. The idea was to have this as an empty template, and the user could paste in text from word and do just a minimum of formatting. The fonts will differ from user to user -- I call up my favorite fonts in descending order, and what you see depends on what you have, the lowest common denominator being the hated Times Roman.

The intro to the paper reads:

Handel’s 1739 musical setting of it, Ode for St. Cecilia’s
Day, signify the meeting of poetry and music in the realm of
the Sublime. Dryden’s poem takes music and its role in the
universe as its theme, and hence invites examination against
the eighteenth century’s radically evolving aesthetics of the
Sublime. Handel’s musical work, setting to music a text
about music itself, invites study to determine whether
musical practice in Handel’s time enacted the aesthetics of
contemporaneous poets and critics, insofar as they claimed to
understand the Beautiful and the Sublime in music.
This paper will attempt to illustrate the enormous gap
between the two arts by showing that eighteenth-century
British critical understanding of music was based on
abstract ideas largely unrelated to musical practice, an
understanding that failed to acknowledge music as an art
capable of sublime effect on its own. I will use Handel’s
work to demonstrate that composers achieve sublime
effects — with or without text — by employing harmonic,
dynamic and rhythmic techniques that constitute a kind of
rhetoric. This techne, closer to the Sublime of Longinus
than to that of Burke or Kant, allows music its
acknowledged power even when accompanied with lessthan-
inspired text. I will review some of the criticism
around Dryden’s poem that relates to its original 1687
musical setting, and then examine Handel’s work itself on a musicological basis.

View the Handel-Dryden Paper Here.

Books by Poet's Press Authors

You can find the ordering links to all the Poet's Press books on our main webpage.

Here are shortcuts to some of our long-time authors:

Emilie Glen

• Emilie Glen Vol 1
• Emilie Glen Vol 2
• Emilie Glen Vol 3
• Emilie Glen Vol 4

Emily Greco

• Things to Do When Dead

Annette Hayn

• Chamber Music
• Enemy on the Way to School
• One Armed Flyer
• Journeys Around One Point

Heinrich Heine

• Heine: Germany

Barbara A. Holland

• Crises of Rejuvenation
• Autumn Numbers
• Holland Collected Poems
• In the Shadows

The Exhumation of Goethe

by Brett Rutherford

East Germany, 1970

By all means do this at night, while Weimar
sleeps, while even those whose job it is to watch
the watchers, sleep. In merciful dark,
the third-shift silence when the local electric plant
shuts down for the Good of the State,

take a cart — no, not a car,
a hand-drawn cart —
dampen its wheels so your journeys to,

and from, and back
to the foggy graveyard are soundless.

Do not awaken the burghers!
Here are the keys to the wrought-iron gates —
mind you don't rattle them.
The crypt has been purposefully left unlocked.
You need but draw the door.
The cart will just squeeze through
(Engineer Heinrich has measured everything!)

Open the sarcophagus as quietly as possible.
Watch the fingers! Don't leave a mark
on the hand-carved cover.
Be sure it's Goethe, the one with a "G."
We don't want his crypt-mate Schiller
(too many anti-People tendencies).

Lift up the whole thing gently.
The bones will want to fly apart.
Only the shroud, and some mummified meat
keep him in the semblance of skeleton.
Just scoop the whole thing up
like a pancake, then into the cart.

Here's a bag for the skull. Don't muss
those ash-gray laurel leaves.
We plan to coat them in polymer
after we study that Aryan skull
whose brain conceived Faust,
Egmont, and sorrowful Werther.

We're going to wire the bones together,
strip off that nasty flesh,
maybe bleach him a little,
make a respectable ghost of Goethe.

Who knows, if he looks good enough,
in a newly-lined sarcophagus,
we could put him on display.
Come to Kulturstadt!
See Goethe's body!
Even better than Lenin!
(Can we say that?)

It will be a world attraction.

We'll pipe in lieder and opera.
Tour guides will be dressed as Gretchen.
Maybe a fun-house
with Mephistopheles,
a sausage-fest at Brander's Inn.

Ah! the cart is here! The bones,
yes, the bones. Unfortunate, the odor.
We can work on that.
The colors, mein Gott,
(excuse the expression)
they will not please —

over there, Klaus,

     if you're going to be sick —

It's such a little skeleton —
was he really so short?

The books said he towered

over his contemporaries.

So much for the books!
And the shroud — that color —
not at all what we imagined.
Perhaps the opera house
could make a new one.

Watch those ribs —

so many little bones
in the fingers.

Things are just not . . .

holding together.

I can't do this.

The project is canceled.

Poets are just too — flimsy.

Put this mess back
where it came from.
Next time let's exhume a general,
Bismarck, the Kaiser,
someone with a sword and epaulets.
Armor would be even better.
The People want giants!

*** ***

Selected from my collection, Things Seen in Graveyards. 
 Photo from Wikimedia Commons, contributed by Charlie1965nrw.


https://www.amazon.com/dp/0922558884/ref=cm_sw_em_r_mt_dp_U_KOmvCb0YWWTEQ
Buy a copy while you and I are still above ground!

The Warning

I think the animals will come and live among us,
their habitats ruined, their forests burned, their seas
afloat with the litter-tide of our abominations.
It comes in small ways, foretold in dreams:
       the snake I saw
amid the lettuce leaves: how does one eat
around its coiled length without disturbing it?
Is it a venomous one? — Will it take an egg
if I poise it at one end of the salad bowl,
and, swallowing it, slide off and ignore me?

Why, when I open my wardrobe door
do two fawns stagger-stumble from it,
their deer-horse voices calling, “Hide us!”?

Why do I awaken, just half the bed my own,
the other half fur-snuggle full of breathing:
a great gray wolf, red-eyed and drooling?
“No need to worry,” his bass voice assures me,
tongue lapping my hand ‘twixt double dog fangs.
“As long as I’m here, the others will spare you.”

“Others?” I ask. I sit up in bed and find
amid my clutter of chairs and Chinese, Egyptian
tchotchkes, blocking the view of Renaissance
boy, the enigma-smiling Bronzino print,
a diorama of wild animals on the move: bear cubs,
an eagle and a fox in tug-of-war fight
over a leftover steak from the refrigerator,

dark-mask raccoon faces, opossums peeping
from under the uplifted carpet’s corner,
a raven (not stuffed, a living raven!) a-perch
my bust of Hermes. My foot, in search of slipper,
startles a whippoorwill that hoots at me.
A badger rejoins its den beneath my floorboards.

I am not their food and they are not mine,
but somehow, they will have to be provided for.
They are here for the duration, as the water rises,
the tornadoes whirl, the fracked earth shivers.
It is hard to look into their eyes without shame.

Goethe's Career Advice for Poets

Comfort for poets from the greatest German poet, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, from his "Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship":

"Now, fate has exalted the poet above all this, as if he were a god. He views the conflicting tumult of the passions; sees families and kingdoms raging in aimless commotion; sees those inexplicable enigmas of misunderstanding,which frequently a single monosyllable would suffice to explain, occasioning convulsions unutterably baleful. He has a fellow-feeling of the mournful and the joyful in the fate of all human beings. When the man of the world is devoting his days to wasting melancholy, for some deep disappointment, or, in the ebullience of joy, is going out to meet his happy destiny, the lightly moved and all-conceiving spirit of the poet steps forth, like the sun from night to day, and with soft transitions tunes his harp to joy or woe.
"From his heart, its native soil, springs up the lovely flower of wisdom; and if others, while waking, dream, and are pained with fantastic delusions from their every sense, he passes the dream of life like one awake ; and the strangest of incidents is to him a part both of the past and of the future. And thus the poet is at once a teacher, a prophet, a friend of gods and men. "

What?! Thou wouldst have him descend from his height to some paltry occupation? He who is fashioned like the bird to hover round the world, to nestle on the lofty summits, to feed on buds and fruits, exchanging gayly one bough for another, he ought also to work at the plough like an ox? Like a dog to train himself to the harness and draught? Or perhaps, tied up in a chain, to guard a farmyard by his barking?"

To Goethe's words I add: Be the poet. No one else can.

A Toast to Wendy

The group known as “The Poets of the Palisades” gathers every New Years Eve to read poetry until midnight and beyond, and to enjoy and renew literary friendships that span decades. Two times the group met at a colonial bed-and-breakfast in Bristol, Rhode Island. This is a true account of the strangest bed-and-breakfast visit of all time.

A TOAST TO WENDY
by Brett Rutherford

1

Who fired the cannonball that this colonial manse
(now B-and-B a-host to poets!) caught up and lodged
in fireplace brickwork? The British, of course, from bay,
a frigate bearing down on Lafayette’s abode.
This red frame barn of a house leans back in salt air,
sheds heat from six-paned windows against the blizzard
of modernity. Its literary pilgrims
arrive on the noon of New Year’s Eve, their papers
bulging from backpacks, laptops, Dickensian journals.
They sign the open guest book: who sleeping with whom,
or chaste with Byronic doom-gloom, whose name is real
and whose pseudonymous, details of little note
as the house is all theirs. The rooms are all for them,
theirs the sole use the welcoming fire, the never-
exploding mortar of King George the Third inert
to even the most outrageous manifesto.

Off to their rooms they ascend on Escher staircase,
up front and down back amid the heaped-up bookshelves,
hostess-hoard of Brit-American volumes,
vestiges of her New York publishing career.
Like as not the bookshelves hold this place together
(Rhode Island shore a vast, connected termite nest
to hear the well-off exterminators tell it).
The walls bulge. Windows no longer square won’t open,
pipes rattle and hiss, the wide-planked floorboards gap-toothed
beneath the cat-scratched and faded Persian carpets.

The stooping elder Anderson greets them; son James,
a new face to them, lugs bags and reminds them,
“Wendy will not be with us. She is gravely ill,
told us from hospital bed she wanted you here.
No matter what, she wanted the poets again.”
Old Mr. Anderson seems dazed and disoriented.
He shuffles away as his son gives out advice
on local eateries. “Redleffsen’s the best,” James says.
He counts up heads for the morrow’s breakfast, assures
them he knows his way around the dim-dark kitchen
that looms cool-cave behind the formal dining room.
“We’ll get you breakfast, don’t fear. My father’s no help,
but Wendy made me promise to help you out.”
To the one he thinks is their leader, James adds:
“Of course a large tip would be appreciated,
since I’m off to the ski slopes once this is over.”

As midnight nighs, the fireplace sputters, poetry
sparks up and out, logs spurt out flame-salamanders,
to the lines of Thomas Hardy, to their Gothic
utterances, Poe-reimaginings, wild verse
salt-sown from Carthage in elephantine revenge,
Baudelairean bleedings, achings of heart-sweet
first love, oh what an overflow of unbashful
egos and peculiar tastes. James has joined in,
“I just want to listen,” he says. So on they go.
But when one translates from Russian (Akhmatova)
and reads “I drink to our ruined house, Ya pyu
Nad razorenni dom, James interrupts them, “No!
That is just too close for comfort. Let’s not say that.”
So they veer away from Russian. The Hardy book
makes another round with its bittersweet savor.
The dining room clock then rattles out its midnight
clamor; before twelve-stroke fireworks erupt somewhere;
drunks who failed to kill deer fire off at the heavens.
They break out the champagne. Glasses are passed around,
and one spontaneously says, “Let’s make a toast
to our absent hostess, a toast to Wendy!” “I'll join
in that,” James answers, half-choking the words.
“A toast to our absent hostess! A Wendy toast!”

They drink, and being poets, they read some more, and more.
It goes on till nearly two, till one by one and
two by two they rise to go on up to their rooms.
“Listen!” James calls out to them. “I could not say it,
while you were reading and sharing your work with us.
But I can tell you now that Wendy — my mother —
she died at ten o’clock this morning. Her last wish
was that you all have your New Year’s celebration.”

2
Who slept, if at all?
Who lay awake
and listened
as the bereft husband
in and out of knowing
roamed in his bedclothes
mouthing, Wendy? Wendy?
Then shaking his head,
You fool, she’s dead.

Whose door squeaked open
to Mr. Anderson’s plaintive
Wendy? Wendy?

Who listens as through
the floorboards
James phones his girlfriend
in Minnesota,
hears snatches of sentences:

“She was doing well,
brain-tumor surgery and all.
They planned to send her home,
but then the diabetes kicked in
and they had to amputate
both legs.”

What walked just then,
first up, then down
the crazy-angled staircase;
who thought he saw
a foot, a knee,
a calf, a thigh,
then rubbed his eyes
of sleep-sand
and saw nothing?

“And so I came home. First time
in a decade, to take my mom
to New York in her wheelchair.
Just one last time she wanted to see
the big tree at Rockefeller Center,
the lions at the Public Library,
the Bethesda Fountain.”

And who was it,
in search of toilet,
who saw and heard
the pages turn
in an open book,
the Oxford dictionary
on its oaken lectern,
turn, turn, turn of page
fast-furious,
yet not a hint of draft?
Who would not wish to know
what word was sought
and by whom or what?

“And then it got worse.
Back to the hospital.
They must have liked
her insurance policy.
This time they took her arms.
Both of them.
What was the point?
She died this morning.”

And who, in their bed

where the Gothic dame
and her platonic admirer
shared one chaste mattress,
reached out the hand
that made her yell

I told you not to touch me like that!

And just as he protested
That wasn’t me!

what kicked him hard,

rolled him clear off

the bed to the floor?
That wasn’t me! She cried.

“My father. His mind is gone.
We were in the hearse.
Taking her, you know.
And he had agreed
to God knows what,
signed up for ‘the best’.
I lost it.
We have no money for that.
We had a screaming fight,
right in the hearse,
and so, it being a holiday and all,
we never —”

What roamed the rooms
so that every third book
was pulled from its place
and left at shelf-edge?
The books, perhaps,
she never got around
to reading?

What rattled pots
in the kitchen
in the pre-dawn hour?
No, that was not a poltergeist:

just the quarrelsome son

and the still-angry father.

“There’s nothing fresh!

No eggs! No milk!

How are we going to feed

these people?”

A car roars off. As poets stir,

it screeches back in.

Doors slam. A coffee smell

wafts up. Sun peeks

through clotted clouds,
frowning on Bristol
and its half-frozen bay.

3.

Sensing the rancor and chaos backstairs
two poets brave the kitchen.
They help, they set the table.
James does a yeoman’s job of cooking
while Mr Anderson attends
to a bin of dubious potatoes.
He wields a dull peeler
and just as well it is
they take it from him
and hide away the green potatoes
unfit for human eating.

Uncommon quiet rules the table.
Some make attempts to thank the Andersons
for hosting them despite calamity.
Each thing James says just makes it worse.
“You’ll be the last guests we’ll ever have,”
he tells them. My father is incompetent,”
he says while his father stands right beside him.

Breakfast has passed, and all have breakfasted.
Bags at the door, hugs all around, glances
at the parlor and its extinguished fireplace.
James looks at his watch, reminds them
of his urgent need for ski-lift fees. Wallets
and credit cards go and return.

At the door, he tells the last of them:
“Sorry I didn’t tell you that my mother was dead.
And what I really didn’t want to say at all,
while all of you sat eating there, and everything,
was that Wendy is in the freezer in the basement.”

Walt Whitman Rips Into Politicians

Walt Whitman had equal loathing for politicians of North and South, and blamed both for the horrors of the Civil War. This is just the beginning of his tirade, which he suggests is only part of the story and is worth "conning" now and in the future. I think it describes the slime mold of the U.S. Congress today quite well ... I add a link to the complete Whitman piece.

       ORIGINS OF ATTEMPTED SECESSION

Not the whole matter, but some side facts worth conning to-day and any day.

I consider the war of attempted secession, 1860-'65, not as a struggle of two distinct and separate peoples, but a conflict (often happening, and very fierce) between the passions and paradoxes of one and the same identity—perhaps the only terms on which that identity could really become fused, homogeneous and lasting. The origin and conditions out of which it arose, are full of lessons, full of warnings yet to the Republic—and always will be. The underlying and principal of those origins are yet singularly ignored. The Northern States were really just as responsible for that war, (in its precedents, foundations, instigations,) as the South. Let me try to give my view. From the age of 21 to 40, (1840-'60,) I was interested in the political movements of the land, not so much as a participant, but as an observer, and a regular voter at the elections. I think I was conversant with the springs of action, and their workings, not only in New York city and Brooklyn, but understood them in the whole country, as I had made leisurely tours through all the middle States, and partially through the western and southern, and down to New Orleans, in which city I resided for some time. (I was there at the close of the Mexican war—saw and talk'd with General Taylor, and the other generals and officers, who were feted and detain'd several days on their return victorious from that expedition.)


Of course many and very contradictory things, specialties, developments, constitutional views, &c., went to make up the origin of the war—but the most significant general fact can be best indicated and stated as follows: For twenty-five years previous to the outbreak, the controling "Democratic" nominating conventions of our Republic—starting from their primaries in wards or districts, and so expanding to counties, powerful cities, States, and to the great Presidential nominating conventions—were getting to represent and be composed of more and more putrid and dangerous materials. Let me give a schedule, or list, of one of these representative conventions for a long time before, and inclusive of, that which nominated Buchanan. (Remember they had come to be the fountains and tissues of the American body politic, forming, as it were, the whole blood, legislation, office-holding, &c.) One of these conventions, from 1840 to '60, exhibited a spectacle such as could never be seen except in our own age and in these States. The members who composed it were, seven-eighths of them, the meanest kind of bawling and blowing office-holders, office-seekers, pimps, malignants, conspirators, murderers, fancy-men, custom-house clerks, contractors, kept-editors, spaniels well-train'd to carry and fetch, jobbers, infidels, disunionists, terrorists, mail-riflers, slave-catchers, pushers of slavery, creatures of the President, creatures of would-be Presidents, spies, bribers, compromisers, lobbyers, sponges, ruin'd sports, expell'd gamblers, policy-backers, monte-dealers, duellists, carriers of conceal'd weapons, deaf men, pimpled men, scarr'd inside with vile disease, gaudy outside with gold chains made from the people's money and harlots' money twisted together; crawling, serpentine men, the lousy combings and born freedom-sellers of the earth. And whence came they? From back-yards and bar-rooms; from out of the custom-houses, marshals' offices, post-offices, and gambling-hells; from the President's house, the jail, the station-house; from unnamed by-places, where devilish disunion was hatch'd at midnight; from political hearses, and from the coffins inside, and from the shrouds inside of the coffins; from the tumors and abscesses of the land; from the skeletons and skulls in the vaults of the federal almshouses; and from the running sores of the great cities. Such, I say, form'd, or absolutely controll'd the forming of, the entire personnel, the atmosphere, nutriment and chyle, of our municipal, State, and National politics—substantially permeating, handling, deciding, and wielding everything—legislation, nominations, elections, "public sentiment," &c.—while the great masses of the people, farmers, mechanics, and traders, were helpless in their gripe. These conditions were mostly prevalent in the north and west, and especially in New York and Philadelphia cities; and the southern leaders, (bad enough, but of a far higher order,) struck hands and affiliated with, and used them. Is it strange that a thunder-storm follow'd such morbid and stifling cloud-strata?

Read Whitman's Prose at Project Gutenberg   

The Day They Fired Walt Whitman

On the 30th of June last, this true American man and author [Walt Whitman] was
dismissed, under circumstances of peculiar wrong, from a clerkship he
had held for six months in the Department of the Interior. His dismissal
was the act of the Hon. James Harlan, the Secretary of the Department,
formerly a Methodist clergyman, and President of a Western college.

Upon the interrogation of an eminent officer of the Government, at whose
instance the appointment had, under a former Secretary, been made, Mr.
Harlan averred that Walt Whitman had been in no way remiss in the
discharge of his duties, but that, on the contrary, so far as he could
learn, his conduct had been most exemplary. Indeed, during the few
months of his tenure of office, he had been promoted. The sole and only
cause of his dismissal, Mr. Harlan said, was that he had written the
book of poetry entitled Leaves of Grass. This book Mr. Harlan
characterized as “full of indecent passages.” The author, he said, was
“a very bad man,” a “Free-Lover.” Argument being had upon these
propositions, Mr. Harlan was, as regards the book, utterly unable to
maintain his assertions; and, as regards the author, was forced to own
that his opinion of him had been changed. Nevertheless, after this
substantial admission of his injustice, he absolutely refused to revoke
his action. Of course, under no circumstances would Walt Whitman, the
proudest man that lives, have consented to again enter into office under
Mr. Harlan: but the demand for his reinstatement was as honorable to the
gentleman who made it, as the refusal to accede to it was discreditable
to the Secretary.

The closing feature of this transaction, and one which was a direct
consequence of Mr. Harlan’s course, was its remission to the scurrilous,
and in some instances libellous, comment of a portion of the press. To
sum up, an author, solely and only for the publication, ten years ago,
of an honest book, which no intelligent and candid person can regard as
hurtful to morality, was expelled from office by the Secretary, and held
up to public contumely by the newspapers. It remains only to be added
here, that the Hon. James Harlan is the gentleman who, upon assuming the
control of the Department, published a manifesto, announcing that it was
thenceforth to be governed upon the principles of Christian
civilization.
— William Douglas O'Connor, The Good Gray Poet: A Vindication. 1866

Photo of Walt Whitman by Matthew Brady, Wikimedia Commons.

Knecht Ruprecht, or The Bad Boy's Christmas

by Brett Rutherford

Don’t even think of calling your

mother or father.

They can't hear you.

No one can help you now.

I came through the chimney

in the form of a crow.

You are my first this Christmas.

You are a very special boy, you know.

You have been bad,

bad every day,

dreamt every night

of the next day’s evil.

It takes a lot of knack

to give others misery

for three hundred and sixty

consecutive days!

How many boys have you beaten,

how many small animals killed?

Half the pets in this town

have scars from meeting you.

Am I Santa Claus? Cack, ack, ack!

Do I look like Santa, you little shit?

Look at my bare-bone skull,

my eyes like black jelly,

my tattered shroud.

My name is Ruprecht,

Knecht Ruprecht.

I am Santa’s cousin! Cack, ack, ack!

Do stop squirming and listen —

(of course I am hurting you!)

I have a lot of visits to make.

My coffin is moored to your chimney.

My vultures are freezing their beaks off.

But as I said, you are special.

You are my number one boy.

When you grow up,

you are going to be a noxious skinhead,

maybe a famous assassin.

Your teachers are already afraid of you.

In a year or two you will discover girls,

a whole new dimension of cruelty and pleasure.

Now let us get down to business.

Let me get my bag here.

Presents? Presents! Cack, ack, ack!

See these things? They are old,

old as the Inquisition,

make dental instruments look like toys.

No, nothing much, no permanent harm.

I shall take a few of your teeth,

and then I shall put them back.

This is going to hurt. There —

the clamp is in place.

Let's see now — where may I plug in

those electrodes?

Oh, now, do not whimper and pray to God!

As if you ever believed in God! Cack, ack, ack!

I know every tender place in a boy’s body.

There, that’s fine! My, look at the blood!

Look at the blood! Look at the blood!

You’ll be good from now on? That’s a laugh.

Am I doing this to teach you a lesson?

I am the Punisher. I do this

because I enjoy it! I am just like you!

There is nothing you can do!

I can make a moment of pain seem like a year!

No one will ever believe you!

Worse yet, you cannot change.

Tomorrow you will be more hateful than ever.

The world will wish you had never been born.

Well now, our time is up. Sorry for the mess.

Tell your mother you had a nosebleed.

Your father is giving you a hunting knife

for which I am sure you will have a thousand uses.

Just let me lick those tears from your cheeks.

I do love the taste of children's tears.

My, it is late! Time to fly! Cack, ack, ack!

I shall be back next Christmas Eve!

— Revised October 2019

_______

Knecht Ruprecht, from German folklore, is St. Nicholas' evil twin, who punishes bad children.