American Poetry: Dream! What Dream? And What Did It Make of Woman?

Poe, the Devil’s Lyrist,
forged two great horrors,
bestowed on the world
and begot by two
ill-assorted parents—
Ms. Romance and Mr. Alcohol:

a woman’s haunting death
and a woman who can never die—

Then on May’s last day
comes Walt Whitman,
out of West Hills, New York,
a Patriot’s ‘printer’s devil,’
whom Marquis de Lafayette
lifted up and kissed on July 4—

to become ‘the first truly American poet,’
‘one of the roughs, a kosmos, disorderly,
fleshly, and sensual, no sentimentalist...
no more modest than immodest’—

with puissant words poured
in a mighty spermatozoan rush,
equally for all—men and women—

declaring all gods and daimons
to be true as long as they help
extol one’s own self
as final truth and form—

thus, most Hegelian
of all American poets,
while subsuming them all.

And then this odd Trinity
found its late New Son
in Ginsberg,

whose
dream supreme
was an orgy
in a public park
with city police—
along with
the wives—