THEY WILL COME

Whitman’s “Song of Myself” is an audacious work of self-dramatization. The voice is new to American literature. It compels contact with other voices. It is designed to rouse readers from their torpor. It defines a matrix of energy, a field of vision, which we enter as we read and which we defuse as we turn away. The poet’s dark night results in renewed vigour and life. His psychic dissolution is overcome by a model of suffering that transforms pain into self-awareness. The reader, too, can be filled with an energy that unlocks his being, launches him into the unknown beyond quiet desperation to a new horizon encompassing eternity. Whitman’s greatest act of pioneering was in helping the modern sensibility feel at home in the modern age. -Ron Price with appreciation to Jeffrey Steele, The Representation of the Self In the American Renaissance, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 1987, pp.70-94.

And here is psychic dissolution overcome
by an advancing psychopharmacology and
the several dark nights of the soul long gone
and replaced with mini-nights and mornings
of an hour or so which anyone can cope with:
a pioneer whose greatest act seems to be to
put it all on paper for some future age in its
vast move beyond quiet desperation, as we
too have moved thanks to His ennobling force.

I have tried to define this field of vision here,
in these several epochs laying so unobtrusively
a foundation the world is just now seeing, even
now so slowly, but they will come, they will come
and this pioneering part, this piece, this moving,
these endless dark nights and black mornings
will be seen to have played their part, however
obscurely, insignificantly, minutely, in this dark
heart of an age of transition when the tempest blew.


Ron Price
30 June 1996