Capacious

     Today we begin with a self-published poet from Brooklyn and end with a multi-millionaire rock star.
     The Brooklynite was a journalist and a bit of a hustler who decided (after publishing a self-help guide that recommended beards, cold baths, and meat-eating as keys to health) to become a bard. Most people thought his poetry was garbage. Many others thought it obscene. With little hope of finding a publisher, he printed a book at his own expense, and then praised it in print under false names. Maybe you've heard of this guy; his name was Walt Whitman.

The original Brooklyn hipster.

     Whitman's verse almost never rhymed or stuck to a regular meter. It was full of everyday things that people were not used to seeing in poetry: marketplaces, working people, ferry boats, sex. (Even gay sex!) He tried to jam all of America into his work -- in fact, into himself. Thus Whitman's famous lines:



     Do I contradict myself?
     Very well then I contradict myself,
     (I am large, I contain multitudes.)

     The most surprising thing about Whitman is that he actually succeeded in becoming what he wanted to be: America's national poet. Not bad for a hustler.
     Whitman's most obvious poetic heir was Allen Ginsberg, the bearded bongo-banging beat who shared Walt's gifts for observation and incantatory stanzas. ("I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness," and so on.) Ginsberg even wrote down a dream he had about going shopping with his influencer:

     Where are we going, Walt Whitman? The doors close in an hour. Which way does your beard point tonight?
     (I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the supermarket and feel absurd.)

     Ginsberg got famous enough to hang out with the more-famous people who liked his work, as you can see here:

     The behatted fellow is Bob Dylan. He took the form-busting spirit of Whitman and Ginsberg into the folk scene and then the rock scene, in the process greatly expanding everyone's idea of what could be said in popular song. He's definitely the only guy to star in a Victoria's Secret ad, sell a hundred million records, and win a Nobel Prize for literature. Oh and also he helped produce some of Ginsberg's own music, just to pay off the artistic debt.
     Just last week, Dylan dropped a new tune that contains references to William Blake, the Rolling Stones, Beethoven, Edgar Allen Poe, and much else. Its title? "I Contain Multitudes."

     

Indeed he does. One assumes Uncle Walt would approve.