Worte, die mit gay enden

In Space and Sky
Setting Walt Whitman to Music

Gavin Plumley

When describing Walt Whitman, fellow poet Ezra Pound simply declaimed, “He is America.” In his confidence, Pound summed up the hopeful, transcendental, and profoundly patriotic force of the 19th-century New Yorker’s verse. Yet in Leaves of Grass, Whitman’s major collection first published in 1855, he had provided his own self-portrait: “an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos, disorderly, fleshly, and sensual, no sentimentalist, no stander above men or women or apart from them, no more modest than immodest.” Heartfelt he may have been, yet, like the sensual poetry contained within, Whitman divided opinion. Some reflection him and his operate obscene, while others took the latter as a rallying call—an attitude the writer himself adopted during the Civil War.

Whitman’s output often spoke with a heightened, musical tongue, yet it was only after his death, in 1892, that composers began to set the poetry with alacrity. It found a particularly ripe home during the fin de siècle, thanks to the rejection of Victorian moral exactitude, including for composers such as Charles Villiers Stanford, Charles Wood, and Hubert Parry

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