Walt & Emily – Between The Rooms
Monday, August 1, 2011
In 1983, the American poet Donald Hall wrote a poem entitled “The Impossible Marriage.” And in it, he describes Emily Dickinson in her white wedding gown, hiding and making herself scarce in the church cellar and refusing to come up to the altar, while Walt Whitman, who couldn’t care less, is up in the bell tower with the handsome young sexton.
“Never will these poets marry,” Donald Hall tells us. But against all odds, I nevertheless wanted to make an attempt to convince the poets to give it a try, and so I decided to set up an arranged literary marriage that I call “Walt and Emily – Between the Rooms.”
After all, to me – and I’m sure to many others – Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson are our two greatest American poets. And poetry, as Franz Kafka once beautifully defined it, is “truth clothed in the language of friendship and love.”
Emily herself once said: “We are all friends upon a spar.” And Walt, for his part, believed that a friend is just another self.
So I thought I’d introduce the poets to each other and let them stay up all night and talk together, in their own words, in the language of Friendship and Love.
- Jonathan Cott
“Never will these poets marry,” Donald Hall tells us. But against all odds, I nevertheless wanted to make an attempt to convince the poets to give it a try, and so I decided to set up an arranged literary marriage that I call “Walt and Emily – Between the Rooms.”
After all, to me – and I’m sure to many others – Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson are our two greatest American poets. And poetry, as Franz Kafka once beautifully defined it, is “truth clothed in the language of friendship and love.”
Emily herself once said: “We are all friends upon a spar.” And Walt, for his part, believed that a friend is just another self.
So I thought I’d introduce the poets to each other and let them stay up all night and talk together, in their own words, in the language of Friendship and Love.
- Jonathan Cott