On Second Chances

I tried. I really did. I gave him a second chance, but he let me down. I still cannot abide Walt Whitman.

I have disliked that poet ever since I was first introduced to him five years ago in high school. In my English class, we studied the transcendental movement. I did not care for the ideas, aside from a few interesting quotes, but other than that, I did not think much about Emerson, Whitman, Thoreau, and their whole lot.

As I have learned matured and my own ideas and outlook have taken shape, I have realized more and more how much transcendentalism has influenced American culture, in my mind, for the worst. They took everything that was Romanticism and pushed it to its extremes, particularly the glorification of man to the place of the divine--something I cannot really abide. Thus, I further rejected the transcendentalists.

While studying at Oxford, I became friends with a young man named Jay. He was very smart, and I enjoyed talking to him and wish I had taken more opportunities to do so. The thing is, Jay loves the transcendentalists, particularly the poetry of Walt Whitman. He would tell me about poems or about the virtues of these men, but I just couldn't abide the ideas they had put forth, so I was reluctant to concede any ground. However, by the end of the semester, Jay had persuaded me that I needed to give Whitman's poetry another chance.

That did not happen until this week. I am taking an American Literature course, and one of the first movements we are studying is transcendentalism, which means a whole lot of Whitman's poetry. I tried. There were poems and bits of poems that I really liked, but I kept running into the glorification of the individual, spiritually communing with nature, and the exaltation of man, and it sickened me. Song of Myself was particularly troublesome. There are some truly exquisite passages--it can never be said that Whitman was shoddy in his craft--but it is all one terrific ego trip for Whitman, and the game got old quickly.

So for Jay, if you ever read this, I tried. Sorry, but I still don't like Walt Whitman.

On Inspiration

Well, I survived KCACTF.

My play was read and responded to. The respondents were hard on me, but there was a lot of helpful feedback. There was some that was less than helpful, but for the most part, it showed me things I could improve in my play.

In a broader sense, my creativity is bursting. There is something about being around art that inspires me and pushes me to create art myself. In the last few days I have had idea after idea and I am scrambling to set them all down before they drift away or I lose them in the coming business of my final semester of college. Weeks like this remind me why I love the theatre and make me want to quit college and devote myself to writing constantly until something comes of it. Hopefully, I can curb my desire to forego my studies while feeding this creative impulse. I cannot wait to see where it takes me.