This can be seen as another narcissistic post on so-called social media: the title “Song of Myself”. Yet it is one of America’s most emblematic poetic works of the 19th century. OUR Walt Whitmancreator of the famous “Song”, arrived in 1855. “Leaves of Grass” to give poetry the most multi-prism that young America could give. And this oceanic synthetic poem now comes to Greek thanks to a brand new translation by Dimitris Dimiroulis (Gutenberg bilingual edition).

Whitman was certainly not alone, Mr. Gray reminds me. There was the great Hawthorne, the demon Poe, there were the “transcendentalists” Emerson and Thoreau, Mark Twain and Ambrose Bierce, there was the incredible Emily Dickinson. “And, of course,” Mr. Gray puts in, “the great Herman Melville. In a sense, Leaves of Grass is to American poetry of the time what Moby Dick is to the novel.

“There are many voices inside me, silent for years, / Voices from countless generations of slaves, / Voices from harlots and ugly people” …

The central place in “Phill” is occupied by the “Song of Myself”. The apotheosis of American nature, coolness and wildness, America’s cosmogonic “experiment” on a broad, cultural and anthropological level, the mixing of races, the deafened Indian shamanism, the all-pervasive pansexualism that will so excite a hundred years after the beatniks and hippies, the deification of both the individual and the community . “I laugh at what you call decay, / And I know the breadth of time. / I am a poet of the body, / And I am a poet of the soul. // My heavenly pleasures and my hellish torments, / I graft the former and grow on myself … / I translate others into a new language.

An orgiastic, Dionysian poetic song about the dynamics of the present moment, where I is only the starting point: the poet discovers in every moment small and large associations with the world, with the unknown, with the alien, with the other. The harlot and the president in the White House, the fugitive slave and the naked youths in the rivers all become one person who experiences blood as something alive, warm, painful, and at the same time resurrected. “Inside me, many voices have been mute for years, / Voices from countless generations of slaves, / Voices from harlots and ugly people, / (…) And from the tissues that connect the stars – and from the wombs, and fatherly secretions” …

Is poetry optimistic? No, we limit it like this. It is poetry, narrative and lyrical together, epic and visionary, erotic and convincing, embracing existence with all its thorns and colors.