What thoughts you have of me, and what thoughts I have of you, in poems by Walt Whitman and Allen Ginsberg

Abstract

Just the other day, 2020.01.31, I had the good fortune of getting involved in a special event, held at Harvard University, which was described, most engagingly, as “A night of philosophy and ideas.” During that event, sponsored by a variety of Harvard organizations with the help of the French Consulate in Boston, I had the opportunity of presenting, within a set time-frame of fifteen minutes, some comments about ancient Greek heroes. I spent most of my minutes, however, by reading out and briefly highlighting the words of a poem composed by Allen Ginsberg in 1955 and published in 1956, “A Supermarket in California.” Ginsberg had meant his words to evoke the words of a poem composed a century earlier, “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” by Walt Whitman, originally published in 1856. The idea behind my highlighting was that the words of Whitman, evoked by Ginsberg, evoke the words of an ode, Pythian 8, composed by the Greek poet Pindar in the middle of the fifth century BCE. But there was another idea behind that idea, which was paradoxically this: the evocations of Pindar by Whitman and then by Ginsberg were unintentional. It was all an accident, even though these unintended evocations can now shed light on the very idea of the ancient Greek hero.