The Free Channel
The greatest poet has less a marked style and is more the channel of thoughts and things without increase or diminution, and is the free channel of himself. He swears to his art, I will not be meddlesome, I will not have in my writing any elegance or effect or originality to hang in the way between me and the rest like curtains. I will have nothing hang in the way, not the richest curtains. What I tell I tell for precisely what it is.
, Preface to Leaves of Grass (1855)
Whitman uses the word “channel” twice in quick succession, and it’s worth pausing over. A channel doesn’t generate; it transmits. It carries something from one place to another without adding or subtracting. The greatest poet, Whitman suggests, is not the one with the most distinctive voice or the most elaborate style, but the one who gets out of the way.
We’re often told now that our “unique voice” is what makes creative work irreplaceable, that distinctiveness itself is proof of humanness. But Whitman argues almost the opposite: the goal is to have “less a marked style,” to refuse elegance and effect and even originality when they become curtains between the work and the reader. Curtains: the word reframes style as potential obstruction. We tend to think of style as revelation, as the thing that makes our work recognizably ours. Whitman sees it as something that can block light.
The goal is nakedness, directness: “What I tell I tell for precisely what it is.” And yet the poet doesn’t disappear. Whitman insists on being the “free channel of himself.” The channel is not empty. It carries the particular shape of one life, one body, one history. But it carries without posturing, without the anxiety of needing to prove its value through ornamentation.
Perhaps the question for any of us making things now isn’t whether our work sounds recognizably “human,” but whether we’ve had the courage to remove the curtains we hang out of fear that who we are, unadorned, isn’t enough.