Masters of verse have also come to Central Park to get discovered by Muses and take a breather from the hustle and chaos of cosmopolitan life. In May of 1896, almost forty years after he published the first edition of “Leaves of Grass,” Walt Whitman wrote an article that praised the park’s flora and fauna in the spring:
“I visit Central Park now almost every day, sitting, or slowly rambling, or riding around. The whole place presents its very best appearance this current month – the full flush of the trees, the plentiful white and pink of the flowering shrubs, the emerald green of the grass spreading everywhere, yellow dotted still with dandelions – the specialty of the plentiful gray rocks, peculiar to these grounds, cropping out, miles and miles – and over all the beauty and purity, three days out of four, of our summer skies.”
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“A bum on a park bench shifts, another bum keeps his majesty of stone stillness, the
forty-foot split rocks of
Central Park sleep the sleep of stone whalebacks.”
—
Carl Sandburg in
“Nights Nothings Again.” |
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While the free-spirited Whitman celebrates spring’s “flowering shrubs” and spreading grass, the pensive Wallace Stevens finds beauty in the cold clarity of winter, as he makes clear in a January 1909 letter to his wife, Elsie Noll:
“The Park was turned to glass to-day. Every limb had its coating of ice and on the pines even every needle. The sun made it all glitter, but then the sun did not shine directly and it was twilight before it was really clear.” |
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After tasting the “North wind and the blowing snow,” the reinvigorated Stevens declares, “There is as much delight in the body as in anything in the world and it leaps for use.”
By contrast, Carl Sandburg focuses on the subtle movements and faint sounds of Central Park at night in his 1922 poem“Nights Nothings Again.” He takes us through a serene scene in which “a bum on a park bench shifts, another bum keeps his majesty of stone stillness, the forty-foot split rocks of Central Park sleep the sleep of stone whalebacks, the cornices of the Metropolitan Museum of Art mutter their own nothings to the men with rolled-up collars on the top of a bus….”
Robert Lowell, writing forty years later, proved more resistant to the park’s serene charm. His poem, “Central Park,” portrays the park as the center of sexual tension, sorrow and violence. He finds a “one-day kitten” dying behind a “dripping rock” and a lion “serving his life-term” in a “slummy cell.” Even the lovers “sunning openly” at “every inch of earth and sky” are stained with “fear and poverty.” His ending stanza is particularly effective in reinforcing a modern reader’s conception of what the park was like several decades ago:
“We beg delinquents for our life.
Behind each bush, perhaps a knife;
each landscaped crag, each flowering shrub,
hides a policeman with a club.”
Even as the great American poets disagree about the virtues of Central Park, they all appreciate its ability to surprise. Whether it’s the expanding emerald green of spring grass, the glass limbs of a tree in winter, or knives lurking behind bushes, the park offers a variety of striking images and sensations not found anywhere else in the city. This is why Central Park continues to be the number-one stop for modern bards crafting sentences and stanzas that, despite the painstaking labor, look as fresh and organic as the park that inspired them.
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