ABSTRACT
‘The Primitive Poet, Walt Whitman, translated by Evie Allison Allen, in Walt Whitman Abroad (1955), ed. Gay Wilson Allen, pp. 112–23 (reprinted by permission of the translator and the editor). Allen states: ‘Title supplied by the editor. This essay was an expansion of an address Hamsun gave in the Copenhagen Student Union during the winter of 1889, and published in Fra det moderne Amerikas Aandsliv, Copenhagen, 1889, pp. 63–85’.
Knut Hamsun (1859–1952), Norwegian novelist, was born the son of poor parents. He started to write when he was nineteen at a time when he was a shoemaker’s apprentice. Later he earned his livelihood as coal trimmer and country schoolmaster. He eventually went to America where he became a streetcar conductor in the city of Chicago. His bad impressions of America may be, at least in part, responsible for the vehemence of his attack upon Whitman. In 1888, he published, in a Danish magazine, the fragment of a novel, which was later translated into English and became well- known under the title Hunger. The work immediately attracted attention because of the beauty of its style and originality of treatment. In his attraction to the analysis of psychologically morbid types of character, he is said to resemble the Russians. His best known work perhaps is Growth of the Soil In 1920, he received the Nobel Prize for Literature. His collaboration with the German occupation forces in Norway during the Second World War helped to embitter the last years of his life. It is only quite recently that a revival of interest in his works has become noticeable in America. Among the unfavourable responses evoked by Whitman, Hamsun’s seems to me the wittiest and, in some respects, the weightiest. I like to imagine Whitman himself who, though he is sometimes denied the quality of humour by his critics (like 209Wordsworth and Milton in this respect), once hazarded the guess to a friend that he might go down to posterity wearing ‘the cap and bells of a jester’, enjoying some of the keenly humorous and satiric thrusts of Hamsun.
