Let's talk about poetry! Who's your favorite poet?
Mine is technically Walt Whitman, but I have a very love-hate relationship with Walt Whitman because he steals all my ideas before I have them (see: Harold Bloom). But every time I read anything by Whitman it is really just like a superhuman experience. He's magnificent. Everything he rights is absolutely crammed with energy and life, and furthermore, somehow he has all this energy in a very outward manner, a very extroverted manner. It's the marriage of this intensely interior, powerful consciousness with this extroverted character that is the outward luminosity (like an emanation) of this inward energy. Rough Walt, the speaker of many of the poems, is just astounding as a representation or figure of the incredible electrifying nuclear power that whitman has as a writer, and that as an achievement is really more spectacular that I have proper vocabulary to say.
I also really love Shakespeare's sonnets. He's not as extroverted as Whitman, but he's magnificent and energetic. Like Hamlet, he creates mighty opposites (in the rival poet) where there are none, because who could be mighty as a poet in comparison to Shakespeare? Cervantes? Dante? Milton? Homer? I can't think of any more. It perplexes me that Shakespeare is a better writer than Whitman, that Shakespeare has more of that energy that's so obvious and plain on the face of Whitman, he just doesn't spread it so openly, he keeps it more subtle, expressing it through representation rather than lights and flashes and noise.
When we write about Whitman, we perspectivize him. I see him as noise, noise, noise. But we're really just trying to grapple with this extraordinary influx of life, and this emotional aggression (to borrow a socionics term) that forces you to feel the fire just by reading him. I feel like the entirety of American poetic tradition is like an excited electron transferring from carrier to carrier trying to harness the energy that Walt Whitman first ignited and first took inside himself, trying to harness America, rather than letting it just release all at once, because the all at once release would be a massive explosion, and it might just kill us all.