The Walt Whitman poem that shaped a Lana Del Rey song
“Whitman is my daddy,” croons Lana Del Rey in ‘Body Electric’. In her 2013 short film Tropico, Whitman’s words and visions of American epics came to life as Del Rey writhed on a pole. His 1855 poem, I Sing the Body Electric, mirrored the themes she often touches on, such as seediness, corruption, and the constant mythologising of certain places.
Place is something that has always been central to both artists, with Whitman spending a lifetime committing the mystique of New York to his poems. Before writing the Leaves of Grass collection, he set a mystery novel there, its sprawling urban metropolis providing the perfect setting. But the rambling verses he was known for were the best medium for capturing city life, like in 1860’s Mannahatta.
On New York, he wrote: “Numberless crowded streets, high growths of iron, slender, / strong, light, splendidly uprising toward clear skies,” calling it a “city of hurried and sparkling waters! city of spires and masts!”. Del Rey shares his fascination with America, often injecting herself into descriptions of it: “I’m your little harlot, starlet, Queen of Coney Island.”
On ‘Brooklyn Baby’, she nods to the glamour of Whitman’s New York in the title and its infamous Beat poets, singing: “I’ve got feathers in my hair / I get down to Beat poetry.” Its central artists, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs, all adopted a non-conformity that resonated with Del Rey, their work often being explicit, laced with discussions of sex and drug use. Their poetry, as well as Whitman’s, chimed with her vision of dark Americana.
In 2020, she released the book Violet Bent Backwards over the Grass, a collection of 19 original poems. It’s enduring evidence of her love of poetry, her prose mirroring Whitman’s down to the use of exclamation marks as he so often did. “I love you, but you don’t understand me, I’m a real poet!” Del Rey writes in Salamander. “My life is my poetry, my love making is my legacy! My thoughts are about nothing, and beautiful, and for free”. Whitman, who is often dubbed the “father of free verse”, is the singular force who inspired her sensual words.
While his poems were dismissed as obscene, Del Rey’s audiences revel in her open nature. One of her most popular lyrics, one routinely belted out at concerts, comes from 2019’s ‘Norman fucking Rockwell’. “Goddamn, man child,” she sings. “You fucked me so good that I almost said, ‘I love you’.” Her material – poetry and lyrics – are imbued with the carefree nature of Whitman’s. In a fitting ode to his preoccupation with bodily corruption, she also has his name etched on her, a ‘Whitman’ tattoo sitting alongside her right arm, nestled against another ode to a literary favourite of hers, Nabokov.
