23.10.

2003
Lecture 3



NINETEENTH- CENTURY AMERICAN POETRY

The American Renaissance:
Transcendentalism
Influence on literature.

Emerson: 1844: America was ready for its genuine poetry new American voice.
Emerson was a poet himself.

The new poet: does not use the established form. New American techniques. Great
poerty has architecture of its own. Romantic vision of the poets.

New American poetry v/s old poetry: schoolroom poets their poems were studied at
school & fireside poets used the established European convention.

Longfellow The poet Laureate

Whitman and Dickinson broke the Convention against the style of the fireside
poets.
Whitman alienation from the social conventions, fragmented personality. Not a
unified poetic self.
Whitman and Dickinson non poetry very early predecessors of literary
modernism.
Dependence on the views expressed by Emerson in his early essay The Poet:
- the poet = the only person who could see the oversoul;
- the poet should not rely on meter but on argument


WALT WHITMAN
(1850s)

Whitman turned into a heroic figure represents the hero in poetry sage, wise man for
the whole nation.
Family background: ordinary; working-class family. He was born in the rural area of
Long Island. He mentions his mother in his poems. The mother was a Quaker, very religious.
His father not mentioned. Obsessed with the idea of democracy.
Whitmans brothers were given presidents names.
Whitman wrote short stories. In the beginning they were naturalistic and crude. The
alcoholic father is present in the short stories.
He spent 5 6 years of formal schooling and he was influenced by English poets:
- read the classics;
- read the Bible and the New Testament.

A new genre emerged in American poetry shore ode the meeting between the Land
and the Sea mysterious, frontier. It symbolised the whole cycle of life. The Solid and the
Liquid. The Known and the Unknown Ocean of Life.
Later T.S. Eliot began writing in this genre fluctuation of life.
For Whitman not the sea was an object of interest (v/s Melville) and he was not
interested in the ultimate truth, but in the borderline: life death inseparability. The symbol of
life death; time timelessness.

Engagement in journalism:

Whitman changed a lot of jobs printer assistant, school teacher, journalist, editor of
journals and magazines. He put detailed accent on everyday life.

Songs of Myself reportorial style. Fidelity to realistic vision of everyday life.
Fervent democratic beliefs. He was dismissed from his job because of his democratic beliefs.

The Civil War he couldnt be a soldier, so he became a wound dresser. He went back
to Long Island because of his falling health.

Collection of poems:

5 editions of Leaves of Grass
1
st
collection: 12 poems containing a long preface, where the purpose of writing is
explained.
The Sleepers, Songs of Myself
There was a Child autobiographical growing up;
initiation of a young person into life;
double process;

Autobiographical trend: Songs of Myself; biographical references more subtle.
Example of the Romantic consciousness: substitution of the old epic hero heroic presence
of the poet (suitable to the present moment v/s the past).
Exploration of the self: Songs of Myself the relationship of the Self and the Present.
Comparison with the epic Songs of Myself not a dramatic (classic) form but a new one
a series of emotions.
The portrait of the poet completed, drawn.
Songs of Myself - a continuous expression in the process of being formed. Never
finished.
Both personal and national Identity (American identity so to say).

Me You Plurality of identities
(democratic)
Cosmic person freedom introduced

Obliterating the dichotomy of the Soul and the Body

19
th
Century: - the Soul and the Body: separate, different entities. Literature deals
with the soul. Whitman shockingly stated: I am the poet of the body. I am the poet of the
soul. Walt Whitman believed in the unity of the body and soul. He considered the human
body a miracle.
The Past and the Present: the past is an indispensable part of the present.

The Sleepers:

It is very different from A Song of Myself. It is in the genre of the inward journey. This
is a poem about the recovery of the Self. Assurance that could help the self survive. Unity of
the self that could produce harmony. Reconciliation of the surrounding environment. Poetry
embodiment (here) of Emersons idea of the reunited self that can achieve this eternal beauty.
One could restore the broken world. The Sleepers is a very good example of this transplanting
of European ideas on the American soul.

Songs of Myself:

A second edition published a year after the first one. Excitement with his own poetic
creativity and that of Nature. In most of the poems they appear as one thing

Crossing Brooklyn Ferry:

This is an example of the poetic intoxication of Whitman. Reality flows into the poets
soul and vice versa. Mystical oneness of people, places etc. It is a kind of an eternal flow; it
isnt stable, fixed, never hanging. On the contrary, it is created by the power of the poetic
vision an integrating power. The poem itself and the whole second edition is a celebration of
life. Throughout the next year Whitman wrote a lot of poems, but didnt publish them. Some
interpret this as the result of his entering the outer world, working as a journalist, in particular.
Unfulfilled love is another possible interpretation.
The tone of the two editions is entirely different. The second one has as its main theme
death. Title poem: As I walk into the ocean of life. In the second edition the theme is autumn
while in the first one the theme is spring. The supremacy of life is not the true reality here, the
true reality is rather death.
The discovery of different kinds of death physical, psychic, emotional, creative. All
these different kinds of death become the source of human understanding.
Another example is the poem Out of the Cradle Endlessly Walking. While watching the
unhappy affair b/n the two distant birds becomes a poet and this gives rise to his poetic
consciousness, a consciousness of totality is achieved. Reconciliation. He does not only sing
songs of sorrow; reconciliation of life and death - life and death meet outside this united
reality.
Whitman usually used blank verse. Yet, there was rhythm in his poems. His poems
seemed rather un-American (not superfluous). Later, the Romantics, represented by E. A. Poe,
Hawthorne, etc., would continue this tradition of preoccupation with DEATH. Throughout
such experience one becomes a poet rather than a simple imitator.
In the 4
th
edition of Leaves of Grass we see the incorporation of his Drum.?. It
includes The Captain of my Captain (praise for Lincoln). There Whitman gives out to the
public urge. This presidential image, though, is too obvious.
Another poem dedicated to Lincolns death is an example of the merging of the response
to the public event and the private sorrows of the poet. There is the reconciliation again of the
private and the public. Two losses again of the individual and the nation. At the end of the
poem the image becomes total a totality of life achieved through further merging and
reconciliation of art. This is one of the last examples of his life. Pulling away from the
imaginative self. What follows later is abstraction, pompous words, obscure dream, life. The
explanation is his spending a lot of time in service of the state. For most of the critics, the
dedication at the beginning of this last 4
th
edition (the word choice) signals this balance. Very
little can be distinguished from this last edition.
Whitman devoted his last years to writing prose. Collection of essays entitled
Democratic Vistas a survey of the changed America of the gilded age. It is also an
indictment against greed and corruption. He turned to social issues.
Towards his last years, he lived a sage-like life.