III.6. Walt Whitman

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III.6. Walt Whitman

• The Focus of Study
• Life Experience
• Literary Career
• Point of View
• Writing Style
• Major works
• Significance

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Walt Whitman

• Epitome of Emersons American Scholar.
• The boldest and most unrestrained bard of the
  American people.
• Pioneer of modern American poetry.
• A philosopher, mystic, and critic.

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Life Experience

• 1819, born in Long island, NY, a farmers family.
• 1830, received little schooling, worked
  temporarily as an office boy, apprentice, printer
  and country school teacher.
• 1840-41, published essays and short stories in
  Democratic papers.
• 1841-45, reporter, editor and writer.
• 1855, Leaves of Grass First edition.
• 1861-65, clerk and male-nurse in Washington.
• 1873-92, suffered paralytic stroke and died.

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Literary Career

• Three distinctive periods
• 1. 1855-59, an individualistic, sensual,
  material and rejoicing author of Leaves of Grass
  .
• 2. 1859-65, modification in style and subject
  matter from joyous chant of life to the musing of
  death and the limitation of life.
• 3. 1866-92, conversion from individualism to
  nationalism or internationalism, from love of
  freedom to love of law and materialism to
  spiritual idealism.

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Representative poems for different period

• 1. Song of Myself, most celebrated poem
  introduces 1st edition of Leaves of Grass .
• a. reveals his belief of universality by
  identifying himself imaginatively with all the
  things of world.
• b. glorifies the deity of nature, the
  miracles of the soul.
• c. celebrates the individualism as the cosmic
  I who sings the poem.
• d. hails brotherhood in taking all things and
  people as equal in value.

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Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking

• Obsessed with the loss of a beloved friend, a
  melancholy speculation on the theme of death.
• The lament for the loss of the physical love is
  motivated to a spiritualized realization of
  death.

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• Shine! shine! shine! Pour down your warmth,
  great sun! While we bask, we two together.
• Singing all time, minding no time, While we two
  keep together.
• 0 past! 0 happy life! 0 songs of joy! In the
  air, in the woods, over fields, Loved! loved!
  loved! loved! loved! But my mate no more, no
  more with me! We two together no more.
• Whereto answering, the sea, Delaying not,
  hurrying not, Whisper'd me through the night,
  and very plainly before daybreak, Lisp'd to me
  the low and delicious word death, And again
  death, death, death, death,

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When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd

• Whitmans most famous elegy on the death of
  Lincoln, the most distinct expression of his
  democratic belief in the image of Lincoln.

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• 1
• WHEN lilacs last in the dooryard bloom'd,
• And the great star early droop'd in the
  western sky in the night,
• I mourn'd, and yet shall mourn with
  ever-returning spring.
• Ever-returning spring, trinity sure to me you
  bring,
• Lilac blooming perennial and drooping star in
  the west,
• And thought of him I love.
• 2
• O powerful western fallen star!
• O shades of nightO moody, tearful night!
• O great star disappear'dO the black murk that
  hides the star!
• O cruel hands that hold me powerlessO helpless
  soul of me!
• O harsh surrounding cloud that will not free my
  soul.

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Point of View

• Whitman is a caresser of life. He absorbs and
  embraces the whole of American life.
• The praise of individual freedom connected with a
  love of nature the celebration of the holiness
  of body as a part of the soul sex as healthy, a
  part of generation against conventional code of
  good and evil the birth and death being an
  eternal cycle as well as an evolution.
• Celebrates the Western movement and economic boom
  as miracles created by Americans celebrates
  democracy as he advocated brotherhood among all
  the people of different races.

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Writing Style

• Wrote free verse in harmony with his keen love
  for nature. Features
• 1) long, loose and cumulative rhythms rolling
  forward like the movement of the sea.
• 2) A loose poetic structure.
• 3) Extensive use of repetition and parallelism.
• 4) Cataloguing or listing of a series of images
  in a long line.

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• 5). A poetic diction noted for the use of odd
  jargon mixing up vernacular with learned words,
  foreign words, scientific terms and fabricated
  words.
• 6). Effective use of symbolic words to bring
  forward suggestive meanings.

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Significance

• Whitmans influence over modern poetry is great
  in the world as well as in America. His best work
  has become common property of Western culture.
• Whitmans vision of the poet-prophet and
  poet-teacher exerts great influence on modern
  poets, like Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Carl Sandburg.

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• Contemporary American poetry, whatever school or
  form, bears witness to his great influence.
• For his innovations in diction and versification,
  his frankness about sex, his inclusion of the
  commonplace and the ugly and his censure of the
  weakness of the American democratic practice all
  these have paved his way to a share of immorality
  in American literature.
• 
  

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Study Questions

• Describe Whitman's conceptions of the soul and
  the body, and the relationship between the two.
  Which is more important, in his view?
• How do you account for the eroticism in
  Whitman's poetry? Does he use homosexual
  eroticism differently from heterosexual
  eroticism?
• What kinds of structures does Whitman use in his
  poetry? Why might he be using these rather than
  traditional structures like rhyme?

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References

• Beach, Christopher. The Politics of Distinction
  Whitman and the Discourses of Nineteenth-Century
  America. Athens, GA University of Georgia Press,
  1996.
• Bloom, Harold, ed. Walt Whitman. Broomall, PA
  Chelsea House Publishers, 1999.
• Erkkila, Betsy and Jay Grossman. Breaking Bounds
  Whitman and American Cultural Studies. New York
  Oxford University Press, 1996.
• Greenspan, Ezra, ed. Cambridge Companion to Walt
  Whitman. Cambridge Cambridge University Press,
  1995.
• Mancuso, Luke. The Strange Sad War Revolving
  Walt Whitman, Reconstruction, and the Emergence
  of Black Citizenship, 1865-1876. Columbia, SC
  Camden House, 1997.

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• Thank You Very Much for Attending This Lecture