WaltWhitman. Philosophical basics of his work
Ekaterinburg, 2009
Introduction
When having to think about the philosophy of Americanness, whoelse could come to one’s mind other than Walt Whitman. One of the most read,most enjoyable writers of American Literature so much debated and gossipedabout, preceding his own folk’s and the world’s age by light-years ahead,throwing himself in the face of his contemporary readers, at last knocking downall the remains of the long-suffered puritan establishments and values that thecountry has carried as a burden for far too long. One simply cannot excludeWhitman without having to make a comment about his poetry – his art – he simplycannot be ignored, for he and his art does not allow that.
The aim of our work is to analyze features of Walt Whitman’sstyle. We will study his literary techniques, such as alliteration, anaphora, «free»verse etc. In our work we will try to show philosophical basics of his works.
Our tasks are:
– To investigate theuniqueness of his style
– To analyze some of his worksin order to characterize his poetic techniques
– To conduct a detailedanalysis of philosophical basics of his works
We will also propose some of his poems because we wanted to showpeculiarities of his style.
«Leaves of Grass»
If we want to talk about philosophical basics of Walt Whitman, weshould analyze them all in common because they are all connected and you canfind several of them in one poem at the same time.
First of all we will start our investigation with one of hisgreatest poems «Leaves of Grass».
The title «Leaves of Grass» is used by Whitman to symbolize theimmortality of the soul, the mechanical universe, and that all things are in astate of flux Whitman says in the last chapter:
«I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love»
He loves the grass so much as part of nature, assimilates himselfto nature, and considers the immortality of the soul in nature because of hisbelief and his own inspiration and individuality.
Whitman’s idea of nature can be accepted concerning the world ofdeath since nature is inextricably linked with mortal beings and in harmonywith the mind. That greatest harmony is thought to be the immortality of thesoul in nature. In other words, its harmonization is based on the medieval ideathat «The will of God creates nature».
He thought that this is a dark mysterious world, and that humanbeings contribute to the world of death by their domination of nature. Theworld of human being is a lonely creature in a chaotic universe. Firm in thisbelief, Whitman in his philosophical approach to Nihilism described himself asthe immortality of the soul in the great universe. He said in his firstchapter:
«I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as God belongs to you.» (P. 1).
This is the liberation of the mind from the philosophy of acontrolling God, which was current in the plantation period of J. Edwards (1703–1758).To expound this theme, Whitman wrote his poem, in which he propounded hisideas.
«The atmosphere is not a perfume,
It has no taste of the distillation, and it is odorless,
It is for my mouth forever, I am in love with it,
I will go to the bank by the wood and become undisguised andnaked,
I am mad for it to be in contact with me.» (P. 2).
Whitman’s nature is good, not evil. The stream of this idea isaccepted by J. Rousseau (1712–1778) «As a human nature is good in nature» whichis an absolutely optimistic and ever frontier spirit.
Whitman pursues each personal develop – meant by showing howpeople relate. For example: looking forth on pavement and land, or outside ofpavement and land, «Belonging to the winders of the circuit of circuits.» (P.78).
From this point of view, he looks over the natural phenomenon ofcircuits, and God is defined by the relationship of human nature to thecircuits.
Whitman thought that inspiration was equal to the dualism of thesoul and the personality, and wrote:
«Apart from the pulling and hauling stands what I am,
Stand amused, complacent, compassionating, idea, unitary,
Looks down, is erect, or bends an arm on an impalpable certainrest.
Looking with side-curved head curious what will come next.
Both in and out of the game and watching and wondering at it.
Backward I see in my own days where I sweated through fog withlinguists and contenders.
I have no mocking or arguments, I witness and wait.» (P. 6).
Whitman considered the relation of phenomenon and the personality.His mind was not closed to the realities in which his personality asserted themethod of the audience and passive state condition and tried to contact therefusing phenomenon.
«Leaves of grass» belongs to no particular accepted form ofpoetry. Whitman described its form as «a new and national declamatoryexpression.» Whitman was a poet bubbling with energy and burdened withsensations, and his poetic utterances reveal his innovations. His poetry seemsto grow organically, like a tree. It has the tremendous vitality of an oak. Itsgrowth follows no regular pattern: «Song of Myself», for example, seems atfirst almost recklessly written, without any attention to form. Whitman’spoetry, like that of most prophetic writers, is unplanned, disorganized,sometimes abortive, but nevertheless distinctively his own.
Walt Whitman’s Poetical Techniques
In his poems he used some special poetical techniques.
Alliteration
«Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking»: «’And thenceforward allsummer in the sound of the sea.’ This use of alliteration of the creates asound of the sea… which is very effective. This is by no means the only use ofalliteration in the poem. Other groupings such as ‘sterile sands,’ ‘briers andblackberries, ‘ ‘Listened long and long,’ ‘sweetest song and songs,’ and’singer solitary’ occur throughout the poem» (Kimmel 9/16/96).
Anaphora
Anaphora: repetition of words or phrases at beginnings of lines.
«Crossing Brooklyn Ferry»: «’Others will enter… / Others willwatch… / Others will see’ and also ‘Just as you feel… / Just as you arerefresh’d… / Just as you stand… / Just as you look…’» (Barham 9/17/96).
«One of the first cases in which he uses anaphora extensively in Drum-Tapsis in the section titled «Poet,» in which the first four lines begin with ‘Ihear, ‘ and lines 8–12 begin with ‘I see, ‘ while the entire first 13 linesbegin with ‘I.’ He is creating one large audio and visual image in those lines,with each line being a separate image, but all tied together by their commonbeginning. In this case, lines all beginning with the same word also help toset up a rhythm, as the reader is inclined to read all of the ‘I’s with thesame amount of stress, like reading off items on a list. Through the use ofanaphora in this way, Whitman can express one theme in several different lines,with several different ideas, while having a definite link between eachthought. In the first section of ‘Give Me the Splendid Sun, ’ Whitman beginsthe first eleven lines with ‘Give me.’ Although in each line he is asking for adifferent thing, the entire thought expressed in the lines together is hisdesire for ‘nature’s primal sanities.’ With the common beginning in theselines, he is expressing all of his values at once in eleven lines, with elevendifferent ideas» (Minis 9/17/96).
«Free» verse
Definition: verse that, while free of rhyme and a consistentrhythm, may employ other structural and sound elements, such as anaphora andchiasmus.
Whitman may have picked up on Emerson’s line in «The Poet»: «Forit is not meters, but a meter-making argument that makes a poem.»
But he also may have found models in «Proverbial Philosophy,» afree verse poem that Tupper published in 1838, and in a poem by George Lippard(Reynolds).
Catalogs
«In many of Whitman’s poems, like Children of Adam, helists many things at once. In Children of Adam, section 9, he lists over80 parts of the body, both male and female. He does this listing techniqueagain in Song of the Open Road, when he tells of all the things hepasses and sees on his journey» (Baldwin 9/17/96)
They show a childish joy in naming things (Matthiessen 518).
Perhaps they also betray a desire to incorporate everything in apoem, as Melville tried to do in Moby-Dick.
Whitman may have borrowed the idea from contemporary travelliterature, including books called Mississippi in Gobs and New Yorkin Chunks (Reynolds).
«In ‘Drum-Taps’ the smaller passages which make up the whole poemseem to give all different perspectives of the war. The perspective of themother, father, child, wound dresser, slave woman, and even a banner are allgiven. In turn, the reader is fed a catalog of various feelings about war.Also, in ‘Drum-Taps’ and particularly in the passage ‘First O Songs for aPrelude, ‘ there is a catalog. Whitman lists and lists all different peoplewith varying occupations and how they are getting ready for war. Thy lawyer,the mechanic, and salesman are all mentioned. It would be easy to see Whitman’suse of the catalog as simply ‘show[ing] childish joy in naming things'(Matthiessen 518). However, I see it as Whitman’s way of presentinguniversality. Everyone is going through this same event, and everyone isfeeling emotions about the war. The catalog shows common links among humans» (Plonk9/19/96).
Chiasmus
Definition: a mirror pattern in words, sounds, or other elements.
See «Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,» lines 71–74: «SOOTHE!Soothe! Soothe!» / CLOSE on its wave soothes the wave BEHIND / And againanother BEHIND embracing and lapping, everyone CLOSE, / But my love SOOTHES notme, not me.»
See «By the Bivouac’s fitful flame»: «By the Bivouac’s fitfulflame… / A procession… / A solemn and slow procession… / By the Bivouac’sfitful flame» (Daigneault 9/20/96).
See Psalm 124:7: «Our soul is ESCAPED as a bird out of the SNAREof the fowlers: the SNARE is broken, and we are ESCAPED.»
Circles and Cycles
Drum-Taps: «Hebegins the poem with a short prelude and then begins telling of the year 1861and how all the men were having to leave their jobs and wives to go fight inthe war. Then he starts telling about the war itself. He describes cavalriescrossing fords and army corps marching to battle. In one section, he speaks ofa soldier who watches his friend get fatally wounded. The soldier holds a vigilall night for his friend and then buries him when he dies. In another section,he describes a soldier’s family–his mother, father, and sister–when theyreceive a letter telling them that he has been injured in battle. Whitmanbrings out the true emotion of the families during this time. After describingall of the different parts to the war, at the end of the poem, Whitman comesfull circle as he does in all his works by declaring that the war is over andthat there is peace throughout the country. In this manner, Whitman completeshis poetic story, and the reader is fulfilled» (Jake man 9/19/96).
Envelope
«Passage to India»: «O…Of you…Of you…Of you…O»
Psalm 70:1–5: «Make haste…. Let… Let… Let… Make haste.»
Genre
Whitmanhad writtensensational stories; visionary works, nationalistic works, biblical stories,and works on social issues.
«If Leaves of Grass was the era’s most expansive poem,continuing the largest variety of voices and topics, it was largely because itwas written by one who had unabashedly tried his hand at virtually every genrethat had been popularized by previous American writers» (Reynolds 106).
Grammatical mood
Section 9 of «Crossing Brooklyn Ferry» is a mirror image ofSection 3, except that mood of Section 9 is imperative, and that of Section 3is indicative.
Imagery
Still pictures suggest immortality of images, as on Grecian Urn,and may reflect interest in photography. Whitman uses unpoetic objects andmakes them poetic.
He also uses outrageous analogies: «the cow crunching withdepressed head surpasses any statue» resembles Thoreau’s description of the «cheapand natural music of the cow» in Walden.
Drum-Taps:» Whitmanuses [phrases] like ‘the young men falling in and arming, / The mechanicsarming, (the trowel, the jack-plane, the blacksmith’s hammer, toast aside withprecipitation).’ This use of imagery allows Whitman to make descriptive scenesthat the reader can attach himself to and see» (Aron 9/19/96).
«Another technique Whitman makes use of is that of imagery: ‘Weprimeval forests felling, we the rivers stemming, vexing we and piercing deepthe mines within… we the virgin soil up heaving…’ The extensive use of imageryserves to widen the reader’s scope of comprehension for the picture thatWhitman is painting. The content is driven by the images like still photographscoming together to form a film» (Premakumar 9/17/96).
Line length
Lines in «Crossing Brooklyn Ferry» suggest tides.
Length of lines in Section 1 suggests flood tide because each islonger than the one preceding it.
Sections also suggest flood tide because they grow longer ingroups of three: a, a+b, a+b+c, d, d+e, d+e+f, g, g+h, g+h+i
Elsewhere, Whitman often achieves an aural effect by writingincreasingly longer lines, suggesting expansion of thought.
«In most of Whitman’s poems, the pattern is not rhythmic, yet thepattern lies in the length of the lines. In one verse, the first line is oftypical length, and the second line is extended a little longer than the first.The pattern continues with the third and fourth lines each becoming longer thantheir predecessor. The reason seems to be to build up a climax in each ofWhitman’s verses, and the fifth and final line is the conclusion of the verse.This style puts a greater emphasis on each verse and provides the reader withvarious miniature climaxes» (Atkinson 9/12/96).
Musicality
Whitman wasinspired by opera.
He portrays himself as a bard, singing for the common people.
Onomatopoeia
«Beat! Beat! Drums!»: «Throughout the poem, he not only repeats,’Beat! Beat! Drums! – Blow! Bugles! Blow!’ but he uses the words in thestanzas that incorporate some kind of sound. He uses words like ‘burst, ‘ ‘pound,’ ‘rumble, ‘ ‘rattle, ‘ and ‘thump.’ I can associate sounds with each of thesewords. I can hear the drums drumming and the bugles blowing» (Patterson9/17/96).
«One example of this can be seen in ‘Song of the Banner atDaybreak’ when the flag expresses its voice by ‘Flapping, flapping, flapping,flapping…’» (Daugherty 9/19/96).
Oratory
Whitman lived at a time ofgreat orators, such as Daniel Webster.
He may have been influenced by grass-roots reformers’ oratory(Reynolds).
Parallels
Definition: variations on a theme, often linked by anaphora (therepetition of a word or phrase at the beginning of lines).
«Song of Myself»: «Have you reckoned a thousand acres much? haveyou reckoned the earth much? Have you…»
«Crossing Brooklyn Ferry»: «I see… I see… I see…»
See Ecclesiastes 3:2 – …: «A time to be born, and a time to die: atime to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted…»
Persona
«’Persona, ‘ as defined by A Handbook to Literature, is amask created by an author and through which a narrative is told. Intrinsic inthe concept of persona is that the author’s own views are masked by the impliedauthor through which he/she speaks (385). Another interpretation of ‘persona, ‘the Jungian view, is that persona is a set of attitudes adopted by anindividual to fit himself for the social roles he sees as his (Simpson 598)….Both of these explanations of persona are applicable to Whitman’s works» (Hundley1).
Punctuation
«Section 9 of «Passage to India» includes 29 lines. Twenty-five ofthese lines end either in a question or exclamation mark. The effect of thispunctuation is that Whitman depicts the deep emotion that he pours into hiswriting» (Lasher 9/17/96).
Whitman «uses exclamation points frequently, creating extraemphasis on lines. The beautiful things in life become magnificent, and sadbecome tragic» (Minis 9/17/96).
Whitman believed that poetry should be spoken, not written, andthis basic criterion governed the concept and form of his poetry. He usedrepetition and reiterative devices (as, for example, in «Out of the CradleEndlessly rocking,» the lines «Loud! Loud! Loud!» and «Blow! Blow! Blow!») Healso employed elements of the opera (the aria and the recitative) in his poems.
He also was a master of exuberant phrases and images: «Thebeautiful uncut hair of graves» («Song of Myself,» section 6) isextraordinarily descriptive. Conversely, another description of the grass inthe same section of the same poem, where it is described as «the handkerchiefof the Lord,» is trivial.
Whitman brought vitality and picturesqueness to his descriptionsof the physical world. He was particularly sensitive to sounds and describedthem with acute awareness. His view of the world was dominated by its changeand fluidity, and this accounts for his frequent use of «ing» forms, eitherpresent participle or gerund.
Whitman’s language is full of his eccentricities: he used the word«presidential» for presidency, «pave» for pavement, and he spelled Canada witha K.
«Leaves of grass» contains archaic expressions – for example, betimes, betwixt, methinks,haply, and list (for listen). Whitman also employs many colloquial expressionsand technical and commercial terms. Words from foreign languages add color andvariety to his style.
Peculiarities in Whitman’s Rhythm and Verse
Whitman’s use of rhythms is notable. A line of his verse, ifscanned in the routine way, seems like a prose sentence, or an advancing waveof prose rhythm. Yet his work is composed in lines, not in sentences as prosewould be. The line is the unit of sense in Whitman.
Whitman experimented with meter, rhythm, and form because hethought that experimentation was the law of the changing times, and thatinnovation was the gospel of the modern world. Whitman’s fondness for trochaicmovement rather than iambic movement shows the distinctive quality of his useof meter. An iamb is a metrical foot of two syllables, the second of which isaccented. A trochee is a metrical foot consisting of an accented syllablefollowed by an unaccepted one. The iambic is the most commonly used meter inEnglish poetry, partly because of the structure of English speech. Englishphrases normally begin with an article, preposition, or conjunction whichmerges into the word that follows it, thus creating the rising inflection whichis iambic. Why, then, did Whitman prefer the trochaic to the iambic meter? Itwas partly due to the poet’s desire for declamatory expression and oratoricalstyle, since the trochee is more suitable for eloquent expression than theiambic meter. Whitman also liked to do things that were unusual and novel.
Imagery – a Special Technique of Walt Whitman’s
Imagery means a figurative use of language. Whitman’s use ofimagery shows his imaginative power, the depth of his sensory perceptions, andhis capacity to capture reality instantaneously. He expresses his impressionsof the world in language which mirrors the present. He makes the past comealive in his images and makes the future seem immediate. Whitman’s imagery hassome logical order on the conscious level, but it also delves into thesubconscious, into the world of memories, producing a stream-of-consciousnessof images. These images seem like parts of a dream, pictures of fragments of aworld. On the other hand, they have solidity; they build the structure of thepoems.
The Use of Symbols in Whitman’s Works
A symbol is an emblem, a concrete object that stands for somethingabstract; for example, the dove is a symbol of peace; the cross, Christianity.Literary symbols, however, have a more particular connotation. They sometimessignify the total meaning, or the different levels of meaning, which emergefrom the work of art in which they appear. A white whale is just an animal–butin Melville’s Moby Dick it is a god to some characters, evil incarnate toothers, and a mystery to others. In other words, it has an extended connotationwhich is symbolic.
In the mid‑1880s, the Symbolist movement began in France,and the conscious use of symbols became the favorite practice of poets. Thesymbolists and Whitman had much in common; both tried to interpret the universethrough sensory perceptions, and both broke away from traditional forms andmethods. But the symbols of the French symbolists were highly personal, whereasin Whitman the use of the symbol was governed by the objects he observed: thesea, the birds, the lilacs, the Calamus plant, the sky, and so on.Nevertheless, Whitman did have an affinity with the symbolists; they even translatedsome of his poems into French.
Whitman’s major concern was to explore, discuss, and celebrate hisown self, his individuality and his personality. Second, he wanted to eulogizedemocracy and the American nation with its achievements and potential. Third,he wanted to give poetical expression to his thoughts on life’s great, enduringmysteries–birth, death, rebirth or resurrection, and reincarnation.
The Self
To Whitman, the complete self is both physical and spiritual. Theself is man’s individual identity, his distinct quality and being, which isdifferent from the selves of other men, although it can identify with them. Theself is a portion of the one Divine Soul. Whitman’s critics have sometimesconfused the concept of self with egotism, but this is not valid. Whitman isconstantly talking about «I,» but the «I» is universal, a part of the Divine,and therefore not egotistic.
The Body and the Soul
Whitman is a poet of these elements in man, the body and the soul.He thought that we could comprehend the soul only through the medium of thebody. To Whitman, all matter is as divine as the soul; since the body is assacred and as spiritual as the soul, when he sings of the body or itsperformances, he is singing a spiritual chant.
Nature
Whitman shares the Romantic poet’s relationship with nature. Tohim, as to Emerson, nature is divine and an emblem of God. The universe is notdead matter, but full of life and meaning. He loves the earth, the flora andfauna of the earth, the moon and stars, the sea, and all other elements ofnature. He believes that man is nature’s child and that man and nature mustnever be disjoined.
Time
Whitman’s concept of the ideal poet is, in a way, related to hisideas on time. He conceives of the poet as a time-binder, one who realizes thatthe past, present, and future are «not disjoined, but joined,» that they areall stages in a continuous flow and cannot be considered as separate anddistinct. These modem ideas of time have given rise to new techniques ofliterary expression–for example, the stream-of-consciousness viewpoint.
Cosmic Consciousness
Whitman believed that the cosmos, or the universe, does notconsist merely of lifeless matter; it has awareness. It is full of life andfilled with the spirit of God. The cosmos is God and God is the cosmos; deathand decay are unreal. This cosmic consciousness is, indeed, one aspect ofWhitman’s mysticism.
Mysticism
Mysticism is an experience that has a spiritual meaning which isnot apparent to the senses nor to the intellect. Thus mysticism, an insightinto the real nature of man, God, and the universe, is attained through one’sintuition. The mystic believes in the unity of God and man, man and nature, Godand the universe. To a mystic, time and space are unreal, since both can beovercome by man by spiritual conquest. Evil, too, is unreal, since God ispresent everywhere. Man communicates with his soul in a mystical experience,and Whitman amply expresses his responses to the soul in Leaves of Grass,especially in «Song of Myself.» He also expresses his mystical experience ofhis body or personality being permeated by the supernatural. Whitman’s poetryis his artistic expression of various aspects of his mystical experience.
Bardic Symbols
No one, even after the fourth or fifth reading, can pretend to saywhat the «Bardic Symbols» symbolize. The poet walks by the sea, and addressingthe drift, the foam, the billows and the wind, attempts to force from them, byhis frantic outcry, the the [sic] true solution of the mystery of Existence,always most heavily and darkly felt in the august ocean presence. All isconfusion, waste and sound. It is in vain that you attempt to gather the poet’sfull meaning from what he says or what he hints. You can only take refuge inoccasional passages like this, in which he wildly laments the feebleness andinefficiency of that art which above all others seeks to make the soul visibleand audible:
O, baffled, lost,
Bent to the very earth, here preceding what follows,
Terrified with myself that I have dared to open my mouth,
Aware now, that amid all the blab, whose echoes recoil
upon me, I have not once had the least idea who or
what I am,
But that before all my insolent poems the real one still standsuntouched, untold, altogether unreached,
Withdrawn far, mocking me with mock-congratulatory
signs and bows,
With peals of distant ironical laughter at every word I
have written or shall write,
Striking me with insults till I fall helpless upon the sand.
If indeed, we were compelled to guess the meaning of the poem, weshould say it all lay in the compass of these lines of Tennyson–the saddest andprofoundest that ever were written:
Break, break, break,
On thy cold gray stones, O sea!
And I would that my tongue could utter
The thoughts that arise in me! 1
An aspiration of mute words without relevancy, without absolutesignification, and full of «divine despair 2 .»
We think it has been an error in Whitman to discard forms andlaws, for without them the poet diffuses. He may hurry forward with impulses,but he is spent before he reaches the reader’s heart through his bewilderedunderstanding. Steam subject, is a mighty force; steam free, is an impalpablevapor, only capable of delicate hues and beauty with the sun upon it. But O,poet! there is not a sun in every sky.
The theme of love
Themes of sex and sexuality have dominated Leaves of Grassfrom the very beginning and have shaped the course of the book’s reception. Thefirst edition in 1855 contained what were to be called «Song of Myself,» «TheSleepers,» and «I Sing the Body Electric,» which are «about» sexuality (thoughof course not exclusively) throughout. From the very beginning, Whitman wovetogether themes of «manly love» and «sexual love,» with great emphasis onintensely passionate attraction and interaction, as well as bodily contact(touch, embrace) in both. Simultaneously in sounding these themes, he equatedthe body with the soul, and defined sexual experience as essentially spiritualexperience. He very early adopted two phrenological terms to discriminatebetween the two relationships: «amativeness» for man-woman love «adhesiveness» for«manly love.» Although Whitman did not in the 1855 Preface call directattention to this element in his work, in one of his anonymous reviews of hisbook («Walt Whitman and His Poems,» 1855) he wrote of himself and the 1855 Leaves:«The body, he teaches, is beautiful. Sex is also beautiful…. Sex will not beput aside; it is a great ordination of the universe. He works the muscle of themale and the teeming fibre of the female throughout his writings, as wholesomerealities, impure only by deliberate intention and effort» (Poetry andProse 535).
Whitman added other sex poems to his book in 1856, including «Poemof Procreation» (now «A Woman Waits for Me») and «Bunch Poem» («SpontaneousMe»). At the end of the volume he included, without permission, Emerson’sletter praising the 1855 Leaves (its «great power,» and «free andbrave thought»), and alongside it he published his own letter in reply. He mayhave been misled by the nature of Emerson’s praise to emphasize the centralityof his themes of adhesiveness and amativeness: «As to manly friendship,everywhere observed in The States, there is not the first breath of it to beobserved in print. I say the body of a man or woman, the main matter, is so farquite unexpressed in poems; but the body is to be expressed, and sex is» (Poetryand Prose 529).
It was not until the 1860 edition of Leaves that Whitmangathered the poems celebrating sexuality into the cluster «Enfans d’Adam»(«Children of Adam») and the poems celebrating «manly love» into «Calamus.» WhenWhitman came to Boston to see his book through the press there, Emerson triedto persuade him to withdraw the sex poems, but Whitman refused. He probablyunderstood that if he really desexed Leaves it would be likeself-castration. Although Emerson never publicly withdrew his endorsement ofWhitman, he passed up opportunities to repeat it. Emerson’s silence togetherwith Whitman’s loss of his job at the Interior Department in 1865, charged withwriting «indecent poems,» were early warning signs that he and his Leaveswere embarked on a difficult road ahead.
In subsequent editions of Leaves, Whitman revised andshifted his poems of amativeness and adhesiveness, but by and large hisdominant themes became not the body but the soul, not youth but old age–anddeath. His experience in the Civil War hospitals seems to have provided aturning point for Whitman’s focus. He even claimed, in «A Backward Glance O’erTravel’d Roads» (1888), that the war revealed to him, «as by flashes oflightning,» the «final reasons-for-being» of his «passionate song» (Poetryand Prose 516). In his Civil War poems, Drum-Taps (1865, laterincluded in the 1867 Leaves), the «Calamus» theme runs throughout – «croppingout» as Whitman himself said of it in his 1876 Preface to Two Rivulets(Prose Works 2:471). Whitman critics have not failed to notice in «Drum-Taps»the poet’s theme of adhesiveness–the joy in the physical transmuted by the warinto pain and anguish–in such poems as «The Wound-Dresser,» «Vigil Strange IKept on the Field One Night,» and «A March in the Ranks Hard-Prest, and theRoad Unknown.»
In 1868 W.M. Rossetti published a British edition ofWhitman’s poetry, Poems by Walt Whitman. In effect, this was anexpurgated Leaves, with «Song of Myself,» «Children of Adam,» and «Calamus»omitted, except for a few poems of the «Calamus» cluster placed in a sectionentitled «Walt Whitman.» In spite of Rossetti’s gutting of the book, itestablished Whitman’s reputation in England and attracted many ardent admirers.Some, when they became familiar with the poems purged by Rossetti, became evenmore ardent, while others turned hostile. The former included Anne Gilchrist,who fell in love with Whitman and wrote an article «An Englishwoman’s Estimateof Walt Whitman» (Boston 1870), especially praising Whitman’s sex poems.Algernon Swinburne wrote a poem in praise of Walt Whitman in Song Before Sunrise(1871), but loudly reversed himself in his 1887 essay, «Whitmania,» afterencountering all of Leaves. John Addington Symonds read Whitman’spoems as a young man, and, bowled over, found his way to the whole of «Calamus.»He would later strike up a correspondence with Whitman in Camden, pressing himon the real meaning of his «Calamus» poems, leading Whitman ultimately to replyin a notorious letter in 1890 claiming to have had six illegitimate childrenduring his «jolly» «times south» (Poetry and Prose 958).
Although in the fifth edition (1871–1872) of Leaves,Whitman seemed temporarily to lose his way in shaping Leaves tocontain his new work («Passage to India» and related poems), some ten yearslater, in the sixth edition (1881–1882), he adopted his earlier practice ofintegrating the poems of a lifetime into a single structure. Before the bookcould be distributed by its publisher in Boston, however, it was found to beimmoral by the Society for the Suppression of Vice; because Whitman refused to removethe offensive parts, the book was withdrawn and published in Philadelphia. TheBoston censors found offensive not only the whole of «A Woman Waits for Me,»«The Dalliance of the Eagles,» and «To a Common Prostitute,» but also passagesvital to the life of a number of Whitman’s greatest works, including «Song ofMyself.» But the «Calamus» cluster with its songs of «manly love» was leftintact!
In «A Backward Glance,» Whitman made his final assessment of thesex poems that had given him so many problems. Writing a bit after the mostrecent attempt to censor his book, whitman affirms boldly–» Leaves of Grassis avowedly the song of Sex and Amativeness, and even Animality…. Of thisfeature… I shall only say the espousing principle of those lines so gives breathof life to my whole scheme that the bulk of the pieces might as well have beenleft unwritten were those lines omitted» (Poetry and Prose 518). Asimilar claim might have been made for the «Calamus» poems of adhesiveness;that no such claim was made was attributable, surely, to the fact that they hadnever inspired public controversy as had the sex poems.
The theme of death.
Whitman deals with death as a fact of life. Death in life is a fact,but life in death is a truth for Whitman; he is thus a poet of matter and ofspirit.
Whitman’s view on death is reflective of his belief inTranscendentalism. In «Song of Myself», Whitman uses the scientific principleof Thermodynamics to assert that there is life after death, because energycannot be destroyed; only transformed. In stanza six, he writes «And what doyou think has become of the women and children? / they are alive and wellsomewhere, / The smallest sprouts shows there is really no death». Deathcontends that life remains long after death, and to find him now all one mustdo is look «under your boot-soles».
Lincoln’s death influenced Whitman’s works a lot too.
The death of Abraham Lincoln had a profound impact on Walt Whitmanand his writing. It is the subject of one of his most highly regarded andcritically examined pieces, «When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed» (1865–1866)and one of his best-known poems, «O Captain! My Captain!» (1865–1866). Whitmanalso delivered (sporadically) annual public lectures commemorating Lincoln’sdeath beginning in April 1879. Although the two never met, Whitman and Lincoln,both deeply committed to the Union, remain intertwined in Whitman’s writing andin American mythology.
Whitman intensely admired Lincoln from the late 1850s onward,remarking at one point, «After my dear, dear mother, I guess Lincoln getsalmost nearer me than anybody else» (Traubel 38). On the Friday of 14 April1865, when John Wilkes Booth shot Lincoln at Ford’s Theater in Washington,D.C., Whitman was in New York and read about the assassination in the dailynewspapers and extras.
His first poem responding to Lincoln’s death came only a couple ofdays later when he added to Drum-Taps (1865), already in press, ashort piece titled «Hushed Be the Camps To-day» (1865). Although it endssolemnly with «the heavy hearts of soldiers,» this public commemoration ofLincoln’s funeral–spoken to the poet by and for Union soldiers–asks us to «celebrate»his death as it remembers «the love we bore him.» «Hushed Be the Camps To-day» isnot one of Whitman’s best-known poems, but it is significant not merely becauseit was his first poetic word on Lincoln’s death, but also because itexemplifies the primary features that generally characterize Whitman’s poetictreatment of Lincoln’s death: as in «Lilacs,» the poem mourns for the dead butcelebrates death; it identifies Lincoln’s death with the coming of peace; andit remembers Lincoln not because he was a great leader or conqueror but becausehe was well-loved. The poem also associates Lincoln with the war’s ordinarysoldiers, an association that prefigures «Lilacs» and its treatment ofLincoln’s death as a metonymy for all the war dead.
«Hushed Be the Camps To-day» and the other Lincoln poems («Lilacs,»«O Captain!,» and «This Dust Was Once the Man» [1871]) never mention Lincoln byname. As some critics have noted, Whitman had no need in the postbellum era torefer directly to Lincoln because his readers would easily recognize thesepoems as elegies for President Lincoln. Later, after the immediacy of Lincoln’sdeath had faded into historical memory, Whitman identified the subject of thesepoems by grouping the four of them together, first in a cluster titled «PresidentLincoln’s Burial Hymn» in an annex to Passage to India (1871) andlater in the «Memories of President Lincoln» cluster in the 1881 edition of Leavesof Grass. Other critics believe that the lack of direct reference toLincoln indicates the poet’s attempt to address universal themes.
Whitman does, of course, use Lincoln’s death to talk aboutsubjects beyond the events at Ford’s Theater, including the subject of deathitself. In «Lilacs,» Whitman reconciles himself and the nation to Lincoln’sdeath and death in general by fashioning the historical fact of theassassination and burial into a spiritual embrace of death in which deathbecomes both a personal and a national regeneration and cleansing. Thetreatment of Lincoln’s death in «Lilacs» is famous for its symbolism and itsformal, musical qualities. Indeed the poem relentlessly transforms itshistorical content into symbols. Lincoln as a person disappears only toreappear as a «western fallen star» and as the evoked metonymic associations ofthe poems other symbols and images–coffin, lilacs, cloud, and the hermitthrush’s song.
Whitman’s handling of Lincoln’s death in the lecturesdiametrically reverses the musical, ethereal, often abstract, heavilysymbolized style of «Lilacs.» In his lecture on the» death of Abraham Lincoln» (1879),Whitman depicts the scene of the murder with dramatic immediacy, as if he werean eyewitness. The narration is suspenseful, detailed, and focuses on specifics(sometimes minutiae). Although Whitman was not an eyewitness, his closecompanion, Peter Doyle, was at Ford’s Theater, and Whitman made impressive useof Doyle’s story in his imaginative retelling. In the lecture, the president’smurder is not a bizarre denouement to an inevitable war but rather theculmination of and solution to all the historic, national conflicts of theCivil War era. Lincoln’s death becomes a metaphor for the bloody war itself andthe climax of a lofty tragic drama that redeems the Union. Whitman’s lectureturns Lincoln’s assassination into the ceremonial sacrifice that gives new lifeto the nation.
Whitman’s Lincoln possessed an undeniably heroic stature. Whitmancalled him «the grandest figure yet, on all the crowded canvas of theNineteenth Century» (Prose Works 2:604). Still, the poet did notmerely apotheosize the dead president; he also transformed Lincoln and hisdeath into a symbolic referent for thoughts on the war, comradeship, democracy,union, and death. Perhaps best exemplified by the «Lilacs» elegy, Lincoln’sdeath became the event around which Whitman twined so sadly and beautifully hisunderstanding of death’s affiliation with love.
The theme of war
If to begin discussion of the war poems, we should see how theexperience of fratricidal war might affect Whitman as the poet of nationalunion. This will lead to reflections on the tragedy of the Civil War. The poemsof Drum-Taps – which proceed from militant exultation, to the actualexperience of war, to demobilization and reconciliation–might be read as anattempt to place the butchery of the war within a poetic and ultimatelyregenerative design. Ask the students to compare Whitman’s war poems with hisearlier poems. They are at once more formally controlled and more realistic–stylisticchanges that are linked with the war context. «A March in the Ranks Hard-Prest,and the Road Unknown» and «The Artilleryman’s Vision» are proto-modern poems inwhich the individual appears as an actor in a drama of history he no longerunderstands nor controls. Whitman’s ambivalence about black emancipation isevident in «Ethiopia Saluting the Colors.» «Vigil Strange I Kept on the FieldOne Night» and «As I Lay with My Head in Your Lap Camerado» are particularlyeffective in suggesting the ways the wartime context of male bonding andcomradeship gave Whitman a legitimate language and social frame within which toexpress his love for men.
Transcendentalism
Transcendentalism, which originated with German philosophers,became a powerful movement in New England between 1815 and 1836. Emerson’s Nature(1836) was a manifesto of American transcendental thought. It implied that thetrue reality is the spirit and that it lies beyond the reach or realm of thesenses. The area of sensory perceptions must be transcended to reach thespiritual reality. American transcendentalism accepted the findings ofcontemporary science as materialistic counterparts of spiritual achievement.Whitman’s «Passage to India» demonstrates this approach. The romanticist inWhitman is combined with the transcendentalist in him. His quest fortranscendental truths is highly individualistic and therefore his thought, likeEmerson’s, is often unsystematic and prophetic.
Personalism
Whitman used the term «personalism» to indicate the fusion of theindividual with the community in an ideal democracy. He believed that every manat the time of his birth receives an identity, and this identity is his «soul.»The soul, finding its abode in man, is individualized, and man begins todevelop his personality. The main idea of personalism is that the person is thebe-all of all things; it is the source of consciousness and the senses. One isbecause God is; therefore, man and God are one–one personality. Man’spersonality craves immortality because it desires to follow the personality ofGod. This idea is in accord with Whitman’s notion of the self. Man should firstbecome himself, which is also the way of coming closer to God. Man shouldcomprehend the divine soul within him and realize his identity and the truerelationship between himself and God. This is the doctrine of personalism.
Conclusion
Walt Whitman’s achievement as a poet and prophet is trulymonumental. He exercised a deep influence on his immediate successors inAmerican letters, and even on modern poets, although he himself was a highlyindividualistic poet. As a symbolist, his influence was felt in Europe, wherehe was considered the greatest poet America had yet produced. His high styleand elevated expression found echoes in Emily Dickinson, Hart Crane, MarianneMoore, and others. Whitman as a stylist is the culmination of the sublimetradition in America, and even Allen Ginsberg, so different from Whitman in somany respects, follows the Whitman tradition of using invocative language.Whitman, though a man of his age, an essentially nineteenth-century poet,exercised a profound influence on twentieth-century poets and modern poetry inthe use of language, in the processes of symbol and image-making, in exercisinggreat freedom in meter and form, and in cultivating the individualistic mode.In many ways Whitman is modern because he is prophetic; he is a poet not onlyof America but of the whole of mankind. He has achieved the Olympian statureand the rare distinction of a world poet.
In our work we analyzed features of Walt Whitman’s style. We triedto study his literary techniques and also showed philosophical basics of hisworks.
We think that we have done all our tasks rather well. We achieveda deep analyze of some of his works and viewed the poetical techniques of WaltWhitman and the uniqueness of his style.
List of Literature
1. Allen, Gay W. A Reader’sGuide to Walt Whitman 1970.
2. Kinnell, Galway.«Introduction.» The Essential Whitman New York: The Ecco Press, 1987. 3–12.
3. Whitman, Walt. Leaves ofGrass. USA 1961