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Lecture 24

1. Identify several ways in which Leaves of Grass is quintessentially American.

Emerson insists that this new poet will at last create an American idiom, an actual language that is homespun yet powerful and fresh.

Emerson calls for a poet to celebrate American grandeur, to realize that everyday American life is, in fact, grand. Leaves of Grass arrived as a book without an author, a thin collection of poems without label or tag.

Emerson, with his uncanny sense of American intellectual "weather," saw these poems for what they were and wrote Whitman a now-famous letter of congratulations.

2. Explain how Whitman incorporates the idea of democracy into his poetry.

Whitman effectively changes the language—American, not English, is what he delivers.

Whitman's love for Indian names suggests a conscious effort to create an indigenous code.

Whitman's fondness for slang and common speech, which had always been considered inappropriate in polite verse, explodes in these raucous poems.

Whitman's famous "lists" are also new, and they may be thought of as the democratic form par excellence. Many asked, "Is this poetry?"

America is to be understood as a great poem, as a new and capacious subject for writing.

We must struggle to fashion new gods, says Whitman; the old gods will not do.

Rejecting the European legacy is easier to claim than to achieve, and it is instructive to watch Whitman's struggles here.

Whitman's many excesses are among the strangest performances in 19th-century literature

3. Summarize D.H. Lawrence's criticism—and praise—of Whitman.

The poetry of democracy is what Whitman aimed for; we must realize the crucial elitism of past poetry, an art form intimately related to aristocratic figures of politics, religion, or legend.

Whitman's programmatic inclusiveness meant that there was a place for everyone in his work. People who had never before appeared in poetry began to arrive on the scene.

Whitman's goal consisted of presenting American voices never before heard, and we need to measure the political as well as the literary dimensions of such an aim.

Whitman is justly famous for his capacity to merge with his subject, to "become" the figures whom he evokes. This is social history of a completely new variety.

D.H. Lawrence offered a biting and hilarious criticism of Whitman's "empathy" as a concealed form of egoism.

Lecture 25

  1. Summarize Whitman's depiction of the human body and understand how this contrasted with contemporary norms.

Whitman in the flesh comes to us in countless poetic evocations that are filled with humor and wit and that give us a record of the man.

Whitman often presents himself as solid as a house, a physical entity that is exceptionally grounded.

The core of Whitman's vision seems to be the human body first, last, and always.

Whitman's project tapping the power of the body seems sensationalist and indulgent, but it is also philosophical.

In Leaves of Grass, the body is made equal to the soul. This is a startling proposition.

Whitman emerges as a shocking new voice, finding ways to "say" the body that were (and remain) extraordinarily vivid.

Whitman ultimately claims no less than the divinity of the body, and in this formulation we can see the awesome "democracy" of his poetic vision.

Whitman invented a dazzling physical inventory of

Whitman invented a dazzling physical inventory of terms and images to represent the body and its ecstatic life.

In some memorable passages, Whitman depicts the body as landscape, as a place that interacts with natural forces. Whitman's corporeal language of the elements sounds a note that is unique in 19th-century poetry, radically different from the propriety of Wordsworth and the English Romantics.

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