Comments on: Whitman and Hughes

By: kevinv

kevinv — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 22:58:06 +0000

Excellent connection between the two men. Whitman hit the nail on the head, knowing what would become of American literature. He lead the revolution.

By: s-words

s-words — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 21:52:44 +0000

Incredibly enough, I’m working on a research paper for Tweedy’s African American literature course that addresses this exact question of a polycultural narrative voice’s “authenticity,” with specific reference to Zora Neale Hurston’s “Their Eyes Were Watching God.” Even more incredibly, I was already thinking of blogging on this subject because one of Hurston’s autobiographical writings, “How It Feels To Be Colored Me,” engages this subject in language that quite explicitly mirrors Whitman’s.

She writes that “At certain times I have no race, I am me… The cosmic Zora emerges. I belong to no race nor time. I am the eternal feminine with its string of beads. I have no separate feeling about being an American citizen and colored. I am merely a fragment of the Great Soul that surges within the boundaries. My country, right or wrong.”

I completely agree that, even if the “kozmic Walt” may not have been able to foresee the particular “amalgamation” of black and white cultures, he nevertheless conceptually prefigured the “cosmic Zora’s” belief in the unity of, and not only the tension between, disparate cultural elements.

By: sarahlawless

sarahlawless — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 19:58:16 +0000

Very interesting. I hadn’t made that leap from Whitman’s ‘new writings for a new land’ to the actual new writings that we have in America. I like the idea that while the words, or at an even smaller level, the letters, are the same, they are used to tell completely new stories. While voices like those in African American lit, women’s lit, and others are new, I also thought of the issue in post-colonial works involving language. If a writer is composing a work in a culture that was subjected to European colonialism, what language does he or she write it in? Many post-colonial writers will use the language of their former oppressors. Does this show the continuing oppression of the writer, in that his or her own language is gone, or does it challenge and change the language of the oppressor in new ways? While I don’t know that Whitman would have anticipated this debate (with his habit of marginalizing and stereotyping various groups), it encourages me to see that this is a logical application of his works, and ethical as well. Even if Whitman would not have made the leap from his words to African American fiction, we can make it for him.

By: emilym

emilym — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 19:19:12 +0000

I like the connections you made.