Ben Brishcar

Digital Whitman

Scanlon/Earnheart/Groom

10/9/09

A Kosmos of Voices

            When I was given the option of a nonstandard project for the final for this class, my brain started boggling with options.  Immediately the traditional seminar paper was out the window and my head started going towards the many other options.  Now like many papers and possibly more projects, this one went through many different variations before incarnation in the attached link.

            It started with the far to quixotic undertaking of doing a video in which different people would read one to two words of a section of “Song of Myself” and then splice all the video together into one epic montage.  This was, needless to say, to big of a task and never got off the ground.  The roots where there though for this project.  The next version came with my looking over of my blog posts for most of the semester and realizing that so much of my focus has been on Whitman’s narrative voice that to do a project and leave this issue of voice out of it, would be doing myself a disservice.

            The question arising out of this then, was where to go with Whitman’s voice.  The answer then, came from some of my studies in performance.  Things always sound different when they are read out loud.  Also, with this being a project that focused highly on the idea of ‘voice’ it seemed to call for some sort of audio enhancement.  Now, I had a vague idea of what I wanted to do with the audio, but to many ideas of what to do with the video.  For a while I was throwing around the idea of taping the readers and trying to get their videos to sink up, in much the same way as my first conception of the project.  The fear I had with this, though, was that there would be to much chaos from back and forth cuts, that I would lose the meaning of the voice in all the images.  From there it went to the idea of some sort of slide show, either of pictures of Whitman or of the text of the poem.  Where both of these ideas got dropped was that I really wanted this to be an audio experience and did not want people distracted by the images.

            I finally settled on one iconic image of Whitman to run throughout the entire piece.  The reason I left any visual at all was because I wanted this piece to go up through YouTube and have it accessible to more than just our blog.  My feeling on the spirit of this class and the entire idea of a nontraditional project is that it should transcend the boundaries of the semester and stay up as a resource for others to use.  In other words, I was not just building something for a grade, I was building something people will hopefully want to use in the future.

            As far as the video itself functions, it was designed as an experimental look at voice.  The idea was to combine a group of readers, each one embodying a different narrative voice found within Whitman’s poetry.  These seven different voices were then going to bounce off each other to highlight similarities and differences within one section of poem.  The readings were kept to two specific sequential sections of “Song of Myself”, namely sections 44 and 45; by using two sections instead of picking and choosing between multiple sections of Whitman, two things where accomplished.  First, it eliminates much of the debate along the lines of ‘of course I found all these voices, I went out and dug through his full body of work,’ and second and more important of the two, it kept all of these separate voices still within one section of Whitman.  I was already splitting up his voice, but by giving all the readings within one section, I was keeping it all congealed into one Whitman.

            As far as cast list goes for this project, the seven voices I presented were: the Prophetic Whitman, voiced by Professor Gray Richards; Whitman the Good Grey Poet, voiced by Professor Claudia Emerson; the Womanly Whitman, voiced by Professor Mara Scanlon; the Natural Whitman, voiced by Dean Cedric Rucker; Whitman as Witness, voiced by Professor Ana Chichester; the Nurse Whitman, voiced by Taylor Williams, and the Sexual Whitman, voiced by Katie O’Connor.

            To help better put this project into focus, here is how I defined each voice when looking through the poem.  The Prophetic Whitman was the voice that was talking whenever Whitman is casting things beyond himself and reaching for things far beyond the grasp of what normal people could know, this is as close to a metaphysical Whitman as is seen in these sections of “Song of Myself”.  Whitman, the Good Grey Poet, is the type of voice one would expect Whitman to pick up while sitting in a rocking chair and talking to someone; this is the more introspective Whitman, where as the prophet reaches out, the Good Grey Poet reaches in.  The Nurse Whitman is the Whitman that reaches out to his readers or his audience.  The title comes from the image of Whitman sitting next to the men he was nursing during and after the Civil War, hearing their stories and talking directly to them.  The Womanly Whitman is the Whitman in touch with the more motherly feminine side of himself.  The Natural Whitman is the Whitman of the dirt and the soil, the one who goes back to the earth for his imagery.   Walt Whitman as Witness is the Whitman that steps back a bit and looks at what is going on; this voice does not have the all encompassing aspects of the Prophet Whitman, as it is not a voice of announcement, but rather a voice of being separate and reflective.  The Sexual Whitman really needs no explaining, in that if one is to deny the inherent thrusting force of intimacy in Whitman’s poetry, then one is doing a terrible misreading.

            As far as what I’ve discovered from this project is honestly difficult to say.  This experiment was not a failure, as I feel that I have learned much about Whitman’s voice, and I feel that those that watch my video can take away much about Whitman’s voice.  However, upon repeated listening to the audio file, I find that by pulling his voice apart, although I can hear more of the distinct voices differently, I also hear the singular multifaceted voice of Whitman that much more.  It seems counter intuitive but the farther apart the pieces where, the more it sounded like one voice.  One of the first questions I asked myself when I approached what was to become the final version of the project, was would looking at the voices in the piece separately lead to a better understanding of the contradictions and comparisons within the one overarching voice, or would it just be a matter of staring at the Kosmos, so to speak.  I think in this case, what I’ve found is that Whitman’s voice exists because of the contradictions there in and the separate pieces contribute to one larger organism that would not exist without them.

Works Cited

Black, Stephen A. “Radical Utterances from the Soul’s Abysms: Toward a new Sense of Whitman.” PMLQ 88.1 (1973): 100-11. JSTOR. Web. 5 Dec. 2009.

Hutchinson, George B. “Whitman’s Confidence Game: The “Good Gray Poet” and the Civil War.” South Central Review 7 (1990): 20-35. JSTOR. Web. 5 Dec. 2009.

Jay, Gregory. “Catching up with Whitman: A Review Essay.” South Atlantic Review 57.1 (1992): 89-102. JSTOR. Web. 5 Dec. 2009.

Killingsworth, Myrth J. “Whitman and Motherhood: A Historical View.” American Literature 54.1 (1982): 28-43. JSTOR. Web. 5 Dec. 2009.

Stovall, Floyd. “Main Drifts in Whitman’s Poetry.” American Literature 4.1 (1932): 3-21. JSTOR. Web. 5 Dec. 2009

Abstract: Throughout the semester, I used the FlipCams to film the sun rising over the Potomac, walking to and from school, to work, on my way back from brother’s house in Westmoreland, just life. Some of the footage is from my own camera that does small, short videos. There are three pictures I used from google images and one from Facebook; the Korean conflict memorial (from Facebook), a photo of a soldier in Vietnam, a photo of a Middle-eastern man holding an automatic gun, the infamous photo of the little girl running who had napalm on her back, and picture of Whitman’s frontispiece. I used a few videos from Youtube which I converted using vixy.net. The videos include the mob scene (which is spliced into three different spots of the cinepoem), the bomb blowing up at 4:43, the homeless person digging for food at 4:45, footage of Bloody Sunday (London) at 4:49, the three children laughing at 4:53, footage of Devil’s Marbleyard in the Blue Ridge Parkway (which I have been there, but I did not shoot it) at 4:57. I selected to use one band, The Verve, and already had the music, so I just took it from my iTunes library and added it into my iMovie production. The song at  the beginning of the cinepoem is Lucky Man and the song ending the poem is Bittersweet Symphony.

Works Cited

“37 Years Later, Girl in Vietnam War Photo Spreads Hope.” Web. 10 Dec 2009. <boards.library.trutv.com/ showthread.php?t=294622>.

“children laughing.” Youtube. Web. 10 Dec 2009. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y4h8f38IaZU>.

“Bloody Sunday, 30.1.1972.” Youtube. Web. 10 Dec 2009. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuBaAzH7Kkw&feature=related>.

“Fred Phelps supporters attacked by mob.” Youtube. Web. 10 Dec 2009. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BrFVjg79_iM>.

“view from Devils Marbleyard in the early morning.” Youtube. Web. 10 Dec 2009. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z5sG9pOju0M>.

Whitman, Commercialism, and the Digital Age;

What does this mean for Whitman?

Today’s culture is centered on technology; literature and education are fighting to stay current. Gone are the days when families watched the sunset or sat on the porch after dinner to watch nature happen as their night’s entertainment. Also, gone is the age in which college classes are almost strictly taught by stuffy professors in front of simple blackboards, and with students writing not typing. Our seminar on Walt Whitman is a testament to the new age of education and that it is effective. Therefore, college has maintained its purpose and is still gradually changing for the future of collegiate education. Literature has amazingly survived as well, despite the odds of television, the internet, and radio; wait, not only has literature survived, it has evolved. The vessel of literature may have changed, the new technology has created another layer to analyze, but the message and meaning is still current and powerful.

The media world and literature have merged, most noticeably, in a commercial sense. Combining poetry to advertising, such as Langston Hughes’ poem A Dream Deferred used in a 2008 Nike advertising campaign, or creating movies based on renowned novels, like Pride and Prejudice in 2005, provide a transition of literature to the twenty-first century.

Walt Whitman is recognized as the culmination of patriotism, the voice of America and its culture. Through the different versions of Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman shed his skins and it is easy to see him evolve through with the augmentations he made in each edition of Leaves of Grass. However, when he died in 1892, it would seem that the changes in tone and voice died with him. Walt was dead, and Leaves of Grass would carry on, but it could not vary in tone anymore. However, this proves to be a shortsighted claim when the medium of Whitman is changing from wood pulp to computer chips, when the words on the paper turn into commercials seen by pixels through the computer chips. The changing of the medium has brought criticism and mixed emotions about the smooth (or failed) translation of Whitman’s message that is being reintroduced to a more 21^st century-friendly medium. This evolution runs the risk of the works loosing pieces of their integrity, meaning, and being dehumanized.

In the summer of 2009, the denim company, Levi’s, took on an advertising campaign that features Whitman’s poems America and Pioneers! O Pioneers! “Whitman is an involuntary spokes-celebrity here” and the lack of control he has over peoples perception of his works (for instance, having them paired with video clips he did not choose) creates palpable tension. (Stevenson) The counterargument is the idea of simply getting Whitman to the masses, the route or direction does not matter. However, the most pertinent question is “who is using who”? Is Levi’s using Walt Whitman or is Walt Whitman using Levi’s?

When answering the first part of the question, Levi’s is using Walt Whitman, especially in the commercial that uses a supposed recording of Walt Whitman reading four lines from America. Yet, the message of the commercial is one that’s distinctly anti-capitalism. Ironically, capitalism rests on advertising and commercialism to keep the capitalist-cycle going round. From the first 15 seconds to 18 seconds of the commercial, it portrays a CEO look-alike being chauffeured in a slick town car, then he is behind a dark desk in front of a large, one-paned window that shows a cityscape with skyscraper-type architecture. Both times we see the CEO, he seems disgruntled and worried; this dark play on America’s uncomfortable state is troubling. With the market down and the war on terrorism a black hole, Whitman pops through the speakers and reminds us that there is a light at the end of the tunnel; there is beauty in us despite our plight. Thus, at the end of the commercial, the viewer is left with the sounds and sights of the ad. After 58 seconds of provocative, beautiful, and patriotic scenes, the last two seconds show a red Levi’s emblem while a definite gunshot is heard after fireworks are shown booming and lighting the screen.

When the viewer thinks back to the commercial, after almost a minute of Whitman’s reading accompanied with beautiful cinematography, Levi’s motive is to get the viewer to feel inspired enough to buy their specific brand of jeans (again, that capitalist pull, quite anti-Whitman). The demographic that Levi’s caters to are ages 18-34, most people beyond or younger than this may not feel the pull which the commercialized cinepoem seeks to enforce. The scenes of the commercial show people of all ages, from all walks of life, running, jumping, laughing, and watching other people; it is powerful in showing human nature and the unpredictable way of life. In Levi’s print campaign, they are using a tagline “specific to the economy, including ‘Will work for better times’.” (Clifford B1) Obviously, if the audience does feel the pull, then the capitalist game comes full circle and the people feel good because if they are buying something for “better times”, then the better times will be here soon. Right? The completion of that cycle, no matter how “American” capitalism seems, is not the America that Whitman was advocating or would be proud of.

Granted, Whitman’s own feelings towards commercialism are scattered and unclear. Whitman “himself had permanently mixed feelings on the subject of sales” and whether he should censor himself or make more “socially appropriate” moves in his own commercialism. (Earnhart 192) The lack of direction is unsettling. Whitman was very aware and keen of the business aspect of the written word; after all, he wrote his own raving reviews to help sell Leaves of Grass. However, because the advertising world has changed so drastically since Whitman’s time, it is hard to determine if any action using his works is justified. The answer to that question lies in the context of what company would use Whitman and to what means.

Having the Whitman seminar in a digital, evolving capacity is parallel to the way Levi’s, Starbucks, and other companies have digitalized and reintroduced Whitman. In the classroom, and classroom blog spanning four different college campuses, it combines traditional, meaningful verbal discourse and analysis with a new digitalized way of learning. This would be comparable to watching a cinepoem of a selected reading from Leaves of Grass instead a traditional reading and analysis of the same reading featured in the cinepoem. The traditional reading can provide a more personal experience and relationship with Whitman. The traditional classroom experience is somewhat stagnant, rarely do field trips happen outside of high school, but part of the multi-sensory class experience includes travel, correspondence with other students studying the same concept. The way the classroom experience leaves you with multiple understandings and levels of analysis, a cinepoem can alter, enhance, and even delude your perception of the poem. If a poem is being used only in the setting of a classroom to enhance the experience of the students, it still alters the original perception the student had of the poem. Thus, even if there is no commercial motivation in creating a cinepoem, the only original perception of a work of literature can be from the readers actively reading it for themselves. Anything other than that is tainting the original meaning of the work for the reader; which is never the intent of the author; especially when after their death, their work is used in something they never intended. Even in an innocent cinepoem, a reader’s perception of what Whitman was trying to convey could be drastically different from what they viewed in the cinepoem.

In conclusion, the digital classroom is valuable for creating a multi-sensory experience and provides layers for the students to delve into. On the other hand, a cinepoem reflects too much of what the director interprets and not the untainted message the poet was trying to convey in their work. If Whitman had been able to create his own cinepoems, or another type of multi-sensory experience, it is hard to believe that there would be a better way to interpret his poems other than his original text. Calamus and Drum-taps are both very personal works that almost feel invasive when imagining the images he describes and uses. Oddly enough, the invasive feeling means Whitman succeeded; how readers of his works come to care for him, his first person point-of-view creates a relationship with the reader that makes he or she feel like they could have been Whitman. All the feelings and emotions from the text of Leaves of Grass, without the help of a cinepoem or technology, still creates a plethora of emotion in the reader. Cinepoems are creating another layer for literature, but it is not yet obvious how long that will last. It is safe to say that the test of a truly good poem is when it can stand on its own for 150 years. Lucky for Whitman, it’s been almost 160 years since 1855’s fresh Leaves of Grass.

Works Cited

Clifford, Stephanie. “In New Campaigns, Spots Take On a Rosier Hue .” New York Times 12 Oct 2009, Tues: B1. Print.

Earnhart, Brady. “The Good Gray Poet and the Quaker Oats Man: Speaker as Spokescharacter in Leaves of Grass.” Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 24. (2007): 179-200. Web. 8 Dec 2009. <http://www.whitmanarchive.org/criticism/wwqr/pdf/anc.00305.pdf>.

Stevenson, Seth. “Walt Whitman Thinks You Need New Jeans.” Slate (2009): n. pag. Web. 8 Dec 2009. <http://www.slate.com/id/2233597/>.

Wignot, Jamila, Prod. Walt Whitman. Dir. Mark Zwonitzer.” Perf. Chris, Cooper. PBS.org: 2008, Web. 8 Dec 2009. <http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/whitman/program/>.

Immediately searching for Whitman, of course, I came to this passage from an 1888 letter Van Gogh wrote to this sister:

Have you read Whitman’s American poems yet? Theo should have them, and I really urge you to read them, first because they’re really beautiful, and also, English people are talking about them a lot at the moment. He sees in the future, and even in the present, a world of health, of generous, frank carnal love — of friendship — of work, with the great starry firmament, something, in short, that one could only call God and eternity, put back in place above this world. They make you smile at first, they’re so candid, and then they make you think, for the same reason. The prayer of Christopher Columbus is very beautiful.

For an article exploring connections between the two artists, see “WHITMAN AND VAN GOGH: STARRY NIGHTS AND OTHER SIMILARITIES.”

So Im sitting in my living room with my mom and sister, watching the History Channel special on the history of Thanksgiving…and who signed the proclamation establishing Thanksgiving? Old Abe.

I feel ya, Walt. Who wouldn’t have a crush on this man?

Here’s a link to the History Channel page.

Meghan has created a site for her project that briefly describes the idea behind her project, as well as includes a link to a quick Google form embedded within the Survey page on her site. So, be sure to check out her project, and please, please, please fll out the quick survey and redistribute this as far and wide as possible.

So here’s the map with all the UMW students’ videos as well as one from a student in NYC— also I highly recommend you check out the videos, particularly this one and this one.

A Quick How-To for the Whitman Video Locator

I told Martha Mara’s idea—which, in fact, Martha had given her—and she built the Whitman Video Locator that we are now using on the Digital Whitman blog. You can see both the embedded map and form for entering data here. And while I didn’t build it and don’t have all the details, it appears that Martha created a Google Spreadsheet with three columns: time stamp, address, and embed code, with an associated Google Form that allows users to add the address in one field and the embed code for where ever their video lives (YouTube, Blip.tv, Vimeo, etc.) in another.

After that, there is a gadget you need to add to the Spreadsheet titled “Map,” and from there you can select the appropriate range of data—which is the address and embed code columns, not the time stamp. Afer that, you click on the Gadget and publish out the map.  What’s nice is that the videos get added real time to the map when people add their address and embed code.

I hope Martha will fill in the holes if I missed anything here, because it is a truly slick use of Google Docs for quickly sharing work through a form and aggregating it instantly via a map, and all the crazier that videos of all kind embed within the map.  I love the whole thing.

One of the most prominent uses of Whitman is that the journal Poetry, of central importance in the history of Modernism, from its very first issue in 1912 included this on its back cover:

To have great poets there must be great

audiences, too.—Whitman.

HELP us to give the art of poetry an organ in America. Help us to give the poets a chance to be heard in their own place, to offer us their best and most serious work instead of page-end poems squeezed in between miscellaneous articles and stories.

If you love good poetry, subscribe.

If you believe that this art, like painting, sculpture, music and architecture, requires and deserves public recognition and support,subscribe.

If you believe with Whitman that “the topmost proof of a race is its own born poetry,” subscribe.

Throughout various issues, the question of whether or not great poetry needs great audiences is actively taken up by Harriet Monroe, Poetry‘s editor, and Ezra Pound, who disagree about it.  Eventually, by the start of Volume 2,  the back cover uses only that quote by Whitman and dropped the rest of the text above.

By October 1915 in Poetry, a comment written by Alice Corbin Henderson, engaging with a critical letter written about the publication of Carl Sandburg in the magazine (ouch!  take that, Mr. Hervey!), calls on Whitman as an elder statesman, a judge of all that is good in poetry:

“And, by the way, what, oh, what do you suppose Walt would have thought of Miss Monroe’s magazine if he had lived to see it?”  So asks Mr. John L. Hervey in a recent letter to The Dial. The question is delightfully suggestive.  We would love to know just what Walt Whitman would have thought of POETRY. It is not impossible that Mr. Hervey thinks that Walt would have thought of POETRY just what he, Mr. Hervey, thinks of the magazine. No doubt it is under this conviction that Mr. Hervey delivers this last, smashing blow! Still, there isn’t any way of being sure that Walt would have come out on Mr. Hervey’s side. Walt was very tolerant ; tolerant of poets—you remember his charming, “I like your tinkle, Tom,” to Thomas Bailey Aldrich ; also tolerant of editors—of Richard Watson Gilder, to whom Whitman’s November Boughs “did not appeal” for publication in The Century.

No, it’s a toss-up just what Walt would have thought about the magazine. Undoubtedly, he would have thought about it just as each of you, whoever you are, now reading this magazine, think about it.  For the great dead, curiously enough, always mold their opinions to suit their admirers.  . . .  And now Mr. Hervey wants Miss Monroe to say what Carl Sandburg’s poems will mean to the reader of fifty years hence, if she thinks any of them will live that long.  Mr. Hervey himself does not risk a direct opinion.  Fortunately there were people intelligent and courageous enough to risk an opinion on Whitman fifty years ago.  And these people were not the editors of magazines, who “knew what the people wanted,” and took no risks. If Whitman had waited for them, Mr. Hervey might have missed his Walt, and he would then have had to invoke some other shadowy figure . . . to pass mythical judgment upon the new poetry.  . . .  Would Walt applaud the risk taken by Miss Monroe in publishing it, or would he, too, like Mr. Hervey, be shocked by her temerity?

In volume 1.3 of Poetry (1912), this discussion of Whitman’s continental influence is given:

It is significant of American tardiness in the development of a national literary tradition that the name of Walt Whitman is today a greater influence with the young writers of the continent than with our own.  Not since France discovered Poe has literary Europe been so moved by anything American.  The suggestion has even been made that ‘Whitmanism’ is rapidly to supersede ‘Nietzscheism’ as the dominant factor in modern thought.  Léon Bazalgette translated Leaves of Grass into French in 1908.  A school of followers of the Whitman philosophy and style was an almost immediate consequence.  Such of the leading reviews as sympathize at all with the strong ‘young’ movement to break the shackles of classicism which have so long bound French prosody to the heroic couplet, the sonnet, and the alexandrine, are publishing not only articles on ‘Whitmanism’ as a movement, but numbers of poems in the new flexible chanting rhythms.

In the second volume of BLAST, a Vorticist journal edited by Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis, a column entitled AMERICAN ART contains the following:

American art, when it comes, will be Mongol, inhuman,optimistic, and very much on the precious side, as opposed to European pathos and solidity.

Wait Whitman Bland and easy braggart of a very cosmic self.  He lies, salmon-coloured and serene, whitling  a stick in a very eerie dawn, oceanic emotion handy at his elbow.

What?!  BLAST also describes a book as having “a soul like Walt Whitman, but none of the hirsute mistakes of that personage, and invention instead of sensibility” (!).

Whitman appears comparatively in book reviews, as in this one on D.H. Lawrence (authorial commentary: boo Lawrence): “‘Leaves of Grass ‘ rise to one’s mind as this fine catalogue is proclaimed; it seems to me now that Walt Whitman’s poetry is the only proper parallel to Mr. Lawrence’s ‘Sons and Lovers’” (The Blue Review 1.3).

Whitman is referenced repeatedly as a thinker moreso than poet in The New Age, a publication which describes itself as “an independent socialist review of politics, literature and art” or, eventually, “a weekly review of politics, literature and art”  (examples just below from issues in 1907):

The dominant idea of Whitman, for example, is undeniably friendship, or what he calls camaraderie ; and the fact that the early Socialists called each other Comrade without distinction of sex is Significant.

This example, from a book review of a collection by Edward Carpenter, is bound to make Brendon as mad as it made me:

The politicians may make Socialism ; but such a spirit as Carpenter’s is required to make Socialists. I remember making in a moment of dubious inspiration an epithet for Carpenter that appeared to me at the time essentially true. I called him Mrs. Whitman. Whitman certainly impressed one with the sense of masculinity ; and equally certainly there are qualities in Carpenter that strike one as womanly.

In February 1910, a writer laments the shaky condition of American letters:

Nothing mortified me so much as to be told by an Englishman that Europe absorbs our finest talent. I was angry. He then began to call the names–Whistler, Sargent, Shannon, Abbey, Henry James, Henry Harland, and others of whom I had never heard. He named so many I cannot recall them. He wound up by saying Walt Whitman would have been far happier had he lived in England where he would have had a public instead of a small coterie in his own country. Needless to say my anger gave place to shame and mortification.

In November 1915, The New Age reprints this part of a review of a translation of Whitman (as an example of an ass’s bray):

To him all is without exceptions just as in prostitution to him all men are “friends,” just as to the prostitute everyone is a guest.  Pah ! Pah ! What blindness! Whitman is blind and deaf, for he does not distinguish and, therefore, does not select, neither colours nor sounds nor persons. And the human soul?–he has no comprehension of it.

We too beg, of course, to disagree.

Where I read, and show the signs in the video, are on route 24 in Appomattox County, Virginia. Zipcode 24522.

Filmed in Marye’s Heights at the Fredericksburg Battlefield. My camera makes me sound like I have a lisp, I don’t know why.

*Title stolen  from inspired by Dr. Scanlon

My Womanly Whitman

You say you speak for the masses,

that your words bodies for our bright souls

but my body is crude at your hands, unskilled

in curves and perfection.

You say you contain multitudes, but you can barely envision me.

You did not know, but I have contained multitudes as well.

I was there in your masculine rough hewn hills, rolling

mountain lines, painted into red sand deserts and sculpted

into warm stucco walls, in damp depths of canyons

that descend beyond the limit of your thoughts.

And yet, I have seen you only in broken mausoleums,

carved in granite and steel, rotted in petrified logs

invaded by time.

You think you have built this America without

me, and invited me back to admire your craftsmanship

and sew its garments, but I am not a visitor,

or a servant, or a nurse who longs to be buried with her soldiers.

I am not born out of your cracked skull, made whole only

when you exalt the beauty of my sons.

You, who do not believe in the god stuff, should have known

that I came before you.

But you, slouching, cocked brim, good grey wise uncle Walt,

I can’t revere you, I

can’t believe you, you

who have never known me under your fingers in the night, you

who have only known me through idle conversations

with your married projected lovers.

Film Location: Sunken Road in front of the original stone wall where the Battle of Fredericksburg was fought. In the background is The Angel of Marye’s Heights monument.

Was the wind piping the pipe of death under the black clouds? (428)
During this reading the wind certainly was!

One of the things that I find fascinating about Whitman is that, while I’m not very much of a patriot, I can jump on his America-loving train. He writes beautiful sweeping visions of the nation, and he includes me in them (well as a woman that’s somewhat arguable, but I’ll avoid that line of thought this time), and it feels ominous and powerful. Normally I’m all about some “the American dream is dead!” poems/songs/books what have you, and yet somehow Whitman can get me away from that, if only for a short while. However, when I read Whitman’s work, I don’t envision it applying to America now. I apply it to some idyllic America of long ago, one that does not, and will never exist again.

Obviously it’s not just me who has this preference for the depressing view of America, since so many people write about it. It got me thinking though, did society really change that much from Whitman’s time to now that we’re so much keener to bash our country than talk about how great it is? What happened that created such a giant shift? It can’t be that things are so much more corrupt now than back then, or harder or more horrible. In Whitman’s time they were dealing with tenement houses and awful working conditions, racism, bad pay, unemployment, the same things that Bruce Springsteen and others write about. Yet something tells me that if Ginsberg or Springsteen went back in time, their take on America wouldn’t resonate the same way that Whitman’s did, and vice versa.

Basically every idea I formulate as a reason for this shift has an equally valid opposition. I wondered if it was because there still seemed to be so much opportunity left in America during Whitman’s time. There were parts of it that were still unexplored, that hadn’t been carved up into states yet. Maybe the “American dream” is something that people still widely believed in. Then I am reminded of Dr. Rigsby’s course on American Realism, and I’m pretty confident that the people of Whitman’s time were aware that the “American dream” was something only available to those who were lucky, or were already privileged.  Even now, while many people recognize that the ideal of the American dream is just that, there are still people who come to this country because of the belief that you can do anything here.

Another thing that I have considered is that perhaps people during Whitman’s time people needed an uplifting view of America, especially when it got to the Civil War. Things were bad for pretty much everyone at that time, and to be included in Whitman’s ideal vision of America was what they needed. Maybe we can only enjoy Springsteen and Ginsberg because we come from a position of privilege. Most of us will never have to go to war, or work in a factory for minimum wage, but we can look at it from a distance and get mad about the injustice of it all. We can criticize the government without being in danger of being imprisoned or persecuted or shunned for it. On the flip side of that though, that doesn’t include the people who aren’t privileged, who Springsteen centers his narratives around, and who still enjoy his music.  

So in the end, I have no concrete ideas about why this shift has occurred. Why can I accept Whitman’s view of the America in the past when I know it’s not really true? Why does “Song of Myself” make me just as happy as Ginsberg’s “America” or Springsteen’s “No Surrender?” I don’t know. I put it to the rest of the world to sort these things out for me.

This must be the appeal.  Ezra Pound perfectly describes the conflict of interpreting Whitman, saying that he “is an exceedingly nauseating pill, but he accomplishes his mission.”  Whitman’s endless effort to encompass everything and everyone makes him difficult to grasp sometimes, but it also allows nearly any reader to find something that seems to speak to him or her directly.  Old Walt was a smart guy, though.  He probably knew better than anyone his broad appeal, like in ‘Song of Myself,’ when he says, “I am the mate and companion of all people. Just as immortal and fathomless as myself, (They do not know how immortal, but I know.)”  Whitman is immortal, his legacy lives on the lives that he has touched and the works he has inspired.

The only selection that I was familiar with from this week’s readings was that of Allen Ginsberg.  The connection between these two men is pretty obvious: the beards, the prophetic self-images, and their “possibly-romantic-or-maybe-just-platonic” obsessions with their contemporaries.  However, my favorite poem from this week was “Ode to Walt Whitman” by Frederico Garcia Lorca.

I’ve been thinking about Whitman as an “American Poet” and I’ve decided that he does indeed fit the bill.  Here is this poet, Frederico.  He is a gay Latin-American poet living in America in the 1930s.  He picked up Leaves of Grass, and it spoke to him.  Whitman truly lived up to his promises of creating a comradeship of men from all different walks of life.  In his poem, Lorca evokes Whitman in both form and content.  I know I had a fellow Whitmaniac on my hands when I read,

“Not for a moment, Walt Whitman, lovely old man,

Have I failed to see your beard full of butterflies,

Nor your corduroy shoulders frayed by the moon,

Nor your thighs pure as Apollo’s,

Nor your voice like a column of ash,

Old man, beautiful as the mist…”

He calls Whitman “old man” twice in this short passage.  A term that I too have begun to use in reverence, picturing this old gray prophet dispensing wisdom down to his followers.  The repetition in the poem is something that I can easily recognize as taken from Whitman and the declarations and explanation points also hark back to our Whitman.

It’s pretty amazing to read the scope of works that have been inspired by our Walt.  Artists spanning several decades and walks of life create echoes of Whitman’s message.  Just as he predicted, he is indeed immortal and has become the voice of America.

OK, now on to Leaves of Grass.  The Whitman that I see this week is an old, gray man.  He is losing his health and his cognitive abilities but clearly has no intention of throwing in the towel no matter how badly his health fails him.  I see his determination and possibly a hint of stubbornness in his refusal to give up and go quietly, although he has clearly accepted his mortality by the end of his life.  Whitman clearly began to see himself as a patient, recording his ailments with exactly the same poetic descriptiveness with which he had used to describe the ailments of his beloved wounded soldiers.

I was saddened to read that he could no longer handle going outside, and instead spent his hours in his bedroom, or as he referred to it, his “den,” surrounded by papers and notebooks.  I see this picture of Whitman, shuffling around his dark bedroom, sorting through papers and talking about his work with his aides and friends with steadily declining mental awareness.  I think that Whitman was at this time basically the same as he had always been in at least one major way: he was obsessed with his work and making something as perfect as it could possibly be.

I see the deathbed edition of Leaves of Grass as Walt’s final masterpiece.  I think that even at the end of his life, as loopy as he may have been, he was still thinking of Leaves as a work in progress.  I think that we can assume that the finished product was the result of a lifetime of careful tinkering and reworking.  Although Walt grew old and faded away, his work has lasted because of his obsessive attention to detail and his unwavering commitment to perfecting it throughout the entire course of his life.

Sometimes when we talk in class about Whitman, I feel as though we are honoring this perfect nonhuman being. Prior to the field trip, it was hard for me to fathom the fact that Whitman was someone who had human faults and weaknesses. Rather, I always believed Whitman was this ideal prophet-like individual with awe inspiring ideas and who could foresee the future of America.

The picture of the Bust of Whitman created by S.H. Morse and the street sign depicted my view of Whitman prior to the field trip.

I thought of Whitman as this statue like person who was greater both physically and mentally than any other human. I associated Whitman as a Moses like figure leading his people. At the same time however, Whitman’s names was still associated as a “historical figure” who happened to be recognized for his talents and who like many other famous individuals had streets and buildings named after him.

But, this misconstrued idea of Whitman was slowly broken down throughout the day. Walking down Constitution Ave, standing at Freedom Plaza, and entering into the grand Willard Hotel I began to see how Whitman too had to walk these same streets. Although DC in 2009 is much different than the DC Whitman experienced from 1863-1873, these lines from Brooklyn Ferry stand out in my mind when trying to put into words how Whitman’s humanity was discovered.

“Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt,
Just as any of you is one of a living crowd, I was one of a crowd,
Just as you are refresh’d by the gladness of the river and the
bright flow, I was refresh’d”

This discovery of the human Whitman continued as I saw firsthand Whitman’s personal possessions. Although I was deeply moved at the unveiling of the haversack, what captivated my attention the most was Walt Whitman’s glasses and pen.

This picture of Whitman’s glasses show how Whitman had physical ailments and was affected by the outside world around him. The right eye is frosted over and as Barbara Bair, the librarian at the Library of Congress told us, his loss of eyesight in an eye could have been due to the multiple strokes that Whitman had during the later years of his life. So seeing these glasses made me realize that Whitman although brilliant was not perfect.

The pen is a reed that was Whitman’s in 1891. The simple reed pen, changed my perception of how Whitman did not miraculously create his works, but rather, he tirelessly labored pen in hand over paper. Much like what we, as students, do today. So, although Walt Whitman’s work is under the category of canonical American literature, Whitman is no longer a name to me. After this trip Whitman is human just like you and I.

]]> http://jpike1.lookingforwhitman.org/2009/11/08/whitman-searching-in-dc/feed/ 1 http://mscanlon.lookingforwhitman.org/2009/11/03/st-weet-victory/ http://mscanlon.lookingforwhitman.org/2009/11/03/st-weet-victory/#respond Tue, 03 Nov 2009 21:48:57 +0000 http://mscanlon.lookingforwhitman.org/?p=305

Cartoon

Free Lance Star, 11/3/09

Have you reckon’d a thousand acres much?

Have you practis’d so long to learn to read?

Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems?

Well, have we?  I do feel like I, or I guess I should say, we, have been on a journey with the great grey poet for the past few months.  We have had to re-teach ourselves how to read in Whitman’s language, how to understand his rhetoric and how to interpret changes in his usual tone or subjects.  When we first met Walt, he was a cocky character smirking inside the cover of Leaves of Grass.  Early on it seemed as if he was his biggest fan.  In the 1855 version of ‘Song of Myself’ he admits, “I know perfectly well my own egotism, / And know my omnivorous words, and cannot say any less, / And would fetch you whoever you are flush with myself.”  This is the early Whitman, who proclaimed that America needed a great poet and that he was just the man for the job (meanwhile quietly altering the crotch region of his frontispiece.)

I know that I had trouble trudging through the idealistic language and the sprawling lists.  I mean, who exactly did this guy think he was?  I was inspired by his great hope for America and the potential he saw in the lowliest of people, but I have to admit: I wasn’t sure that I bought it.  Then, when the nation verged on falling apart and Whitman himself was surrounded by chaos, Whitman earned himself some much-needed street cred.

Sure, his early poetry is filled with language that hints at war.  He seemed to want to motivate his “troops” to join the revolution to build a new nation.  However, he didn’t seem to realize the bloody implications of such a revolution until it arrived.  His later “Song of Myself” has a certain undertone of realism, since his battle cries are laced with the real-world experience of what comes along with war.

It can feel frustrating to read as Walt tries desperately to encompass every facet of everything and everyone.  However, reading through his personal reflections I realize not just the high standards that he had for his countrymen, but for himself.  Walt didn’t paint himself as the great poet of America because he thought that he was the most qualified for the job.  He simply saw something that needed to be done and took the initiative to do it.  He explains this in his interview when he says that, “our work at present, and for a long time to come, is to lay the materialistic foundations of a great nation.”  He (shockingly) continues with a sprawling last of all that must be covered and the great scope of this challenge.

As I reflect on Walt Whitman, reflecting on Walt Whitman I am attempting to see him as he saw himself.  Somehow, the cocky, preachy sort of jargon dims in my memory as I realize what Walt was trying to do from the very beginning.  He wanted to define what it meant to be an American.  Unexpectedly, he ended up in the trenches, experiencing the darkest side of revolution during the Civil War.  As a result, Whitman was given the chance to put his money where his mouth was a write a real description of what it really means to fight for the nation that you want to see.  I’m willing to say that he succeeded.

When examining the changes in punctuation marks, the first thing that caught my attention was absence of ellipses in the 1891 version. Whitman instead replaced the ellipses with commas. This change can be seen in the difference between page 59 compared to page 219 and 220. In the 1855 edition, Whitman uses an excessive amount of ellipses to describe the travels that his vision takes him on and begins with the line, “My ties and ballasts leave me….I travel….I sail….my elbows rest in the seagaps”. Meanwhile on page 219 these similar lines are written as, “My ties and ballasts leave me, my elbows rest in sea-gaps.” The change from ellipses to commas and occasional dashes, give the poem a more clean and concise feel. As a man nearing his deathbed, Whitman was firm in his opinions and did not need to drag out what he was trying to say. So, perhaps Whitman is using this change in punctuation to demonstrate not only his perfectionist “clean up”, but also the change in a more definite and concise Whitman.

Also, throughout the 1891 edition, Whitman uses many more parentheses than in the first edition of SoM. I would say that Whitman’s asides, personal comments, and feelings are expressed through the usage of these parentheses. Rather than generalizing his thoughts and opinions, Whitman makes a clear distinction of his opinions and attitudes by using the parentheses. The words within the parentheses are included in the 1855 edition, but because they are not separated by the parentheses, there is less attention given to them. So, Whitman as a perfectionist must have wanted readers to focus on what was included within the parentheses and make a distinction between those thoughts that are in the parentheses and the rest of the poem. To really see this, let us look at page 39 and pages 200/201. On page 200, Whitman uses parentheses to describe the lunatic and writes, “The lunatic is carried at last to the asylum a confirm’d case, (He will never sleep any more as he did n the cot in his mother’s bed-room). Yet, on page 39, Whitman combines both thoughts about the lunatic and does not separate by parentheses. This subtle change can tell us a lot about the self perception that Whitman is trying to reflect in the later edition. Perhaps Whitman in the later edition wanted to provide readers with his personal first-hand knowledge, experiences, and opinions and used this punctuation mark to do so. Whitman was older and as the saying goes, with age comes wisdom, so by using the parentheses, Whitman could freely express and make clear the wisdom he believed to have.

Also, Whitman did not use as many exclamation marks in the 1891 edition. This can be seen when looking at page 48 and 208. In Whitman’s earlier edition when describing the sea Whitman writes, “Sea of stretched ground-swells! Sea of breathing broad and convulsive breaths!” However, in the later edition, Whitman replaces the exclamation points with commas. This change in punctuation mark could demonstrate Whitman’s reflective tone and nature. Whitman did not need to use exclamation points to shout out his message, because most of the public was aware of Walt Whitman and this work. Therefore, in the later edition Whitman wanted to remind readers of the importance of his message and ideas, but, it was not as urgent and commanding as the 1855 edition.

Furthermore, Whitman demonstrates his change of self-perception by leaving out references of him being immortal. When Whitman was 37, Whitman expressed his immortality and wrote, “I am the poet of commonsense and of the demonstrable and of immortality” (Whitman 48). However, in the 1891 edition, Whitman does not even include this line in SoM. I feel this absence clearly demonstrates Whitman’s change of perception of his body as being immortal. Whitman is dying and knows that his body will not live in this world. Therefore, Whitman edits out this line in the later edition.

Although Whitman knows that his body will not live, Whitman considers his written words to be immortal. Thus, his message of hope and direction for the American people does not change from the first edition to the last. Whitman writes in both version of the poem about turning and living with animals. In this section there are no changes in punctuation or addition/subtraction of words. I feel this section demonstrates how Whitman wants the American people to live. Whitman likes how the animals do not complain about their position in society, do not excessively discuss their duty toward God, are not materialistic, and are not unhappy. In this section, it is as if Whitman wants the American people to be simple like the animals. Since there was no change in this section, Whitman’s vision of the American people did not change. Although Whitman personally experienced change in his own perception, his hope for the American people remained the same.

Last night I started poking around on databases for ideas on what I should do my final project on, and I happened to stumble on an article called “Whitman, Springsteen, and the American Working Class” by Greg Smith. I had to read this for two reasons. The first being that my mother is a HUGE Bruce Springsteen fan, and has spent the last two years converting me so that I will accompany her to shows on his cur

rent tour with the E Street band (we’ve been twice in the last year, and we’re going again in November) and the second reason being that it’s a pretty interesting comparison, considering Bruce Springsteen is kind of like the Walt Whitman of our (our parent’s?) time in the sense that America is his schtick.

Older picture of the Boss circa the late 70's early 80's. Did I mention I totally have the hots for him?

A young photo of Whitman for good measure.

The article discusses the success of the respective writers to reach/capture the American working class, something  Whitman, as we all know, desperately wanted to do. Smith says that Springsteen wins this fight on both counts, and I have to agree. While the article mostly focused on Springsteen, it did bring up an interesting contrast between Walt and Bruce. Whitman represents the idealized American Dream, where America is continuing to expand, the industrial revolution is still in motion, and the working man is happy and robust (Smith refers to “I Hear America Singing”). Springsteen is concerned with destroying the fallacy of the American Dream, and truthfully portraying the American working class, destroyed by their blue collar jobs. Smith makes no mention of Whitman’s war poetry (I suppose that would be a bit of a tangent considering it was focused on the working class) but I wondered what comparisons he would have drawn between Springsteen and Whitman there.  While he may have romanticized the working man, Whitman was of course dedicated to portraying the horror of war,  just like Springsteen sings about the effects of the Vietnam war. 

You can read the article here.

By the end of the article I was prepared to start working on in-depth comparison of Whitman and Springsteen, but I’m not sure there would be any real value to that analysis except that it would amuse me…

While I haven’t been blogging about the Digital Whitman class at UMW (which is part of the multi-campus Looking for Whitman experiment) nearly as much as I had intended, let me just say that it is the single most amazing example of a distributed conversation through blogging I have yet to witness. They are all going blog wild, and the conversations that are emerging both in class and spilling out in all kinds of amazing ways online is far more than I ever dreamed would come of this experiment. First of all, Mara Scanlon has turned into an  a-list blogger in my mind, just take a look at her recent posts on John Wilkes Booth and Whitman as an American Idol in popular culture—this is downright awesome blogging—and she is pumping these out almost daily.  In fact, the energy level of the entire class is amazing, look at Allison Creire’s recent post on the class trip to Washington DC—which I freaking missed because of my house—that is both intensely candid and precise about just what this learning experience has been all about:

Reflecting on this feeling of “good” and enrichment, my mind was drawn to Paulo Freire’s essay “The Banking Concept of Education”….Freire’s essay describes how limiting education can be, how the teacher/professor can fall into a pattern of narration, while the students become “containers” that mechanically memorize facts and promptly forget them after spewing them out on a test: “Education thus becomes an act of depositing, in which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor.” This, sadly, is the mode of education that is most familiar to us. However, this course breaks that mold, nay it shatters it! What we have developed in this class is what Freire calls “authentic thinking,” which, “does not take place in ivory tower isolation, but only in communication.” Communication is our middle name; in class, students are speaking 80%-90% of the time. We are physically connecting to what we’re learning about. Instead of mindlessly “consuming” Whitman’s letters, we went out and saw them, were inches away from them. The reason we all feel personally connected to Walt Whitman is because he has become more than information and we have become more than “containers.” This is what it feels like to be a student.

And you better believe this course breaks that mold, in fact Allison’s very next post about the Whitman Lincoln platonic and unrequited  love affair was commented on by Darrel Blaine Ford, a Whitman impersonator who has been interpreting the Gray Poet for 7 decades—-as Missvirginia likes to say “shut the front door!”

This past Saturday,the entire class went to Washington for a walking tour of Whitman’s DC, as well as a visit to the recently re-opened Ford’s Theatre. And as a final stop, they went to the Library of Congress archives to view various letters written by and to Whitman (including Emerson’s famous letter to the young poet as well as another form Fannie Fern), his Civil War haversack, glasses, cane, and much more they will be documenting on the Looking for Whitman Field Trips blog. It was by all accounts a transcendent experience for the class, and they were all glowing when I saw them tonight, they even did a freaking hippie group hug which is saying something—though I was excluded, damn it!!!

Something has happened in this class that is truly rare, and I think I’ve seen a sense of ownership, community, and trust amongst this group this is not only rare, but somehow new. I mean just look at them in the LOC archive looking at Whitman’s hallowed haversack:

Image credit TallerSam’s “Walt Whitman’s messenger bag”

They all know the value of what they are experiencing, and everyone of them is relishing it. The ability to view items from the archive that bring the ongoing discussions of the particular Whitman that emerges through a week’s readings into a material nexus of time and space with the actual man opens a door, and they all courageously walked through it.  I’m still on the other side of that threshhold, but I am amazed at what I can see through the cracks. This class embodies the comraderie and community that, for me, epitomizes the best of Whitman’s poetry and politik, and while I am sad I’ve been such a deadbeat, I’m absolutely thrilled to even tangentially be a part of the consuming passion that is driving this group on.  I am convinced they will each find their Whitman, and he will be both sweeter and more tender to the touch for all their critical longing that has been buttressed by a rare in the power of vision. Search on UMW Whitmaniacs, you’re in the journey, and the unfolding of your depth and breadth of America’s poet will prepare the strapping generations to come. You will breath taut life into a new nation for imagining what learning should be about, an animated a longing for serendipitous discovery that must be worked insanely hard at to truly surprise and enrich. Procreative knowledge wantonly shared in the unflinching openness of a new day.

Digital Whitman, the bava salutes you, and is your undying tech slave!

Nevertheless, let us first look at Whitman’s love for Lincoln in a mutual “we are both famous, I respect, admire, and can relate to you” way.  In Whitman’s lecture on Lincoln delivered in Boston in 1881, Whitman describes his first encounter with Lincoln, and places Lincoln in a celebrity role. Whitman lists Lincoln among other historical figures, but then uses the word “celebres” to describe the Lincoln that he observes. Analyzing this scene that Whitman describes, it is almost as if Whitman is in awe over the powerful presence that Lincoln, as President-elect, had over the crowd of thirty to forty thousand. Although Whitman states that he saw Lincoln “often” during the four years following the crowd scene, for some reason Whitman admits that this first meeting stood at the forefront of his mind and best represented the “genius”. However, the mere fact that Whitman was giving a lecture on Lincoln, places Whitman in the category of someone that is a genius enough to capture the essence of Lincoln. Even in Whitman’s description of the crowd, Whitman acknowledges that it would take four geniuses Plutarch, Eschylus, Michel Angelo, and Rabelais to capture the physical resemblances of Whitman’s portrait. Yet, Whitman thought he was capable of describing the death and essence of Lincoln in his lectures, therefore placing himself on an all-knowing celebrity like status.

But, it is important to remember that the mutual celebrity status was not the only thing that Whitman and Lincoln had in common, Whitman could relate to Lincoln’s goal of improving America and the American people. As a leader of the Union, Lincoln wanted a united front and a united people. Similarly, Whitman wanted a better America where individuals would be able to live and take up any “open road” that they choose. So, perhaps, Whitman was trying to continue Lincoln’s legacy in the only way he new how, through the written and spoken word.

On the other hand, looking at Whitman’s relationship with Lincoln in a worshiping Christ-like figure way, there can be many parallels drawn. Although, the scholar Erkkila argues that Whitman avoids the Lincoln-Christ symbolism in writing When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d, I disagree with this statement and feel that there are obvious connections between the symbols throughout the poem and Christ. First, the “great star” immediately reminds me of the star of Bethlehem that leads the shepherds and kings to Jesus birthplace. This “powerful western fallen star” used in Whitman’s poem also leads the reader to Lincoln and his death. Furthermore, the description of the coffin passing through the lanes and streets invokes the image of Christ carrying the cross among the ancient streets knowing fully well that he will be crucified. Furthermore, in the poem This Dust Was Once the Man, Whitman describes Lincoln as “gentile and plain” which are common descriptors of Jesus. Also, the title of the poem corresponds with Genesis 3:19, “Since from it you were taken for dust you are and dust you will return.” This short poem demonstrates that Whitman was aware of religion and the self scarifying nature of both Christ and Lincoln.

It of course is not hard to figure out why Whitman would admire Lincoln.  The President embodied much of what Whitman called all Americans to be.  He noted Lincoln’s “perfect composure and coolness.”  Lincoln was also a outdoorsman, a man who was familiar with the common people, had experience in nature, and valued not just academic knowledge but more importantly common logic and reasoning.  His physical stature also caught Whitman’s attention.  A tall and burly man, he resembled the ideals of what Whitman thought a man should look like.  Lincoln was a new embodiment of the great poet who would come to save the nation.

As much as I hate to admit it, I can’t help but feel that Lincoln’s love for Whitman dims a bit in comparison to his other descriptions of love for different people.  Whitman really admired Lincoln as a man and as the President, and although he crafted some powerful prose in tribute to Lincoln, I have trouble equating it to some of his other descriptions of love and admiration.  In Calamus, Whitman spoke brazenly of sex and physical attraction.  Whitman spoke intimately of relations with both men and women in a way that he only could by drawing from personal experience.  In class we have explored whether or not Whitman’s relationships with the young soldiers was appropriate, but after seeing his journals yesterday, it is clear that his concern for the broken young boys was genuine.

When it comes to Lincoln, Whitman’s tone is so intimate.  It goes beyond admiration and in to this realm where is seems that Whitman is imagining that the two have a relationship that just did not exist.  I do not understand why Whitman could not express his feeling for the President without going stepping in to “creepster” territory.  I had hoped that through writing this blog I would answer some of my own questions.  Unfortunately, I am still stumped.

Although he may have popularized the style, he did not invent it.  That credit goes to John Hetherington, a hat-maker from London who designed the style in 1797.  When Hetherington debuted his prototype by wearing it out on the streets it caused such a commotion that he was arrested and fined for causing a disturbance. A subsequent law was made in London banning them after the police chief reported, “people booed, several women fainted and a small boy got his arm broken” in the riot incited by Hetherington(Scrivens, Louise).  The law was eventually abandoned and the top hat enjoyed a surge of popularity.

Originally, these hats were covered with fur.  Beaver fur was more common among the higher social classes, while the middle-class version used rabbit fur.  Covering the fur with oilcloth created a smoother look and eventually hat-makers used silk to create the style that we recognize today.   This silky style developed by Hetherington was slow to catch on until Prince Albert adopted them, making them a fashion staple in Europe and The United States(Curiosities).  As an unexpected result of the trend, the beaver-trapping trade in America greatly declined(Feinstein, Kelly).

In the 19^th century these hats reached the peak of their popularity.  Their endorsement from admired political figures made them a status symbol among the upper class and especially those involved in politics.  However, their popularity died out due to the high costs of making the specialized product.  Eventually they became a sort of caricature.  Uncle Sam wears one and it has been depicted satirically as a symbol for capitalism.  Throughout recent memory, the top hat has retained its historical ties to nobility and class.  It is still worn at some formal functions or as part of some official uniforms.  There was brief resurgence of popularity for the style when in the 1920’s and 30’s it was associated with the pop culture of the time, prompting Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers to title one of their most popular productions, “Top Hat.”

Despite the changing attitudes of what the hat represents, Lincoln’s stovepipe will always serve as an iconic image and the hat he was wearing on the night of his death can be viewed today at the Smithsonian. The tattered and worn relic is still encircled with the black band that Lincoln used to tribute his dead son(Harding, Allison).  There are also two finger-sized holes in the brim, where Lincoln always touched when taking his hat on or off (BBC).

The style could even be experiencing a revival in the wake of the 200^th anniversary of President Lincoln’s birth.  The stovepipe hat is a vastly recognizable symbol for the president, and many are using it in different forms of tribute.  As part of the 21^st Century Abe Project, hat distributor; Quintin produced a modern-day spin on the original.  The reproduction is modeled after today’s baseball hat but “includes a wool outer, and satin lining with a letter written to Gideon Welles by Lincoln”(Quintin,com).  In Illinois, the town of Springfield honored Lincoln with a community-wide art project featuring fiberglass recreations of Lincoln’s hat, all several feet tall and painted with historic images(Reynolds, John).

For Whitman, a man in a top hat would have been a fairly common experience, but he identifies it with President Lincoln as in Specimen Days when he recalls, “Mr. Lincoln in the saddle…wears a black stiff hat and looks about as ordinary in attire at the commonest man”(p.733).  The stoic effect of the hat has served as a symbol for success and power since its arrival on the market.  No doubt it only amplified President Lincoln’s dignified grace, making him an even more interesting character in Whitman’s eyes.  The stove pipe hat has endured a very colorful and prominent history, from inciting riots to witnessing a presidential assissination.

Works Cited

“Abe Stove Pipe Hat by Quintin.” Quintin. 4 May 2009. Web.

“Curiosties.” Civil War Times 43.3 (2004): 67-68. Print.

Feinstein, Kelly. “Fashionable Felted Fur: The Beaver Hat.” Thesis. History Department, UC Santa Cruz, 2006. Print.

Harding, Alison. “Smithsonian exhibit pays homage to Lincoln.” CNN.com/US. Web.

Norton, R.J. “A Shot Through Abraham Lincoln’s Hat.” Abraham Lincoln Research Site. Web.

Reynolds, John. “Stovepipe hats to go on display starting today.” The Stat Journal-Register. 28 May 2009. Web. <sj-r.com>.

Scrivens, Louise. “Changing the flaws in London’s Laws.” BBC News. Web.

Zaslow, Jeffrey. “A Hatless JFK: Inaugural Moments That Became Cultural Turning Points.” Wall Street Journal- Eastern Edition. 20 Jan. 2005. Web.

Image Citations

Allan Pinkerton, President Abraham Lincoln and General John A. McClernand, October 3, 1862. Photograph. National Archives. Lincolnstudies.com. Web.

Men’s Fashion. Advertisement. La Mode 19 Mar. 1852. Print.

Perlman, Seth. Abraham Lincoln’s Hat. Photograph. AP, Seattle. The Seattle Times. 18 June 2007. Web.

Abe Stovepipe Hate. Photograph. Quintin Hats. Quintin. 4 May 2009. Web. <quintinco.com>.