Wed 16 Sep 2009
Shift From Country to City, Collapse of Relied-upon Systems: Overall Alienations
- living w/ extended family to living by himself
- surveillance of small town to looking out for oneself
- vertical authority (hierarchy, chain-of-command) to horizontal institutions (peers, friends, equals)– absence of people telling you what to do
- agricultural system (attn to rhythms of nature, systems of time depending on outside world) to factory system (human-made clock, artifice runs life)
- barter system (close, direct human contact, even in financial dealings) to capitalism (middleman, impersonal)– life less animal/natural, more mechanical/numerical
- factory’s value of woman’s work over man’s work: suddenly all that matters is how strong you are; nuances of personality less valued
Connecting Alienations to Whitman(‘s Writing)
- Whitman thought authors should go beyond writing just the words of their book, make books themselves, restore hand-crafting to your own art
- late 19th C: products start to feature faces of people who make them
- b/c consumers couldn’t see the faces of manufacturers anymore; way to counteract increasing impersonality
- Whitman becomes one of first and earliest celebrities
- Does Whitman’s poetry make him more familiar to the reader or does it do the opposite, objectify the reader? How does his poetry work to heal the wounds of industrialization?
- Does his poetry succeed in using adhesiveness as a social glue to restore the kind of interdependence that people had before they moved to the cities?
Characterizations of WW’s Poetic Style
- long lines
- ellipses (most in 1855, progressively fewer) –> commas and semicolons, often line-ending
- scarce periods (makes them more valuable?)
- asides (parenthetical and otherwise), often personal moments
- uncontained, sprawling thoughts
- excessive–breathlessness
- “his lines, like Whitman’s own persona, are larger than life, too big for space” –mns
- content not only talks about violation of genitals, but form itself violates space (form mimics function)
- progressive attempts to (micro)manage, esp. Song of Myself
- pentimento/palimpsest/”textual unconscious” (Jameson?)
- heavy use of “ing” verbs, like actions are happening right there
- use of exclamation (“ah!” “o!”)
- insistent use of direct-address “you”
- some poems start in meter, let it go
- (most popular Whitman poem “O Captain! My Captain!” metrical but WW didn’t like it)
- anaphora, repetitive beginnings and endings
- gutsy sexual writing cost him finances, reputation, etc. (point: writing this sexually explicit wouldn’t have been accepted everywhere)
- “true” WW happens later when interest in gay WW becomes powerful, seeing him as early gay icon– “Here the Frailest Leaves of Me” (283)
- homosocial vs. eroticized
- **The excuses Reynolds gives do not hold up; more to it than passionate friendship.**
- 2 eagles mating in midair– subject of one of WW’s most controversial poems
- people didn’t notice when he described men as sexy, but heterosexuality among animals was scandalized