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