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Well this weeks reading i found a little more bearable. The titles i feel helped out immensly! Funny though how he started all the titled poems with the title itself. perhaps the first sentence of the other poems was all we had to look at to know what was instore for us ?
We saw again a few reacurring themes in these poems. Im sure we could have expected some talk of equality and love for the human anatomy. The first line that stood out to me as an almost word for word reacurring theme was in the poem ” I Sing the Body Electric” second line down on page 251 “That of the male is perfect, and that of the female is perfect”. 3 pages over on 254 ” The man’s body is sacred and the woman’s body is sacred”.It’s obvious how he feels by now.
The poem i think i enjoyed the most was ” One Hour to Madness and Joy”. Basically what i take from it, is an hour of sexual nirvana. And it is in that time he feels completely liberated from all the bullshit of life, only to be “yielded” by his lover. He takes note of the first kiss between lovers just as we all remember ours with a significant other. And of course we come across a line stating ” i am sufficient as i am”. He ends the poem the same way he began it only with a wish that the hour of madness and joy would last the remainder of his life.
The next page over we encountered the dreaded categorical style of Whitman’s, that we’re all to familiar with in the poem ” We Two, How Long We Were Fool’d” Here he explains we are all that is nature, we are forever changing, and we are undefined Bla Bla Bla Bla.
In “Ciity of Orgies” Whitman describes a Manhatton abundant in sexual pleasures perhaps it was there that he found numerous hours of “Madness and Joy” Its not the landscape of Manhatton or the food soley the requited love of its residents that he passes on the streets.
Anyway i came across a somewhat comical photo just doing a google search. Here it is:
Just seems like something that he might endorse.
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Hi Kevin! I assume you’re in the NYC Whitman class? We had a discussion similar to your post. You quote “I Sing the Body Electric” in thinking that Whitman saw men and women as equals. In my mind, I see Whitman as being like that super-intuitive, gay, guy best friend I always wanted. Yet, Whitman focuses SO much on the male body (and believe me…part(s) of me are not complaining! haha) and seemingly forgets the female form. He does make effort to praise the female body, to make it “equal”, yet he still keeps her passive. In the second section of “Body Electric” he says, “But the expression of a well-made man appears not only in his face, it is in his limbs and joints also, it is curiously in the joints of his hips and wrists…” he continues to talk about a man’s walk. The second break then describes women and children–in the same line. I think that’s a little telling; is he putting women and children on a parallel? He then only describes their dress too, not the gait of their walk, or the powerfulness of their bodies. In the second line of that, he speaks of a swimmer, “he swims through the transparent green-shine, or lies with his face up and rolls silently to and fro…” The man is so much more active than the woman. I’m a little disappointed, but I think Whitman WANTED to think of women as being equal, but his sexual preferences and social customs made his writing a little too slanted to be called gender-equal.
Comment by missvirginia 09.27.09 @ 8:33 pmYes, I definitely agree with the readings for last week. I’m really interested in his use of paradoxes and almost all of his poems were filled with them!
And by the way, your little picture really goes well with your post about his sexually-interested personality
But this picture almost reminds me of the “beer” picture with Whitman in it. I think that shows more of his sexual personality.
Comment by jenny and walt 09.28.09 @ 10:24 pm