Lecture 8 walt whitman

1819-1892

The poet Walt Whitman was born in a small country place called West Hills, on Long Island, not far from New York. His father was a poor farmer and a carpenter. All his life Walt Whitman was proud of being "one of the people".

When Walt was eleven years old, he had to leave a school and start working. He became an office boy at a lawyer's office. Later he worked for a small newspaper where he learned printing.

At seventeen Walt Whitman became unemployed and could not find a job in a town. He went to the country where for some time he worked as a school teacher. Some people said that he was unpractical, because he was not interested in making money or getting a place in the society.

Whitman understood very well that his education was very poor and when he had time he studied literature or history and tried to write. He wrote poems, short stories and newspaper articles. Bourgeois critics did not like his poems and they were very seldom published, because he wrote about the ordinary people of America and of their hard life. Whitman loved the ordinary people of America whose life he knew very well.

In 1848 he went to New Orleans, where he did some editorial work. Soon after his return, in 1849, he left journalism for studying and writing supporting himself by carpenting and house-building with his father.

By this time Whitman had become attached to the ideals of Transcendentalism. He came to those ideals himself by way of Hegel's and Carlyle's writings, but there of an immediate influence that of Emerson. [72]

Whitman, however, had his own idea of man and democracy, which was his personal expression of those hopes for a new man and new life which had always existed abroad since the founding of the American Republic. The feelings and ideas he developed were the expressions of all which was finest in American people.

Whitman's greatest book, "Leaves of Grass", was printed privately in 1855. That was ten years after the publication of Emerson's "Nature"' and six years before the outbreak of the Civil War. When the book, which Whitman had been preparing ever since his visit to New Orleans, finally came out, it was so fresh in style and so original in subject and technique that it aroused sharp discussion. Whitman didn't follow the fashion of the age — he wrote his poems in free verse: he destroyed rhythm, he neglected regular line length.

The first edition continued twelve poems and had a Preface - a virtual manifesto of Whitman's aims - which was not subsequently re­printed. Thirty-tree new poems were added into the second edition (1856), and a hundred and twenty-two more into the edition of 1860. It was with the publication of this third edition that Whitman began to see the true scope and place of his book, how it was in reality one long poem, with "I, Walt" who stood for all men.

During the Civil War Whitman worked as a volunteer nurse. He expressed his experience as a nurse in his book "Drum Taps" (1866). After the war he remained in Washington until 1873, when he went to live in Camden, New Jersey. In 1879, Whitman made a lecturing journey across the continent.

By that time Whitman had a considerable reputation abroad particularly in England, where an edition of his highly popular "Specimen Days" had been published as early as 1868.

For the last eight years of his life Whitman lived alone in a little house in Camden, to which many famous men made a pilgrimage. By the age of seventy-three, when he died, he had achieved greatness in the eyes of the world.

A poet of free rhythm, Whitman was a poet of free spirit. He believed in the ultimate goodness of man's nature and hoped that everything would be for the best in his native land. Alas, he lived to discard those illusions to some extent by his seventies. His essay "Democratic Vistas", first published in 1871, contains bitter criticism of American civilization. [73]

73Whitman diagnoses the "deep disease" of America as "hollowness of heart". And yet, the book is still marked by optimism. The poet has not lost his faith in man and brotherhood, in transforming power of love, in humanity and life, and in the great poetry to come, which is "the stock of all". Whitman has not lost his faith in the future, but the future is the only thing that gives him hope.

Answer the questions

1. Where and when was Walt Whitman born?

2. What was Whitman proud of?

3. When did he have to leave school?

4. Where did Whitman work in his youth? Why did some people say that he was unpractical?

5. How did he get his education?

6. Why did bourgeois critics not like Whitman's poems and seldom publish them?

7. When and why did he leave journalism?

8. How did he come to the ideals of Transcendentalism?

9. What was Whitman's greatest book?

10. When did he begin to see the true scope and place of his book?

11. When did Whitman work as a nurse? Where did he express this experience?

12. Why did Whitman have a considerable reputation abroad?

13. What kind of poet was Whitman?

14. When and why did he achieve greatness in the eyes of the world? [74]

Lecture 9

AMERICAN LITERATURE

OF THE END OF THE XIX^th С -

THE BEGINNING OF THE XX^th С

At the end of the century it is not quite easy to achieve a really deep understanding of works by the authors belonging to the dawn of the century.

Since we are concerned here with the history of American literature we might try to follow its course of development in connection with historical forces, economic background, the nature of society and the intellectual currents that prevailed. Art is closely connected with sociology, philosophy and politics for it is a sort of superstructure over the economic basis. But it is also a means of cognition, for it helps, in a very special way, to make a study of surrounding reality.

At the close of the XIX^th century philosophers and some New England writers were inclined to see man as weak and helpless in the face of indifferent and impersonal Nature. And this Nature could not be identified with the increasingly hostile and seemingly impersonal monster of mass production, machine technology and finance capitalism. The ordinary man found himself the victim of sweatshops, starvation wages, cut­throat competition. He found himself depended on the unprincipled, avaricious and dollar-crazy robber of an industrialist for his bread and butter, for his happiness, for his children's future while it was blissful freedom that he was supposed to enjoy in "the Land of the free and the Home of brave", the statue of Liberty promised, as the patriotic songs went.

As for economic development, by the end of the end of the XIX^th century the United States was already a highly developed industrial country and the dawn of the XX^th с found it in a state of capitalist prosperity. [75]

The rapid rise of the industrial order (based on the system of private ownership and individual enterprise) had resulted in many economic situations that were sure to lead the country into disaster. In fact this was proved by the financial panics of 1869 and 1873 and as time went on an increasing number of people found themselves victims of economic circumstances.

The growth of big business had created great numbers of proletarians. Those were people deprived of any chance of education, ignorant and often unskilled workers dependent for their livelihood on the fluctuations of industry. Clerks, office workers and even fanners depended on bank credit, transportation and machinery. So then, in the frequently depressed economic conditions of the period, the ordinary man began to feel the effects of the ups and downs of business.

The foreign policy of the United States was a policy of aggressive tactics of domination and annexation of lands to which the United States had no legal title and with which they had no cultural affinity. Mark Twain in his pamphlet "We are Americanizing Europe"( 1906) wrote: "For good or for evil we continue to educate Europe. We have had the post of instructor for more than a century and a quarter now. We were not elected to it, we merely took it. We are of the Anglo-Saxon race. And when the Anglo-Saxon wants a thing he just takes it."

Check yourself

1. Why do we connect the development of American literature with development of America itself?

2. Who saw man as weak and helpless in the face of impersonal Nature?

3. How did the ordinary man find himself?

4. What kind of country was the United States by the end of the XIX^th century?

5. What results did the rapid rise of the industrial order have?

6. Why did a great number of people find themselves victims of economic circumstances?

7. What created vast number of proletarians? What kind of people were they?

8. What did people depend on?

9. What was the foreign policy of the United States like?

10. What did Mark Twain write about Americans in his pamphlet? [76]