- •1. Identify several ways in which Leaves of Grass is quintessentially American.
- •2. Explain how Whitman incorporates the idea of democracy into his poetry.
- •Identify some of the sexual taboos Whitman broached in his poetry.
- •3.Explain how Whitman's wartime experience affected his sense of comradeship.
- •2. Explain the role of the city in the Whitmanesque notion of human bonding.
- •1. Give examples of different traditions of death that Whitman draws from.
- •2. Explain the relationship between poetry and death in "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking".
- •1. Describe the range of Whitman as the poet of nature.
- •2. Summarize Whitman's ambivalent relationship with the idea of American democracy.
- •1. Summarize why so many critics have accorded Stowe second class status as a 19th-century novelist.
- •2. Explain whether Stowe's attitudes toward race seem dated or prophetic.
- •3. Summarize how Uncle Tom's Cabin is a religious allegory.
Identify some of the sexual taboos Whitman broached in his poetry.
Still more shocking, Whitman celebrates the (male) body beautiful.
Whitman's evocations deserve comparison with Thomas Eakins' painting, The Swimming Hole. Eakins admired Whitman's work.
A comparison with Edward Muybridge's photographs of the body in motion is also appropriate, for it gives us a sense of the graphic, even the scientific dimensions of Whitman's literary representations.
The general reaction to Whitman's explicitness was, predictably, one of anger and outrage.
General 19th-century views on the body, as we can infer them from Victorian culture, were hushed and discrete.
Whitman's effusions and his brawny, self-flaunting persona are the direct opposite of the sensitive, effete romantic type.
Contemporary reactions to Whitman are not surprising; Thoreau's response is characteristic of the pudeur of the culture.
The question of Whitman's homosexuality has much interested modern critics who are concerned with issues of gender, yet it is hard to gauge this key issue with certainty.
Despite its pudeur, the 19th-century pre-Freudian language of male affection is surprisingly bold and extensive.
Whitman is conspicuously, sometimes pathetically (as in his old age), drawn to men; he is a friend of coach drivers, ferry boat pilots, and soldiers.
The poems in "Calamus" and "Children of Adam," which deal most explicitly with male friendship and attraction, offended many readers.
In one instance, the male sex organ is represented as poetry.
Whitman, in his life and in his poetry, emerges as a champion for open display of affections, in clear contrast to the genteel climate of the age.
3.Explain how Whitman's wartime experience affected his sense of comradeship.
Whitman conveys the scale of destruction in the Civil War by evoking the everyday frequency of dying bodies.
In his hospital experience, Whitman's need for comradeship was gratified, and the demands of empathy were met at last.
Dying bodies became for Whitman the source of visionary poetry.
"A Sight in Camp" conveys the sacramental character of tending the dying.
Whitman's gift of love incorporates a kind of tenderness that complements our image of the "cosmos."
The famous "Christ" photo of Whitman seems entirely relevant to this wartime experience.
Lecture 26
1. Summarize how Whitman's depiction of urban life broke with literary tradition.
"Broadway Pageant" offers us an image of New York the melting pot, which was an apt characterization of the city even in Whitman's time.
We see the New Yorkers watching the parade together, and we grasp the commonality of public life.
The Orient is on show in this poem, and we understand just how capacious the urban container can be.
"Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" is unquestionably Whitman's urban masterpiece, the long poem in which his vision of the city merges entirely with his vision of poetry.
Historic Brooklyn of the mid-19th century is recorded here.
The ferry is easily understood as a site of encounter, rather than a source of transportation. Poetry itself is redefined as a site of encounter.
The "well join'd scheme" is Whitman's phrase for capturing the body politic.
Whitman's "transcendental" theater is richly on show here; he urges us to see the spirit beyond the physical surfaces. This theme is classically Emerson; it is, in fact, Emerson's legacy.