1. Describe the range of Whitman as the poet of nature.

The grandeur of the natural scene bursts upon us in passage after passage in Leaves of Grass.

"When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer" displays Whitman as the ironic philosopher who gently distinguishes between learned twaddle and real beauty.

Van Gogh's reaction to Whitman's poems testifies to the dignity and simple passion of the work.

Reclaiming nature, putting the "mental world" into its proper place, is an epic enterprise, tonic in its reversals.

Nature and passion are nowhere more perfectly fused than in the little-known poem "The Dalliance of Eagles."

God's signature is everywhere espied in the sacramental scheme; divine markings dot the world. Here is the Puritan legacy, transformed. 1. "Bare-bosomed night" is Whitman's beautiful phrase for his ecstatic intercourse with nature.

Whitman has few rivals as a discoverer and a translator of nature; it is as if he had lived among natural creatures for thousands of years.

2. Summarize Whitman's ambivalent relationship with the idea of American democracy.

Whitman stands as the archetypal American poet. Whitman's view of American democracy evolved over time and, in his later years, could be ferociously critical.

Whitman was prophetic in his vision of America as the land of the future.

"Passage to India" depicts an America on the march, seeking to fulfill its global destiny. This is the autumnal period of a great poet.

"Song of the Open Road" is to be understood as America's ultimate theme song: we make our futures, we are mobile and free. He prefigures the Beat Poets as the "American bard."

3. Explain why Whitman, in D.H. Lawrence's assessment, was a poet of experience rather than salvation.

D.H. Lawrence's commentary on the "open road" testifies to Whitman's stature: he is the poet of experience, not of salvation.

Whitman emerges from his poems as our personal medium, our "self" whom we discover because of him.

In the final lines of "Song of Myself," Whitman proves to be with us still, under our boot soles, as we take our leave. It is the ultimate phase of Whitman's song of the earth and is one of the most haunting farewells in literature.

Lecture 29

1. Summarize why so many critics have accorded Stowe second class status as a 19th-century novelist.

Stowe's book was long relegated by critics to the sidelines as a melodramatic, sentimental pot-boiler, too filled with sermons and too devoid of art to warrant being put on the standard reading lists. But fashions change, and we are now again, with the advent of feminist and ideological criticism, in a position to understand why Uncle Tom's Cabin sold more than 300,000 copies in its first year and became the all time American best-seller. The Sentimental Tradition is the great popular form of the 19^th century, and unlike the males of the "American Renaissance"—Stowe is telling a story that touches a national nerve.

Stowe's book is profoundly matriarchal, and it relocates power itself, moving it from the government to the kitchen.

Stowe comes from a distinguished family of intellectuals, including a sister and a half-sister who are leaders in American feminism.

Above all, Stowe celebrates the family, the bonds and links that unite people, rather than the fate of the individual self, and we need to reconsider a number of our famous American books in this light.

Stowe is also writing a religious allegory, positing Tom as the book's suffering Christ and little Eva as the great redeemer.

Little Eva's death is the celebrated emotional center of the book, the calculated tear-jerker that nonetheless introduces a new vision of death and of slavery.

Tom's drama is that of Calvary; Simon Legree's single goal is to break Tom, and Stowe is out to show that the soul cannot be bought or possessed by another, no matter how "salable the body is."