WHITMAN

Response Questions on Whitman

March 10: Response on Whitman, Grass, and Biblical Allusion

Leaves of Grass borrows from Biblical passages that employ grass as a metaphor for life and death. Your task for this response is to develop a claim about the varied use of grass in section 6. You should select 3-4 passages (each no longer than 4 lines) from section 6 to develop your claim: One key to understanding Section 6 can be found in the Bible (see handout, “All Flesh is Grass”). Section 6 borrows from Isaiah, which says “All flesh is grass.”  Isaiah tells us that “grass dies after a season.” By contrast, sec. 6. notes: “The smallest sprout shows there is really no death.” Select specific metaphors, similes, and comparisons, to develop a claim about how Whitman’s representation of grass both alludes to Isaiah and departs from it: 1)  compare and contrast: look for ways Sec 6 differs from its Biblical counterpart; 2)  allusion: look for moments when s6 borrows from Biblical images of grass; 3)  figurative language: circle interesting/striking metaphors, similes, descriptive language

March 24: Response on Whitman and Sexuality

It is a commonplace that Victorian society was prudish and sexually repressed, and yet Whitman celebrates the human body and sexuality. "I believe in the flesh and the appetites," Whitman asserts. Many sections in "Song of Myself" describe intense physical and sexual contact--with an unnamed other (s5); with the sea (s22), with a stallion (s32), with the self (s28), etc. For the response, select one section--your choice is not limited to these--to discuss in detail. What techniques does Whitman use to counter society's sexual repressiveness?

One key to these issues may be found in the history of censorship. In 1884, the Boston District Attorney classified Leaves of Grass as "obscene literature." Whitman replied that he was "not afraid of the District Attorney's threat." While he did not fully capitulate to the District Attorney's demands, it is interesting that the poet said he was willing to revise--some would say censor--his own poetry. In other words, there are two contradictory aims in these poems: to get sexuality out in the open, on the one hand; and to modulate or censor that openness, on the other.

Sigmund Freud observes that writers often self-censor, by “foreseeing passages which were likely to be objected to by the censors” and “softening them down.” You will be looking for 3-4 specific passages to develop a claim about how Whitman simultaneously represents, and represses, the sexualized human body. Focus on the following ways of describing the human body: 1) highly concrete and descriptive language, vs. indeterminate/abstract language; 2) pronoun usage (he/she/it etc); 3) in general, descriptions of the body that are both very specific, but very vague.

March 31: Bibliography Assignment on Sexuality. See "Syllabus" tab under March 31st.

April 11:  Whitman and the Civil War

Whitman's Drum Taps was written to describe the Civil War, in which 620,000 Americans died. Select one of the following poems from DT: "Come Up from the Fields Father," "The Wound Dresser," "Vigil Strange". How does the poem commemorate the dead? Historians note that the Civil War was remarkable for sheer numbers of dead. What are some of the techniques he employs to memorialize the soldiers he knew? Historical Context: Whitman first came to Washington to visit his brother George who had been wounded in a Civil War battle, and stayed on as a volunteer nurse at the Armory Square Hospital. He made daily rounds at the city's primitive tent hospitals, listening to wounded soldiers, writing letters to their parents, and comforting them with food and presents. On his first day, Whitman was greeted by the sight of “heap of feet, legs, arms, and human fragments, cut bloody, black and blue, swelled and sickening.” In a diary entry he wrote: “Death is nothing here . . . you see before you on a stretcher a shapeless extended object, and over it is thrown the corpse of some wounded or sick soldier . . . perhaps there is a row of three or four of these corpses lying covered over.”

Within the poem you select, find 3-4 passages that contribute to the effort to commemorate the dead:

• Interesting uses of rhythm/rhyme: how does the poet use sound effects?

• Striking examples of figurative language: does the poet use simile, metaphor, or conceit?

• Interesting or unusual syntax: how does the poet employ sentence structure or word order?

          Weave together these examples to develop a claim about how the poem commemorates or memorializes the dead.

April 25: Whitman and Intertextuality

“On the Brooklyn Bridge, I feel deeply moved, as if in the presence of a new divinity or religion,” wrote painter Joseph Stella, who made numerous pictures of the bridge. Critic Lewis Mumford agreed that the bridge was inspirational: “More than any other aspect of New York, the Brooklyn Bridge has been a source of inspiration to the artist . . . all that the age had just cause for pride in: its advances in science, its skill in handling iron, its personal heroism in the face of dangerous industrial processes, its willingness to attempt the untried and the impossible . . . "

By contrast, many contemporaries felt that there was something unnatural about the size and span of the bridge. A great work of engineering is a battle against nature—a battle against a divinely-ordained natural order of things, opponents claimed. Citing the twenty workers killed in the construction of the bridge, some warned against its dangers. Others, like Hart Crane, agreed with Stella and Mumford that the bridge was an inspirational, almost divine achievement. Develop this response by collecting textual evidence and examples from two registers of language: the sacred/religious and the profane/manmade

         LANDSCAPE                                          BRIDGE

         natural                                                   man-made

         divine                                                     engineered

         sacred                                                     profane

         religious                                                 secular 

Identify words, phrases, metaphors, and figures from “The Bridge: A Proem”.  Develop a claim about how the poem represents the Brooklyn Bridge.