Final Project - Youtube Project Revision (Song)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zckNBa2fLYo&feature=youtube

(copy/paste the link, the embed option is failing)

My Final Project

The heirs of Whitman project made sense because so much of Whitman’s poetry is configured as a dialogue with future generations. When he’s effusing, asking us to find him under our boot-soles he is speaking to contemporary and future residents of his spaces. Guthrie took up Walt's message during a national communications shift from readership to more visual/auditory forms.  Walt and Guthrie both believed their art should be social, democratic, and popular and Guthrie’s context provided him a new mode to appropriate Walt’s message to make it truly popular.

Walt said in a conversation with future generations: “you justify me.” I feel the format I chose justifies Whitman in several ways. His message is encoded in a pop format which is easily digestible yet contains words of wisdom. It’s an egalitarian, democratic mode that has appeal beyond class lines. Moreover, the form itself implies Walt’s message, specifically his panoramic scope and insistence that there’s no thing too small that fails to possess a fair measure of dignity and divinity, e.g. various fundamental American pop tropes. Unusual for a pop song, these parts don’t repeat; rather, they survey what’s available in a pop context, sampling among options just as Whitman surveys scenes and occupations, lingering for a little while and then moving on. This effort hopefully constitutes an authentic engagement with Whitman and the American Tradition by appropriating existing instruments to serve the ends of each of them. 

Project Development

I'm unsatisfied with my effort for the Youtube assignment and aim to revisit it in hope of producing a worthwhile project. My aim is to embody a selection of Whitman's verses in melody and form and to present it as a short, traditional song. This, I think, goes hand in hand with the democratic import of his project and will enable his words to move beyond the page and become actual "vibrations" that float through the air.

Tweet of the Week: Peter Doyle

Peter Doyle was a romantic companion of Whitman for an extended period of their lives. They met in D.C. when Walt was in his forties and Peter was in his early twenties at his work of conducting a street car, in which Walt was the sole occupant. This selection of a mate embodies Whitman's preference to move among the “uneducated” as Doyle was a simple, ordinary man; also embodied is Whitman's internal contradictions as Doyle, an Irish immigrant, fought on the confederate side of the war whose function was to dissolve the Union, the preservation of which Walt had been pining. Doyle is thought to have some effect on the arrangement of the Calamus poems which extol manly love. Doyle provided a biographer of Walt insights into Walt's romance and sexuality by allowing him to publish love letters from Walt to himself and by agreeing to an interview for the biography.  

Specimen Days: My Passion For Ferries

Whitman equates commuting with poetry in this entry. He thinks of his daily commute as a living poem, one teeming with a plurality of captivating sights for him: schooners, crashing waves and “oceanic currents,” the “tides of humanity” along with those of the water.  Moreover, this stuff is actually the subject of much of his poetry, and we are able to trace his subsequent poetic renderings of this ordinary event to its incipient moments. This entry illustrates Whitman’s tendency to find beauty in the common and mundane. 

Tweet of the Week: Martin Tupper, Proverbial Wisdom

Martin Tupper, an English didactic writer popular in America due to copyright/ circulation circumstances and efforts to reconcile the two countries, had many ideological differences with Walt Whitman, especially regarding aristocracy/social orders and conservatism. However, Tupper’s Proverbial Philosophy, a text which Whitman owned, highlighted and may have even printed, employed the free verse form. It was not referred to as poetry by the author and was instead called “rhythmics.” Whitman appropriated this form, seeing it as the formal equivalent of his democratic philosophy. Some of Tupper’s poetry in standard form may have influenced Whitman, as Tupper’s “Are you a Great Reader?” is evocative of Whitman’s “Have you practis’d so long to learn to read?” Tupper uses some very Whitman-ian language, such as “I am untamed, a spirit free and fleet.” He mentions a “dull, grazing ox” which Whitman inverts with “Oxen that rattle the yoke and chain…what is it that you express in your eyes? It seems to me more than all the print I have read in my life.” Apparently, Whitman’s lines sometimes intersect with Tupper’s in a dialogue that criticizes their “poetic commonplaces.” Early reviewers in England noticed and wrote about this connection.  

Whitman and Mass Culture

A quotations of Whitman was cited in a section of Oprah Winfrey’s O magazine in 2004 whose intention was to enhance their audience’s sense of self worth in connection with their bodies.  The quote is “If anything is sacred, the human body is sacred.” Whitman is an especially useful writer to invoke for this purpose, as he always finds the other beautiful and connects them to himself/ his own sense of self worth.

Another popular culture reference to Whitman occurred in an episode of Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman entitled “The Body Electric.” Whitman is dramatized in this episode, as he travels to Colorado Springs where he is welcomed as a poet but it’s understood that he “prefers the company of men.” Dr. Quinn worries that her adopted son, who has been employed to interview Whitman alone for the town’s newspaper, will find himself in a sexual quagmire. Her fears are eventually dissipated, but Whitman apparently disturbed by her intolerance. This adaptation is useful because it helps us conceptualize contemporary perspectives on Whitman and his gay sexuality.

Van Morrison has a track called “Rave On, John Donne” in which he cites Whitman among other writers: Donne, Yeats, Omar Khayam, and Kahlil Gibran. He urges them to “rave on” through “industrial, atomic, nuclear” periods and visualizes Whitman “nose down in the wet grass,” and as someone who “fills the senses on nature’s bright green shady path.” This corroborates the popular conception of Whitman as a nature poet and demonstrates that respect for nature is something that extends across generational lines and remains consistently relevant, contrasted against the technological/machine industry of our and previous times against which these writers must “rave.” 

Contemporary Views on Whitman

This entry focuses on three critical and contemporary perspectives of Whitman and help to illustrate Whitman’s perception among his contemporaries.

[Whitman, Walt]. "An English and an American Poet." American Phrenological Journal 22.4 (October 1855): 90-1.

For the reviewer, great poets embody a national identity by their poetry, and that it’s informed by the actions of his or her country from the past, and the conglomeration of uniquely country-specific experiences. Interestingly, he thinks of Whitman’s identity and poetics in terms of a long, sprawling list, and he is adapting Whitman’s prose/poetry style to suit the expansive subject. In a way, he is suggesting that Whitman himself is too large to encompass normal prose, and he adjusts his form fittingly. He sees Whitman as a break from tradition, from the practice of ornamentation and “ready-made models,” whose writing eschews these in order to focus on “the very meanings of the works of nature and compete with them.” He ascribes to Walt, as a “new poet,” the ability to pack within his poem a pervasive, eternal, “fearless,” and provocative element that if heeded, allows the reader to “tread the half invisible road where the poet is standing fearlessly before.” If what Walt says is true, poetry has a “subtler range” than large actions and events as exemplified in Homer and Shakespeare.

The same review mentions Tennyson and that in spite of all his “ennui and aristocracy,” he is still a real poet. Yet, the contrast between the two poets is startling. The reviewer intimates that the moment of publication of LoG signifies a break from tradition, and he feels on the cusp of a liminal space. He, however, is not certain whether history will judge Whitman’s “haughty” efforts as the “most lamentable of failures or the most glorious of triumphs.”

[Griswold, Rufus W.]. "[Review of Leaves of Grass (1855)]." The Criterion 1 (10 November 1855): 24.

Rufus Griswold unleashes a bitter diatribe against Whitman and his poetics. He states that LoG adheres to the principles of “metempsychosis,” which is apt for him since he declares that only a man could have written it if he were in possession of the soul of a donkey. Griswold declares that there is no “wit” in the poem, so he probably conceives of poetry in the Augustan manner, as a highly wrought, traditionally/classically-inspired form that utilizes rhetorical devices to illuminate some human concept/essential truth. This highly-wrought form, in combination with the Latin inscription with which ends the review, suggests he doesn’t think poetry should be for the common people. He claims that these dissidents are finding a way into the Academy and “leaving a foul odor.” There is no place for new forms; revising or updating them is “licentious.”

Much of the language for the reviewer uses is excessively passionate: vile, shameful, abhor, abuse, etc. A lot of the things we neutrally or positively associate with Whitman cause problems for Griswold: his “vagrant wildness”; “beastly sensuality.” This initial problem is strange considering how frequently questing/vagrancy has appeared as a trope for classic/traditional poetry. To the other charge, Whitman would not think beastly pejorative, as he seeks to learn from the animals. He thinks Whitman, and the type of person that he represents, ill for “having no secrets, no disguises,” employing the Renaissance courtier aesthetic that poetry should disguise our urges; Whitman’s indulgences “rot the healthy core of social virtues.” For Grisworld, Whitman’s speech should be suppressed as it is tantamount to crime, which increases when the “exposure of their vileness is attended with too great indelicacy.”

In this essay, Griswold obsesses on single points, instead of seeing the big picture. He is disgusted with an unconventional method of living, and so much so, that he attacks that way of life, and we are supposed to take that over anything by way of actual criticism. In fact, not one word of LoG is even mentioned in this ostensible review. The review ends with: Peccatum illud horribile, inter Christianos nos nominandum”; that horrible crime not to be named among the Christians. I believe this is a reference to sodomy, and a probable basis to his dislike of Whitman.

[Anonymous]. "[Review of Leaves of Grass (1855)]." The Merchant's Magazine and Commercial Review 34 (May 1856): 654.

The reviewer is unaware of how to proceed in his article; there isn’t even an author’s name attached to LoG.  Structurally, the reviewer doesn’t quite know where to start, as the poem doesn’t contain any formal meter, but instead is an amalgamation of “common-place remarks, aphorisms, and opinions.” This new method of composition develops the author’s “undisciplined power” and seems to convey emotional resonance, as the reviewer is confounded by and impressed with the “perfect pictures” of the prose-poems. The review is short because the reviewer does not yet possess sufficient poetic vocabulary to comment upon the work. He is confounded by the “kaleidoscopic, grotesque” shifting of images and changes, and informs us that possibly the author only can explain what these mean, as it is indeed a “curiosity of literature.” He ends by stating that the author, who he presumes is the fellow depicted on the frontispiece, is a “remarkable blade” among the leaves of grass.

He describes the book as “singular”—a term which I’ve noted several times so far in brief perusals of other reviews. This iteration confirms our suspicion of Whitman’s radical departure from poetic norms of his time.

Specimen Days-A Discovery of Old Age

This entry is about patience. It reminds me of one of Whitman's maxims about seeing the poetry in neglected objects. He wonders where “the best is always cumulative.” Certain things (art, people, places), he notes, won't always at first appear special, but through time their brilliance is revealed. It may take years, but this is the way the “best” has been revealed to Whitman, either through “stealth” or a “sudden bursting forth.” He decries people who only want things “for the nonce.”

Frances Wright

Frances Wright was Scotland-born, and eventual U.S. Citizen, and noted for her involvement in feminist and abolitionist issues. Regarding slavery she has said, of the purported humanity of Virginian slave holders, that it is “better to break the chains than to gild them”; of gender, she has said that “the mind has no sex but what habit and education give it.” She is well known for her Independence Day speech, which is considered by some to have been the “first major public address by a woman” in the United States. She influenced many important people, such as “Thomas Jefferson, Mary Shelley, and Walt Whitman. Walt used to frequent anti-slavery halls, met her, and in retrospect called her “one of the best (characters) in history.” Walt loved to listen to her weekly talk of broad reforms in New York. He calls her “one of the sweetest of sweet memories,” and was “enthralled” by her “very appearance.” He also said she was “never satisfied unless she was doing good.” We see the influence in Whitman's work of civil reform, of slaves and women as equal to all and constitutive of a great American whole. Frances Wright's tombstone reads “I have wedded the cause of human improvement, staked on it my fortune, my reputation and my life.”

Song For Occupations

Song for Occupations (1855)

Evident in this section is an extension of the dialogic mode/relationship between reader/writer. They are still established as equals. He eroticizes distance and touch, and longs for levels of contact. He shuns “cylinders”— evocative of a manmade object, cold, dividing. I think the frequent ellipses used are suggestive of his democratic method, and are sort of equivalent to the conjunction “and.” They don’t subordinate sections of the sentence; they instead give equal weight to separate parts (I think we’ve discussed this…).  This sprawling form perhaps suggests authentic description.

He offers paradoxes (“usual terms…never the usual terms”) and rhetorical questions in a probable effort to obtain some cosmic truth. Also, he repeats grammatical forms (“If you…”; “Is it you…”), positing the similarities and nearness he shares with the reader. The ordinary is rendered “remarkable, eternal”; it is also absolute, and definitive.

The poem is partly concerned with immutable connections between reader and writer, but this is extended to all persons. In a country grappling with racial/ political divisions, unity of self and other is a frequent concern, and probably requisite for an authentic democracy the likes of which Whitman espouses. 

There is a civil rights emphasis on granting subjectivity to foreigners and women.

So many small, different scenes and aspects of life are presented, perhaps to show the variety and beauty of our possible existences that, at an initial glance, seem mundane. Whitman says to not think less of yourself if you are not a scholar, or to feel unwise if you have no education/training, but ushers in these images to give them poetic space and beauty; to let people know their lives are the stuff of poetry.

1856 brings a new title: Poem of The Daily Work of The Workmen and Workwomen of These States.  This suggests more specificity and resonance; it includes the female's in general hitherto-excluded voice) Ellipses have been replaced with commas and dashes. Cleaner, neater typographical presentation is presented (Walt makes use of indentations.).  The text is possibly more readable, and certainly less sprawling.

He alters some of the language, but doesn't change meaning greatly. Interestingly, he adds this self-reflexive moment to the list of jobs and job-utensils:

the compositor's stick and rule, type-setting, making up the forms, all the work of newspaper counters, folders, carriers, news-men

1860 brought another revised title to this section: “Chants Democratic (3).” Perhaps Whitman, in doing this process of manuscript revision, cultivated an appreciation for and linked working with a democratic ideal. Whitman, the loafer, also sees the necessity of all the parts functioning to produce a coherent system; I believe this is the reason for his enumerations.  

In 1871, Whitman retitled the poem “Carol of Occupations.” He explains the title, extending and plainly stating his theme: “In the labor of engines and trades, and the labor of fields, I find the developments, and find the eternal meanings.”It ends without that strange object-veneration part (it has been pushed back and modulated), and instead we see something closer to a restating of his thesis, the divinity of the working men. We also see him employ semi-colons here. This poem is situated in about the middle of LoG. Carol is an evocative word for the title because it often has a religious resonance, and Whitman is singing here of the divinity of the common man.

In 1881, the title “A Song for Occupations” was restored. It is a slightly more condensed version, and ends in the manner of previous editions (excluding '71). I also did not notice any semi-colons. Instead of “come closer,” it starts with “A song for occupations!” Perhaps this is done for thematic organization, as he initially states his intention and then develops and extends it. Pushing closer and longing for contact, as it initially began, suggests a poem that will continue to be concerned with that.

In the final edition, the title is preserved, and it appears earlier in LoG. The ending is revised and follows the 1881 edition, not the 1871. The last couple of editions are sprawling in size, much like his intial prose; our poem is just one song among the many songs, as in his frequent lists and his iterations that one thing is as good as any other, and just as worthy of your time.  We can also think of this as having an America-type expanse; thinking of its humble beginnings to the sprawling, effulgent poem that eventually surrounded "A Song for Occupation" and how it might mirror population expanse, diversity, and resilience beyond the war. 

Bowery b'hoy

This is a term used to denote a subset of the working class in Lower Manhattan (1840s-60s?) . The term is modeled after the Irish pronunciation of "boy." B'hoys dressed in an elaborate style (e.g. stovepipe hat, trousers tucked into boots, gaudy neckcloth) and employed swagger and slang, of which Whitman was enamored, and it had some influence in the composition of "Song of Myself." They attended the same theatre, and their influence on his writing demonstrates his hybrid artistic technique of mixing the high and low.

Thoughts on Whitman's process of revision

A striking difference from the initial 1855 composition, "Song of Myself" has been recast as "Walt Whitman." Looking at the different editions, the most widespread of Whitman's emendations seem to be typographical/organizational in nature, and demonstrate his interest/experience in that subject and printing. By the 1867 version nearly all of the words carrying the same form as "packed " and "helped" have been modified to "packt" and "help'd." Throughout the poem this is evident. The ellipsis of the 1855 version have been replaced by the 1860 version with dashes and commas. In the 1867 version, many of the commas (especially in lists) and exclamation points have become semi-colons. These changes, in addition to the exclusion of occasional extraneous passages, allow the poem to breathe a bit more since they can cut down on overall line length. He also, in the 1867 version, omits certain things: passages about particularly himself ("I am the poet;" "I step up"; "I eat and drink" ; "I receive you") ;  racially-specific language ("darkey"; passages about the "savage") ; and overtly eroticized language ( "thruster holding me tight" ; "the climax of my love-grip"). I think Whitman made these changes because of their ability to obscure the general message and the overall import of the poem. Often passages of conflict, especially the prisoners of war section, have been reduced or excised, suggesting the influence of the war on his writing. Some redundancies in place names have been eliminated. Fat and excess have generally been trimmed. However, the reason for many of the changes eluded me, and I will probably return to add something substantive to this post. It's tough for me to say how all the revisions alter the constitutional and thematic import of the poem as I think their effect on the poem has been generally minor.

Walt Whitman and Ariel Pink

Specimen Days: Abraham Lincoln

In this entry, Whitman considers his close proximity to president Lincoln, someone by whom he was apparently fascinated. He describes the route by which he sometimes catches glimpses of he and his wife during their daily sojourns. His precise detail of certain points and sensitive representation of Lincoln's character imply a minor obsession. This entry is interesting because Whitman meditates on greatness instead of common, rustic images. However, Lincoln's greatness is enhanced to Whitman because of the simplicity of he and his wife's bearing: he respects Lincoln's reluctance to engage in the perfume of haughty civilization, instead resembling the “commonest man” in attire, and, during their occasional evening pleasure-strolls, notes the simple “equipage” of their barouche. He forgives Lincoln for an ostensible extravagance, noting that the extensive cavalry that attend upon him is “against his personal wish.”

Specimen Days: A Sun-Bath -- Nakedness

This entry is a tract on the purity of nakedness and solitude in nature. Whitman attacks our “manners,” inverting the conventional idea of clothes-nudity, claiming that clothes make us indecent, and he elevates the potential of nudity in nature as a means of self-renewal (he is free of “prostration, pain.”). It is also a religious, transcendental experience for Whitman, as heaven “filters nutriment and peace” to him. He engages in a typical trope of his as he imagines himself merging with nature.

Instead of seeing himself as a communal figure, he emphasizes seclusion within nature in this entry, and invites his readers to the same thing, attributing his daily excursions into Nature to his enhanced health (and knowledge of “purity, art, faith,” etc.). He loves the touch of water against his whole body (“never before did I get so close to Nature.”).The language he employs is more poetic than in other entries, as he is experiencing a swelling of emotion.

Whitman and His Peers

“The Village Blacksmith”

Content/Thematic concerns: We see, as in Whitman, the sympathetic depiction of the working man as a fit subject for poetry. “He owes not any man” evokes Wilt's sensibilities of freedom. The subject of the poem also experiences the divine, as he possibly experiences a transcendental moment at church.

Formal characteristics: the form of this poem is in a regular prosody (with slight variations) form, the ballad, with alternating lines of iambic tetrameter and trimeter. This is repeated 3 times per stanza and the rhyme scheme is abcbdb. Obviously this poem is more highly-wrought and metrically regular than what we've read from Whitman. However, many of Whitman's concerns have been historically subjects deployed in the ballad form.

Oakes-Smith (An Incident); The natural theme evokes Whitman; the speaker of the poem is content to grant the eagle alone its sublime views of nature, preferring instead to remain aground with the rest of humanity and wingless creatures. This poem is much more pedantic than Whitman, and the argument of the poem is not as easily divined as in Whitman's work, especially in lines 3-5. Another highly-wrought poem, a Shakespearean sonnet. Stylistically, this is foreign to the prosody/form of Whitman.

Lynch (An Imitation); This poem is in iambic trimeter, and evokes the English Romantic poets: precise meter; poet as visionary experiencing something sublime (the sublimity of nature for example; large mountains, a tempest), a dream-vision; appropriating myth, irrational, emotive. Unlike Whitman, this poem has a linear narrative sequence, and contains much more action. There is something of a refrain of “Excelsior,” yet in lines of Whitman we've read so far, the refrains are generally thematic and less explicit. The end of the poem alludes to a synthesis of you-and-i, a recurring trope in Whitman.  

Tweet of the Week. Re: Barnum

P.T. Barnum and Walt Whitman are two distinct markers of American popular culture, and hardly similar: Whitman believes in essential human passions, the transcendental capabilities of humanity, the divine, the low as sublime, the possibility of a truly democratic republic, the power of nature, the transformative potential of the common, and human as wanderer; and Barnum is interested in tricking people, gaining capital from them, the extraordinary, and is indifferent to nature. He has studied human instinct toward capitalist ends; Whitman to ennoble the common man.

Interestingly though, their paths intersect: Barnum's autobiography (descibed as “sociopathic”) was published the same year as Leaves of Grass; when Whitman claimed to have exchanged glances with Lincoln in a deeply inspiring moment for him, it occurred within a busy crowd in front of Barnum's American Museum. Whitman describes the building in “Song of the Exposition” from Leaves of Grass:

"In large calm halls, a stately Museum shall teach you the infinite lessons of minerals,
In another, woods, plants, vegetation shall be illustrated -- in another animals, animal life and development."

Whitman also interviewed Barnum in 1846 for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. For additional information, consult theses sources:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/whitman/map/8.html

http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/reconsiderations/hatching-monsters.php?page=all

Motif Discussion

In this entry I'll be writing about the motif of democratic vision as it appears in “Song of Myself.” This is a broad motif, so I'll be selecting specific examples (since so many images in the poem work toward this effect, and enumerating all of them would be unnecessary) that illustrate the broader motif.

“I CELEBRATE myself, and sing myself, 
And what I assume you shall assume, 
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. “ ;

“I loafe and invite my soul...Nature without check with original energy.”

These initial remarks serve to usher in his vision; the poem will be concerned with the self as it contributes to the other, and to the community, small and large (national identity). The trope of democratic vision is exemplified in the inaugural remarks, as the first utterance in the poem of his repeated insistence that I=you. Whitman sets out to dissolve this apparent duality, proposing a unified voice of America, calling for the cessation of division.

His democratic vision of a unified voice for America can be contrasted against the antiquated Augustan ideal that metered poetry is the highest form of art/writing; yet to Walt, certain conventions of poetry, namely a stiff , academic prosody/meter, may have an alienating effect, especially if the meter is more complicated than a ballad. He adjusts, democratizes his poetic form for his vision and audience.

“I am the poet of the woman the same as the man, 
And I say it is as great to be a woman as to be a man, 
And I say there is nothing greater than the mother of men. “

Also, to Walt, bard is equal to slave; no longer does the poet enjoy the most elevated status of a society, but the same status as everyone else. Throughout “Song of Myself,” he offers sympathetic perspectives on marginalized voices, that contextually are experiencing democracy withheld. He harbors slaves at the risk of sedition, yearns for their inclusion into the American democratic tradition. In fact, Walt often mentions slaves consecutively with women, often transposing woman to “mother.” He is fascinated by their reproductive potential, their “fit(ness) for conception.” He dislikes “neuters and geldings.” They are, as mothers, responsible for the diversity Whitman cherishes, responsible for the birth of democracy. For Whitman, what is better than being the mother to all men? He understands the need for greater female inclusion in our American scheme, to which the 29^th bather parable alludes.

"The pure contralto sings in the organ loft

The carpenter dresses his plank, the tongue of his foreplane
whistles its wild ascending lisp... 

And these tend inward to me, and I tend outward to them,
And such as it is to be of these more or less I am,
And of these one and all I weave the song of myself."

Wilt also democratizes the American experiences with his lists of jobs and scenes. He lends these rich portraits of American life a democratic voice; since each scene is as important and necessary as any other and the next, they are all given equal space. These iterations always confirm his democratic ideology.

This democratic motif, pervasive throughout the poem, suggests a Romantic influence. Romantic interests are evident in exalting low to high (although, for Whitman, everything is high), dialects, and love of nature. He employs these to sustain and enhance his vision of a greater America. Walt's democratic vision leads to, I think, fallacious relativism (if everyone is right, how can we improve? Especially morally.) but is also contextually necessary as Whitman employs it poetically to enact his vision of a truly democratic America.

“I depart as air, I shake my white locks at the runaway sun...

Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,
Missing me one place search another,
I stop somewhere waiting for you.”

The poem ends with Whitman dissolving into and becoming nature, suggesting a greater import for equality than previously imagined; men are equal to not only each other, but also to nature. The poem ends cryptically, on what feels like an unfinished tone (suggesting another departure from the Augustans, who believed poetry should be highly wrought): work remains that must be fulfilled in additional, subsequent steps by the reader, and involve adjustments and revisions of a national consciousness, away from division and unnecessary dispute. This is the ultimate democratic move; what we use the poem for is as equal as Walt's efforts creating it. The creator engages his audience with a task equal to his.

(Other occurrences of thematically linked excerpts:

“I will not have a single person slighted or left away, 
The kept-woman, sponger, thief, are hereby invited, 
The heavy-lipp'd slave is invited, the venerealee is invited; 
There shall be no difference between them and the rest;”

“Through me many long dumb voices,
Voices of the interminable generations of prisoners and slave;”

“ I am the hounded slave, I wince at the bite of the dogs;”

“The friendly and flowing savage, who is he?...

Wherever he goes men and women accept and desire him;”

“I hear bravuras of birds, bustle of growing wheat, gossip of flames,

clack of sticks cooking my meals …

It shakes mad-sweet pangs through my belly and breast.” 

The Wilmot Proviso

The Wilmot Proviso, initiated in 1846 by Congressman David Wilmot, called for the end of slavery in states acquired from Mexico during and subsequent to the Mexico-American war. Whitman supported the proviso, though it eventually failed in the Senate, and is now historically regarded as one of the events leading to the Civil War. This proviso reflected enhanced division between the North and South regarding slavery. 

I have mixed thoughts about Whitman and racism from “Song of Myself.” I can’t seem to decipher his position on it. For the time, it probably seemed provocative and possibly seditious for him to harbor a runway slave, yet, when he lists among the jobs and activities of persons in Canto 16, he mentions “the quadroon girl is sold at the auction-stand” as just one activity among others without explicitly denouncing it. If his interest is social reform, he should probably say something by way of resistance. I think this is an example of Whitman’s encoded inconsistencies, his contradictions that led him to famously exclaim: “Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself (I am large, I contain multitudes.).” 

Maybe, but to me Whitman is the ultimate relativist, and cannot provide a moral compass by which we may guide our actions.  He is as “wicked” as “righteous;” he simply belongs to every position to which one can ascribe. He loves nature, but has no qualms with killing animals for sport. He is a loafer, but also a capitalist. For what other reason might one work hard and compile one’s poems? They are no longer “thoughts,” but thereby become commodities. 

Specimen Days: Grow—Health—Work

This diary entry of Whitman is fascinating because, speaking of himself as a young boy, we witness many of the traits that will develop into his subsequent identity.  It anticipates his penchant for travel and the outdoors. Perhaps, the constant movement of his formative years bred this comfort, providing the initial experiences for what he would eventually term in “Song of Myself,” “his place late at night in the crow’s nest.” For comfort, he would eventually look both “on” and “outside of pavement or land.”

His “omnivorous” reading habit, cultivated from youth, also proved useful, in that it gave him the requisite tools to articulate his philosophy. Even though his thought and prescriptions are based in the experiential, visceral, and communal, (and decidedly populist/non-intellectual) he would not be able to articulate as eloquently without a history of study. He, in time, respects this learning, but subordinates it to essentially human, visceral, touch-specific experiences: “Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems? Stop this day and night with me, and you shall possess the origins of all poems…”

Whitman also worked odd jobs (compositor, teacher in various counties) at a young age, which may have contributed to his later attitude of respect toward the working individual, and his perception of himself as embedded within the working community. In “Song of Myself” he declares, after listing a series of jobs, “and of these one and all I weave the song of myself.”

Collectively, this diary entry underscores and possibly provides the source for dynamic, essential aspects of Whitman’s character.  

Part 17 of “Song of Myself ,“ and elements of the surrounding cantos, exemplify, I think, Whitman’s approach to life, his worldview. Whitman sees himself defined by community and vice-versa.

Whitman sees the world or aspects thereof as composed of binaries that sometimes seem to somehow unify, or have potential to unify.  They are distinct yet unified. He sees himself carrying on an intellectual tradition just by recording “his thoughts,” since they are all the thoughts that every man has ever thought; and moreover, they belong to you as much as to him, since they are your thoughts as much as his.

The apparent contradictions of binaries never give Walt anxiety; rather, they give him comfort as the constitutive fabric of his conceptual cosmos.

Sort of how a quilt is composed of different patches, but each pieces has an essential quality of quilt-ness simply by dint of its inclusion, which reminds one of one’s status as an American-as divergent parts contributing to a national identity-, since Walt is an American to the utmost degree.  After enumerating a lengthy grouping of persons/workers and descriptions of their positions, he integrates himself among this vocational list; he is all jobs, or at least “more or less” has components of them, and they --Walt, the jobs, and the people who perform them-- tend toward each other.

Communally, in Whitman’s perspective, we are granted meaning by granting meaning: our part in the/as the whole justifies not only ourselves, but also the community at large.

“…in all people I see myself, none more and not a barley-corn less.”