Erkkila's aim is to repair the split between the private and the public, the personal and the political and the poet and the history that has governed the analysis and evaluation of Whitman and his work in the past.
Author: Betsy Erkkila
Publisher: Oxford University Press on Demand
ISBN: 9780195113808
Category: Literary Criticism
Page: 360
View: 230
Erkkila's aim is to repair the split between the private and the public, the personal and the political and the poet and the history that has governed the analysis and evaluation of Whitman and his work in the past.
“Wonderful . . . a timely invitation to political and social theorists to take seriously this imaginative man who solicited us to think and sing democracy.” —Bonnie Honig, author of Emergency Politics The works of Walt Whitman have ...
Author: John E. Seery
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 9780813139838
Category: Literary Criticism
Page: 385
View: 910
“Wonderful . . . a timely invitation to political and social theorists to take seriously this imaginative man who solicited us to think and sing democracy.” —Bonnie Honig, author of Emergency Politics The works of Walt Whitman have been described as masculine, feminine, postcolonial, homoerotic, urban, organic, unique, and democratic, yet arguments about the extent to which Whitman could or should be considered a political poet have yet to be fully confronted. Some scholars disregard Whitman’s understanding of democracy, insisting on separating his personal works from his political works. A Political Companion to Walt Whitman is the first full-length exploration of Whitman’s works through the lens of political theory. Editor John E. Seery and a collection of prominent theorists and philosophers uncover the political awareness of Whitman’s poetry and prose, analyzing his faith in the potential of individuals, his call for a revolution in literature and political culture, and his belief in the possibility of combining heroic individualism with democratic justice. A Political Companion to Walt Whitman reaches beyond literature into political theory, revealing the ideology behind Whitman’s call for the emergence of American poets of democracy. “Exceptionally rich and intellectually exciting.” —Choice
Author: M. Jimmie KillingsworthPublish On: 2016-08-01
This book combines literary and historical analysis in a study of sexuality in Walt Whitman's work.
Author: M. Jimmie Killingsworth
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 9781469620633
Category: Literary Criticism
Page: 218
View: 884
This book combines literary and historical analysis in a study of sexuality in Walt Whitman's work. Informed by his "new historicist" understanding of the construction of literary texts, Jimmie Killingsworth examines the progression of Whitman's poetry and prose by considering the textual history of Leaves of Grass and other works. Killingsworth demonstrates that Whitman's "poetry of the body" derives its radical power from the transformation of conventional attitudes toward sexuality, traditional poetics, and conservative politics. The sexual relation, with its promise of unity, love, equality, interpenetration, and productivity for partners, becomes a metaphor for all political and social relationships, including that of poet and reader. The effect of the poems is protopolitical, an altering of consciousness about the body's relation to other bodies, a shifting of the categories of knowledge that foretells political action. Killingsworth traces the interplay in Whitman's poetry between sexual and textual themes that derive from Whitman's political response to the historical turbulence of mid-century America. He describes a subtle shift in Whitman's prose writings on poetics, which turn from a view of poetry in the early 1850s as morally and politically efficacious to a chastened romanticism in the postwar years that frees the poet from responsibility for the world outside his poems. Later editions of Leaves of Grass are marked by the poet's deliberate repression of erotic themes in favor of a depoliticized aestheticism that views art not as a motivator of political and moral action but as an artifact embodying the soul of the genius.
Whitman aligned his poetry with an impartial authority hard to find elsewhere and inclined his work as a poet to speak for the voiceless, for the masses, and for an entire nation.
Author: Mark Maslan
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 9780801876462
Category: Literary Criticism
Page: 240
View: 365
Whitman aligned his poetry with an impartial authority hard to find elsewhere and inclined his work as a poet to speak for the voiceless, for the masses, and for an entire nation.
Highlights of this collection include Erkkila's essays on pairings such as Marx and Whitman, Dickinson and Whitman, and Melville and Whitman.
Author: Betsy Erkkila
Publisher: Iowa Whitman
ISBN: 9781609387228
Category: Literary Criticism
Page: 306
View: 636
The Whitman Revolution brings together a rich collection of Betsy Erkkila's phenomenally influential essays that have been published over the years, along with two powerful new essays. Highlights of this collection include Erkkila's essays on pairings such as Marx and Whitman, Dickinson and Whitman, and Melville and Whitman. Across the volume, she demonstrates an international vision that highlights the place of Leaves of Grass within a global struggle for democracy. The Whitman Revolution is evidence of Erkkila's remarkable ability to lead critical discussions, and marks an exciting event in Whitman studies.
"Wayward Poets" examines the long careers of Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, and Frederick Douglass.
Author: Cody Marrs
Publisher:
ISBN: OCLC:810065009
Category:
Page: 456
View: 615
"Wayward Poets" examines the long careers of Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, and Frederick Douglass. Although these authors are typically associated with certain mid-century texts (i.e., the 1855 Leaves of Grass, Moby-Dick, and The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass), their careers in fact span the arc of the nineteenth century. Across this period, they experiment with a variety of literary forms - from journalism to fiction, public speaking, and literary criticism - but are each drawn, at particular moments and for particular reasons, to poetry. This interest in verse, I argue, has to do with its relationship to time, and with these writers' broader entanglements with temporality as a medium of political experience. Indeed, I bring these figures together, ultimately, to reveal a shared formal project, insofar as they each manipulate poetic structures in order to reimagine the shape and propensities of historical time. Assembled through internal splits, ruptures, and inversions, theirs is a fractured verse, and these formal breaks are directly tied to questions about how, and to what ends, a people can share a polity. Chapters 1 and 2 consider the ways in which temporality acquires political meaning and formal significance in Whitman's poetry. Comparing Leaves of Grass across its many editions, I argue that Whitman's book is structured through a slow but definitive move away from the early verse's now-time in favor of a teleological not-yet. I examine the ways in which this transition from a poetics of immediacy to a poetics of anticipation is connected to Whitman's reading of Hegel; to changes within liberal ideology; and to the postbellum struggles of American workers. I move from Whitman's chants to Melville's poetics in chapters 3 and 4, which look at how Battle-Pieces and Clarel provide an immanent account, or inside narrative, of Melville's transition from novelist to poet. Through the Civil War, Melville comes to perceive history as a process of destructive repetition, and this altered historical sensibility plays a pivotal role in his embrace and use of verse. In both Battle-Pieces and Clarel, he crafts a poetry in which damaged rhymes, broken meters, and twisted syntax attempt to carry the weight of the war as a historical phenomenon and connect the conflict to other episodes of discontinuity. Chapters 5 and 6 recast Frederick Douglass as a political poet. Douglass's orations, wherein most of his poetry arises, create fissures and pockets in time by constructing patterns of temporal relation that divorce listeners and readers from official modes of remembrance. It is in these temporal breaks that Douglass's poetry erupts, often through quoted - and then strategically revised - lines of verse, in order to promote emancipatory forms of feeling and connection. From his repeated use of Byron's The Giaour in his Civil War speeches to his enlistment of William Cowper's The Task to describe slave song in his autobiographies, Douglass invokes verse to activate a unique mode of experience vital to fashioning counter-publics against slavery.
Together the poems in this omnibus volume affirm his creation of a radical new language designed to convey and affirm the poet’s man love.
Author: Walt Whitman
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
ISBN: 9781587299599
Category: Poetry
Page: 167
View: 600
In his 1859 “Live Oak, with Moss,” Walt Whitman’s unpublished sheaf of twelve poems on manly passion, the poet dreams of a city where men who love men can live and love openly. The revised “Live Oak, with Moss” poems became “Calamus,” Whitman’s cluster of poems on “adhesive” and manly love, comradeship, and democracy, in Leaves of Grass. Commemorating both the first publication of the “Calamus” poems and the little-known manuscript of notebook poems out of which the “Calamus” cluster grew, Whitman scholar Betsy Erkkila brings together in a single edition for the first time the “Live Oak, with Moss” poems, the 1860 “Calamus” poems, and the final 1881 “Calamus” poems. In addition to honoring the sesquicentennial of the “Calamus” cluster, she celebrates the ongoing legacy of Whitman’s songs of manly passion, sex, and love. The volume begins with Whitman’s elegantly handwritten manuscript of the “Live Oak, with Moss” poems, printed side by side with a typeset transcription and followed by a facsimile of the 1860 version of the “Calamus” poems. The concluding section reprints the final version of the “Calamus” poems from the 1881 edition of Leaves of Grass. In an afterword, Erkkila discusses the radical nature of these poems in literary, sexual, and social history; the changes Whitman made in the “Live Oak” and “Calamus” poems in the post–Civil War and Reconstruction years; the literary, political, and other contests surrounding the poems; and the constitutive role the poems have played in the emergence of modern heterosexual and homosexual identity in the United States and worldwide. The volume closes with a selected bibliography of works that have contributed to the critical and interpretive struggles around Whitman’s man-loving life. One hundred and fifty years after Whitman’s brave decision to speak publicly about a fully realized democracy, his country is still locked in a struggle over the rights of homosexuals. These public battles have been at the very center of controversies over the life, work, and legacy of Walt Whitman, America’s (and the world’s) major poet of democracy and its major singer of what he called “manly love” in all its moods. Together the poems in this omnibus volume affirm his creation of a radical new language designed to convey and affirm the poet’s man love.
An intelligent introduction to this famous poem, including contextual information, an overview of critical reception and critical extracts, key passages with commentary and annotation, and the poem in its full 'final' 1881 edition.
Author: Walt Whitman
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 0415275431
Category: Poetry
Page: 210
View: 354
An intelligent introduction to this famous poem, including contextual information, an overview of critical reception and critical extracts, key passages with commentary and annotation, and the poem in its full 'final' 1881 edition.
In this first comprehensive study in English of Walt Whitman's reception in the German-speaking countries, Walter Grunzweig posits a very broadly based notion of culture, embodying a wide variety of elements such as high literature, ...
Author: Walter Grünzweig
Publisher:
ISBN: UOM:39015033964704
Category: Poetry
Page: 274
View: 427
In this first comprehensive study in English of Walt Whitman's reception in the German-speaking countries, Walter Grunzweig posits a very broadly based notion of culture, embodying a wide variety of elements such as high literature, politics, youth movements, sexuality, and other subcultures.
Hartley was introduced to Whitman's poetry by New York friends in 1904 , corresponded with Horace Traubel ( Whitman's close friend and ... Betsy Erkkila , Whitman the Political Poet ( New York : Oxford University Press , 1989 ) , 98 .
Author: Donna Cassidy
Publisher: UPNE
ISBN: 1584654465
Category: Art
Page: 395
View: 857
A provocative new reading of the great American avant-garde arist Marsden Hartley's late work.