英美文学选读学习笔记 Walt Whitman

Leaves of Grass has always been considered a monumental work which commands great attention because of its uniquely poetic embodiment of American democratic ideals as written in the founding documents of both. the Revolutionary War in tile United States and the Civil War, and the author of the book is a giant of American letters. This man is Walt Whitman (1819-1892).

Whitman was born in 1819 into a working-class family and grew up in Brooklyn, New York. Son of a carpenter, Whitman left his schooling for good at eleven, and became an office boy. Later on he changed several jobs, one of which was in the printing office of a newspaper, which would be of great help in his literary career. By this early age he had already shown his strong love for literature, reading a great deal on his own, especially the works of Shakespeare and Milton, and developed his potential for the writing career in the future. Before he was 17 years old he had already had his poems printed on a paper, although these early works were not comparable to his later and mature ones. However, Whitman did not become a professional writer directly henceforth, until an opportunity came up which sent him back to New York City, where he formally took up journalism and indulged himself in the excitement of the fast-growing metropolis. It was during these years that Whitman began to show his democratic partisanship. And the ideas governing Whitman's poetry-writing gradually took shape. Feeling compelled to speak up for something new and vital he found in the air of the nation, Whitman turned to the manual work of carpentry around 1851 or 1852, as an experiment to familiarize himself with the reality and essence of the life of the nation. At the same time, he widened his reading to a new scale and made it more systematic. After enriching himself simultaneously by these two very different approaches, Whitman was able to put forward his own set of aesthetic principles. Leaves of Grass was just the exssion of these principles.

Walt Whitman is a poet with a strong sense of mission, having devoted all his life to the creation of the "single" poem, Leaves of Grass . The work has nine editions and the first edition was published in 1855. In this giant work, openness, freedom, and above all, inspanidualism are all that concerned him. His aim was nothing less than to exss some new poetical feelings and to initiate a poetic tradition in which difference should be recognized. The genuine participation of a poet in a common cultural effort was, according to Whitman, to behave as a sume inspanidualist; however, the poet's essential purpose was to identify his ego With the world, and more specifically with the democratic "en-masse" of America, which is established in the opening lines of "Song of Myself." Two people, Whitman believed, could be "twain yet one:" their paths could be different, and yet they could achieve a kind of transcendent contact. Equally, many people could realize a community while remaining inspaniduals. He repeated his philosophy again and again to ensure his fellow citizens a full participation in a series of reciprocal relationships in the course of reading his poetry.

As Whitman saw it, poetry could play a vital part in the process of creating a new nation.  It could enable Americans to celebrate their release from the Old World and the colonial rule. And it could also help them understand their new status and to define themselves in the new world of possibilities. Hence, the abundance of themes in his poetry voices freshness. He shows concern for the whole hardworking people and the burgeoning life of cities. To Whitman, the fast growth of industry and wealth in cities indicated a lively future of the nation, despite the crowded, noisy, and squalid conditions and the slackness in morality. The realization of the inspanidual value also found a tough position in Whitman's poems in a particular way. Most of she poems in Leaves of Grass sing of the "en-masse" and the self as well. In celebrating the self, Whitman gives emphasis to the physical dimension of the self and openly and joyously celebrates sexuality. Pursuit of love and happiness is approved of repeatedly and affectionately in his lines. Sexual love, a rather taboo topic of the time, is displayed candidly as something adorable. If two persons are really in love, "what is to us what the rest do or think?“ The inspanidual person and his desires must be respected. Obviously, Whitman's sexual themes are beyond the physical.

Some of Whitman's poems are politically committed. Before and during the Civil War, Whitman stood firmly on the side of the North and wrote a series of poems incorporating his emotions and feelings during the period, which were gathered as a collection under the  of Drum Taps (1865). Not a lover of violence and bloodshed, Whitman exssed much mourning for the sufferings of the young lives in the battlefield and showed a determination to carry on the fighting dauntlessly until the final victory, as we may find in poems like "Cavalry Crossing a Ford." Another occasion which allowed Whitman to fill his lines with his political emotions was the death of Lincoln. He wrote down a great many poems to air his sorrow, and one of the famous is "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd Mournful as these poems are, a reader can still detect in them a thin trace of ecstasy for the victory of progress.

To dramatize the nature of these new poetical feelings, Whitman employed brand-new means in his poetry, which would first be discerned in his style and language. Whitman's poetic style is marked, first of all, by the use of the poetic "I." Speaking in the voice of "I," Whitman becomes all those people in his poems, and yet still remains "Walt Whitman," hence a discovery of the self in the other with such an identification. Usually, the relationship Whitman is dramatizing is a triangular one: "I" the poet, the subject in the poem, and "you" the reader. In such a manner, Whitman invites us, as we read his lines, to participate in the process of sympathetic identification. Whitman is also radically innovative in terms of the form of his poetry. What he fers for his new subject and new poetic feelings is "free verse," that is, poetry without a fixed beat or regular rhyme scheme. A looser and more open-ended syntactical structure is frequently favored. Lines and sentences of different lengths are left lying side by side just as things are, undisturbed and separate. There are few compound sentences to draw objects and experiences into a system of hierarchy. By means of "free verse," Whitman believed, be has turned the poem into an open field, an area of vital possibility where the reader can allow his own imagination to play. And, as the poet, Whitman can be conversational and casual, in the fluid, expansive, and unstructured style of talking, like one of the ordinary men. However, there is still a strong sense of the poems being rhythmical. Rather than giving a description of those concrete things, Whitman catalogues them. These details in the catalogue are not given as a separate event, but as one phase in the movement of feeling. Different things would mean a different wave of feeling. So when we read his poems, we can feel the rhythm of Whitman's thought and cadences of his feeling. Parallelism and phonetic recurrence at the beginning of the lines also contribute to the musicality of his poems.

Contrary to the rhetoric of traditional poetry, Whitman's is relatively simple and even rather crude. Most of the pictures he painted with words are honest, undistorted images of different aspects of America of the day. Unifying images of the body, the crowd, the sexuality are pervasive in his poems. The particularity about these images is that they are unconventional in the way they break down the social spanision based on religion, gender, class, and race. One of the most often-used methods in Whitman's poems is to make colors and images fleet past the mind's eye of the reader. This kaleidoscope was rather laughed at when it made its first appearance, but its effectiveness was acknowledged before long. Another characteristic in Whitman's language is his strong tendency to use oral English, which has a lot to do with his early career as a newspaperman and the Americans' traditional love for orations and orators. Whitman's vocabulary is amazing. He would use powerful, colorful, as well as rarely-used words, words of foreign origin and sometimes even wrong words.

Though he was attacked in his lifetime for his offensive subject matter of sexuality and for his unconventional style, Walt Whitman has proved a great figure in the literary history of the United States because he embodies a new ideal, a new world and a new life-style, and his influence over the following generations is significant and incredible. Love for Whitman and his poetry is bound to increase to an uncedented height.