Abstract
Walt Whitman cuts so large a figure that readings of his work seem doomed to be fragmentary. What often emerges is a splitting apart of Whitman into contradictory and opposing poses. There is Whitman the solitary singer as against Whitman the political journalist; Whitman the imperial self as against Whitman the poet of democracy; Whitman the Romantic and/or antinomian ego as against Whitman the wound dresser; Whitman the homoerotic radical as against Whitman the defender of the “American Way.”
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Notes
Betsy Erkilla, Whitman the Political Poet (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 238.
See Charles Feidelson, Symbolism and American Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953),
Cf. Stanley Cavell’s discussions of Emerson’s as a yet unattained America, especially in Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990).
Harold Bloom, “Introduction,” Walt Whitman (New York: Chelsea House, 1985), 1–9, p. 2.
Harold Bloom’s poetics, from Figures of Capable Imagination (New York: Seabury Press, 1976)
D.H. Lawrence Studies in Classic American Literature (New York: Viking, 1961), pp. 163, 165;
Quentin Anderson’s The Imperial Self (New York: Knopf, 1971),
Roy Harvey Pearce’s reading of Whitman in The Continuity of America Poetry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961)
David Simpson in Nation and Narration, ed. Homi Bhabha (London: Routledge, 1990)
R.W.B. Lewis discusses it in Trials of the Word (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965), p. 11.
Gay Wilson Allen, The Walt Whitman Handbook (New York: Hendruck’s House, Inc. 1962), p. 378;
C. Carroll Hollis, Language and Style in ‘Leaves of Grass’ (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983).
Also Ezra Greenspan, Walt Whitman and the American Reader (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990);
Kerry Larson, Whitman’s Drama of Consensus (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1988).
Shira Wolosky, “Emerson’s Figural Religion: From Poetics to Politics” Religion and Literature, ed. Paul Kane, 41:1 (Spring 2009), 25–48.
Paul Zweig’s biography, Walt Whitman: The Making of the Poet (New York: Basic Books, 1984)
David Reynold’s Walt Whitman’s America (New York: Knopf, 1995)
Thomas L. Brasher, Whitman as Editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1970), p. 20.
Vivian Pollak, The Erotic Whitman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), pp. 37–55.
David Herbert Donald, Liberty and Union (Boston: Little, Brown, 1978), pp. 53–58.
Clifton Joseph Furness, “Walt Whitman’s Politics,” American Mercury, Vol. 16, 1929, 459–466, p. 2.
Edmund Morgan, Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America (New York: Norton, 1988).
Robert B. Remini, Andrew Jackson and the Course of American Democracy (New York: Harper and Row, 1984), Vol. III, pp. 154–9.
Edward Pessen, Jacksonian America: Society, Personality, Politics (Homewood, IL: Dorsey Press, 1978), pp. 150–159;
Robert Remini, The Jacksonian Era (Chicago: University of Illinois Press), pp. 24–27; 66;
John William Ward, “Jacksonian Democratic Thought: A Natural Charter of Privilege” in Stanley Coben and Norman Ratner, eds., The Development of American Culture (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983), pp. 58–79; pp. 62–66.
George Fredrickson succinctly but usefully discusses it in The Inner Civil War (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1965), p. 66.
Allen Grossman, “The Poetics of Union in Whitman and Lincoln: An Inquiry toward the Relationship of Art and Policy,” The American Renaissance Reconsidered, eds., Donald Pease and Walter Benn Michaels (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985).
Herbert Levine, “Union and Disunion in “Song of Myself,” American Literature, Vol.59, No. 4, December 1987: 570–589.
Larzer Ziff, Literary Democracy (New York: Viking Press, 1981)
Donald Pease discusses the senses of national celebration in Visionary Compacts (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), pp. 115–116.
C. Carroll Hollis, Language and Style in “Leaves of Grass’” (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983);
Ezra Greenspan, Walt Whitman and the American Reader (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990);
Kerry Larson, Whitman’s Drama of Consensus (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988).
Allen Grossman, “The Poetics of Union in Whitman and Lincoln: An Inquiry toward the Relationship of Art and Policy,” American Renaissance Reconsidered, ed. W. Benn Michaels and Donald Pease (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), pp. 183–208;
Herbert Levine, “Union and Disunion in “Song of Myself,” American Literature, Vol. 59, No. 4, December 1987: 570–589.
Sacvan Bercovitch, The Rites of Assent (New York: Routledge, 1993);
Samuel Huntington, The Disharmony of Politics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981).
David Reynolds, “Politics and Poetry: Leaves of Grass and the Social Crisis of the 1850s,” The Cambridge Companion to Walt Whitman (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 66–91:
Sandra Gilbert, “The American Sexual Poetics of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson,” Reconstructing American Literary History, ed. Sacvan Bercovitch (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), pp. 123–155;
Harold Aspiz, who calls “A Woman Waits for Me” a product of “arrogant male chauvinism” (Walt Whitman and the Body Beautiful [Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980]), p. 140.
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© 2010 Shira Wolosky
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Wolosky, S. (2010). Walt Whitman’s Republic of Letters. In: Poetry and Public Discourse in Nineteenth-Century America. Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230113008_13
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