Matthew Mutter
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- September 2008
- ISBN:
- 9780195342536
- eISBN:
- 9780199867042
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195342536.003.0004
- Subject:
- Religion, Religion and Society
This chapter discusses Ralph Waldo Emerson's prophetic announcement of both the decay of orthodox, institutional religion and the ascent of a solitary spirituality founded upon the intuition of the ...
More
This chapter discusses Ralph Waldo Emerson's prophetic announcement of both the decay of orthodox, institutional religion and the ascent of a solitary spirituality founded upon the intuition of the “moral sentiment.” Matthew Mutter argues that this dual expectation is made possible by a radicalization of the Puritan project of integrating the sacred and the secular. This radicalization ultimately placed the burden of sacred order on the vision of the perceiving individual, which in turn diminished the significance of outward social and political arrangements. Attention is given to Emerson's misapprehension of the actual trends in nineteenth‐century American religious life, to the differences between Emerson's prophetic stance and those of Whitman, Thoreau, Melville and Lincoln, and to the effects of the Civil War on Emerson's thought and American public religion in general. The conclusion looks at Emerson's legacy in American religious history.Less
This chapter discusses Ralph Waldo Emerson's prophetic announcement of both the decay of orthodox, institutional religion and the ascent of a solitary spirituality founded upon the intuition of the “moral sentiment.” Matthew Mutter argues that this dual expectation is made possible by a radicalization of the Puritan project of integrating the sacred and the secular. This radicalization ultimately placed the burden of sacred order on the vision of the perceiving individual, which in turn diminished the significance of outward social and political arrangements. Attention is given to Emerson's misapprehension of the actual trends in nineteenth‐century American religious life, to the differences between Emerson's prophetic stance and those of Whitman, Thoreau, Melville and Lincoln, and to the effects of the Civil War on Emerson's thought and American public religion in general. The conclusion looks at Emerson's legacy in American religious history.
David‐Antoine Williams
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- May 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780199583546
- eISBN:
- 9780191595295
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199583546.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
This chapter investigates Geoffrey Hill's abiding concern with the equation of semantic and ethical recognition, his experience of language as an arena in which our ethical being is both menaced and ...
More
This chapter investigates Geoffrey Hill's abiding concern with the equation of semantic and ethical recognition, his experience of language as an arena in which our ethical being is both menaced and succoured, though perhaps not secured. Hill's cogitations on this problem accompany a career‐long exploration of the question of intrinsic value, a concept which he admits has gone out of fashion but which he nonetheless attempts to rescue for his theory of language. Hill's ethics of responsibility requires that literature memorialize and memorize the dead, but his scepticism about the ability of language to do justice to its subjects forces him into a paradoxical contemplation of silence as the only responsible speech. Even so, the question of value has increasingly been posed by Hill in its public dimension, as embodying the union of civic (including political), theological (including metaphysical), and grammatical (including etymological) thought. One way Hill thinks the writer can realize intrinsic value is in the assiduous plying of words, the working in poetry of their etymology, grammar, and syntax into a high semantic pitch; this chapter pays special attention to the words that have meant the most to Hill: ‘value’, ‘atonement’, ‘endurance’, ‘patience’, ‘attention’, ‘justice’, ‘grace’, ‘pitch’, ‘common’, and ‘alienation’.Less
This chapter investigates Geoffrey Hill's abiding concern with the equation of semantic and ethical recognition, his experience of language as an arena in which our ethical being is both menaced and succoured, though perhaps not secured. Hill's cogitations on this problem accompany a career‐long exploration of the question of intrinsic value, a concept which he admits has gone out of fashion but which he nonetheless attempts to rescue for his theory of language. Hill's ethics of responsibility requires that literature memorialize and memorize the dead, but his scepticism about the ability of language to do justice to its subjects forces him into a paradoxical contemplation of silence as the only responsible speech. Even so, the question of value has increasingly been posed by Hill in its public dimension, as embodying the union of civic (including political), theological (including metaphysical), and grammatical (including etymological) thought. One way Hill thinks the writer can realize intrinsic value is in the assiduous plying of words, the working in poetry of their etymology, grammar, and syntax into a high semantic pitch; this chapter pays special attention to the words that have meant the most to Hill: ‘value’, ‘atonement’, ‘endurance’, ‘patience’, ‘attention’, ‘justice’, ‘grace’, ‘pitch’, ‘common’, and ‘alienation’.
Josephine Nock-Hee Park
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- May 2008
- ISBN:
- 9780195332735
- eISBN:
- 9780199868148
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195332735.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry, American, 20th Century Literature
The introduction reads figures of transpacific alliance in the Orientalist verse of Walt Whitman and Ernest Fenollosa. Their grand visions of a union between East and West installed a poetics of ...
More
The introduction reads figures of transpacific alliance in the Orientalist verse of Walt Whitman and Ernest Fenollosa. Their grand visions of a union between East and West installed a poetics of transpacific accord and fueled modernist innovation. Against this backdrop, the introduction considers the rise of Asian America and sketches a genealogy of theorizing Asian American literature which grapples with a legacy of resistance to an Orientalist past.Less
The introduction reads figures of transpacific alliance in the Orientalist verse of Walt Whitman and Ernest Fenollosa. Their grand visions of a union between East and West installed a poetics of transpacific accord and fueled modernist innovation. Against this backdrop, the introduction considers the rise of Asian America and sketches a genealogy of theorizing Asian American literature which grapples with a legacy of resistance to an Orientalist past.
A. P. David
- Published in print:
- 2006
- Published Online:
- September 2007
- ISBN:
- 9780199292400
- eISBN:
- 9780191711855
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199292400.003.0006
- Subject:
- Classical Studies, Poetry and Poets: Classical, Early, and Medieval
This chapter considers the impact on Homeric art, thought, and narratology of an origin in the dance of the Muses, in ‘the intellectualization of a corporeally bound rhythm’. On the concept of ...
More
This chapter considers the impact on Homeric art, thought, and narratology of an origin in the dance of the Muses, in ‘the intellectualization of a corporeally bound rhythm’. On the concept of ‘rhapsody’, it takes issue with Nagy’s inferences about composition and writing, citing images of art within the Homeric poems and the premise of a written original assumed by ‘rhapsody’ in other historical manifestations. Odysseus’ coinage, μυθολογεύειν, comprising μυθέεσθαι, ‘disclosing’, and καταλέγειν, ‘recounting’, encompasses a distinction between two words for ‘word’, μυθος and έπος; the discussion leads to a poetics of the ‘episode’ as a disclosive digression or retrogression, inserted within the links of a recounted narrative chain or catalogue (exemplified by a chart from Cedric Whitman). The peculiar retrogression built into the συρτός dance ultimately inspires the distinctively Greek rhetorical form ‘chiasmus’, whose reflexes in narrative include not only ‘ring composition’, but some of the deepest themes in Homeric epic, such as reversed tides of battle and returns of wandering warriors.Less
This chapter considers the impact on Homeric art, thought, and narratology of an origin in the dance of the Muses, in ‘the intellectualization of a corporeally bound rhythm’. On the concept of ‘rhapsody’, it takes issue with Nagy’s inferences about composition and writing, citing images of art within the Homeric poems and the premise of a written original assumed by ‘rhapsody’ in other historical manifestations. Odysseus’ coinage, μυθολογεύειν, comprising μυθέεσθαι, ‘disclosing’, and καταλέγειν, ‘recounting’, encompasses a distinction between two words for ‘word’, μυθος and έπος; the discussion leads to a poetics of the ‘episode’ as a disclosive digression or retrogression, inserted within the links of a recounted narrative chain or catalogue (exemplified by a chart from Cedric Whitman). The peculiar retrogression built into the συρτός dance ultimately inspires the distinctively Greek rhetorical form ‘chiasmus’, whose reflexes in narrative include not only ‘ring composition’, but some of the deepest themes in Homeric epic, such as reversed tides of battle and returns of wandering warriors.
Gunter Leypoldt
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- March 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780748635740
- eISBN:
- 9780748651658
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748635740.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
This book deals with narratives of cultural legitimation in nineteenth-century US literature, in a transatlantic context. Exploring how literary professionalism shapes romantic and modern cultural ...
More
This book deals with narratives of cultural legitimation in nineteenth-century US literature, in a transatlantic context. Exploring how literary professionalism shapes romantic and modern cultural space, the author traces the nineteenth-century fusion of poetic radicalism with cultural nationalism from its beginnings in transatlantic early romanticism, to the poetry and poetics of Walt Whitman, and Whitman's modernist reinvention as an icon of a native avant-garde. Whitman made cultural nationalism compatible with the rhetorical needs of professional authorship by trying to hold national authenticity and literary authority in a single poetic vision. Yet the notion that his ‘language experiment’ transformed essential democratic experience into a genuine American aesthetics also owes much to Whitman's retrospective canonization. What the author calls Whitmanian authority is thus a transatlantic and transhistorical discursive construct that can be approached from four angles. The book begins with an overview of transatlantic contexts such as the nineteenth-century literary field (Bourdieu) and the romantic turn to expressivism (Taylor). The author gives a detailed analysis of how Whitman's positions develop from the intellectual habitus, a cultural criticism of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and locates Whitmanian authority within three conceptual fields that function as contact zones for European and American theories of culture – romantic notions of national style as a kind of music. The book provides place-centred concepts of national aesthetics and traditional ideas about the aesthetic effects of democratic institutions. The final section, on Whitman's reinvention between the 1870s and the 1940s, discusses how the heterogeneous nineteenth-century perceptions of Whitman's work were streamlined into a modernist version of Whitman's nationalist program.Less
This book deals with narratives of cultural legitimation in nineteenth-century US literature, in a transatlantic context. Exploring how literary professionalism shapes romantic and modern cultural space, the author traces the nineteenth-century fusion of poetic radicalism with cultural nationalism from its beginnings in transatlantic early romanticism, to the poetry and poetics of Walt Whitman, and Whitman's modernist reinvention as an icon of a native avant-garde. Whitman made cultural nationalism compatible with the rhetorical needs of professional authorship by trying to hold national authenticity and literary authority in a single poetic vision. Yet the notion that his ‘language experiment’ transformed essential democratic experience into a genuine American aesthetics also owes much to Whitman's retrospective canonization. What the author calls Whitmanian authority is thus a transatlantic and transhistorical discursive construct that can be approached from four angles. The book begins with an overview of transatlantic contexts such as the nineteenth-century literary field (Bourdieu) and the romantic turn to expressivism (Taylor). The author gives a detailed analysis of how Whitman's positions develop from the intellectual habitus, a cultural criticism of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and locates Whitmanian authority within three conceptual fields that function as contact zones for European and American theories of culture – romantic notions of national style as a kind of music. The book provides place-centred concepts of national aesthetics and traditional ideas about the aesthetic effects of democratic institutions. The final section, on Whitman's reinvention between the 1870s and the 1940s, discusses how the heterogeneous nineteenth-century perceptions of Whitman's work were streamlined into a modernist version of Whitman's nationalist program.
David Manning
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780195182392
- eISBN:
- 9780199851485
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195182392.003.0079
- Subject:
- Music, History, Western
The first sketches for A Sea Symphony were made in 1903, and it was gradually worked out during the next seven years. It was first produced at the Leeds Festival in 1910, and has since been performed ...
More
The first sketches for A Sea Symphony were made in 1903, and it was gradually worked out during the next seven years. It was first produced at the Leeds Festival in 1910, and has since been performed at Oxford, Cambridge, and Bristol. The plan of the work is symphonic rather than narrative or dramatic, and this may be held to justify the frequent repetition of important words and phrases that occur in the poem. The words as well as the music are thus treated symphonically. The Symphony is written for soprano and baritone soli, chorus, and orchestra. The words are selected from various poems of Walt Whitman to be found in Leaves of Grass: “Sea Drift,” “Song of the Exposition,” and “Passage to India.”Less
The first sketches for A Sea Symphony were made in 1903, and it was gradually worked out during the next seven years. It was first produced at the Leeds Festival in 1910, and has since been performed at Oxford, Cambridge, and Bristol. The plan of the work is symphonic rather than narrative or dramatic, and this may be held to justify the frequent repetition of important words and phrases that occur in the poem. The words as well as the music are thus treated symphonically. The Symphony is written for soprano and baritone soli, chorus, and orchestra. The words are selected from various poems of Walt Whitman to be found in Leaves of Grass: “Sea Drift,” “Song of the Exposition,” and “Passage to India.”
John Gatta
- Published in print:
- 2004
- Published Online:
- January 2005
- ISBN:
- 9780195165050
- eISBN:
- 9780199835140
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/0195165055.003.0006
- Subject:
- Religion, Religion and Literature
Among the divergent forms of nature writing that flourished in nineteenth-century America, the “Old Manse” preface by Hawthorne reflects a distinctive mood of contentment about the author’s residence ...
More
Among the divergent forms of nature writing that flourished in nineteenth-century America, the “Old Manse” preface by Hawthorne reflects a distinctive mood of contentment about the author’s residence in Concord, Massachusetts. This essay’s conception of nature is based not on a wilderness aesthetic, but on a pastoral sense of human interaction with the green world—a sense that Hawthorne associates in turn with Christian theological terms of grace and incarnation. The holiness of gardening likewise informs writing of this period by women such as Celia Thaxter and Margaret Fuller. The religious intensity of Walt Whitman’s ecopoetic worldview, epitomized by “Song of Myself,” ranges from the astronomical heights to the lowly plants mentioned in section 5 of this poem. Unlike Whitman’s oceanic poems, Herman Melville’s portrayal of the sea in Moby-Dick exposes nature’s underlying savagery and vulturism—but also raises deep questions about the divinely inscrutable freedom of Creation embodied by the great white whale.Less
Among the divergent forms of nature writing that flourished in nineteenth-century America, the “Old Manse” preface by Hawthorne reflects a distinctive mood of contentment about the author’s residence in Concord, Massachusetts. This essay’s conception of nature is based not on a wilderness aesthetic, but on a pastoral sense of human interaction with the green world—a sense that Hawthorne associates in turn with Christian theological terms of grace and incarnation. The holiness of gardening likewise informs writing of this period by women such as Celia Thaxter and Margaret Fuller. The religious intensity of Walt Whitman’s ecopoetic worldview, epitomized by “Song of Myself,” ranges from the astronomical heights to the lowly plants mentioned in section 5 of this poem. Unlike Whitman’s oceanic poems, Herman Melville’s portrayal of the sea in Moby-Dick exposes nature’s underlying savagery and vulturism—but also raises deep questions about the divinely inscrutable freedom of Creation embodied by the great white whale.
David E. Shi
- Published in print:
- 1996
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780195106534
- eISBN:
- 9780199854097
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195106534.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, History of Ideas
This book provides a history of the rise of realism in American culture. It captures the character and sweep of this all-encompassing movement—ranging from Winslow Homer to the rise of the Ash Can ...
More
This book provides a history of the rise of realism in American culture. It captures the character and sweep of this all-encompassing movement—ranging from Winslow Homer to the rise of the Ash Can school, from Whitman to Henry James to Theodore Dreiser. It begins with a look at the idealist atmosphere of the antebellum years, when otherwordly themes are considered the only fit subject for art. Whitman's assault on these standards coincided with sweeping changes in American society: the bloody Civil War, the aggressive advance of a modern scientific spirit, the popularity of photography, the expansion of cities, capitalism, and the middle class—all worked to shake the foundations of genteel idealism and sentimental romanticism. Both artists and the public developed an ever-expanding appetite for hard facts, and for art that accurately depicted them. As the book proceeds through the 19th century, it traces the realist revolution in each major area of arts and letters, combining an analysis of the movement's essential themes with incisive portraits of its leading practitioners. Here we see Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., shaken to stern realism by the horrors of the Civil War; the influence of Walt Whitman on painter Thomas Eakins and architect Louis Sullivan, a leader of the Chicago school; the local-color verisimilitude of Louisa May Alcott and Sarah Orne Jewett; and the impact of urban squalor on intrepid young writers such as Stephen Crane.Less
This book provides a history of the rise of realism in American culture. It captures the character and sweep of this all-encompassing movement—ranging from Winslow Homer to the rise of the Ash Can school, from Whitman to Henry James to Theodore Dreiser. It begins with a look at the idealist atmosphere of the antebellum years, when otherwordly themes are considered the only fit subject for art. Whitman's assault on these standards coincided with sweeping changes in American society: the bloody Civil War, the aggressive advance of a modern scientific spirit, the popularity of photography, the expansion of cities, capitalism, and the middle class—all worked to shake the foundations of genteel idealism and sentimental romanticism. Both artists and the public developed an ever-expanding appetite for hard facts, and for art that accurately depicted them. As the book proceeds through the 19th century, it traces the realist revolution in each major area of arts and letters, combining an analysis of the movement's essential themes with incisive portraits of its leading practitioners. Here we see Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., shaken to stern realism by the horrors of the Civil War; the influence of Walt Whitman on painter Thomas Eakins and architect Louis Sullivan, a leader of the Chicago school; the local-color verisimilitude of Louisa May Alcott and Sarah Orne Jewett; and the impact of urban squalor on intrepid young writers such as Stephen Crane.
M. L. Gasparov
G. S. Smith and Leofranc Holford-Strevens (eds)
- Published in print:
- 1996
- Published Online:
- September 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198158790
- eISBN:
- 9780191673368
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198158790.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry, European Literature
When we read a poem composed in iambic blank pentameter, it reminds us of Shakespeare. When we read a poem composed in long lines without rhyme or rhythm, we think of Whitman. In this study of the ...
More
When we read a poem composed in iambic blank pentameter, it reminds us of Shakespeare. When we read a poem composed in long lines without rhyme or rhythm, we think of Whitman. In this study of the history of European versification, the book shows how such chains of association link the poetry of numerous languages and diverse ages. Examining poetry written in thirty languages (from Irish to Belorussian) and over several millennia (from classical Latin and Greek to the experiments of the contemporary avant-garde), the book traces the ways in which the poetry of English, French, Russian, Greek, and other European languages has developed from a single common Indo-European source. The account is liberally illustrated with verse examples, both in their original languages and in translation.Less
When we read a poem composed in iambic blank pentameter, it reminds us of Shakespeare. When we read a poem composed in long lines without rhyme or rhythm, we think of Whitman. In this study of the history of European versification, the book shows how such chains of association link the poetry of numerous languages and diverse ages. Examining poetry written in thirty languages (from Irish to Belorussian) and over several millennia (from classical Latin and Greek to the experiments of the contemporary avant-garde), the book traces the ways in which the poetry of English, French, Russian, Greek, and other European languages has developed from a single common Indo-European source. The account is liberally illustrated with verse examples, both in their original languages and in translation.
Srikanth Reddy
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- September 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780199791026
- eISBN:
- 9780199950287
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199791026.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry, American, 20th Century Literature
“A book I have made, the words of my book nothing, the drift of it every thing,” said Walt Whitman in 1865. While this may seem an extraordinary claim for a wordsmith to make, the concept of textual ...
More
“A book I have made, the words of my book nothing, the drift of it every thing,” said Walt Whitman in 1865. While this may seem an extraordinary claim for a wordsmith to make, the concept of textual drift defines a strain of American writing from “the radiant gist” of Williams’ Paterson to the implicit question (“get my drift?”) which underwrites the Beat aesthetic in the post-war period. In the writings of Frank O’Hara, poetic utterance is modelled upon the digressive drift of “metropolitan conversation” as a means of constructing personhood; this writer’s conversation poems articulate a mode of self-presentation which prioritizes the digressive drift of personality over formal, expository discourse on any single governing subject. Moving from Whitman through O’Hara to the post-war Manhattan art world, this section discusses the abolition of the pictorial subject under the aesthetics of abstraction; wielding conversational digressions instead of oils and acrylic in poems such as “Digression on Number 1, 1948,” O’Hara imports the New York School’s painterly project of constructing “a text without a subject” into the discursive field of language.Less
“A book I have made, the words of my book nothing, the drift of it every thing,” said Walt Whitman in 1865. While this may seem an extraordinary claim for a wordsmith to make, the concept of textual drift defines a strain of American writing from “the radiant gist” of Williams’ Paterson to the implicit question (“get my drift?”) which underwrites the Beat aesthetic in the post-war period. In the writings of Frank O’Hara, poetic utterance is modelled upon the digressive drift of “metropolitan conversation” as a means of constructing personhood; this writer’s conversation poems articulate a mode of self-presentation which prioritizes the digressive drift of personality over formal, expository discourse on any single governing subject. Moving from Whitman through O’Hara to the post-war Manhattan art world, this section discusses the abolition of the pictorial subject under the aesthetics of abstraction; wielding conversational digressions instead of oils and acrylic in poems such as “Digression on Number 1, 1948,” O’Hara imports the New York School’s painterly project of constructing “a text without a subject” into the discursive field of language.
Louis P. Masur (ed.)
- Published in print:
- 1995
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780195098372
- eISBN:
- 9780199853908
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195098372.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, American History: 19th Century
Drawing on a wide range of material, including diaries, letters, and essays, this book captures the reactions, as the American Civil War was waged, of writers such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Harriet ...
More
Drawing on a wide range of material, including diaries, letters, and essays, this book captures the reactions, as the American Civil War was waged, of writers such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Frederick Douglass, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Henry Adams, and Louisa May Alcott.Less
Drawing on a wide range of material, including diaries, letters, and essays, this book captures the reactions, as the American Civil War was waged, of writers such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Frederick Douglass, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Henry Adams, and Louisa May Alcott.
Willard Spiegelman
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780195368130
- eISBN:
- 9780199852192
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195368130.003.0015
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry
This chapter criticizes Jorie Graham's poetry collection Overlord. This volume contains twenty-five poems that take on the problem of public themes, including economics, history, and ecology, in ...
More
This chapter criticizes Jorie Graham's poetry collection Overlord. This volume contains twenty-five poems that take on the problem of public themes, including economics, history, and ecology, in tones of anxiety fear, contemplation, remembrance, and prayer. This chapter compares Graham to Walt Whitman and suggests that like Whitman, Graham has been able to put her finger on the pulse of the zeitgeist and that no other poet has tried to come to grips with the larger world as much as she has.Less
This chapter criticizes Jorie Graham's poetry collection Overlord. This volume contains twenty-five poems that take on the problem of public themes, including economics, history, and ecology, in tones of anxiety fear, contemplation, remembrance, and prayer. This chapter compares Graham to Walt Whitman and suggests that like Whitman, Graham has been able to put her finger on the pulse of the zeitgeist and that no other poet has tried to come to grips with the larger world as much as she has.
Bonnie Costello
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- May 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780691172811
- eISBN:
- 9781400887873
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- DOI:
- 10.23943/princeton/9780691172811.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry
This is the first book to focus on the poet's use of the first-person plural voice—poetry's “we.” Closely exploring the work of W. H. Auden, the book uncovers the trove of thought and feeling carried ...
More
This is the first book to focus on the poet's use of the first-person plural voice—poetry's “we.” Closely exploring the work of W. H. Auden, the book uncovers the trove of thought and feeling carried in this small word. While lyric has long been associated with inwardness and a voice saying “I,” “we” has hardly been noticed, even though it has appeared throughout the history of poetry. Reading for this pronoun in its variety and ambiguity, the book's author explores the communal function of poetry—the reasons, risks, and rewards of the first-person plural. The author adopts a taxonomic approach to her subject, considering “we” from its most constricted to its fully unbounded forms. The author also takes a historical perspective, following Auden's interest in the full range of “the human pluralities” in a time of particular pressure for and against the collective. Examples from many other poets—including Walt Whitman, T. S. Eliot, Elizabeth Bishop, and Wallace Stevens—arise throughout the book, and the final chapter offers a consideration of how contemporary writers find form for what George Oppen called “the meaning of being numerous.” Connecting insights to philosophy of language and to recent work in concepts of community, the book shows how poetry raises vital questions—literary and social—about how we speak of our togetherness.Less
This is the first book to focus on the poet's use of the first-person plural voice—poetry's “we.” Closely exploring the work of W. H. Auden, the book uncovers the trove of thought and feeling carried in this small word. While lyric has long been associated with inwardness and a voice saying “I,” “we” has hardly been noticed, even though it has appeared throughout the history of poetry. Reading for this pronoun in its variety and ambiguity, the book's author explores the communal function of poetry—the reasons, risks, and rewards of the first-person plural. The author adopts a taxonomic approach to her subject, considering “we” from its most constricted to its fully unbounded forms. The author also takes a historical perspective, following Auden's interest in the full range of “the human pluralities” in a time of particular pressure for and against the collective. Examples from many other poets—including Walt Whitman, T. S. Eliot, Elizabeth Bishop, and Wallace Stevens—arise throughout the book, and the final chapter offers a consideration of how contemporary writers find form for what George Oppen called “the meaning of being numerous.” Connecting insights to philosophy of language and to recent work in concepts of community, the book shows how poetry raises vital questions—literary and social—about how we speak of our togetherness.
Louis P. Masur (ed.)
- Published in print:
- 1995
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780195098372
- eISBN:
- 9780199853908
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195098372.003.0014
- Subject:
- History, American History: 19th Century
The Civil War, Walt Whitman claimed, could not, should not, be written about, yet he never stopped writing. He wrote profusely in notebooks, letters, editorials, and poems during the war; Memoranda ...
More
The Civil War, Walt Whitman claimed, could not, should not, be written about, yet he never stopped writing. He wrote profusely in notebooks, letters, editorials, and poems during the war; Memoranda During the War afterwards; and then Specimen Days. Of all the American writers at the time, no one was touched more deeply by the war than Whitman. He often recalled where he had been when news of the attack on Fort Sumter first spread. Returning from the opera around midnight, he had been walking down Broadway on his way home to Brooklyn when he heard the shrieks of newsboys. He bought one of the Extras and crossed to Niblo's, where a crowd had gathered. He stood in stunned silence and then trudged home. Forty-one at the time, Whitman may have been expected to enlist; years later critics such as Thomas Wentworth Higginson would condemn him for not fighting. However, Whitman found another way to serve. He devoted himself to the sick and wounded and dying soldiers.Less
The Civil War, Walt Whitman claimed, could not, should not, be written about, yet he never stopped writing. He wrote profusely in notebooks, letters, editorials, and poems during the war; Memoranda During the War afterwards; and then Specimen Days. Of all the American writers at the time, no one was touched more deeply by the war than Whitman. He often recalled where he had been when news of the attack on Fort Sumter first spread. Returning from the opera around midnight, he had been walking down Broadway on his way home to Brooklyn when he heard the shrieks of newsboys. He bought one of the Extras and crossed to Niblo's, where a crowd had gathered. He stood in stunned silence and then trudged home. Forty-one at the time, Whitman may have been expected to enlist; years later critics such as Thomas Wentworth Higginson would condemn him for not fighting. However, Whitman found another way to serve. He devoted himself to the sick and wounded and dying soldiers.
Alan Marshall
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- February 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199561926
- eISBN:
- 9780191721663
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199561926.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 20th Century Literature, American, 19th Century Literature
Chapter one begins with a discussion of the envisioning of democracy in Tocqueville before embarking on a re‐examination of the role of vision in Whitman. It looks at how a certain dominant and ...
More
Chapter one begins with a discussion of the envisioning of democracy in Tocqueville before embarking on a re‐examination of the role of vision in Whitman. It looks at how a certain dominant and domineering model of human subjectivity, referred to in the chapter as narcissistic subjectivity, fails to account for what may be called Whitman's posture, the intersubjective and democratic nature of which is better expressed in what may be characterized as the invisible physiognomy of the poetry. The chapter deepens the question of narcissistic subjectivity by engaging with the thought of Sigmund Freud, which is then contrasted with the work of Donald Winnicott. It argues that the distance from Tocqueville's picture of democracy to Whitman's finds a correlative in the distance from Freud to Winnicott.Less
Chapter one begins with a discussion of the envisioning of democracy in Tocqueville before embarking on a re‐examination of the role of vision in Whitman. It looks at how a certain dominant and domineering model of human subjectivity, referred to in the chapter as narcissistic subjectivity, fails to account for what may be called Whitman's posture, the intersubjective and democratic nature of which is better expressed in what may be characterized as the invisible physiognomy of the poetry. The chapter deepens the question of narcissistic subjectivity by engaging with the thought of Sigmund Freud, which is then contrasted with the work of Donald Winnicott. It argues that the distance from Tocqueville's picture of democracy to Whitman's finds a correlative in the distance from Freud to Winnicott.
David E. Shi
- Published in print:
- 1996
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780195106534
- eISBN:
- 9780199854097
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195106534.003.0003
- Subject:
- History, History of Ideas
At the same time that journalists and editors were celebrating the vibrant new urban culture emerging in the United States at the point of mid-century, several commentators were criticizing the ...
More
At the same time that journalists and editors were celebrating the vibrant new urban culture emerging in the United States at the point of mid-century, several commentators were criticizing the slavish dependence of American architects on classical or medieval styles. Those promoting an indigenous American architecture found an ardent advocate in the Boston-born sculptor Horatio Greenough with his new “functionalist” theory. However, the most fervent celebrant of the “triumph of the real” during the 1850s was a writer hardly known today: Charles Godfrey Leland who became the spirited editor of Philadelphia's struggling Graham's Monthly late in 1856. Leland brought a fresh conviction that America had reached a transitional stage in its cultural history. Leland discovered in Walt Whitman the epitome of the vigorous new cultural outlook he advocated. By rooting romantic idealism in an affection for everyday realities, Whitman became the most potent catalyst for change in 19th-century American culture with genteel conservatism and domestic sentimentalism.Less
At the same time that journalists and editors were celebrating the vibrant new urban culture emerging in the United States at the point of mid-century, several commentators were criticizing the slavish dependence of American architects on classical or medieval styles. Those promoting an indigenous American architecture found an ardent advocate in the Boston-born sculptor Horatio Greenough with his new “functionalist” theory. However, the most fervent celebrant of the “triumph of the real” during the 1850s was a writer hardly known today: Charles Godfrey Leland who became the spirited editor of Philadelphia's struggling Graham's Monthly late in 1856. Leland brought a fresh conviction that America had reached a transitional stage in its cultural history. Leland discovered in Walt Whitman the epitome of the vigorous new cultural outlook he advocated. By rooting romantic idealism in an affection for everyday realities, Whitman became the most potent catalyst for change in 19th-century American culture with genteel conservatism and domestic sentimentalism.
David E. Shi
- Published in print:
- 1996
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780195106534
- eISBN:
- 9780199854097
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195106534.003.0004
- Subject:
- History, History of Ideas
The Civil War was a pivotal event in American political and social history. However, it also served as the hinge in the nation's cultural development, a turning point after which intellectual life ...
More
The Civil War was a pivotal event in American political and social history. However, it also served as the hinge in the nation's cultural development, a turning point after which intellectual life and artistic expression were perceptibly different. Underneath the Civil War's romantic veneer lurked grim realities. Gender roles especially felt the conflict's transforming impact. Most of America's promising young writers and artists did not participate in the Civil War. The war reinforced Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.'s developed skeptical materialism. Walt Whitman had urged “relentless war” to end secession, but he, too, changed his exuberant tone after witnessing the war's grim reaping. The war's “mortal reality” gave greater depth, poignancy, and clarity to Whitman's Drum-Taps. Over the years Romanticism formed around the Civil War, making it stirringly unreal. The soul-numbing war depicted in John Esten Cooke and John W. De Forest's writings, Winslow Homer's illustrations, and Alexander Gardner's photographs soon disappeared.Less
The Civil War was a pivotal event in American political and social history. However, it also served as the hinge in the nation's cultural development, a turning point after which intellectual life and artistic expression were perceptibly different. Underneath the Civil War's romantic veneer lurked grim realities. Gender roles especially felt the conflict's transforming impact. Most of America's promising young writers and artists did not participate in the Civil War. The war reinforced Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.'s developed skeptical materialism. Walt Whitman had urged “relentless war” to end secession, but he, too, changed his exuberant tone after witnessing the war's grim reaping. The war's “mortal reality” gave greater depth, poignancy, and clarity to Whitman's Drum-Taps. Over the years Romanticism formed around the Civil War, making it stirringly unreal. The soul-numbing war depicted in John Esten Cooke and John W. De Forest's writings, Winslow Homer's illustrations, and Alexander Gardner's photographs soon disappeared.
David E. Shi
- Published in print:
- 1996
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780195106534
- eISBN:
- 9780199854097
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195106534.003.0006
- Subject:
- History, History of Ideas
The commanding reality in the United States during the 19th-century was an ever-accelerating industrial revolution that transformed the very nature of social life and generated ...
More
The commanding reality in the United States during the 19th-century was an ever-accelerating industrial revolution that transformed the very nature of social life and generated a conspicuous new urban consciousness and culture. In the process, many came to expect a literary and artistic representation of their new urban culture. In the preface to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman asserted that the poet and artist must assimilate “the factories and mercantile life and labor-saving machinery.” Artist John Ferguson Weir experienced a similar enchantment in the presence of modern industrial technology. More than any other mechanical innovation during the 19th century, the railroad served as the most ubiquitous symbol of the new industrial age. Nathaniel Hawthorne saw in the railroad the spirit of commercial concerns intruding upon the pre-industrial imagination. Perhaps more than any other factor, this pervasive materialism helped spawn the realistic movement in thought and the arts.Less
The commanding reality in the United States during the 19th-century was an ever-accelerating industrial revolution that transformed the very nature of social life and generated a conspicuous new urban consciousness and culture. In the process, many came to expect a literary and artistic representation of their new urban culture. In the preface to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman asserted that the poet and artist must assimilate “the factories and mercantile life and labor-saving machinery.” Artist John Ferguson Weir experienced a similar enchantment in the presence of modern industrial technology. More than any other mechanical innovation during the 19th century, the railroad served as the most ubiquitous symbol of the new industrial age. Nathaniel Hawthorne saw in the railroad the spirit of commercial concerns intruding upon the pre-industrial imagination. Perhaps more than any other factor, this pervasive materialism helped spawn the realistic movement in thought and the arts.
Albert W. Dzur
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- September 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780199874095
- eISBN:
- 9780199980024
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199874095.003.0008
- Subject:
- Political Science, Political Theory
This book concludes by considering Socrates’ critique of the jury in the Apology, which misleadingly contrasts expert justice with democratic injustice. While producing an unjust outcome, Socrates’ ...
More
This book concludes by considering Socrates’ critique of the jury in the Apology, which misleadingly contrasts expert justice with democratic injustice. While producing an unjust outcome, Socrates’ trial was nevertheless thoroughly public because of the court’s lay membership: It addressed the people, was transparent, well understood, held the people accountable for justice, and influenced public discourse on punishment for centuries. Though a failure of justice, it was a public failure, a lesson for Athens and the wider world. The enduring need for public engagement in criminal justice explains why the jury form persists, why it is being reintroduced in Japan and elsewhere. The jury brings people together not as an assumed public, a voice of an already existing community, but as a deliberately constructed public; it provides a procedural rather than substantive foundation for the public interests represented in criminal adjudication. Contemporary proponents of Socrates’ expert justice, like Whitman, fail to see the threats this technocratic model poses to the civic capacity of a democracy. Reviving the jury in the fashion suggested in the previous chapter, or developing related institutional forms of load-bearing lay participation, would increase public sobriety about contemporary punishment and broaden responsibility for more humane criminal justice.Less
This book concludes by considering Socrates’ critique of the jury in the Apology, which misleadingly contrasts expert justice with democratic injustice. While producing an unjust outcome, Socrates’ trial was nevertheless thoroughly public because of the court’s lay membership: It addressed the people, was transparent, well understood, held the people accountable for justice, and influenced public discourse on punishment for centuries. Though a failure of justice, it was a public failure, a lesson for Athens and the wider world. The enduring need for public engagement in criminal justice explains why the jury form persists, why it is being reintroduced in Japan and elsewhere. The jury brings people together not as an assumed public, a voice of an already existing community, but as a deliberately constructed public; it provides a procedural rather than substantive foundation for the public interests represented in criminal adjudication. Contemporary proponents of Socrates’ expert justice, like Whitman, fail to see the threats this technocratic model poses to the civic capacity of a democracy. Reviving the jury in the fashion suggested in the previous chapter, or developing related institutional forms of load-bearing lay participation, would increase public sobriety about contemporary punishment and broaden responsibility for more humane criminal justice.
John Michael
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- September 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780823279715
- eISBN:
- 9780823281473
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823279715.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism
Secular Lyrics interrogates the distinctively individual ways that Poe, Whitman, and Dickinson adapt ancient and renaissance conventions of lyric expression to the developing conditions of their ...
More
Secular Lyrics interrogates the distinctively individual ways that Poe, Whitman, and Dickinson adapt ancient and renaissance conventions of lyric expression to the developing conditions of their modern context, especially to the heterogeneity of beliefs and believers in a secular society and to the altered or emergent role that literature assumes in a secular age. These poets, in idiosyncratic but related ways, register the pressures of the modern crowd—which Benjamin rightly identified as nineteenth-century poetry’s essential topic—within their poems, where the mass appears as potential readers, as resistant skeptics, as a heterogeneous crowd of contending beliefs and contentious believers. For these poets, the processes of signification rather than the communication of truths become central to their poetry, which in turn becomes an important origin of the modern poetry that in Europe and the United States follows. Each invokes the normative practices that have long characterized Western poetry only to disrupt the audience’s conventional expectations and enliven the reader’s sense of language’s material density and the limits and potentials of modern life.Less
Secular Lyrics interrogates the distinctively individual ways that Poe, Whitman, and Dickinson adapt ancient and renaissance conventions of lyric expression to the developing conditions of their modern context, especially to the heterogeneity of beliefs and believers in a secular society and to the altered or emergent role that literature assumes in a secular age. These poets, in idiosyncratic but related ways, register the pressures of the modern crowd—which Benjamin rightly identified as nineteenth-century poetry’s essential topic—within their poems, where the mass appears as potential readers, as resistant skeptics, as a heterogeneous crowd of contending beliefs and contentious believers. For these poets, the processes of signification rather than the communication of truths become central to their poetry, which in turn becomes an important origin of the modern poetry that in Europe and the United States follows. Each invokes the normative practices that have long characterized Western poetry only to disrupt the audience’s conventional expectations and enliven the reader’s sense of language’s material density and the limits and potentials of modern life.
