Much of the course has focused on the reverberations that Whitman’s work has made throughout American literary tradition unto today. In Langston Hughes’ essay “The Ceaseless Rings of Walt Whitman” he states that Whitman remains relevant,
“because the vast sweep of democracy is still incomplete even in America today, because revolutionaries seeking to break old fetters are still foiled in Europe and Asia, because the physical life of the Brooklyn Ferries and the Broadway street cars and the Mississippi river banks and the fresh battlefields of World War II continue to pulse with the same heartbeats of humanity as in Whitman’s time. His poetry strikes us now with the same immediacy it must have awakened in its earliest readers in the 1850s” (WWMS 174)
Just as Whitman’s work remained true and poignant for Hughes then, Hughes’ reasoning for Whitman’s relevance remains true for us today. For goodness sake the course is named “Walt Whitman’s Afterlives,” and as many authors seek to keep Whitman alive through bringing him into conversation in their works, we would like to do the same. As young people today, our generation is marked by a paradigm shift of social change. This change is multi-dimensional and spans across a wide range of issues yet can all certainly be traced back to these “heartbeats of humanity” that we are trying to sustain and strengthen. Whitman has had many afterlives, but in our final project we would like to address the question of if Whitman was in fact living today, where would he stand on these issues?
Ivy, Abrie, and I are creating a podcast to answer this question. It would take shape as a roughly six-episode podcast, about 15 minutes each, with a defining issue discussed in each episode. Through it we would like to re-introduce Whitman in the modern world, look for evidence of Whitman’s work in our modern life, pay homage to an influential American writer/author/poet, bring humor into Whitman’s work, give Whitman of the past a voice in the present, and have a conversation with Whitman as one sided as the one he had with the public. The issues we are going to be discussing with Walt will be ones that we as a generation are faced with daily and are active in the movements surrounding them. We will attempt to cover topics such as, but not limited to gendered issues (Women in the time of “Me too,” bodily autonomy, Queer visibility and intersectionality), police brutality and mass shootings, the climate crisis and political activism, anti-vacc issues and the current Mumps issue at CofC, and the vaping and drug culture of young people today. We would like to end with an analyzation of Whitman’s reputation after the synthesis of his work within the wider scope of these issues.
Some features of the podcast that we would like to include are possible interviews with guests who hold some expertise in the topic that we are discussing. These would be people who are experts in the fields we will be discussing. We will ask them questions about how they see Walt Whitman fitting into life in their realms. We would also like to include a “Warble of the Week” as music is a huge medium in which artists share their ideas, that Whitman as a poet would appeal to just as our generation does today. This would include a chosen song that relates to the issue at hand, and brings in the aspect of mass media and shared information in a palatable way.
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