The purpose of my essay was to bring together the lyrical world of Walt Whitman and the visual world of the Hudson River School. Both Whitman and the painters in the Hudson River School worked in the early-to-mid-eighteen-hundreds, and both created works that captured the hearts of America. The poems that I mainly focused on were Whitman’s later poems, and his poems attached to Native American ideas/themes. Simultaneously I looked at the works of Thomas Cole, one of the Hudson River School’s most prominent figures. Cole’s paintings also dealt with ideas concerning Native Americans and the natural landscape of America. Problems arose for these two figures within my argument due to research that was based in “romantic ideology”, an ideology that wants to place the artist in the context of her/his time. By doing this to Whitman and Cole’s works, we saw that they had no true connection to the Native American world other than living on the land that Native Americans used to inhabit. According to the ideas of “romantic ideology”, Whitman and Cole created illusions due to the ways in which they romantically presented Native Americans in their creative. By also looking at Ed Folsom’s essay in our text book, I found that Whitman sometimes put himself in a corner due to misrepresenting groups of people. The same could be said for Cole, who place figures in his work despite the realities of the landscape at the time.
The second part of my essay focused on the poems that came later in Whitman’s career. I found that they paired nicely with some of the works from the Hudson River School. Whitman’s mood matched the mysterious, somber, and somewhat frightening elements we see in the paintings. In looking at the works of Albert Bierstradt and Frederic Edwin Church, I saw parallels with Whitman in the ways in which they created moody and mystical ends to their days in the paintings. I also looked at Thomas Cole’s painting “Old Age” from his “Voyage of Life” series. This painting paired well the ideas that Whitman expressed when he was saying “Good-Bye” in Leaves of Grass. It matched the dreamlike state that Whitman describes in the poem.
I found a lot of worth in this project due to the idea of tying the visual arts from the 1800’s in American to works of literature and poetry at the time. By combining and comparing these two I found that there was a lot to be said in terms of similarities, differences, problems, and perfections. The Hudson River School and Walt Whitman are a good match in my head because they both capture raw and romantic elements concerning the American landscape and American history. I struggled a bit with finding sources, but I found that I worked it out in the end with some suitable pieces. I also struggled to pick and choose poems/paintings because there are so many to choose from, but it was a pleasure picking them out and then breaking them down together as a pair.
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