The United States during the 1960’s was a time of massive change for the country. The President being shot and the war overseas are just a couple of the issues being dealt with by Americans, and people were overwhelmed with the then current status of the country, and out of this came several movements; no […]
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Who is Walt Whitman? – A Critical Look at the Good Gray Poet in Popular and Academic Culture
Over the course of the semester, we have seen Walt Whitman through various lenses from academic culture. We have viewed Whitman through the lense of African Americans, Native Americans, Queer poets, and women, all with their varying degrees of disdain and praise for the controversial poet. We have also studied Whitman’s influence over popular culture […]
10:04 and “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”
In his book 10:04, Ben Lerner takes a new approach to the novel with an extremely “metaphysical” plot where Lerner adapts a storyline from a short story in which the narrator is writing a novel about a person writing a novel. There are multiple levels of the story, where Lerner will seamlessly transition between which […]
Queer Whitman in our 21st Century Lens
I often find myself asking the question of why no one of Whitman time seemed to grasp the fact that Whitman was queer or cared at all if they did know for that matter. Whitman was queer and wrote about it very explicitly in his many works which was a very taboo, uncommon, and largely […]
Ginsberg addressing Whitman
The poetry of Walt Whitman has inspired centuries of authors since its conception in the 19th-century, but, none are so moving as the Beat poets. The Beat authors came as a result of the counterculture the United States was experiencing in the late 1950’s and almost the entirety of the 1960’s; they wrote literature for […]
Two Sides of the American Coin: Whitman and Ortiz
Yesterday marked Christopher Columbus Day across the US. It is a deeply problematic day and Americans across the country have been moving to instead celebrate Indigenous people’s day, commemorating those that were a part of this land long before and after the genocide and horror inflicted upon them by colonization. This is an interesting coincidence […]
Spahr and Whitman
In Juliana Spahr’s collection of poems, “This Connection of Everyone with Lungs” Spahr implements several Whitmanian characteristics throughout the two poems. Although she never specifically names Whitman throughout the two poems, there several moments that read like a modern adaptation of a Whitman point-of-view. Moreover, her second poem titled “Poem Written from November 30, 2002, […]
Speaking Back to Whitman
Walt Whitman is quintessential to American poetry and literature alike, so one can expect to see the massive amounts of thinkers and critic engaging with the author. Normally when Whitman is brought up in a text, he is named specifically and his views criticized directly; so it is a fresh change of pace to read […]
Farewell Dear Mate, Dear Love!
In the second annex of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, Whitman includes two poems, “Good-Bye my Fancy” and “Good-Bye my Fancy!” titled respectively. The first “fancy” poem is really only the words “Good-bye my fancy” and then an aside contained in parentheses, and a footnote delving into the act of saying “bye” and the obsession […]
Now Finalé to the Shore’ Validating Structure in ‘So Long’
Whitman’s final poem in Leaves of Grass, So Long, is an interesting one often regarded as chaotic and unstructured, mimicking the end of a life. Whitman manifested himself so intensely and personified himself so much in his editions of Leaves of Grass that in this final poem, the death of his book translated to his […]