Walt Whitman is the poet of spiritual oneness, he believes in the sanctity of all life, all men, all women. However, and despite himself, Whitman rejects some men, some women. There are things which Whitman’s all-encompassing poetry refuses to entangle, there are people in whom the poet cannot find himself. Much of this contradiction is swept under the rug by Whitman’s own assertion that he is allowed to contradict himself. Whitman read deeply into the Hegelian view of progress by way of opposing forces (LeMaster). If, in keeping with Hegel, Whitman aimed to represent good and evil as complimentary forces, perhaps this contradiction can stand. However, there are moments of judgement that put the poet at odds with the harmony he preaches. There are moments of irony or of exasperation at the world, these are not what I am after. What is interesting to me are the moments in which Whitman reveals more than he wanted. When he attempts to praise the prostitute by saying that she is “no longer vile” there is an implication that she was vile to Whitman before this poem. In “Song of the Open Road,” Whitman includes all people yet condemns the corrupt. This seems minor, perhaps, or even justified but it is a perversion of the nature Whitman builds for himself. The goal of this project is to find those moments of discordance, anthologize them, and see if there is a connective thread.
There are a few schools of thought about Whitman’s relationship with what he might regard as evil. W.B. Yeats and Henry Miller both felt that Whitman was incapable or somehow beyond understanding hatred or evil. Others, including the critic V.K. Chari, suppose that Whitman’s universe requires evil so that good will flourish, that these things are a matter of fact but that we are trending toward something better. Still others like critic Kenneth Burke claim that Whitman knows all of this evil and that his celebration of light over dark is merely posturing, the poet is lying to his readers and himself as a source of unfounded comfort. I will go through the criticisms of Whitman’s worldview to find specific readings of negative instances and see if there is best fit for justifying the tone of the poems.
I will read through the texts I’ve selected by the end of this weekend so as to be able to make a cogent annotated bibliography for Wednesday. Paying special attention to the poems mentioned in the essays, I will go through Whitman’s works looking for primary examples of this “otherness.” I hope to write half of the paper before next weekend and finish it by Friday or Saturday.
Bibliography
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Black, Stephen A. Whitman’s Journey into Chaos: A Psychoanalytic Study of the Poetic Process.
Princeton: Princeton UP, 1975. Print.
Chase, Richard Volney. Walt Whitman Reconsidered. New York: William Sloane Associates,
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Erkkila, Betsy. “A Political Companion to Walt Whitman.” Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 32.1
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Graber, Samuel. “Useful Antagonists: Transatlantic Influence, Sectionalism, and Whitman’s
Nationalist Project.” Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 27.1 (2009): 28-48. Publisher
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Herrero-Brasas, Juan A. Walt Whitman’s Mystical Ethics of Comradeship: Homosexuality and
the Marginality of Friendship at the Crossroads of Modernity. Albany: State U of New
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Kahn, Sholom J. “Whitman’s ‘Black Lucifer’: Some Possible Sources.” PMLA 71.5 (1956):
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Kurant, Wendy. “’Strange Fascination’: Walt Whitman, Imperialism, and the South.” Walt
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LeMaster, J. R., and Donald D. Kummings. Walt Whitman: An Encyclopedia. New York:
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Schmidgall, Gary. Containing Multitudes: Walt Whitman and the British Literary Tradition. New
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