Through ‘Whitman Speaks’ I sought to recreate the persona of Whitman on Twitter and use his poetry and prose to directly engage in conversations with people surrounding news and social issues. Initially, the project was a question of how to fairly represent and recreate Whitman’s voice as I joined in modern conversations. I wanted to be careful not to isolate a specific Whitman persona, but incorporate all of them to the best of my ability. The next question was whether his voice could actually engage in these conversations or if it was too antiquated or irrelevant to speak to things like the Syrian refugee crisis, the Black Lives Matter movement, or sexual assault on college campuses. It became evident as I began tweeting that the issue with resurrecting Whitman was not the relevance of his voice, people were constantly responding to him and quoting as seen on other Whitman accounts like Tweets of Grass. The issue was the medium I had chosen and the way it reflected on our society, where engagement is kept at a minimum and the restriction of 140 characters or less limits what can be said.
My twitter feed and the following paper are a study of modern social media use, specifically Twitter, and why it isn’t a good medium for engaging with literature and dead poets like Whitman. I will reflect on what did or didn’t work when I engaged in social discourse and analyze which elements of that had to do with Whitman and which had to do with Twitter and our generation. I will also present a new Whitman persona that has been created, the Cliched Whitman, that is an inevitable result of social media’s limiting effect on literature and conversation. I will finish this argument focusing on the benefit of media and its ability to connect the global community, one which Whitman would have loved and may have even predicted. Below you can find my twitter account and see the conversations I tried to engage in and the different methods I tried to use to get more followers, like, retweets, etc. For a condensed version of my paper you can check out my previous blog post entitled ‘Engaging Whitman in 140 Characters or Less’.
“The President is there in the White House for you, it is not you who are here for him.” @realDonaldTrump #MyAdviceToTrump #whitmanspeaks
— Walt Whitman (@whitmanspeaks) April 13, 2016
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