Author Archive | Ellen Butler

Final Project Link

Still working on a few things, but here is what I have so far: About

Leaves of Grass, Whitman’s magnum opus, went through a number of significant changes over his lifetime. Adding to, subtracting from, revising, and reorganizing the original 1855 edition until his death in 1892 when the “Deathbed Edition” was published, Whitman created a work of art that was (and is still) defined by its fundamentally kinetic, dialogic, […]

Like Lerner’s 10:04, Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric integrates poetry, prose, and images as it also slips across the boundaries of perspective and personality. However, where Lerner’s work moved from singularity to collectivity by way of stitching together seemingly disparate experience across first-, second-, and third-person perspectives, Rankine seems to remain in […]

In the opening episode of 10:04, the author/narrator discusses a conversation with his agent in which he plans the development of his novel: “I’ll project myself into several futures simultaneously…I’ll work my way from irony to sincerity in the sinking city, a would-be Whitman of the vulnerable grid.” Like Whitman, Lerner’s novel (and that of […]

Leaves of Grass, Whitman’s magnum opus, went through a number of significant changes over his lifetime. Adding to and revising the original 1855 edition until his death in 1892 when the “Deathbed Edition” was published, Whitman created a work of art that was (and is still) defined by its fundamentally kinetic, dialogic, and collectively engaging […]

This Compost is one of the many Whitman poems we’ve read that moves along that Hegelian dialectical structure of ecstasy, crisis, and resolution. However, this one stands out in that it begins in crisis. The first section begins with the line “Something startles me where I thought I was safest,” after which a series of […]

With Ode to Walt Whitman, Neruda draws on the image of Walt Whitman as the prophet-bard to evoke the kind of liberating tradition with which Whitman the celebrant of an ideal democracy is often associated. He calls Whitman “the bard,” “nocturnal healer” who “dug up not only/ earth/ into light” but “unearthed/a man/ and the […]

Blog 3 Reading Whitman’s prose in Democratic Vistas feels kind of odd– a bit like glimpsing the “man behind the curtain” and realizing his magic is not in some kind of heroic ability but rather in the fantasy of his vision. There is no tone of sweeping inclusiveness here, no ecstatic rapture at the common […]

Reading Song of Myself I tried to make notes for each section to try and decipher some kind of pattern in the poem’s progression. Each section at first seemed to be more or less self-contained units of commentary, praise, observation, what have you on a broad subject, flowing into the next section organically. The first ten sections […]