WALT

WHITMAN
‘LEAVES OF
GRASS’

Lesson 2
We will try to analyse the influence Walt Whitman had on the development of the literary tradition.

1. Read the following information and speak about the changes referred to in the last sentence:
When Walt Whitman published his first edition of Leaves of Grass on or around the fourth day of
July in 1855, he believed he was embarking on (приступить к) a personal literary journey of national
significance. Setting out to define the American experience, Whitman consciously (сознательно) hoped to
answer Ralph Waldo Emerson's 1843 essay, "The Poet," which called for a truly original national poet, one
who would sing of the new country in a new voice. The undertaking required unlimited optimism, especially
considering the fact that Whitman had published only a small handful of poems prior to 1855; however,
Whitman felt confident that the time was ripe (созревший) and that the people would embrace (принять)
him. This optimism and confidence resulted largely from his awareness (осознание) of the tremendous
changes in the American literary world that had taken place during his lifetime.

2. What is “the greatest poet” according to Whitman? Enumerate his manifestations and goals (see Preface
to Leaves of Grass) and illustrate them with quotations from Whitman’s poems.

3. “The greatest poet does not moralize or make applications of morals… he knows the soul. The soul has
that measureless pride which consists in never acknowledging any lessons but its own. But it has sympathy
as measureless as its pride and the one balances the other and neither can stretch too far while it stretches in
company with the other. The inmost secrets of art sleep with the twain. The greatest poet has lain close
betwixt both and they are vital in his style and thoughts.” (Preface to Leaves of Grass).
Does Whitman manage to keep the balance judging by the poems you have read? Provide examples.
(For whom does he express sympathy? In what/ whom does he take pride?)

4. “The only profitable point of view from which Leaves of Grass can be regarded is one that, while giving
distinctness to the serious error of unclean exposure and to the frequent feebleness of form and style which
reduce large portions of the work to tedious and helpless prose, leaves our vision clear for the occasional
glimpses of beauty that the book discloses. We must also take into account the imagination often informing
some one of these rhapsodies as a whole, even when its parts are found to be weak, repetitious, and
blemished by inanity or affectation. The absurdities, the crudities, in which Whitman indulges, are almost
unlimited and all but omnipresent. For illustration, he gives utterance to phrases like this: "I effuse my flesh
in eddies and drift it in lacy jags." Following a vague impulse, without depth of reflection, to find new
modes of expression, he cries: "Eclaircise the myths of Asia!" "I expose!" is another of these exceedingly
pointless inventions; and we cannot see that the ends of freedom in art, or grandeur of any kind, are served
by adopting as the symbol for a writer the term "literat." To call him an "inkrat" would be much more
forcible and original. On the other hand, these pages bring to light a mass of vivid and well-chosen though
sometimes uncouth epithets.” (The Atlantic Monthly, January 1882)
Find instances of such epithets and explain their role in the poem(s).

5. What characteristic features of Whitman’s style can you single out? What influenced his prosody? What
levels of creating meaning are most significant? Take the poem you like most and analyse it.
6. Today, more than a century after the publication of the final edition of Leaves of Grass, Whitman's place
in American literary history often seems as nebulous and enigmatic as the ideas upon which America was
founded. Numerous poets since Whitman have consciously either placed themselves in the wake of his
tradition or reacted violently against him, and the aesthetic value of Whitman's poetry continues to be a
controversial subject.
Which group would you join? Why?

Render the piece into Russian: (to send to your teacher)

In his manifesto Whitman declared that the American poet would not repudiate past beliefs but
would incorporate them into newer ones, just as Americans are composed of all peoples. To be
commensurate with this new American stock, the poet would incarnate the American geography,
occupations, and the people themselves in a new and transcendent poetic form. The great poet would find
encouragement and support in the sciences and the branches of history, since his poetry would not be
escapist and otherworldly but solidly tied to verifiable knowledge. He would never populate a tree with a
hamadryad, much less rue the vanishing of that mythological creature, and never write a poem (like John
Milton’s Paradise Lost) which would show God as “contending against some being or influence.” This poet
would have a sense of ultimate causality – that cruelty and goodness perpetuate themselves, that “no result
exists now without being from its long antecedent result.” By his capacity for encouraging and exalting
others, the poet would soon replace the priest as servant to people; then at last every man would be his own
priest.
The great American poet would create both new forms and new subject matter for poetry. Rhyme
would not be primary, if used at all; uniformity of stanzaic pattern would be abandoned. Whitman was even
clearer about the new content. The American poetry would not echo the melancholy complaints of the
“graveyard school” nor proliferate the moral precepts of didactic writers like Longfellow. Exaggeration of
both style and subject would be replaced by “genuineness,” by respect for the way things really are.

THE SONG OF MYSELF

I celebrate myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

I loafe and invite my soul,

I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.

My tongue, every atom of my blood, form’d from this soil, this air,
Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their parents the same,
I, now thirty seven years old in perfect health begin,
Hoping to cease not till death.

Creeds and schools in abeyance,

Retiring back a while sufficed at what they are, but never forgotten,
I harbor for good or bad, I permit to speak at every hazard,
Nature without check with original energy.
(for recording your reproduction)
Twenty eight young men bathe by the shore;
Twenty eight young men and all so friendly;
Twenty eight years of womanly life and all so lonesome.
She owns the fine house by the rise of the bank,
She hides, handsome and richly dressed, after the blinds of the window.
Which of the young men does she like best?
Ah the homeliest of them is beautiful to her.
Where are you off to, lady? for I see you,
You splash in the water there, yet stay stock still in your room.
Dancing and laughing along the beach came the twenty ninth bather,
The rest did not see her, but she saw them and loved them.
The beards of the young men glistened with wet, it ran from their long
Little streams passed all over their bodies,
It deacended tremblingly from their emples and ribs.
The young men float on their backs, their white bellies bulge to the son,
They do not ask who seizes fast to them,
They do not know puffs and declines with pendant and bending arch.
They do not think whom they souse with spray.

6. The above lines comprise section II of Walt Whitman's long poem "SONG OF
MYSELF" which is made of 52 sections of varying length, each celebrating one or more
aspects of Whitman's long love affair with life, with sounds, and sights, and smells, with the
intense pleasure of daily work and relaxation, with people. The above section expresses great
compassion for the lonely woman in the fine house by the river.
But is there, do you think, anything symbolic in it? What is happening in the
poem? What do you think it means? Is its meaning in anything beyond the pathos of the
woman's starved loneliness? How literally do you think Whitman intends her joining the
men bathing in the river? What symbolic significance, if any, is there in the use of the
number twenty eight in the two connections in which Whitman uses it?