Critical Material Flashcards
Whitman’s linguistic intent
Whitman’s intent was both to record and to invent American English as a democratic medium.
Betsy Erkkila, Whitman the Political Poet.
the first great poet
Whitman “is the first great poet of the American vernacular”
Robert Johnstone, Walt Whiman: An Encyclopedia
Whitman’s conception of the American language
words “borrowed plentifully from each of the languages that graft the English language”
Whitman, “An American Primer”
Whitman on blank verse
I have a particular abhorrence of blank verse, but I cling to rhythm
1880 interview
Henry James about Whitman
There is not even by accident a line with a hint of style - it is all flat, familiar, affectionate, illiterate colloquy.
Henry James, review of Calamus
Barthes
L’écriture, c’est ce neutre, ce composite, cet oblique où fuit notre sujet, le noir-et-blanc où vient se perdre toute identité, à commencer par celle-là même du corps qui écrit.
La mort de l’auteur
les participes
“participle-loving Whitman”
Ezra Greenspan, The Poetics of “Participle-Loving Whitman”
geography
America is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imagination
Emerson, The Poet
Eye
I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all.
Emerson, Nature.
American mythology
LG as “the starting point for a new, uniquely American mythology” an attempt to “fabricate an ‘American epic’”
Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence
Lg & the Bible
“Leaves of Grass – Bible of the new religion.”
Whitman in a notebook
from poet-prophet to poet-historian
Betsy Erkkila
Whitman’s “spermatic imagination”
Harold Aspiz
