Leaves of Grass

Question 1

Importance of sex

Answer 1

Sex contains all
Without shame x2
- A Woman Waits for Me

Question 2

Belief in sex

Answer 2

Through me forbidden voices
Voices of sexes and lust, and voices veil’d and I remove the veil,
I believe in the flesh and the appetites.
- Song of Myself

Question 3

Whitman as war general

Answer 3

Fall behind me States!

- By Blue Ontario’s Shore

Question 4

War is qualified

Answer 4

O pennant! Where you undulate like a snake hissing so curious
- Song of the Banner at Daybreak

Question 5

War is qualified 2

Answer 5

I see a sad procession

- Dinge for Two Veterans

Question 6

Whitman’s own war cry, “weapon-word[s]”

Answer 6

I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable,
I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.
- Song of Myself

Question 7

Erkkila, “Whitman the Political Poet” (1996) about the poet

Answer 7

There is a shift from “poet-prophet” to “poet-historian” after the war.

Question 8

Miller, “Drum-Taps: Revisions and Reconciliation” about Whitman’s vision

Answer 8

“A complex sequence alternating nostalgic claims that Whitman’s past vision for the US is not possible but still manifest, with moments of painful realism.”

Question 9

Aspiz’ book about Whitman

Answer 9

The Spermatic Imagination

Question 10

Invitational writing

Answer 10

Comerado, I give you my hand!
… Will you give me yourself? will you come travel with me?
- Song of the Open Road

Question 11

Whitman’s mission

Answer 11

I see myself as a connector, as chansonnier of a great future I must copy the story
- The Centenarian’s Story

Question 12

Old age and the ending?

Answer 12

Forever alive, forever forward.

- Song of the Open Road

Question 13

Erkkila, “Whitman the Political Poet” (1996) about Whitman’s mission for language

Answer 13

Whitman’s intent was both to record and to invent American English as a democratic medium.

Question 14

Whitman’s vision of his poetry

Answer 14

I am the poet of the Body and I am the poet of the Soul,
The pleasures of heaven are with me and the pains of hell are with me,
The first I graft and increase upon myself, the latter I translate into a new tongue.
- Song of Myself

Question 15

Whitman’s American Epic by Slotkin, “Regeneration Through Violence (1973)

Answer 15

American writers have attempted the Homeric task of providing through epic poetry or epic fiction, a starting point for a new, uniquely American mythology.

Question 16

Miller, “Leaves of Grass: America’s Lyric-Epic of Self and Democracy” (1992)

Answer 16

LoG is America’s epic poem, in a new form: “personal epic” or “lyric epic”

Question 17

Ralph Waldo Emerson in “The Poet” (1844)

Answer 17

“The poet is the true and only doctor”
“The poet as reconciler”
“America is a poem in our eyes”

Question 18

Large

Answer 18

I am large, I contain multitudes

- Song of Myself

Question 19

Celebrating the poet and the reader

Answer 19

I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good as belongs to you.
- Song of Myself

Question 20

Accepting the body

Answer 20

Touch me, touch the palm of your hand to my body as I pass,
Be not afraid of my body.
- As Adam Early in the Morning