Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Whitman and the ‘Lawless Music’ of American Culture
- TRANSNATIONAL CONTEXTS OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY US DISCOURSE
- REPRESENTATIVE AUTHORS
- CONCEPTUAL FIELDS OF US CULTURE
- 5 The Music of America
- 6 National Identity and the Smell of the Woods
- 7 The Democratic Muse
- INVENTING WHITMANIAN AUTHORITY
- Epilog: After the American Renaissance
- Bibliography
- Index
5 - The Music of America
from CONCEPTUAL FIELDS OF US CULTURE
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Whitman and the ‘Lawless Music’ of American Culture
- TRANSNATIONAL CONTEXTS OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY US DISCOURSE
- REPRESENTATIVE AUTHORS
- CONCEPTUAL FIELDS OF US CULTURE
- 5 The Music of America
- 6 National Identity and the Smell of the Woods
- 7 The Democratic Muse
- INVENTING WHITMANIAN AUTHORITY
- Epilog: After the American Renaissance
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Orphic Song
Emerson's and Whitman's intellectual personae center around the ambiguous image of the poet as Orphic singer. This image gained currency during the romantic shift towards neoplatonism and expressivism, when the poetic was defined more often by musical than by painterly root metaphors (Abrams 1953: 88–94; Lindenberger 2000). The Whitmanian moment draws from the conceptual appropriation of musical images used in the musicological discussions within the nineteenth-century US literary establishment, which in turn negotiates a transnational emergence of a romantic metaphysics of music as embodied form. Let me briefly sketch this development.
The Cartesian and empiricist traditions of eighteenth-century aesthetics conceived of instrumental music as ‘pleasurable sound’, capable of producing only vague emotions. These so-called hedonistic theories subordinated music to the verbal art it was supposed to accompany, and to the function of providing either an edifying atmosphere for religious worship or a sensuous commentary to operatic drama. In the emergent vocabularies of sensibility, the idea of pleasurable sound developed into the notion of music as a ‘language of feeling’ that encourages empathetic union of minds. The semantic vagueness of music seemed less reprehensible when it was thought capable of addressing an emotive world beyond rational discourse.
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- Information
- Cultural Authority in the Age of WhitmanA Transatlantic Perspective, pp. 131 - 159Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2009