Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Whitman and the ‘Lawless Music’ of American Culture
- TRANSNATIONAL CONTEXTS OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY US DISCOURSE
- REPRESENTATIVE AUTHORS
- 3 The Poet as Orphic Singer: Ralph Waldo Emerson
- 4 Walt Whitman and the Poetry of the Future
- CONCEPTUAL FIELDS OF US CULTURE
- INVENTING WHITMANIAN AUTHORITY
- Epilog: After the American Renaissance
- Bibliography
- Index
4 - Walt Whitman and the Poetry of the Future
from REPRESENTATIVE AUTHORS
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
- 3 The Poet as Orphic Singer: Ralph Waldo Emerson
- 4 Walt Whitman and the Poetry of the Future
- CONCEPTUAL FIELDS OF US CULTURE
- INVENTING WHITMANIAN AUTHORITY
- Epilog: After the American Renaissance
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The ‘Lawless Music’ of the ‘American Muse’
In ‘Song of the Exposition’ (1871, then called ‘After All, Not to Create Only’), Whitman calls upon the ancient Muse to ‘migrate from Greece and Ionia’ and to leave behind her ‘Gothic European Cathedrals, and German, French and Spanish Castles’ for a ‘better, fresher, busier sphere’ in the American West (1871: ll. 15–22). She is ‘[r]esponsive’ to the poet's ‘summons’, not because of his powers of persuasion, but because of the inevitability of her westward course (‘her long-nurs'd inclination’ and ‘irresistible, natural gravitation’ [1871: ll. 22–4]). Westward lies historical growth: the Muse has ‘changed, journey'd considerable’ (1871: l. 53) and gone through ‘evolutions’ (1871: l. 36) since the world spirit's paradisiacal Eastern beginnings. Turning ‘her curious eyes’ upon the American scene, she moves beyond the more ‘primitive call’ (1871: l. 40) of ancient traditions and begins to sing in a more advanced key. Whitman portrays her arrival in modern America as an aesthetic revolution: in masculine pioneer fashion she literally hacks a swath through insipid couplets of genteel verse. As she enters the nation's literary parlors, traditional poems express their fear in rhymed squeaks:
And I can hear
With howling, desperate gulp of ‘flower’ and ‘bower’,
With ‘Sonnet to Matilda’s Eyebrow’ quite, quite frantic;
With gushing, sentimental reading circles turn’d to ice or stone;
With many a squeak, (in Metre choice,) from Boston, New York,
Philadelphia, London;
As she, the illustrious émigré . . .
Making directly for this rendezvous – vigorously clearing a path for herself – striding through the confusion,
By thud of machinery and shrill steam-whistle undismay’d,
Bluff’d not a bit by drain-pipe, gasometers, artificial fertilizers,
Smiling and pleas’d with palpable intent to stay,
She’s here, install’d amid the kitchen ware! (1871: ll. 50–65)
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- Information
- Cultural Authority in the Age of WhitmanA Transatlantic Perspective, pp. 101 - 128Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2009