smhleipzig
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Sebastian M. Herrmann
American Studies Leipzig
www.data-imaginary.de
Once I pass’d through a populous city imprinting my brain for future use with its shows, architecture, customs, traditions
Yet now of all that city I remember only a woman I casually met there who detain’d me for love of me,
Day by day and night by night we were together—all else has long been forgotten by me,
I remember I say only that woman who passionately clung to me,
Again we wander, we love, we separate again,
Again she holds me by the hand, I must not go,
I see her close beside me with silent lips sad and tremulous.
(Leaves [1891])
R.W. French:
The problem is not what one might expect, that Song of Myself is difficult because it belongs to the nineteenth century; the problem is, rather, that the poem is difficult because it belongs more appropriately to the twentieth. Its analogues are [...] The Waste Land and Paterson and the Cantos. These classics of modernism make outrageous demands on their readers, first of all by demanding nothing less than a reconsideration of the very nature of poetry. (76-77)
his poetic surveys and catalogues (which do impart a note of exhilaration to his text even though one inclines to skim through them somewhat as when running the eye down the column of a telephone directory). (97)
Ralph Waldo Emerson:
I expected him to write the songs of the nation, but he seems content to make the inventory.” (qtd. in Daiches 123)
The theory and practice of poets have hitherto been to select certain ideas or events or personages, and then describe them in the best manner they could, always with as much ornament as the case allowed. Such are not the theory and practice of the new poet. He never presents for perusal a poem ready-made on the old models, and ending when you come to the end of it. (Whitman [anonymously], “English”)
the individual suggests a group, and the group a multitude, each unit of which is as interesting as every other unit, and possesses equal claims to recognition. Hence the recurring tendency of his poems to become catalogues of persons and things. (Dowden)
It [...] invites us to play the dangerous but instructive game of shuffling Whitman's lines [...] all through the 1855 Leaves and discovering how easily new poems emerge that sound perfectly plausible: Whitman’s lines, all concerned with [...] the celebration of the democratic scatter of the world, are often interchangeable, and, when shuffled in myriad ways, keep forming different poems that say the same things. (Folsom and Price 33-34)
He is to prove either the most lamentable of failures or the most glorious of triumphs, in the known history of literature. And after all we have written we confess our brain-felt and heart-felt inability to decide which we think it is likely to be.
(Whitman [anonymously], “English”)