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Author: James Perrin Warren
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271073020
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 207
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Book Description
Combining intellectual history with literary analysis, this study of Whitman's language experiment from 1855 to 1892 offers a refreshing new look at his theory of language especially the English language in America—as an expression of a "national spirit" and relates that theory to the language and style of Whitman's major poems and essays. Whitman viewed American English as the most expressive, poetic language that ever existed, and he used his studies of historical linguistics to corroborate that view. Part 1 explicates the theory of language that Whitman developed in his linguistic notebooks, unpublished manuscripts, fugitive essays, and two chapters of the popular book Rambles Among Words. The diction and syntax of the 1855–1856 editions of Leaves of Grass are analyzed to show how Whitman's overwhelming interest in language theories resulted in the "language experiment" of the poems. Part 2 examines the ways in which Whitman's view of language as an expression of the constantly evolving spirit of America subtly shifted to a more cumulative, backward-looking vision of linguistic and spiritual change. Analysis of the diction, syntax, and organization of the last four editions of Leaves of Grass reveals how this shift in vision affected the style of Whitman's poetry and prose from 1860 to 1892. Whitman's groundbreaking poetic style, the author concludes, was a direct consequence of his view of language and the human spirit as dynamic, progressivist, and actively changing within a temporal world. Conversely, Whitman's experiments in both prose and poetry helped confirm his view of linguistic and spiritual evolution.
Author: James Perrin Warren
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271073020
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 207
Get Book Here
Book Description
Combining intellectual history with literary analysis, this study of Whitman's language experiment from 1855 to 1892 offers a refreshing new look at his theory of language especially the English language in America—as an expression of a "national spirit" and relates that theory to the language and style of Whitman's major poems and essays. Whitman viewed American English as the most expressive, poetic language that ever existed, and he used his studies of historical linguistics to corroborate that view. Part 1 explicates the theory of language that Whitman developed in his linguistic notebooks, unpublished manuscripts, fugitive essays, and two chapters of the popular book Rambles Among Words. The diction and syntax of the 1855–1856 editions of Leaves of Grass are analyzed to show how Whitman's overwhelming interest in language theories resulted in the "language experiment" of the poems. Part 2 examines the ways in which Whitman's view of language as an expression of the constantly evolving spirit of America subtly shifted to a more cumulative, backward-looking vision of linguistic and spiritual change. Analysis of the diction, syntax, and organization of the last four editions of Leaves of Grass reveals how this shift in vision affected the style of Whitman's poetry and prose from 1860 to 1892. Whitman's groundbreaking poetic style, the author concludes, was a direct consequence of his view of language and the human spirit as dynamic, progressivist, and actively changing within a temporal world. Conversely, Whitman's experiments in both prose and poetry helped confirm his view of linguistic and spiritual evolution.
Author: Andrew Lawson
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
ISBN: 1587296705
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 187
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Book Description
By reconsidering Whitman not as the proletarian voice of American diversity but as a historically specific poet with roots in the antebellum lower middle class, Andrew Lawson in Walt Whitman and the Class Struggle defines the tensions and ambiguities about culture, class, and politics that underlie his poetry.Drawing on a wealth of primary sources from across the range of antebellum print culture, Lawson uses close readings of Leaves of Grass to reveal Whitman as an artisan and an autodidact ambivalently balanced between his sense of the injustice of class privilege and his desire for distinction. Consciously drawing upon the languages of both the elite culture above him and the vernacular culture below him, Whitman constructed a kind of middle linguistic register that attempted to filter these conflicting strata and defuse their tensions: “You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me, / You shall listen to all sides and filter them from yourself.” By exploring Whitman's internal struggle with the contradictions and tensions of his class identity, Lawson locates the source of his poetic innovation. By revealing a class-conscious and conflicted Whitman, he realigns our understanding of the poet's political identity and distinctive use of language and thus valuably alters our perspective on his poetry.
Author: Ed Folsom
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521585729
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 220
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Book Description
Moving through Whitman's career four times from four different perspectives, this 1994 book investigates several major American cultural developments that occurred during Whitman's lifetime, the development of American dictionaries, the growth of baseball, the evolution of American Indian policy: the development of photography became essential components of Whitman's innovative poetics. Resisting the usual critical temptation to present a totalised, one-dimensional Whitman, this study views him instead as multiple and contradictory, a gatherer of discordant tones and clashing approaches from a variety of surprising cultural arenas. In such cultural activities, Whitman found not his poetic subject so much as his poetic tools and techniques. These cultural actions taught him how to make native representations.
Author: M. Jimmie Killingsworth
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139462288
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 123
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Book Description
Walt Whitman is one of the most innovative and influential American poets of the nineteenth century. Focusing on his masterpiece Leaves of Grass, this book provides a foundation for the study of Whitman as an experimental poet, a radical democrat, and a historical personality in the era of the American Civil War, the growth of the great cities, and the westward expansion of the United States. Always a controversial and important figure, Whitman continues to attract the admiration of poets, artists, critics, political activists, and readers around the world. Those studying his work for the first time will find this an invaluable book. Alongside close readings of the major texts, chapters on Whitman's biography, the history and culture of his time, and the critical reception of his work provide a comprehensive understanding of Whitman and of how he has become such a central figure in the American literary canon.
Author: Frank D. Casale
Publisher: Infobase Publishing
ISBN: 1438127685
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 273
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Book Description
Offers advice on writing essays about the poetry of Walt Whitman and lists sample topics.
Author: C. K. Williams
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691176108
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 208
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Book Description
Pulitzer Prize–winning poet C. K. Williams's personal reflection on the art of Walt Whitman In this book, Pulitzer Prize–winning poet C. K. Williams sets aside the mass of biography and literary criticism that has accumulated around Walt Whitman and attempts to go back to Leaves of Grass as he first encountered it—to explore why Whitman's epic "continues to inspire and sometimes daunt" him. The result is a personal reassessment and appreciation of one master poet by another, as well as an unconventional and brilliant introduction to Whitman. Beautifully written and rich with insight, this is a book that refreshes our ability to see Whitman in all his power.
Author: M. Jimmie Killingsworth
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
ISBN: 1587295164
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 238
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Book Description
Now I am terrified at the Earth, it is that calm and patient, It grows such sweet things out of such corruptions, It turns harmless and stainless on its axis, with such endless successions of diseas’d corpses, It distills such exquisite winds out of such infused fetor, It renews with such unwitting looks its prodigal, annual, sumptuous crops, It gives such divine materials to men, and accepts such leavings from them at last. —Walt Whitman, from “This Compost” How did Whitman use language to figure out his relationship to the earth, and how can we interpret his language to reconstruct the interplay between the poet and his sociopolitical and environmental world? In this first book-length study of Whitman’s poetry from an ecocritical perspective, Jimmie Killingsworth takes ecocriticism one step further into ecopoetics to reconsider both Whitman’s language in light of an ecological understanding of the world and the world through a close study of Whitman’s language. Killingsworth contends that Whitman’s poetry embodies the kinds of conflicted experience and language that continually crop up in the discourse of political ecology and that an ecopoetic perspective can explicate Whitman’s feelings about his aging body, his war-torn nation, and the increasing stress on the American environment both inside and outside the urban world. He begins with a close reading of “This Compost”—Whitman’s greatest contribution to the literature of ecology,” from the 1856 edition of Leaves of Grass. He then explores personification and nature as object, as resource, and as spirit and examines manifest destiny and the globalizing impulse behind Leaves of Grass, then moves the other way, toward Whitman’s regional, even local appeal—demonstrating that he remained an island poet even as he became America’s first urban poet. After considering Whitman as an urbanizing poet, he shows how, in his final writings, Whitman tried to renew his earlier connection to nature. Walt Whitman and the Earth reveals Whitman as a powerfully creative experimental poet and a representative figure in American culture whose struggles and impulses previewed our lives today.
Author: Donald D. Kummings
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1405195517
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 628
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Book Description
Comprising more than 30 substantial essays written by leading scholars, this companion constitutes an exceptionally broad-ranging and in-depth guide to one of America’s greatest poets. Makes the best and most up-to-date thinking on Whitman available to students Designed to make readers more aware of the social and cultural contexts of Whitman’s work, and of the experimental nature of his writing Includes contributions devoted to specific poetry and prose works, a compact biography of the poet, and a bibliography
Author: Kenneth M. Price
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192894846
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 721
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Book Description
A Handbook on Walt Whitman that reflects the best new work in the field including chapters that set his work within the context of digital scholarship, discussion of new manuscript discoveries and transcriptions, exploration of environmental angles on Whitman, and a focus on disability studies.
Author: Michael West
Publisher: Ohio University Press
ISBN: 0821413244
Category : American literature
Languages : en
Pages : 546
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Book Description
Throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, America was captivated by a muddled notion of "etymology." New England Transcendentalism was only one outcropping of a nationwide movement in which schoolmasters across small-town America taught students the roots of words in ways that dramatized religious issues and sparked wordplay. Shaped by this ferment, our major romantic authors shared the sensibility that Friedrich Schlegel linked to punning and christened "romantic irony." Notable punsters or etymologists all, they gleefully set up as sages, creating jocular masterpieces from their zest for oracular wordplay. Their search for a primal language lurking beneath all natural languages provided them with something like a secret language that encodes their meanings. To fathom their essentially comic masterpieces we must decipher it. Interpreting Thoreau as an ironic moralist, satirist, and social critic rather than a nature-loving mystic, Transcendental Wordplay suggests that the major American Romantics shared a surprising conservatism. In this award-winning study, Professor West rescues the pun from critical contempt and allows readers to enjoy it as a serious form of American humor.
