Whitman's Drama of ConsensusUniversity of Chicago Press, 1988 M11 21 - 269 pages In this elegant study, Walt Whitman's democratic, consensual idealism emerges for the first time as truly central to his poetic achievement. Though Whitman's democratic idealism has often been dismissed as a blindness to the political complexities of his day, Kerry C. Larson argues that the poet was in fact vitally engaged in the problems of preserving social continuity at a time (1855-60) when the specter of disunion and fractricidal war grew increasingly ominous. Whitman conceived his poems as vehicles for social integration whose entire aim was to dramatize the joining of the many and the one, speaker and listener, universal and particular without subordinating either term. For Whitman, the poet's role was to be "the better President," the figure in whose person all contending interests and competing factions would be resolved. The importance of "drama" in Larson's title is borne out in his argument that Whitman's most memorable poems depict the goal of consent as an active process, something to be achieved rather than merely affirmed. By way of making this drama vivid, these poems project a fictive audience or interlocutor which, in being invoked by the poet, furnishes him with a partner in the ongoing dialogue of voices Leaves of Grass both embodies and records. |
Contents
Abbreviations | ix |
Acknowledgments | xi |
Introduction | xiii |
A More Perfect Union Whitmans Hymns of You | 1 |
Contacts and Contracts | 7 |
Lessons of the Master | 30 |
Unbetrayable Replies | 56 |
Organic Compacts The Conception of Free Growth | 75 |
Native Models | 106 |
The Overstaid Fraction | 132 |
Breaking the Tally The Body Comradeship and Death | 147 |
The Armies of Love | 153 |
SeaDrift | 185 |
DrumTaps and Beyond | 207 |
Notes | 245 |
265 | |
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Common terms and phrases
aesthetic American Literature American Renaissance apostrophe appear bard become begins Calamus chant Children of Adam compacts consensus Constitution course Cradle crisis criticism Crossing Brooklyn Ferry death democracy Democratic Vistas discourse drama dream Drum-Taps earth Ebb'd Edition of Leaves Emerson Emory Holloway essay final free growth genius hand Harold Bloom Hart Crane images imagination impasse Leaves of Grass less Lilacs lines literary Malcolm Cowley means ment muse nation never night organicism poem poem's poet poet's poetic poetry political proof prophetic R. W. B. Lewis reader reading remains rhetoric role scene sense significance simply Sleepers Song soul speak speaker speech stance stand sublimation suggests T. S. Eliot tally theme things thought tion turn Union University Press utter verse vision voice Wallace Stevens Walt Whitman Walter Benn Michaels Whit whoever words Wound-Dresser writing York