4 WhitmanWord

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　　Lecture FiveAmerican Romanticism (III)

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　　The Poets The Boston Brahmins refer to the patrician, Harvard-educated class, including Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, Oliver Wendell Holmes. Walt Whitman Emily Dickinson

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　　Walt Whitman (1819 - 1892)

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　　1. He was a catalog of American and European thought and was susceptible to many influences, such as, the Enlightenment and its ideals of the rights and dignity of the individual, toleration, humanitarianism and cosmopolitanism, idealism, the Transcendentalism, German philosophy(especially Hegel’s doctrine of a cosmic consciousness with emphasis on cohesiveness and social solidarity), science, pantheism, the idea of progress, and current American life with its western frontier spirit. 2. He seemed to keep his eyes on society at large comparing with Dickinson. 3. His masterpiece “Leaves of Grass”(the collection of over 400 poems)

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　　About his poem: 1) The fundamental ideas which were prevalent in America at the time pervade all Whitman’s poems, such as, general mysticism and anti-rationalism, pantheism, and the theory of “the Great Chain of Being”. 2) In his poems he extols the ideals of equality and democracy and celebrates the dignity, the self-reliant spirit and the joy of the common man. 3) Thematically he extolled an emergent America, its expansion, its individualism and its Americanness. 4) In technical terms, he added to the literary independence of the new nation by breaking free of the convention of the iambic pentameter and exhibiting a freedom in form unknown before.

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　　Literary term: Free verse: It refers to a kind of poetry whose rhythmical lines vary in length, adhering to no fixed metrical pattern or the usually rhyming system. Such poetry may seem formless, but it does have a form or pattern, often largely based on repetition and parallel structure.

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　　Free verse is poetry that has an irregular rhythm and line length and that attempts to avoid any predetermined verse structure; instead, it uses the cadences of natural speech. While it alternates stressed and unstressed syllables as stricter verse forms do, free verse does so in a looser way.

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　　Whitman's poetry is an example of free verse at its most impressive. Free verse is a modem form of verse with no fixed foot, rhythm or rime schemes. Whitman pioneered the form and made the free verse acceptable in American poetry. It has since been used by Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens and other major American poets of the twentieth century.

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　　Whitman’s poems: In his poems, he celebrated new America rather than regretted it. He opposed slavery, idealized Lincoln, supported strikes, and combined the ideal of the democratic common people and that of the rugged individual. Like Emerson, Whitman saw a unity which pervaded the universe. One of his major concerns is the soul and its destiny. For Whitman, sensuality was the origin of the mystical state. Sensuality led to spiritua

　　l insight. Whitman celebrated the body, enjoyed the body, because he said that through the physical people learned the spiritual. He held that poetry should include the lowly, the profane, and even the obscene.