The Walt Whitman Blog / Transnational Poetry

My paper will address the Whitmanian echoes in George Oppen’s poetry. I will explore how Oppen engages with, but ultimately distances himself from Whitman by not manufacturing a glorious recovery. I hope to make my argument by comparing “Song of Myself” to “Of Being Numerous”.

The relationship between Oppen and Whitman is important because of their similarity in form but differences in interaction with the world. Oppen comments directly on the things he sees in the world around him, but does not provide the recovery that Whitman is known for. In “Song of Myself” there is a sense that the center cannot hold, but Whitman always seems to have an underlying hope in recovery. I’m excited to delve into Oppen’s poetry more thoroughly and draw a more clear connection between him and Whitman.

My guiding questions will be: How do Whitman and Oppen each use the serial form of poetry to explore and comment on the world around them? How do their differences in poetics reveal their outlook on interaction with the world? I hope to learn more about the form of their poetics and figure out why they both found this form useful for their different purposes.

During peer revision, my group suggested that I need to choose my sources carefully. Dana pointed out that my claims about form and authorial intent will need to be well documented before I can make my own conclusions. I realize that the only using two poems may be problematic for the length of the paper, but I am hoping that my argument will be supplemented by including the aspect of the time period of the authors. It was also brought to my attention that my own voice will have to somehow emerge as the strongest in the paper, which will be hard to do considering the magnitude of this connection. I’m hoping to “join the conversation” with the critics that I have found. I would love any more suggestions about making my paper more well rounded–or any sources you may come across that would be helpful.

For my final paper, I will be exploring the lineage and relationship between Walt Whitman and Bruce Springsteen.  By looking at these two fully “American” figures, I will be viewing their writings as it pertains to the American working class.  My argument is that Springsteen, “the foremost purveyor of American working-class rock and roll” (Smith, 302), is not only heavily influenced by the writings of Walt Whitman but also seeks to continue and fulfill Whitman’s American tradition and his dreams for the working class.

The American working class, a tradition that is ensnared in the “constructions of race, gender, and sexuality” (Carman, 2), is at the heart of Whitman and Springsteen.  Greg Smith notes how “Whitman envisioned the American working class of the future as having a better existence than those of his own day” (303); however, Whitman’s grand aspirations for the American working class that balanced individual freedom with the public good never seemed to take root in America.  Springsteen, building off of the roots set by Whitman, currently seeks to improve the lives of the American people and through the medium of rock and roll has been able to reach out to the masses in ways that Whitman only dreamed. These two artists not only share passions for the open road and the working class, as exemplified in Whitman’s poems “A Backward Glance O’er Travel’d Roads,” “I Hear American Singing,” and “Song of Myself,” and Springsteen’s “Born to Run,” “Thunder Days,” and Darkness on the Edge of Town, but they also embrace the individual, the community, the other, as they stress the heroism of the everyday.

Grounded in Whitman’s artistic tradition, Springsteen stresses “that the natural rights of freedom and equality [must] be granted to all Americans” (Carman, 227).   My guiding research question for this paper is to what extent does Springsteen fall into the same tradition as Whitman, and how is Springsteen furthering this tradition, as he writes for the American working class?

For my research paper I would like to explore the connections between Walt Whitman and T.S. Eliot.  I chose Eliot to begin with because he often blatantly rejected Whitman and his influence; however, it is undeniably there in both his style and subject matter.  Whitman is a poet of many things, but one of his most profound roles is as the poet of America.  Whitman’s poetry celebrates America and desires much for America.  Going through the suffering of the Civil War with America, Whitman desired to heal the nation and put much hope in the modern way of life.  On the other hand, as a modernist poet, Eliot’s work reflects the view that, due to the forces of modernity, the world has become more complicated and distressed; therefore, art should be, too.  My main focus on their relationship will be to investigate how Eliot rejects the materialism and modernization of America, which, to him, Whitman is a representative of.  Eliot lived in a time in which the phenomena so optimistically described by Whitman had become a daily reality; therefore, his poetry breaks down the optimism of urban life and civilization and acknowledges the new disconnectedness of the landscape and the people. 

My guiding research question will be how does Eliot reverse Whitman’s optimism about the modern world and what is it about Whitman’s poetry in particular that Eliot responds to, often in veiled ways?  I believe the fundamental connections between the two will be in their detailed treatment of urban life and their attitudes toward humanity, in mass and as individuals.  Furthermore, I feel that they each take opposite stances on these subjects and I am looking to explore this further with close readings of many of their poems.  For Eliot, I know that I will be looking at “Prufrock”, “The Hollow Men”, and “The Waste Land”, unless that gets too big, with other possibilities as well.  I am not positive yet what Whitman poems I will be most closely looking at, but probably among “Song of Myself”, “As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life”, “When Lilacs Last…”, and “I Sit and Look Out”.  With a profound understanding of Eliot I hope to understand what it is about Whitman’s poetics and modern life that he rejects and why.  These two are poets born in America but their generation gap and personal differences led to a divergent treatment of often similar topics, with a free and open form that is stylistically similar.  As an Eliot fan I am looking forward to discovering an influence of his that is less commonly accepted as a way to enrich both my understanding of Eliot and of Whitman.

For the final paper, I want to explore the trope of silence in poetry. What sparked my interest in this topic was Walt Whitman’s poem, “I Sit and Look Out.” Whitman ends the poem with a rare silence – one that is infinitely meaningful. To be at a loss for words is a universalizing, human feeling, and for a poet to admit the act of silence reveals that there must be a profound meaning behind it.

In my paper I will closely examine Whitman’s silence in as well as the meaning of silence behind George Oppen’s poetry. Silence played an arguably weightier role for George Oppen than it did Whitman. From 1935 to 1958 after a great deal of success as a poet, Oppen stopped writing all together. He felt poetry seemed trite in relation to the world and said, “Surely there are situations in which it’s absurd to write poetry! One could approach his own death with poetry – I should think one would. But a slaughter, a slaughter for which he bears perhaps some responsibility? Or, he does what he does. I don’t know what one ‘should’ do…” (Oppen xiii). Here Oppen suggests the insufficiency of words and the uselessness of poetry in times of difficulty or crisis. Whitman also suggests this in I Sit and Look Out, when he says “All these— All the meanness and agony without end, I sitting, look out upon/ See, hear, and am silent.” However, the irony is that Whitman suggests this concept in a poem, therefore contradicting himself, while Oppen suggests it by truly neglecting poetry for twenty-three years.

Ultimately, I will attempt to answer the following questions: What kind of impact does the act of silence make? Is the act of silence one of power or weakness? Are the hardest parts of life impossible to express through words, as Oppen suggests in the above quote? How is the silence of Whitman similar to the silence of Oppen? How is it different?

I am planning on writing my research paper on Whitman and Neruda and the subject of self, specifically in terms of bodily limits. Both poets express throughout their poems different feelings towards their bodily existence and limits. I want to trace the crisis of this through a few of each of their poems, and find the highs and lows of it and how, if at all, they are similar.

Whitman has moments of immense celebration of his body. For instance, the beginning sections of Song of Myself exemplify this, when he excuses himself from everyone to go and admire himself in the bath. However, at other moments there is a jumbled celebration, and he seems more disturbed and more aware of being a captive in his own skin. This is evident in the “lurking” he describes in Eidolons. Finally, close to his death Whitman writes Preface Note to 2d Annex in which he describes his decrepit body as a shell-like “conch-shell” existence. I feel that this is a different “shell” feeling than his earlier “lurking”, however, because of the implications of conch shells, which re-house monarchs regularly as they grow. I want to see if this idea of moving through skins and through bodies has any real merit for Whitman, or if it should simply be left in the poem as is.

In Neruda’s Body of Woman he speaks of “surviving himself”, yet there is also a lot of celebration of the body here. I can talk about his exploration of the woman’s body–her skin, in terms of Whitman’s bodily celebration. Some of Neruda’s other poems however seem stuck on this need to survive himself. For instance, in “Walking Around” Neruda says he is “tired of being a man.” I am interested to see if Neruda has a poem similar to Whitman’s conch-shell Preface, or, in general, how he concludes this crisis of bodily limitations at the end of his life.

I am having real trouble narrowing down what I want my topic to be (there are so many things. Whitman is so big!). I can’t figure out if I should focus on a certain poet, or if I should concentrate on a specific topic or conflict that reoccurs in Whitman’s poetry. I am juggling in my head all these names and ideas and it’s gotten pretty overwhelming. So I decided to break from all of that for a second–take a breather–and see if anything would hit me. And I think maybe something did.

I have been a big Bukowski fan for a couple of years now, and the more I think about it the more impossible it becomes to deny Whitman’s influence and connection to Bukowski.

It is easy to see the difference between Whitman, the bearded grandfather, and Bukowski, the dirty old man poet. As we discussed in class Whitman portrays this grand and encompassing persona that both views and embodies the vastness of the masses. Bukowski however just depicts his own surrounding, in vivid and often excruciating detail, there is no separation between Bukowski and the speaker in his poems.

However they do have a good number of things in common. They both revolutionized the form and language of poetry. Bukowski claimed his “aim was to ‘humanize’ poetry, lowering the rhetorical tone by structurally simple language flavoured with slang and swear words, asides to the reader, and other humorous interjections.” I feel Whitman achieved this same sense of “humanizing” with his free verse and rejection of previous forms. Both have also been seen as being controversial and vulgar in their works, “He’s the equivalent in today’s world of Walt Whitman, who was accused in his own day of all the things that Bukowski was, of being a ruffian and uncouth.” His poetry mimics Whitman’s first person narrative, depicting images and scenes that were “disorderly, fleshy, and sensual“–sound familiar?

I don’t know, I am still looking for research on it and trying to narrow what it is I actually want to talk about, but I think it would be a really interesting connection to explore. What do you think?