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Manhattan's big bald – do we have him now?

Walt Whitman opened up the modern to a whole nation. Attempts to catch him once and for all become vain.




(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)

Stephen Miller:
Walking New York. Reflections of American Writers from Walt Whitman to Teju Cole
Fordham University Press, 2015.

Gary Schmidgall:
Containing Multitudes. Walt Whitman and the British Literary Tradition
Oxford University Press, 2015.

Walt Whitmann:
Drum Taps. The Complete 1865 Edition. Edited, annotated, and with an introduction by Lawrence Kramer.
The New York Review of Books, 2015.

Whitman NYRoB(Oh superb! Oh ManhWhitman Fordham UPattan, my own, my peersWhitman Oxford UPs!
O strongest you in the hour of danger, in crisis! Oh truer
than steel!)
How you jumped! How you throw off the costumes of peace
with indifferent hand;

Excerpt from "Drum-Taps" (1865)

As Baudelaire roamed the streets of Paris immersed in melancholy, Walt Whitman sat on New York's horse-drawn buses, quoting Shakespeare and paying tribute to American democracy. Three of this year's releases feature the panegyric and capitalist Whitman that Americans like to showcase, but also pages by the poet who are not yet fully housed.
Walking New York is really most interesting as a reference work for the city's lesser-known authors, and several of the quotes are taken from works that deserve more attention. An example is Colson Whiteheads The Colossus of New York (2003). In the "Brooklyn Bridge" chapter, a nameless woman crosses the bridge by the same name, before being stopped midway by the narrator's voice: "Don't look back, you will be shocked by negligible progress. A man pitched a tent here once and was hauled away. He told the police, I renounce all boroughs. You have the right to remain. You have the right to shout to the gods. Rarely have I seen such a precise description of how the concept of freedom and rights is abused in American political discourse.

Updated conflict. The aggressive tone of today's political United States is a starting point for the new release of Walt Whitmans Drum taps. Professor and author Lawrence Kramer points out that the conflicts that characterized the nineteenth-century United States of America have again been raised in recent times. He does not mention Ferguson and other related racial conflicts, but it is obviously these he is aiming for. Another starting point is the 1800th anniversary of the end of the American Civil War. A brief summary: Drum taps has long been part of Whitman's large, diverse and organic works, Leaves of Grass. Drum taps was published as an independent work in 1865, but according to Kramer has drowned and lost some of its importance because it was integrated into Whitman's main work. In the original version, the work is divided into two: The first part is about the war, the second about life after 1865. The latter deals with the murder of Abraham Lincoln in the iconic tribute poem "O Captain! my Captain! »

Whitman distinguished himself in the other literary countercultures in that he was a materialist and champion of the commercial forces.

Photographic expression. In its original form, the poems tell a story of the American Civil War, and according to the editor, it is "by common consent the only enduring literary work on the Civil War based on firsthand experience." Whitman worked as a nurse during the war, becoming one of the first to describe the soldier's experience in detail and from an individual perspective. In the past, epic depictions were customary, especially inspired by Homer, while Whitman adds something new to the depictions of war: an expression that, according to Kramer, has a photographic edge.
Kramer writes that "for the Whitman of Drum-Taps, empathy replaces transcendence". The culture of emotion surrounding the Civil War is not as well-known as the great battles, Lincoln's speeches and the political game, but Whitman finds room for both the grandiose and the close. "Drum-Taps" (cited above) is an example of the former, with Manhattan appearing as a powerful queen bee and the inhabitants as the most well-organized hive. In "Come up from the fields father" it is about the family of a soldier, and the moment when they receive the son's death message. Here he illustrates how empathy becomes stronger when released from hero mythology and religious conceptions. There is no salvation in the mother's grief, as it was portrayed in the popular grief poems of the Civil War – and perhaps it is by avoiding the buildup of literature that grief can truly be recognized? Here are the last poems of the poem:

But the mother needs to be better;
She, with thin form, presently dressed in black;
By day her meals untouch'd – then at night fitfully
sleeping, often waking,
In the midnight waking, weeping, longing with one deep
longing,
O that she might withdraw unnoticed – silent from life,
escape and withdraw,
To follow, to seek, to be with her dear dead son.

Life and poetry. How empathetic Whitman actually was is hard to say. His ego was the size of his hometown, and he could be completely uncompromising in his artistic pursuits. I "Did you ask dulcet rhymes from me?" he writes:

And go lull yourself with what you can understand;
For I lull nobody – and you will never understand me.

Both the new release of Drum taps and Gary Schmidgalls Containing Multitudes however, highlights just how problematic it is to have to stick such labels on the poet (something we like in the mediated and quantifiable 21st century), and this was a point also for Whitman himself. In the quote from "Song of Myself", which Schmidgall cites eagerly, he expresses:

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

In his book Schmidgall examines the relationship between Walt Whitman and the great British poets, such as Shakespeare, Milton and Blake. At Milton, he finds a similar quote – "a poet ought to be himself to be a true poem" – and uses this as an example that they were both preoccupied with the connection between life and poetry, in addition to Milton not being solidified in his contemporary Christian view of life, which Whitman claimed he was.
I Containing Multitudes convinces the author when he writes of Whitman and the classic British poets' radicality. One of the most interesting things about this release is the discussion of depoliticization and the "taming" of world literature. The canonized writers are literally made the living rooms. When this happens to Walt Whitman, it becomes particularly ironic considering that he constantly opposed the elite and the bourgeoisie's handling of literature. He had no higher education himself, and wanted his books to be read outdoors. Whitman's view of life was close to that of the Quakers, where so-called inner light was far more important than dogmas, rituals and sermons. Schmidgall explains how the canonization and adaptation of Whitman's works has taken place, in that the most patriotic poems have been raised, while the more controversial have been stripped away. In these sections he shows why one can still write books about authors who have already created a sea of ​​secondary literature, and why it is important that they are still read and analyzed.

The old and the new. Schmidgall's work also opens up the understanding of 1800th-century USA. When Whitman was born, the country had been independent for less than 50 years, and it was still characterized by the many years during the British Empire. For the Americans, it was important to distance themselves from British culture and tradition, to make room for their own expression and to develop their own culture. For example, Whitman could be so rigorous in assessing his English-speaking predecessors, and make statements such as: "I could never go Milton: He is turgid, heavy, over-stately ... seems like a bird – soaring yet overweighted: dragging down, as if burdened – too heavily burdened: a lamb in its beak: its flight not graceful, powerful, beautiful, satisfying, like the gulls we see over Delaware in midwinter – their simple motion a delight. ” He uses a language that links the British poet to the eagle, a figure that goes back to the ancient epics and thus represents both something traditionally bound and predatory. He himself represents the new, free, innocent and vital – America.
I Walking New York Miller writes that "Whitman was the first to suggest that an urban landscape can be sublime." This is linked to his anti-elitism; he could see the aesthetic elevation of the city's democratic structure. Miller's works are more loosely composed than Schmidgall's, and there is a longer distance between the really good reasoning. He does, however, tell some worthwhile stories about the mythical city and its authors, and provides some good clues for further reading. It also draws in photographers worth noting, such as Alvin Langdon Coburn and Jacob Riis.

The narrative we construct around our own and others' lives is just that – constructions.

Self made man. In the Whitman chapter, Miller highlights the poet's entrepreneurial spirit. Whitman distinguished himself in the other literary countercultures in that he was a materialist and champion of the commercial forces. However, he was also known for being lazy and dishonest; among other things, he wrote and published anonymously reviews of his works, where he did not return to genius himself. This section gives me associations to the TV series Breaking Bad., where the anti-hero Walter White has clear parallels to Manhattan's own baldness. White gives up the little lucrative job as a chemist and makes his own crystal methlab, and gradually builds an entire industry around the popular product. He is both megalomaniacal and uncompromising, at the same time succeeding in exploiting the opportunities of market liberalism and legal loopholes. The series both alludes and refers explicitly to the other WW, thus showing the problematic of the American ideal of the free, strong man who is the smith of his own happiness. Although Whitman was not at odds with the law in the same way as Walter White, there is much to suggest that he was a person who progressed by being, as critic David Reynolds puts it, "beyond scruples."

Many list. Writing biographical texts is a difficult exercise, and it strikes me time and again how unbalanced the relationship between life and text is often viewed in the biography genre. Writing is something quite different from living life, and the narrative we construct around our own and others' lives is just that – constructions. Here, there is much to be learned from the post-structuralists who pointed out that the linguistic structures also characterize our thoughts, while we normally assume that is the opposite. It is therefore almost impossible to formulate a truth about something as complex as a human being – and it becomes especially strange when Stephen Miller does this with a writer like Walt Whitman, who himself emphasizes his diversity: "It is easy to see how Whitman became a hero to the counterculture of the 1960s. He talked about freeing oneself from the 'cerments' of tradition, being natural, celebrating the body, having guilt-free sex. He was a loafer who did what he liked and went where he wanted to go […] But the 'real' Whitman was an ambitious and hardworking writer. And the 'real' Whitman wasn't very 'rough'. ” How can he know that precisely Miller has the material to prove who the "real" Whitman is? What do we do with such labels, which are nevertheless as fragile as the paper on which they are written? This is part of the "taming" Gary Schmidgall criticizes, which in a conservative style places writers in their permanent place both in the bookshelf and in life – and leaves them there.
One reason why Schmidgall does not fall into the same biographical trap as Miller is that he is to a greater extent based on the poets' own works. He makes close readings where the arguments are closely and closely interwoven. Miller's book may be more accessible and less academic in style, but it has far less substance.
However, Walt Whitman's own poems are the most readable of these three publications, to the extent that they can be juxtaposed in this way. Lawrence Kramer has done a brilliant job with footnotes and comments, showing why Whitman is still worth reading. Although no further justification is required to read a poem like this:

Weave in, weave in, my hardy life

Weave in! Weave in, my hardy life!
Weave, weave a soldier strong and full, for great campaigns
to come;
Weave a red blood! Weave sinews in, like ropes! The
senses, sight weave in!
Weave loading sure! Weave day and night the weft, the warp! Incessant weave! Tire not!
(We do not know what use, O life! Nor know the aim, the
end – but really aught we know;
But know the work, the need goes on, and will go on – the
death-envelop'd march of peace as well as war goes on;)
For great campaigns of peace the same, the wiry threads to
weave;
We don't know why or what, yet weave, forever weave


Bjørnøy is a literary critic and critic.
bbjornoy@gmail.com

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