The Pre-Modernist Sentiment: Whitman & Arnold

At Left: "Old Graybeard"-- Walt Whitman.

MATTHEW ARNOLD: Lived from 1822-1888 (ironically, he died the year T.S. Eliot was born). He was a 19th century English poet who became England's spokesman for culture, classical education, the great literary tradition, the study of "letters" and "humanities", and the saving power of poetry. He was a defender of the "literary faith" or belief in the enobling powers of literature. He insisted on a pursuit of perfection and "the best that is known and thought in the world". He insisted that however rapidly the world changed, however completely old beliefs and faiths became outmoded and discarded, great literature would endure as a source of coninued value: "In spite of momentary appearances", literature will endure b/c it is essential to the coninuted existence of humanity. His writing reflected an age that had lost religious certainty, that was struggling to be modern without enirely breaking with the past; his writing acted as a source of comfort and security. His poem "Dover Beach" serves as a foreshadowing of the dark void that we call "Modernism".

He was a VICTORIAN era poet.

The narrator of the poems overlooks the sea; he takes in the air, listens to the night, and hears the sadness. He refers to the sea as the "sea of faith", which is now "melancholy" and "retreating". What is he saying about faith in general?

He oberves that the world, which should represent dreams, is devoid of "joy, love, light, certitude, peace, and help for pain"; the world ahs become the "darkling plain" where "violent armies clash by night". The poem ends in a vision of darkness and violence. How is this significant?

Symbols? For example, he uses the word "ebb", which is a period of decline between the rise and fall of a tide. How is this symbolic?

Is the poem hopeful or hopeless?          What part does LOVE play?     Is misery an inevitable part of life?

Are "joy and beauty" "illusions", as he suggests?       What is the conflict between science and religion?

Want to learn more?? http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/arnold/index.html

WALT WHITMAN:  May 31, 1819- March 26, 1892; Whitman is considered "the greatest and most influential poet the United States has ever produced". 


Whitman is credited with having invented the genre of "contemporary American Literature" as he abandoned the rigid rhythmic and metrical structures of European poetry in favor of free verse; this parallels his philosphical view that America was "destined to reinvent the world as emancipator and liberator of the human spirit". His works have been translated into 30+ languages.

He was born on Long Island, NY; his most famous work is "LEAVES OF GRASS", and he would continue to revise and edit it until his death. The first few versions were self-published and not well-recieved. The reserved "Puritan" ethic of the times did not jive well with Whitman's graphic depcitions of the human body. So, while US literary critics were indifferent to his work, he became a world-wide sensation, beginning in France, where his intense humanism would help to provoke the "Naturalist Revolution". By 1864, the book had found a publishing house in the U.S., but he was still considered a "literary outsider". By the end of his life, Whitman was being visited by young artists from around the world and was respected as a "literary vanguard".

Later pictuers of Whitman evoke a "Christ-Like" mystique, and it isn't hard to imagine how he got the nickname "graybeard". While he did not invent American TRANSCENDENTALISM, he became its most famous proponent; he also ushered in the blossoming of American Mysticism as well.  His name became synonymous with "poet".

It was in the 20th century that Whitman's "immense shadow" would reveal itself. He greatly influenced Modern poets, suchy as Hart Crane, William Carlos Williams, Jack Kerouac, and Allan Ginsberg, who rediscovered his work and offered it to a new, younger,  and more accepting audience. He reigns as one of the most influential  literary figures-- period.

TRANSCENDENTALISM is "a philosphy that asserts the primacy of the spiritual and the transcendental over the material and empirical" (Webster's Dictionary).  It is a view of life where reality exists only in the world of the spirit. What someone sees in the physical world are just appearances or reflections on the spiritual world.        It was started by the Unitarians of New England and peaked in the 1840's with teh workds of Ralph Waldo Emerson, who thought that the physical world is secondary to the spiritual world. Emerson and his followers believed in INDIVIDUALITY... that humans should find truth within themselves and trust mainly themselves. To learn what is right, people must resisit peer pressure and social codes to do what they believe. People should not be tied down by Christianity but should find god in their own way.

Whitman was born in 1819 and lived in NY; he was the son of a farmer turned carpenter. He began working in journalism at age 12 and was first publishing by age 15. he became a teacher (gave it up at 21) but stayed in the newspaper industry. He published work in the Democratic Review--the foremost magazine of the Democratic Party, and he was very political by his 20's. He began experimenting with poetry in 1848; he was influenced by music, esp. opera. He also became interested in Astronomy, and "Song of Myself" encompasses some "cosmic concepts". By 1854, he gave up both journalism adn poetry to just write. He had developed strong ideas about Pantheism (the universe as a deity). "Leaves of Grass" was published in 1855; the publication of a book like this had been a life-long dream of his... he even wrote some anonymous reviews of his own book. In the mid 1850's, he was writing about the crisis of slavery. His 12 poems called "Live Oak, with Moss" tell a straightforward story of his love for another man. It in, he renounced his role of public poet, seeking knowledge and celebrating America, and chose to be happy in private with his lover. An openly homosexual manifesto would not bne tolerated at this time, so he had to express himself more covertly, and did so with the 2nd edition of "Leave of Grass" in 1860. He acted as a hospital Attendant during the Civil WAr adn wrote several war poems; he wrote "When Lilacs Last in Dooryard Bloom'd", which is considered a masterpiece, after the death of Lincoln. While working in the Dept. of the Interior, the secretary got a hold of some of the sexual passages in "Leaves of Grass," and he was fired. The last years of his life, known as the "Washington Years", Whtiman held govt jobs adn wrote about postwar America. After a stroke in 1873, he had to rely on jounalism again, but he was an outcast due to the sexual connotations of his writings. he was admired by great British poets and so was somewhat accepted in America, but with the 1881 edition of "Leaves of Grass", he was threatened to be prosecuted on the grounds of obscenity. The deathbed edition issued in 1892 was the 1881 edition.

Want to know more?? http://www.whitmanarchive.org/

"Song of Myself" rpresents his general view of humanity. The excerpt shows his intimate/erotic relationship with nature. The use of "YOU" in the poem invites the reader to share his vision... to "get at the meaning of poems" from the inner self. His view is characteristically inclusive and expansive. He uses repetition, questioning, and focuses on nature as the source of EVERYTHING.

All of "Leaves of Grass" : http://www.bartleby.com/142/index1.html



I SIT and look out upon all the sorrows of the world, and upon all oppression and shame;   I hear secret convulsive sobs from young men, at anguish with themselves, remorseful after deeds done;   I see, in low life, the mother misused by her children, dying, neglected, gaunt, desperate;   I see the wife misused by her husband—I see the treacherous seducer of young women;   I mark the ranklings of jealousy and unrequited love, attempted to be hid—I see these sights on the earth;          5 I see the workings of battle, pestilence, tyranny—I see martyrs and prisoners;   I observe a famine at sea—I observe the sailors casting lots who shall be kill’d, to preserve the lives of the rest;   I observe the slights and degradations cast by arrogant persons upon laborers, the poor, and upon negroes, and the like;   All these—All the meanness and agony without end, I sitting, look out upon,   See, hear, and am silent.
Poem by Whitman: "The Sleepers" :
http://bailiwick.lib.uiowa.edu/whitman/sleepers/poem1881.html

Double yourself and receive me darkness,

Receive me and my lover too, he will not let me go without

        him.

 

I roll myself upon you as upon a bed, I resign myself to the

        dusk.

 

He whom I call answers me and takes the place of my lover,

He rises with me silently from the bed.

 

Darkness, you are gentler than my lover, his flesh was

        sweaty and panting,

I feel the hot moisture yet that he left me.

 

My hands are spread forth, I pass them in all directions,

I would sound up the shadowy shore to which you are

        journeying.

 

Be careful darkness! already what was it touch'd me?

I thought my lover had gone, else darkness and he are one,

I hear the heart-beat, I follow, I fade away.

 

 

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