Whitman's Drama of ConsensusUniversity of Chicago Press, 1988 - 269 Seiten 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. |
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aesthetic affirm Allen Grossman American apostrophe appear bard become begins body Calamus chant Children of Adam compacts conception consensus Constitution course Cradle crisis Crossing Brooklyn Ferry dead death democracy Democratic Vistas discourse drama dream Drum-Taps earth Ebb'd Emerson essay final free growth genius hand Hart Crane hermit thrush images imagination impasse Leaves of Grass legitimacy less Lilacs lines listener literary literature means ment metonymic nation never night organicism poem poem's poet poet's poetic poetry political proof prophetic Quentin Anderson question R. W. B. Lewis reader reading remains rhetoric role scene sense significance simply Sleepers social Song soul speak speaker Specimen Days speech stance stand sublimation suggests T. S. Eliot tally theme things thought tion turn Union utter verse vision voice Walt Whitman Whit whoever words Wound-Dresser writing