American Culture

Whitman was not so studied. Not everybody accepted him. He was considered scandalous

(extreme descriptions of sexual and homosexual love).

In a cave, they read Thoreau. He is the one who wrote A life in the woods: idea of leaving

everything behind to live into nature, see what the basic needs are without being

influenced by materialism. Opposed to mass consumption. He also influenced Marxism.

He is a thinker. Romantic. He influenced Gandhi with On civil disobedience.

“I went to the woods because I wanted to live deliberately, I wanted to live deep and suck

out all the marrow of life, To put to rout all that was not life and not when I had come to

die Discover that I had not lived.”

I sing the body electric

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tG-wl2qqD7Y

Song from Fame: quotation from Whitman. The tune is influenced by him.

The keyword is the body.

Levi’s

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FdW1CjbCNxw

Commercial of a pair of jeans. It is a poem.

Letteratura Anglo-Americana – Esercitazioni

7

I hear America singing / Walt Whitman [sound recording]

http://lcweb2.loc.gov/diglib/ihas/loc.natlib.ihas.100010968/default.html

Walt Whitman/ Leaves Of Grass #1: Inscriptons-Song of Myself

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kH3ZF7XAHxI

Two centuries after, New England is still the centre of the culture.

Everybody could read and write. It was important. Writing of a diary. Reading of the

Bible.

Unitarians

Main Calvinist element: salvation.

In life you should always find elements that show you that you are saved.

Unitarians didn’t believe in the Trinity. God was the only element.

They contested to Puritans that everybody was damned from the beginning and only a

few could be saved. To Unitarians, people were not predestined; they could work in life

and attend salvation. Our own effort and will can change the course of our lives.

You can attend it through reasoning. No attention to the soul.

Transcendentalists

Transcendentalism is very similar to Unitarianism. It accepts all its idea.

But it is different because of the attention to the soul, to the spiritual part of men. It gives

important to imagination and intuition. Real parts of life.

Intellectual background of Whitman and Emerson.

Transcendentalism is the first American philosophy.

Emerson

Emerson is the philosopher of transcendentalism. He states some important elements:

- America has to be independent from Europe, not only in a political way, but also in

an intellectual way and to what concerns literature. Mid of the XIX century: the US

were not considered as the US of today, they were considered a new country,

without history and culture, an empty place. American people felt inferior as far as

literature and philosophy were concerned. Nowadays Europe is influenced to

America, two centuries ago it was the other way around. This was a new way of

thinking: America needed an independent culture and literature. American artists,

American writers shouldn’t look at Europe as models, they should look at their

own continent, because to be able to write a high level literature, they have to

experience personally what they wrote and not simply repeat the experience of

other people and not be satisfied by second-hand experiences.

- Nature. It is fundamental to him. He wrote an essay called Nature (1836, text 18).

Importance of being alone in nature, surrounded by nature. P.95. He repeats the

words joy and delight. Nature is mainly a source of joy, but not only in a beautiful

landscape. Nature entirely, in all its aspects, is able to give men delight and joy. In

Letteratura Anglo-Americana – Esercitazioni

8 nature, the human being forgets his/her sorrow. In nature, man gets in contact with

God. God is a sort of strength, more than the Christian God. He is the oversoul.

This entity, that is what the world is made of, continually transforms itself in the

material elements that compose the world. The divine is mainly present in nature.

Man immersing in nature gets in contact with God. This is the most important thing

for the human being. In nature, the human being experiences completeness, having

no more needs. That is what makes the human being completely happy and full of

delight. The New World is the perfect place for it, because here there is wilderness.

The idea of the Bible comes back. The Christian faith is all around. Emerson was a

preacher at the beginning, he was part of the Protestant Church. A sort of

pantheistic vision. What is new is the way of interpreting it, even though it is

related to Wordsworth’s pantheism.

- Self-reliance. It is the typical idea of American people now. This idea comes from

Unitarianism. Human being can rely on him/herself, take their life in their hands

and influence it. Far away from predestination. Being able to do something. Period

of the manifested destiny. American people feel very strong. They live in a

continent which is there for them to be conquered. The frontier is still there and the

space seems to be unlimited. Extreme strength and possibility.

- Vision of the poet. How should an American poet be. The American Scholar, essay.

P.99. Speech delivered to a philosophical society. Nature is boundless, unending,

like God, like poet’s imagination. Books are fundamental, but abused are the worst,

they don’t give first-hand experience. So the American scholar is the one that goes

and lives into the world. He is not an aristocrat and doesn’t live far away from the

world. Rough man thinks that intellectuals are like women, because they are weak,

they think and don’t work. Rough life and intellectual life have to be linked in the

American scholar. He is a writer that goes in the world, he writes in the crowd, on a

ferry, on a bridge… The American poet is the genius, the one who leads everybody

to their own self-reliance, self-determination. He is the leader, but every person has

to find their own way by themselves.

Transcendentalists didn’t give birth to great poets. The importance is related to the

influence outside the movement.

Thoreau

Thoreau was in the inner circle of transcendentalism. He was a close friend of Emerson.

He tried to live according to Emerson’s thoughts and ideas.

- Life in the woods

- On civil disobedience. War between North and South of the US. Economical reason.

Emancipation and liberation of slaves. Trying to avoid the war, the states of the

north decided to introduce a law against the fugitive leaves. There was a very

strong anti-slave movement, where women were very important. These

abolitionists were all on the board of the Ohio River. Slaves escaped to the North,

where they could live a normal life. There was a period in which people went to the

North to find their slaves and had the permission to get them back and take them to

the South. It was a very contrasted law. Thoreau was against this law. That’s why

Letteratura Anglo-Americana – Esercitazioni

9 he decided not to pay taxes: it is very important in the US, where if you don’t pay,

you are seen as a person who doesn’t work for the welfare. He declared not to pay

them: it was a strong act of disobedience. He was in prison for three days. There, he

wrote this pamphlet, On civil disobedience.

Whitman

Very short poems.

The master of the free verse.

Instead, Emily Dickinson was the master of meter and of the restricted word. Lack of

words.

Whitman: multicultural world.

Dickinson: strict Puritan New England world. Apparently.

Whitman: talking about all the facts happening around him.

Dickinson doesn’t seem to live in the world, she is so apart.

Whitman was born in a poor family with many children. He is not a product of New

England and of Puritanism. Family of Quakers. Not an orthodox Quaker family. But the

background was that. Two aspects: you should accept everybody and you shouldn’t judge

people according to their religion or culture; idea of interior life, you can hear God in

yourself, God can be in the aristocrat as in the countryman and in the child. All voices are

equal and have the right to be heard. Fundament for the democratic ideas of Whitman.

That’s why he could give voice to the humble and the poor. He was used to appreciate

everybody. Growing up, he had no problem in humbling poetry.

He studies up to 12 years old. Then he has to work, because the father is dead. Delivery

boy, works in firms, in the fields, he starts working as an apprentice in a typography.

Being a very intelligent person, it gives him the possibility of becoming a journalist.

He reads a lot.

A journalist is a person who moves around, goes everywhere, has to do with all people.

He goes mainly in the urban space. He goes in the city to find news.

Experience of the war. His brother enrolls, his injured and goes to the hospital. Whitman

goes there to visit the brother. He is enrolled in the department of the interior as a

journalist and clerk. He works in the office in the morning and in the afternoon he goes to

the hospital. There, he meets injured soldiers. He goes to the battlefields, where he sees

soldiers dyeing in his hands. Death, suffering and war become part of his poetry.

Moment of sadness. He got a stroke. For him, that stroke was a very disrupting

experience, because he was the singer of the body, the singer of the beauty of the body, of

the health. This stroke gives him the possibility of experiencing the weakness, the limits

and the disability of the body. All this will be in his poetry.

th th

Leaves of thee grass, a book published on the 4 July 1850. 4 July: American independence.

Correspondence between the poet and America. The date of publication is a symbolic

date. The book was published in inquarto, a bigger format, in which he could let his verses

flow without limits. The same technique is used in On the road by Kerouac, originally

written in a roll of paper without page numbers. Unending flow, with no barriers. The

book by Whitman is green, with flowers on the cover. Idea of nature. Dependence between

poetry and nature. The name of the author is not there. Instead, there is an important

Letteratura Anglo-Americana – Esercitazioni

10

picture, a picture of the poet. The image should be an image which didn’t remind to a

poet. He looks like a workman. Attitude: self-reliance, very free. Young. Confident young

man in the world. The name of the poet just appears in a line inside the poem. No name,

but a picture, who is a symbol for the American poet, whoever he/she is. Pictures are more

communicative.

Emerson was completely different from Whitman.

Whitman got the strength by Emerson.

Eight editions of this book. The book grew. The book is a never ending poem, he keeps on

adding things, changing things, transforming, reworking.

The poem is like nature, it is something organic that keeps on growing.

The future reader is free to work on the poem and use it.

The poem is a symbol for the life of the poet.

P.148

With the 1892 edition, there is the final product, which has