>> Lecturer: Chapter 17
of Thoreau's Walden,
which is entitled
&quot;Spring&quot;
is a climatic chapter
which gives us a
very good example
of Thoreau's symbolic method.
It's a method that
allows him to move
from materialist observations
to idealist conclusions.
In a way what Thoreau does is
to build on the observation
that Emerson makes
in the fourth chapter
of his little book Nature,
that particular natural
facts are symbols
of particular spiritual facts.
Moreover, Thoreau
makes use of a rhetoric
of what we might
call &quot;exemplarity.&quot;
He takes little pieces of
evidence, talks about the ways
in which they stand for larger
patterns that he sees recurring
in nature, and then
talks about the ways
in which those larger
patterns are evidence
of what you might call idealist
conclusions or principles
that he wishes to discuss.
So for example, on page 2028
of the text, Thoreau talks
about the ways in
which the phenomenon
of the year take place every
day in a pond on small scale.
&quot;Every morning, generally
speaking,&quot; he says at the
bottom
of the page, &quot;the shallow
water
is being warmed more rapidly
than the deep, though it may
not be made so warm after all,
and every evening it is
being cooled more rapidly
until the morning.
The day is an epitome
of the year.
The night is the
winter, the morning
and evening are the
spring and fall,
and the noon is the summer.
The cracking and booming
of the ice indicate a
change of temperature.&quot;
So one of the things I want
to suggest to you is that even
in a little sentence like that,
you can see that Thoreau is
mixing actual observation
with something that we might
think of as a larger set
of observations -- more
abstract, more idealist
in their imaginings, thinking
about the larger truths
behind these natural facts
that he notices.
So as he watches the pond start
to melt, and he sees the return
of spring to the neighborhood,
there's a certain kind of wonder
that comes into the prose.
And that's another thing
I wanted to say to you.
Again, remember last
time I suggested
that this narrative
should be thought
of as encapsulating
some of the other forms.
And I think if we were to
think about some of the wonder
that we found in the early
settlement narratives,
Thoreau has some of that, too.
It's a settlement
narrative in that sense.
But then he goes off
and he does some things
that you might say
most good naturalists
in this period wouldn't do.
And you could start to see,
particularly when he talks
about the railroad bank,
that he's doing something
that is not strictly
speaking natural history.
Take a look at page 2030.
I mean, he recorded lots of
signs of nature in his journal.
And there were lots of
possibilities for a kind
of epitome for him
of correspondences
with various forms
of nature and beyond.
So it's interesting that
he chooses this one:
the thawing of sand and clay in
the deep cut by the railroads.
You can see that to culminate
which you might call
the revelations
of spring in his text.
And I wanted to point
this out to you
because it's a good
encapsulation
of how his symbolic
method works.
This is the second
full paragraph on 2030.
&quot;Few phenomena gave
me more delight
than to observe the forms
of which the falling sand
and clay assume in flowing
down the sides of a deep cut
on the railroad through which I
passed on my way to the village,
a phenomenon not very
common on so large a scale,
though the number of
freshly exposed banks
of the right material must
have been greatly multiplied
since railroads were
invented.&quot;
We looked at this before.
There's a kind of weird
conflation of nature
and culture going on here.
And that passage about
the meridian shallows
and not being [inaudible]
dinner.
We saw how Thoreau was strangely
mixing images from nature
and culture in order
to make a larger point
about the routineness of life
and the need to strip things
down to their essentials.
So here, again, he's not going
to do what's predictable.
He's going talk about
nature but using
as an example man's
incursion into nature.
So of all the things
you could talk about,
you go to Walden Pond, you live
in nature, you're going to talk
about the way in which
man has cut through nature
to create railroad banks and in
particular, he's going to talk
about this, what he
calls sand foliage.
&quot;The material was sand of
every degree of fineness
and of various rich
colors commonly mixed
with a little clay.
When the frost comes out to the
spring and even in a thawing day
in the winter, the sand
begins to flow down the slopes
like lava, sometimes
bursting out through the snow
and overflowing it where no
sand was to be seen
before.&quot;
Now we're going to have very
close observation of this.
&quot;Innumerable little streams
overlap and interlace one
with another, exhibiting
a sort of hybrid product,
which obeys half way
the law of currents,
and half way that of vegetation.
As it flows it takes the forms
of sappy leaves or vines,
making heaps of pulpy sprays
a foot or more in depth,
and resembling, as you look down
on them, the laciniated, lobed,
and imbricated thalluses of some
lichens; or you are reminded
of coral, of leopard's paws or
birds' feet, of brains or lungs
or bowels, and excrements
of all kinds.
It is a truly grotesque
vegetation, whose forms
and color we see
imitated in bronze,
a sort of architectural
foliage more ancient and typical
than acanthus, chicory, ivy,
vine, or any vegetable leaves;
destined perhaps, under
some circumstances,
to become a puzzle to
future geologists&quot; --
they become fossilized --
&quot;The whole cut impressed
me as if it were a cave
with its stalactites
laid open to the light.&quot;
So Thoreau was interested in
taking a look at this formation.
And you can see there's a set
of associations that he makes.
But again, these are
associations that he makes
out of his own experience.
He kind of sees that these look
like other shapes
that he's known.
But what he wants to do is
generalize out from that.
So it's a kind of weird version
of materialist thinking, right?
He's going to look very
closely and observe this.
Then he's going to apply
his own reason to it.
But the conclusions
he's going to make are
in some sense not reasonable;
they are marked by
something else.
A scientist would be afraid
to make these conclusions,
wouldn't even say
they're ridiculous.
But Thoreau is trying, you might
say, to get at a larger truth
than that which science
alone can provide.
And in that sense, he's
kind of making a case
for the power of
the imagination.
And that's in part what
makes him a Romantic writer.
So he's initially concerned
with recording how the
sands forms these shapes
of what he calls &quot;sappy
leaves&quot; or
&quot;vines.&quot;
But one of the things to say is
that he is making an argument
about certain kinds of
correspondences that take place
in the visible world
in matter itself,
as if somehow there were
something animating matter.
It's a kind of paradox.
He knows this is
inorganic material, but over
and over again he sees
it taking organic forms.
&quot;Why?&quot; he wants to
ask.
Take a look at the
rest of that paragraph.
&quot;When the flowing mass
reaches the drain at the foot
of the bank it spreads
out flatter into strands,
the separate streams losing
their semi-cylindrical form
and gradually becoming more
flat and broad, running together
as they are more moist, till
they form an almost flat sand,
still variously and
beautifully shaded,
but in which you call trace the
original forms of vegetation;
till at length, in the water
itself, they are converted
into banks, like those formed
off the mouths of rivers,
and the forms of
vegetation are lost
in the ripple-marks
on the bottom.&quot;
What he sees here is a
process of change of becoming,
but one that seems to that
place in an orderly way
and that recapitulates
in the same way
that the pond recapitulates
a day or a year or year
on the pond recapitulates
a day of the year
of the whole seasonal cycle.
These things we recapitulate
other things that we see,
the feeding off of
streams into water itself.
So there's a sense in which he
is doing something that looks
like what a naturalist would do,
kind of dividing
his observations
out into larger principles
that create a kind
of progressive idea.
But it leaves him
finally to a belief
that no natural scientists would
argue, which is what he says
on page 2032 that &quot;the
maker of
that earth but patented a
leaf.&quot;
That's at the beginning of the
first full paragraph there.
&quot;The maker of this earth
but patented a leaf.&quot;
Now again, probably a natural
scientist wouldn't write that,
either, this idea of the
&quot;maker&quot;
kind of secularized version
of the divinity patenting --
very 19th century business
language -- a leaf.
What does he mean?
He means that basically
there is one design,
one set of principles
and it is embodied
in the idea of the leaf.
The leaf for him, which
comes out again in the spring
in the same way that it's
come out every spring,
is a pattern of regeneration.
That's what spring
means for him.
But you might say that what the
project of book is from here
on out is to link that
natural concept of regeneration
to a cultural concept,
which we might think
of something like redemption.
And in this way we might
say that Thoreau is in line
with the kind of thinking
that we saw in Emerson:
not interested in the total
depravity of humankind,
interested possibility
of perfection,
interested in the
possibility of redemption,
the idea of redemption
and perfection are
for Thoreau written
into nature itself.
And that's what he finds there.
So if you go back a
page in the middle
of 2031, you'll find this.
It's in the middle of long
paragraph on that page.
&quot;I feel as if I were nearer
to the vitals of the globe,
for this sandy overflow is
something such a foliaceous mass
as the vitals of
the animal body.
You find thus in the very
sands an anticipation
of the vegetable leaf.
No wonder that the earth
expresses itself outwardly
in leaves, it so labors
with the idea inwardly.
The atoms have already
learned this law
and are pregnant by it.&quot;
There's one idea here.
It's the idea of a leaf.
And therefore he says, by the
time we get to that sentence
that I quoted -- well, if
you look at no time middle
of the long paragraph that
begins 2032, he looks at this.
And then in kind of an
almost an echo of one
of the biblical stories of
origins, he says, &quot;What is
man
but a mass of thawing clay?
The ball of a finger is
but a drop congealed.
The finger and toes
flow to their extent
from the thawing
mass of the body.
Who knows what the human body
would expand and flow out to
under a more genial
heaven?&quot;
Again, I want you to look
at the way that prose works.
He looks at the fact
that our fingers
and toes have these
[inaudible] it's almost
like we're flowing
outward and then we stop.
And maybe if we were in a
different kind of creation,
we would keep flowing and
become one with the things
that we're separated from.
So he finally concludes,
&quot;Thus it seemed
that this one hillside
illustrated the principle
of all the operations
of nature.&quot;
Although again, I
want you to see
that these principles
are generated
out of human beings'
incursion into nature.
Now you can think about
that in any ways you want.
You can say Thoreau
underestimates the extent
to which the railroads
will start a process
of the deformation of culture
that leads us to the nature
that we have or don't
have today.
You can say that part of what
he's thinking is this idea
that it's even an extension
of the idea that Emerson has
that all our operations taken
all together don't really affect
other nature and are
somewhat trivial when we think
about the largeness of nature.
And Thoreau would say, &quot;Not
only that, nature manages
to reincorporate all the
things that we would do to
it.&quot;
So we make this cut to
make a railroad bank,
these kind of forms
start happening here.
So you might say it's the use
of an illustrative analogy.
But it isn't good science.
What it is, really, is you
might say it's transcendental
philosophy and that's really
what the culmination of this is.
Thoreau calls it in the middle
of 2037, he refers to this
as the kind of
&quot;inexhaustible
vigor
of nature&quot; is what he calls
it.
And it is the chapter
that basically ends
the narrative proper
when he leaves his cabin.
Although he ends the chapter on
page 2038 in a very strange way:
&quot;This was my first year's
life in the woods completed.
And the second was
similar to it.
I finally left Walden
September 6, 1847.&quot;
I mean, that's kind of weird
when you think about it:
we have this incredible
detail about the first year;
the second was similar to it.
What does that mean?
I mean, what about all
those material details?
Why don't we get them
for the second year?
Surely, it couldn't have
been the same thing.
Ultimately, this is a kind
of case study for him,
this first year, as a case
study and something larger
than simply natural forms.
Therefore, you might say
that the first year stands
in for the second year, and both
of the years taken together
stand in for something else.
I've already told you, of
course, that there's a way
in which this is an
artificial construction.
We talked about when I decides
to official begin the project.
It just happens to be July 4th.
And we know that he didn't
stay out there all the time.
He used to come back
in, bother people
who were living in Concord.
I told you apparently take
pies from window stills
when they were cooling,
that sort of thing.
So this is a kind of
constructed account.
And there's a way in
which the conclusion
of Walden makes it clear
to us that we are part
of the constructed
nature of this account.
And if you looked
at it, you might say
that the conclusion is
a little bit different
because in a certain way,
he ceases being somebody
who's kind grounded
in this cultural seat and
becomes someone who now starts
to walk around and
think more broadly.
So it's almost as if the
foundation that Walden --
the house or the cabin -- laid,
has simply been preparatory
to this final conclusion in
which he will think things
that he was unable to think
when he first got there.
And even more than that, you'll
say, he starts to rethink things
that he thought when he
first got there and things
that he presented to us
earlier on in the book.
Take a look -- he openly
starts to use this language
of discovery at the top of 2039.
And some of antecedents
that I've suggested this
narrative evokes are evoked
literally here.
&quot;Is Franklin the only man
who
was lost that his wife would be
so earnest to find him?
Does Mr. Grinnell know
where he himself is?
Be rather the Mungo Park, the
Lewis and Clark and Frobisher,
of your own streams and
oceans&quot;
-- these are all explorers,
right -- &quot;explore your
own higher latitudes --
with shiploads of preserved
meats to support you
if they be necessary and
pile the empty cans sky high
for a sign.
Were preserved meats invented
to preserve meat merely?
Nay, be a Columbus to a whole
new continent and worlds
within you, opening
new channels,
not of trade but of
thought.&quot;
We won't give you
that on any exam
because it looks too
much like Emerson.
This is probably the most
Emersonian of these chapters.
And it's a chapter that's
full of maxims as well.
I'll give you an example of
one that's fairly well-known.
How about 2041?
&quot;Why should we be in such
desperate haste to succeed
and in such desperate
enterprises?&quot;
This is in greeting cards
all over the country.
&quot;If a man does not keep
pace with his companions,
perhaps it is because he
hears a different drummer.
Let him step to the
music which he hears,
however measured or far
away.&quot;
There are lots of
maxims that are here.
And then Thoreau goes on to
do a very Emersonian thing.
You'll remember how
Emerson ended Nature,
which was supposed to be
again kind of inspired
by natural history with a
weird parable, his Orphic poet,
this figure that he creates
to ventriloquize thoughts
that he himself has
been thinking.
So Thoreau gives us
a parable as well.
He gives us an Emersonian
fable about --
and this is the top of 2042 --
&quot;There was an artist in the
city
of Kouroo who was disposed
to strive after perfection.
One day it came into his
mind to make a staff.
Having considered that in
an imperfect work time is an
ingredient, but into a perfect
work time does not enter,
he said to himself, It shall
be perfect in all respects,
though I should do
nothing else in my life.
He proceeded instantly to the
forest for wood, being resolved
that it should not be made
of unsuitable material;
and as he searched for and
rejected stick after stick,
his friends gradually
deserted him.&quot;
And this becomes a certain
kind of parable about time
and timelessness, and
about the timelessness
of the imagination a
little bit later on.
&quot;As he made no compromise
with
Time, Time kept out of his way,
and only sighed at a distance
because he could
not overcome him.&quot;
This artist has a
commitment you might say
to creating a perfect object.
And it finally leads him at
the very end of the paragraph
to a certain kind of
triumph of the imagination.
So that what we see here is
Thoreau shifting himself away
from natural history and
observation as evidence
of some kind of regeneration
or redemption.
Here's a different model.
It's the not scientist.
Finally, it's the artist --
the artist now as the
maker of the world.
Little bit further on:
&quot;When
the finishing stroke was put
to his work, it suddenly
expanded before the eyes
of the astonished
artist into the fairest
of all the creation of Brahma.
He had made a new
system in making a staff,
a world with full
and fair proportions
in which though the old cities
and dynasties had
passed away fairer
and more glorious ones had taken
their places, and now he saw
by the heap of shavings still
fresh at his feet that for him
and his work, the former elapse
of time had been an illusion.
And that no more time had
elapsed than is required
for a single scintillation from
the brain of Brahma to fall on
and enflame the tinder
of a mortal brain.
The material was pure
and his art was pure,
how could the result be
anything other than wonderful?
So what does this mean?
At the end of all of this what
appears to be natural science
and observation, Thoreau is
attributing the world around us
and the making power of
the world, you might say,
both to Brahma his figure
for God and to the artist.
What I would suggest to you
is this is another aspect
of transcendentalism, right?
We saw it in Emerson, this need
to conflate the human
and the divine.
Emerson does it by talking
about the soul that we all have
that is part the divine mind.
Thoreau does it here in
some sense by taking himself
out of natural observation
into, you might say,
the life the mind
or the imagination.
And it suggests to us that
Thoreau ends his book this way
because he knows that this
is going to turn into this.
I mean, this we see is a
replica across the road
if you go to Walden Pond.
This is what's left
of the cabin today,
just these little markers.
That stone that you see there
on the far side is it marks
the chimney foundation.
It says &quot;Beneath this
stones
lies the chimney foundation
of Thoreau's cabin
1845-47.&quot;
So that's what left
of Thoreau's project.
And what I'm suggesting to
you is that the shift now
in emphasis, he's done
this whole thing --
natural science observation,
looking at a whole year,
this process of regeneration --
but what's the real regeneration
of the world going to be?
It's not going to take
place in some sense only
through natural processes.
Maybe this is the point
of bringing nature
and culture together
all the time.
It's going to take place
through the human imagination.
Walden disappears, but this
Walden stays, particularly
with people like me
keep assigning it.
But I think there's a sense
in the power of textuality
that we finally end
up with here, right?
On September 6th, 1847
Thoreau tells us he left.
He leaves the cabin which
he had built where he lived
for two years, two
months, and two days.
That of course, is
purely accidental math.
Emerson then bought
the cabin from Thoreau,
resold it to his own
gardener, who then converted it
into a cottage for his family.
The guy who bought it from
Emerson had drinking problems,
prevented him from completing
the necessary modifications.
The cabin was abandoned in 1849.
It was purchased by somebody
else who moved it across town
to his own farm and used
it for grain storage.
So the cabin gets
practical purposes.
The roof was removed in 1868,
used as part of a pig sty.
1875, the rest of the
cabin's timber was used
to patch up the barn.
So all that remains
is just what we saw.
This is the Walden
that remains to us.
And I think the next part of
the conclusion after this artist
of Kouroo parable tells
us in some sense that art,
culture preserved through art,
or text is really necessary
because the process of building
a culture is so difficult,
fraught with uncertainty.
So one of the things you
might say is that at the end
of very end of conclusion we
have these showy parables --
the one the artist of
Kouroo, the very end we have
that beautiful bug that's
coming out of the trees.
But in there, there are bits
and pieces that give us pause
or that ask us to reconsider one
of the places where we began.
Do you remember that?
That [inaudible]?
The hard bottom on which you
can build a wall or estate?
Well, Thoreau asks us to think
about that again as we've come
through this long
project with him.
This is page 2044,
about five lines down.
&quot;It affords me no
satisfaction to commence
to spring an arch before I
have got a solid
foundation.&quot;
All right, that sounds like it's
what we would expect, right?
We want to find solid
foundations in order
to build a wall,
estate, or an arch on.
That's what the whole
project has been about,
looking for solid foundations.
And then he says, &quot;Let us
not play at kittlybenders.
There is solid bottom
everywhere.&quot;
And kittlybenders is this game
of trying to be on the ice
and not have it crack under you.
Anybody here like
Pink Panther movies?
Ever seen the movie called The
Pink Panther Strikes Back?
Peter Sellers is
Inspector Clouseau.
He's trying to track down
this nefarious super criminal.
He ends up going to this
inn someplace nearby this
guy's castle.
I think it's in the south
of France someplace.
There's this old guy sitting
behind a desk and a dog.
And the old guy has come
there, &quot;Do you have a
room?&quot;
And Peter Sellers mangles
it, &quot;Do you have a
room?&quot;
&quot;A what?&quot; &quot;A
room.&quot;
&quot;Do you have a room?&quot;
&quot;Oh, a room.&quot;
&quot;That is what I said
along, you idiot.&quot;
&quot;Okay, yes, we have a
room.&quot;
Then he's looking, he
goes, &quot;Does your dog
bite?&quot;
&quot;What?&quot; &quot;Does
your dog bite?&quot;
&quot;My dog? No.&quot;
So Clouseau reaches down to pet
the dog that's sitting there.
&quot;I thought you said
your dog does not bite?&quot;
&quot;Yes, but that is not my
dog.&quot;
[ Laughter ]
All right, that's
a version of this.
You have to know how to
ask the right questions.
There is solid bottom
everywhere,
but maybe that's not the
only thing that's going on.
We read that the
traveler asked the boy
if the swamp before
him had a hard bottom.
The boy replied that he had.
But presently the travelers'
horse sank to the girth.
And he observed to the
boy, &quot;I thought you said
that this bog had
a hard bottom.&quot;
&quot;So it has,&quot; answered
the latter,
&quot;but you haven't got
halfway to it yet.&quot;
He didn't ask the
right question.
Is it hard bottom and close
enough that I can walk
across if with my horse?
Sure, it's got a hard
bottom somewhere down there.
So this is a little
bit of joke, right?
So it is with the bogs
and quicksands of society,
but he is an old
boy that knows it.
&quot;Only what is thought,
said,
or done at certain rare
coincidence is good.
I will not be one of those who
will foolishly drive a nail
into mere lathe and plastering.
Such a deed would
keep awake at nights.
Give me a hammer and let
me feel for the furring.
Do not depend on the putty.
Drive a nail home and clench it
so faithfully that you can wake
up in the night and think of
your work with satisfaction,
a work at which you would not
be ashamed to invoke the
muse.&quot;
So again, it's a kind of weird
conflation now of the kind
of carpentry and stuff that
he was interested in earlier
and this idea of
artistic creation.
But what I think this retelling
of the solid foundation thing is
to suggest to you
that there's something
at stake that's crucial in
this search for a hard bottom
and it's not necessarily
going to be an easy search.
In fact, the implication
is if you're not careful,
if you're this kind of traveler,
you may well drown in this bog
if you don't understand
the right way
to ascertain what
the hard bottom is.
So that one of the things we
say here is that this exertation
at the beginning of the book
to find this foundation,
this hard bottom, here
becomes a kind of warning.
And I think you would
understand something central
to what Thoreau is doing here if
you were to compare this section
of the conclusion to
that session earlier
on that we talked about, about
the mosquito's wings on the rail
and being tied to the
mast like Ulysses.
It tells us something more
about the quest for the real.
In the first version you
might say Thoreau recognizes
that death is a possibility --
that's the invocation of
Ulysses tied to the mast,
trying to hear the sirens.
So he's searching for knowledge
that the siren's song produces
for him, but he needs to be
tied, he needs to be restrained.
That's the image
from The Odyssey.
But here, something
else is going on.
We don't hear the end.
We don't know what
happens to the travelers.
Does the boy sort sit
there and let him sink?
I mean, we know Ulysses
makes it through.
There's no necessarily
guaranteed ending [inaudible]
this kind of obscure
little thing.
When he hits the bottom,
he will hit the bottom,
but he'll be dead
when he does it.
I mean, if we want to take
this as less of a joke and more
of a kind of serious --
you might say, therefore,
if that is the new parable
for searching for hard bottom,
it's an impossibility.
You actually set yourselves
an impossible task.
The bottom is there, but
human means will not allow you
to find it.
So what means do you need?
You need something that
transcends mere humanity,
mere natural observation.
In other words, you
need something
like the artistic imagination.
And I think that's why we
finally end with this parable
that is a kind of folk story,
which prophesize the possibility
of some kind of redemption
or rebirth.
But it can only be done
it in terms of the story,
in terms of the imagination.
It can't be done within
the realm necessarily
of natural history or natural
history won't be enough.
Take a look on page 2045.
&quot;Everyone has heard the
story
which has gone the rounds
of New England of a strong
and beautiful bug which came
out of the dry leaf of an
old table of apple-tree wood,
which had stood in a
farmer's kitchen for 60 years,
first in Connecticut and
afterwards in Massachusetts
from an egg deposited
in the living tree many
years earlier still,
as appeared by counting the
annual layers around it,
which was heard gnawing out for
several weeks hatched per chance
by the heat of an urn.
Who does not feel his faith
in a resurrection and strength
in immorality strengthened
by hearing of this?
Who knows what beautiful
and winged life whose egg
has been buried for ages
under many concentric
layers of woodenness
in the dry dead life the
society deposited at first
in the alburnum of the
green and living tree,
which has been gradually
converted into the semblance
of its well-seated tomb, heard
per chance gnawing out now
for years by the astonished
family of man as they sat
around the festive board.
May unexpectly come for
amid society's more trivial
and handselled furniture
to enjoy its perfect
summer at last.&quot;
So the image of belatedness.
We've come late in the world; we
don't expect miracles to happen.
But maybe this sign of
this bug somehow coming
out could possibly be a sign
that within our larger society,
there is some kind of seed
or bug or something laid
in the foundations years ago
that when we strip things
away we might be able to find.
Thoreau finally says this:
&quot;I do not say that John
or Jonathan&quot; -- England
or the United States --
&quot;will realize all this, but
such
is the character of the morrow
which mere lapse of time
can never make the dawn.
The light, which puts out
our eyes is darkness to us.
Only that day which
dawns, only that day dawns
to which we are awake.
There is more day to dawn, the
sun is but a morning star.&quot;
I mean, that's kind of
the final image of light.
Enlightenment has its
source in both a divine
and a human consciousness.
It should remind us a little
bit of some of the rhetoric
of the Enlightenment
but given this kind
of romantic imaginative
cast, it shows us finally
that Thoreau is not a
naturalist, but Thoreau is
in sense a Romantic writer
and a transcendentalist.
So I want you to see
that there's a sense
in which what Thoreau's project
has been is fundamentally a kind
of compliment to what Emerson's
was in nature and those other.
He promotes a certain kind of
investigation through nature,
he cons you almost into
thinking that that's what it is,
that it's a piece of science.
I mean, if Emerson uses the
structure of natural science
in his little book Nature,
you might say Thoreau kind
of pulls an Edward
Taylor and really goes
and does this writ large
in his own experience,
but ultimately the aim is the
same: to find out something
about the self, to find out
something about the sense
of where American culture is in
the middle of the 19th century,
and to think about what
further exploration of the self,
and trusting in the self,
and the imagination might do
for that culture -- get us
out of what Emerson calls the
&quot;dry bones of the
past&quot; and get
us to imagine something new.
In that sense, he's a
transcendentalist thinker
and I would say to you
that Walden is full
of rhapsodic moments like this
that in some sense
recapitulate this structure.
So the very same thing
that Thoreau says
about the pond recapitulating
the entire season might well be
true of particular moments
in this, in the text as well.
They recapitulate
this larger structure.
And I think you can therefore
see as different as they are,
there are real affinities
between Thoreau's
writing and Whitman's.
You get the sense kind of that
Thoreau is more comfortable
with mud and excrement and
stuff than with people.
I mean, I always got that sense.
With Whitman it's a
little bit different.
I mean, Whitman seems to be
really interested in people
and comfortable with people.
And what we might
say about him is
that he extends Emersonian
self-reliance
and this Thoreau exploration
of nature by taking a look
at the one province of
nature with which Emerson
and Thoreau seem to
be uncomfortable.
That part of the not me that
is not nature out there,
but is nature here, the body.
Whitman is really, really
interested in the body.
And one of the things we
might say about that is
that he constructs a kind
of larger-than-life image,
a kind of poetic persona.
And there's a sense in which
you could start to read the poem
that we read for today, Song
of Myself as in part a kind
of narrative of the development
of a self and a poet,
but one that is going to use
exploration not only of nature,
but of the culture and of the
body, and of sexuality in order
to be able to encompass
the entire country
out of which he comes.
So Whitman is very interested in
constructing images of himself.
As the piece by Angus
Fletcher suggests to you,
Whitman is constantly
reworking his poetry.
He comes up with a small
volume of poems in 1855.
He edits them and produces
more and more editions,
adds to them, changes it.
Song of Myself looks different
in 1855 from the version
that you read, which
is the last edition.
And with that, he kind
reinvents himself all along.
In the end he ends up
sort of like this --
the American bard, a sage.
He starts off kind of like this
around the time he
writes Leaves of Grass.
He's more of a kind of
dandy man about town,
what Baudelaire would call
the &quot;flaneur,&quot;
somebody
that walks around and observes.
When he publishes it, he
reinvents himself again
on the title page of
the 1855 edition as &quot;one
of the roughs, Walt
Whitman.&quot;
And the nine poems that are
in the original edition
are untitled.
They're just kind of there.
And Whitman introduces himself
-- about 29 pages into the poem,
he finally introduces himself
in these lines: &quot;Walt
Whitman,
an American, one of the
roughs, of kosmos, disorderly,
fleshy and sensual, eating,
drinking, and breeding.
No sentimentalist,
no stander above men
and women or apart from them.
No more modest than
immodest.&quot;
So that's the way that
Whitman is presenting himself
in this time.
And one of the things
that people actually say
about Whitman is that he
becomes, for a certain time,
more adventurous as a
writer, perhaps in response
to Emerson's suggestion that he
tone things down a little bit.
But then, gradually as
he becomes well-known
or becomes thought of as
a kind of bard figure,
he becomes the edits
that he does
and the things [inaudible]
become a little bit more
culturally conservative.
In fact, there's a biographer
of Whitman named Gary Schmigdall
who wrote A Gay Life of
Whitman, which is difficult
to do because you have to --
everyone has a sense that
Whitman was at least bi-sexual,
if not gay, that he was very
interested in young men,
but he was very interested in
things that were associated
with gay culture in the
middle of the 19th century.
But there's not a lot of hard
and fast evidence about it.
But one of the things that
he noticed in the course
of doing this is he wanted
to put together an anthology
of poems to accompany it.
And you realizes that the
poems that he needed were not
in the earliest edition and
not in the latest edition,
they were somewhere in
the middle editions.
So one of the things we would
say is that Whitman is kind
of reinventing himself
all the time.
There are contexts for
thinking about Whitman.
So one of the contexts for
thinking about Whitman is part
of a trajectory of poetry
that begins in our course
with neoclassicism,
goes through Bryant.
Remember I talked to you about
Bryant's project being a kind
of Americanization of
Wordsworth's project?
You remember this?
Bryant is a little bit older.
Maybe we should do it that way.
So one of the things to think
about is that Bryant is somebody
who is kind of part of
this larger trajectory.
And Bryant is thought of in that
sense as somebody who's part
of a kind of New
England story of letters
which would then lead
to Emerson, right?
This is Emerson in 1837.
Remember &quot;American scholar.
We've listened too long to
the courtly muses of Europe?
Spirit of the American free
man is already suspected
to be timid, imitative,
and tame?&quot;
Now imitative, again
is something
that we should think
it with poetry, right?
Remember it in neoclassicism,
imitative was a good thing.
Poetry was supposed
to be precisely following
Aristotle mimetic.
You were supposed to imitate
nature if you were a poet.
And if you were a poet
like Phillis Wheatley,
you were supposed to imitate
the masters of poetry.
That's how we all knew
that we were doing poetry.
We could tell.
Originality is not
something that turns
out to be prized
by neoclassicism.
It starts to be prized later
on by people like Bryant,
and then Emerson,
and then Whitman.
So that by this time you would
see that imitative is not part
of the solution to
creating an American poetry,
it's part the problem that's
preventing American poetry
from being created at all.
And interestingly, Emerson
as I told you before,
goes off lecturing.
He was a lyceum lecturer.
People used to raise
funds to let him lecture
in their neighborhood.
He lectured in New York
and Whitman heard him.
He gave a lecture in
1842 called &quot;The Nature
and Powers of the Poet.&quot;
This was later collected in
the second series of essays
and revised into the essay
that you read for today.
And Whitman has a very
famous quote about this.
He says he attended this
lecture on the poetry
of the times, March 7th, 1842.
And he said later on describing
attending this lecture,
&quot;I was simmering,
simmering, simmering,
and Emerson brought
me to a boil.&quot;
Simmering, simmering,
simmering, right?
So this is what he heard, if
you want to look at in the text,
we'll start off with
page maybe 1187.
But you can just look
-- I'm sorry, 1183.
You can just look
at it up there.
Emerson is writing in some
sense against the grain.
If poetry was supposed to
be about decorum and form,
Emerson wants something
else, not just metres,
but a &quot;metre-making
argument&quot; he says,
&quot;that makes the poem a
thought
so passionate and alive that,
like the spirit of a plant or an
animal, it has an architecture
of its own and adorns
nature with a new thing.&quot;
I'm not sure that I know
whether Emerson knew the poetry
that was metaphysical poetry
what he said about that.
He certainly wouldn't
have known Taylor's poetry
because it was lost
at this point.
But you would imagine
Emerson would have approved
of that poetry and along
with it, the idea of wit
that Samuel Johnson
so disparages.
The poet has a new thought.
He has a whole new
experience to unfold,
and he will tell us
how it was with him
and all men will be
richer in his fortune.
And he goes on later on in the
essay -- this is on 1191 --
to talk about the poet
as liberating gods.
This is not unlike Shelley in
Defence of Poetry talking
about the poets as
legislators of the world.
He says, &quot;The ancient
British
bards, had for the title
of their order those who are
free throughout the world.
They are free and
they make free.
An imaginative book renders
much more service at first
by stimulating us through
its troops, then afterward
when we arrive at the
precise sense of the
author.&quot;
It's the process of reading.
Again, think of that moment
from Self-Reliance --
&quot;power ceases in the
instant of
repose consistent the shooting
of the gulf, a darting to
an aim,&quot; same with reading.
The end isn't the important
thing, it's how you get there
and what kind of creative
reading it can inspire you
to do.
&quot;I think nothing is
of value in end books,
excepting the transcendental
and extraordinary.
If a man is inflamed and
carried away by his thought,
let me read his paper and you
may have all the arguments
and history and criticism.&quot;
Again, this is just in line with
what he says at the beginning
of nature, that our age is
retrospective, it builds us
up [inaudible], it
likes history,
biography, and criticism.
On those old genres.
Give me some new thinking and
you can have all of the rest.
And so Emerson goes onto say, a
little bit further down on 1193,
that he looks in vain for the
poet that he's describing.
And there's something poignant
a little bit about this
because Emerson is a poet also.
He writes poetry.
And you can read it.
But nobody really does
compared to reading Whitman.
Although there are
moments when Emerson seems
to anticipate Emily
Dickinson of all people.
There are certain poems that he
has when you would look at them
and you would say, &quot;Oh,
that's
Dickinson,&quot; and it isn't.
So there's some interesting
things going
on in Emerson's poetry.
But he himself, or maybe you
might say he doesn't have the
self-aggrandizing
personality that we find
in Irving or in Whitman.
But he says, &quot;I look in
vain
for the poet whom I describe.
We do not with sufficient
plainness
or sufficient profoundness
address ourselves to life.
Nor dare we chant our own
times and social circumstance.
Time and nature yield
us many gifts, but not
yet the timely man the
new religion to reconcile
to whom all things await.&quot;
And he goes and he evokes other
people who have made history,
you might say, in poetry.
But finally, he wants to say
this: &quot;Banks and tariffs,
the newspaper and
caucus, Methodism
and Unitarianism are flat and
dull to dull people but rest
from the same foundations of
wonder as the town of Troy
and the Temple of Delphos and
are as swiftly passing
away.&quot;
He's making a counter argument
to those who would say,
&quot;Look,
sorry about the lack
of world poetry,
but you know we live
in unpoetic times.&quot;
Remember the kind of
Irving critique of economy
or even [inaudible] critique
of Irving's critique.
This is the kind of dull nation.
Everybody drinks beer and all
they think about is business.
Emerson says, &quot;You're
thinking
about it the wrong way.
Even this business life
of ours is something.
And beyond that, our logrolling,
our stumps and their politics,
our fisheries, our Negroes
and Indians, our boasts
and our repudiations, the wrath
of rogues, and the pusillanimity
of honest men, the northern
trade, the southern planting,
the western clearing, Oregon
and Texas, are yet unsung.
Yet America is a
poem in our eyes,
its ample geography
dazzles the imagination
and it will not wait
long for metres.&quot;
This essay, if you
were to read this essay
and then read Whitman's
preface to the 1855 Leaves
of Grass you would
see strong resonances.
Whitman basically
takes up the invitation
that Emerson's lecture
had posed to him.
This is what he writes in the
preface to Leaves of Grass:
&quot;Americans of all nations
at any time upon the earth
have probably the fullest
poetical nature.
The United States themselves are
essentially the greatest
poem.&quot;
So the story goes is
that Emerson writes this.
It's said to have been
published July 4th, 1855.
It's basically self-published.
Whitman publishes
the book himself,
he sets part the type
himself, he takes care
of his distribution, prints
about a thousand copies
and sells very few of them.
The preface appeared
with twelve --
not nine, but twelve
-- untitled the poems.
They eventually get names
-- Song of Myself,
I Sing the Body
Electric, The Sleepers,
There Was a Child Went Forth.
Whitman sends copies
of the first book
to the leading literary
figures of the day
in New England and in New York.
It is said that this man,
John Greenleaf Whittier,
a very well-known poet and
politically progressive,
antislavery, said he took
one look at his and threw his
into the fireplace where
he used it for kindling.
And you can imagine why that is
when Whittier thought poetry
should look something like this:
&quot;Bearer of freedom's holy
light,
breaker of slavery's chain
and rod, the foe of all
which pains the light
or wounds the generous
ear of God.
Beautiful yet thy temples rise
through their profaning gifts
are thrown and fires unkindled
of the skies are glaring
round thy altar stone.&quot;
Okay. There's a way in which
if you think that's what poetry
looks like, you're going to look
at what Whitman writes and
think &quot;What is this
stuff?&quot;
But Emerson got it.
So probably made up for the lack
of response from other people.
Emerson got it and his response
was more than enthusiastic.
In fact, it's probably one
of the most famous letters
in American intellectual
history.
He writes this to Whitman:
&quot;I am not blind to the
worth
of a wonderful gift
of leaves and grass.
I find it the most extraordinary
piece of wit and wisdom
that America has
yet contributed.
I'm very happy in reading it.
This great power makes us happy.
It meets the demand I am always
making of what seemed a sterile
and stingy nature, as
if too much handy work
or too much lymph
in the temperament were making
our western wit fat and
mean.&quot;
And you can see there's an echo
of the American scholar
in that quotation.
&quot;I give you joy of your
free
and brave thought,&quot; he
said,
&quot;I have great joy in it.
I find incomparable things said
incomparably well as they must.
I find the courage of
treatment which so delights us
and which large perception
only can inspire.
I greet you at the beginning
of a great career, which must
yet have had a long foreground
somewhere for such a
start.&quot;
A long foreground
somewhere for such a start.
And the letter goes on,
actually, in this vein.
There was own one comparable
commentary on the poem
that appeared at this time.
It said -- it was an
anonymous review that said,
&quot;An American bard at
last.&quot;
Any idea who might have
written that review?
It was Whitman, right?
Okay. So Whitman is
very smart about this.
Ever the self-promoter,
he actually goes
and without asking
Emerson's permission,
he has the letter printed
in the New York Tribune.
And he has the words, &quot;I
greet you at the beginning
of great career, RW
Emerson,&quot;
stamped in gold print along
the spine of the second edition
of Leaves of Grass, which
is basically a rebinding
of the first edition.
And he actually then goes on in
I think the next edition takes
out his preface, reprints
Emerson's letter and as a kind
of long essay-like
response to it thereafter.
So that you can say
that one of the things
that Whitman realizes is
that he has the opportunity
to have the Emersonian
stamp put onto his work
and he takes that opportunity.
Emerson wasn't exactly
happy about it for a while
because it was a private letter
that he didn't really
expect to be reprinted.
And I think he actually
edited it shortly thereafter
in an anthology of poems
in which he did not
include Whitman,
but later on they kind
of passed that over.
One thing that Emerson did say
about the poetry that he --
just a little bit friendly of
advice, he sort of suggested
that maybe you should tone
down some of the sexuality.
And so Whitman's response
to this actually
takes issue with this.
And he says, and he writes
this letter back to Emerson
in which he says, &quot;No, this
is exactly what I want to do.
By silence or obedience to
the pens of savants, poets,
historians, biographers,
and the rest&quot; --
so all those people that
Emerson doesn't like --
&quot;have long connived at the
filthy law and books enslaved
to it that what makes
the man of a man,
that sex woman [inaudible]
desires, lusty animations,
organs, acts, are
unmentionable.&quot;
See what he's doing?
He's turning the
tables on Emerson.
Emerson becomes aligned
in some sense insofar
as Emerson is critiquing
Whitman's use
of sexuality in his imagery.
He suggested that Emerson
might well be aligned with all
of those old things old things
that Emerson himself doesn't
like -- &quot;historians,
biographers,
and the rest are unmentionable
and to be ashamed of,
to be driven to skulk
out of literature
with whatever belongs to them.
This filthy law has
to be repealed.
It stands in the way
of great reforms.
I say that the body of a man
or a woman, the main matter is
so far quite unexpressed
in poem.
But that the body is to be
expressed and sex [inaudible]
for these states if it comes
to a question it is
whether they shall celebrate
in poems the eternal decency
of the amativeness of nature,
the motherhood of all, or
whether they shall be bards
at the fashionable delusion of
the inherent nastiness of sex
and the feeble and querulous
modesty of deprivation.&quot;
One of the things that's
a generative metaphor
for Whitman is a link between
procreation and creation,
artistic creation, right?
And there's a sense in which
the poems themselves kind
of embody that.
Whitman therefore later on
describes Leaves of Grass
as the &quot;outcropping
of my own emotional
and other personal nature and
attempt from first to last
to put a person, a human being,
myself in the latter half the
19th century in America freely,
fully, truly on record.&quot;
And that means everything -- all
of his feelings and his desires,
even the things that
someone who was kind
of more decorous thinker
might actually choose to omit.
So he rejects Emerson's plea
to tone down his sexuality
and in fact, writes a series of
poems called the Calamus Poems
for the 1856 edition that
are even more frankly sexual
in their imagery than before.
So one of the things I
want to suggest to you is
that there is this kind of
opening up of the poetry.
And in some sense, it comes in
part through what he talks about
and also how he talks about it.
We can come back to Bryant
here again and thinking
about what Bryant does at the
beginning of Thanatopsis.
Remember the opening lines,
&quot;To him and who the love
of nature holds communion with
her visible form she
speaks.&quot;
We said, &quot;Oh, it's not
rhymed.
It's got a blank verse.
It does this, it has this fourth
foot here in its second line.
It's trisyllabic.
It's making a point.&quot;
One of the things I want
you see about this is
if you're making a point that
way, you're asking your readers
to notice the importance
of metrical feet.
Therefore, in some real way
you're suggesting that the unit
of meaning for a poem
is the metrical foot.
So I want to suggest
to you that one
of Whitman's big innovations
is to make the unit
of meaning not simply the
metric foot, but the line,
the entire line --
however long or short.
So you can scan Whitman's
poetry, but it almost seems
like it's beside the point.
He's doing something
other than that.
And that's why you might say
people who were used to poetry
that can scan and it fits itself
into rigid bounds don't like
and understand what
Whitman is doing.
So what Bryant is
doing is blank verse.
What Whitman is doing more blank
than that, it's free verse.
That's the term that
we use for it.
And it looks like that.
I mean, I have to squish them in
order to put them on the screen.
But these are all lines.
They have weird --
forget caesuras,
they have actual ellipses in
the middle of that, right?
Now, turn to section
29 of your poem.
This is -- sorry section 24.
It's on page 2227.
This is the 1855 version.
And if you look at in your book,
you'll see that the 81
version is different from it.
And that in fact, there
are instead of being simply
&quot;Walt Whitman, an American
one of the roughs of
kosmos,&quot;
he changes it a little bit.
&quot;Walt Whitman, a kosmos of
Manhattan the sun, turbulent,
fleshly, sensual, eating,
drinking, and breeding,
no sentimentalist, no stander
above men or women or apart
from them, no more
modest than immodest.&quot;
What I want to suggest to you
that religion is important
because it's a way in which
Whitman is identifying back
with another story
that we can tell
about the roots of his poetry.
I mean, if Emerson
said that this &quot;long
and great career must have had
a long foreground somewhere
for such a start,&quot; where
that
foreground is is in the streets
of Brooklyn in New York, Whitman
wandering around the streets
of New York, meeting Bryant,
who by this time is
kind of an older person.
So Bryant is not only part of
the New England story, he comes
and becomes even more
famous as an editor
than a poet in New York city.
And Whitman himself,
like Bryant,
becomes part of the press.
He writes for what's
called the Penny Press.
Actually, The Aurora
was a couple of pennies;
it was slightly a cut above.
But one of the things that's
going on in the beginning
of the 19th century
is the establishment
of very cheap newspapers
that sold papers
through sensationalism,
you might say.
And Whitman partakes in that.
Later on he writes this
about the newspaper:
&quot;Whoever does note
that our city&quot; --
by which he means New York --
&quot;is the great place of
the western continent --
the heart, the brain, the focus,
the mainspring, the pinnacle,
the extremity, the no more
beyond the new world --
whoever does not know this,
we say, must have been brought
up in a place where they
didn't take the paper
and where The Aurora
in particular had
never scattered its
[inaudible] light.&quot;
In other words, Whitman
is making argument
that New York is now the most
American place in the country,
that New York should be the seat
of culture, not that
New England.
And that where you're going
to find what's distinctive
about the United States,
you're going to find not
in high literature but in the
papers, in that democratic form.
And Whitman writes in
many of his articles
that the papers can
actually be a force
for education and
for democracies.
He goes, &quot;Among newspapers,
the Penny Press is the same
as common schools among
seminaries of education.
They carry light and knowledge
in among those who most need it.
They disperse the
clouds of ignorance
and they make the great body of
the people intelligent, capable,
and worthy of performing the
duties of republican free
men.&quot;
One of the things to
understand about this is
that he's making an argument
on behalf of a form that many
of the intellectuals of the day
would scorn as being just full
of sensationalistic writing.
And Whitman is, at this
stage of his career,
interested in a certain
kind of sensationalism.
He is -- he styles himself
as kind of a flaneur,
somebody who walks around
the city and observes
and observes lots of
interesting things.
This is an example of
a guy who was known
as a sensationalist
writer, George Thompson.
And he wrote many of these books
about city life were serialized
in precisely these
papers, the Penny Press.
You can look at some of names.
Venus in Boston and city crimes.
New York life of mysteries
of [inaudible] revealed.
The Gay Girls of New York.
Katherine and Clara
or the Double Suicide.
There's a kind
of sensationalistic side
to the Penny Press.
Whitman is part of this
sensationalist side.
For a while, one
of his beats was
to cover murders off
the police blotter.
These are the kinds of things
that was the frontest piece
to one of Thompson's books.
This is a kind of
discourse, you might say,
that Whitman is involved in when
he was involved with the papers.
This is an ad from
one of the papers --
ad for one of these books about
the mysteries of Bonham Street;
ads for some fancy French stuff;
ads for another book called
The Confessions of the Sofa;
ad for another racy
novel; cundoms [phoenetic],
whatever those might be; ad
for a neat and curious book.
This is in Whitman, too.
The high fluting New England
story of transcendentalism,
sure, that's in there.
But Whitman is actually
a poet of the streets.
And one of the things to
understand is that he wandered
around the streets of New York.
He looked at the ships,
clearly he writes about those.
He looked at the immigrants,
people who were desperately
poor, especially the immigrants
who would come from
Ireland in the aftermath
of the Irish famine in
the middle of the century.
They're all moving down
into the Lower East Side.
The Lower East Side was just
kind of teeming hideous slum.
You know, the upper crust people
were moving uptown in horror,
first to Washington Square,
then up Fifth Avenue, right?
Henry James, at the end
of the 19th century writes
about Washington Square.
You have no idea how close the
slums of the Lower East Side are
to the place that he described.
Upper class culture.
Literature.
Keeps aloof from all of that.
Whitman doesn't.
Whitman sees in the streets.
This is a scene from
the Five Points
where I dramatize Scorcese's
Gangs of New York.
Whitman sees the opportunity
for a new culture precisely
in these immigrants.
I'll say a little bit about it
next time, but Whitman talks.
He uses a term,
&quot;adhesiveness,&quot;
touching closeness
to one another.
The people often will
say, &quot;Okay, you know what?
That's a code word.&quot;
That means a gay experience.
It means people coming together.
Sexuality -- that's what
adhesiveness is about.
And that's fine.
And that's revolutionary
insofar as it goes, I suppose.
But really, it means
something else as well.
I mean, when you think about
bodies touching one another,
you think about the slums
of a Lower East Side
and the Five Points.
I mean, those are
bodies touching.
That's what adhesiveness
is -- being cheek by jowl,
living on top of one another.
It scares the crap out
of most intellectuals.
Not Whitman.
Whitman is fully a
part of this culture.
He sees in these immigrants
the crucible of democracy.
So I think
&quot;adhesiveness&quot;
is even a more powerfully
subversive term because it
connotes not only the fullest
exploration of human sexuality,
but also the fullest exploration
of the changes that are
happening in New York
and in the country as a result
of the influx of immigrants,
first from Italy and then
Germany -- I mean, from Ireland,
then Italy, then Germany,
and then from Eastern Europe
at the end of the century.
Whitman sees all of this as
a kind crucible of democracy.
And that's part of the
story that's often lost
in Whitman's poetry.
That's part of story I want you
to remember: that Whitman is
in some sense a city poet and
not just any city, this city
and downtown in this
city, exactly the places
where we now romp around.
So I want you to see Whitman as
somebody who is exploring themes
that the transcendentalists
are mostly afraid of exploring.
He's using pop cultural
forms, mass culture
like in the Penny Paper,
sensationalism, and linking them
to this higher discourse
of the soul and the body,
and suggesting to us that the
body should not be given short
shrift, that we ought to explore
the body as deeply perhaps
as Thoreau explored nature,
even if in the end we're going
to think of it as instrumental.
Take a look on page 2213.
A famous passage, section five.
&quot;I believe in you my soul,
the
other I am must not abase itself
to you, And you must not
be abased to the other.
Loaf with me on the grass,
loose the stop from your throat,
Not words, not music or rhyme
I want, not custom or lecture,
not even the best,
Only the lull I like,
the hum of your valved voice.
I mind how once we lay such
a transparent summer morning,
How you settled your
head athwart my hips,
and gently turned over upon
me, And parted the shirt
from my bosom bone,
and plunged your tongue
to my bare-stripped heart, And
reached till you felt my beard,
and reached till
you held my feet.
Swiftly arose and spread around
me the peace and knowledge
that pass all the
argument of the earth,
And I know that the hand of
God is the promise of my own,
And I know that the spirit of
God is the brother of my own,
And that all the men ever
born are also my brothers,
and the women my sisters and
lovers, And that a kelson
of the creation is love, And
limitless are leaves stiff
or drooping in the
fields, And brown ants
in the little wells beneath
them, And mossy scabs
of the worm fence,
heaped stones, elder,
mullein and pokeweed.&quot;
What's going on in that passage?
[ Pause ]
>> Lecturer: Yes?
Come on. Anyone?
What's going on in that passage?
Look at it again.
Who's doing what to whom?
Best response I ever got --
I take it a braver
group than you --
was somebody's hand goes up.
I'm like, &quot;Yeah?&quot;
He said, &quot;I don't know, but
I think it turns me on.&quot;
[ Laughter ]
So actually, if that's
what's going on,
you're a little embarrassed
to admit you were just
a little bit turned
on by reading something
in your English class.
What's going on?
Yeah?
>> They're rolling around
in
the summer, like it's just --
>> Lecturer: Rolling
around in the grass.
Who's having sex?
>> He and &quot;my
soul&quot; I guess.
[ Laughter ]
>> Lecturer: Yeah, right?
There's a kind of bifurcation
of self, typical body and soul.
&quot;I believe in you, my
soul&quot;
-- he's talking to himself --
&quot;the other that I am must
not
abase itself to you, the body.
You must not be abased
the other.&quot;
And in fact right now,
&quot;loaf
with me in the grass&quot; --
so he's having this kind of
sexual encounter with himself.
So it's masturbatory, I
suppose or maybe it's just --
think of it as a kind of
Edward Taylor moment, right?
I mean, you have a split
between body and soul,
so what if you bring
them back together again?
That's fun, right?
[ Laughter ]
And it's kind of -- &quot;my
head athwart my hips.&quot;
Come on. And then
look what happens.
It's like the best use of
anaphora in the entire course.
What goes on here?
Why all the &quot;and, and,
and, and, and&quot; at the end?
What just happened there?
[ Laughter ]
Yes?
>> He orgasms.
>> Lecturer: Yes, he did.
Exactly. And that's exactly
the structure of it, right?
He has this moment and then
there's this moment of kind
of procreative orgasmic ecstasy,
which is registered formally
in the poem by the use of
anaphora, right, the repetition
of &quot;and&quot; at the
beginning
of all these lines.
That's exactly the structure.
And then of course, him
being a man, it abates.
It doesn't happen again yet
and we do something else.
In fact we go to child,
which is interesting.
[ Laughter ]
So that's part of
what Whitman is doing.
That's part of what is
going on in the poetry.
I mean, there's a kind of
frank exploration of this.
And this is one of the
uses of a poetic technique.
So we have to understand
that this is poetry.
It makes use of a lot of
poetic techniques that were
on your list; it just
makes use of them
in a slightly different way.
And the arbiter of what is
appropriate is it Whitman.
Whitman is the one who has to
set the constraints on himself
and sometimes he will, sometimes
he'll decide that he needs
to short line, sometimes
he needs a long line.
Look at the other things.
We'll talk about
this more next time.
There's a kind of cataloging
function that goes on here.
I mean, the anaphora
sometimes work to survey all
of these things become
part of matter of a poem.
It's his body and the United
States and sometimes he's trying
to bring these two
things together.
Let's leave it there for now.
I was going to play you a
little bit of Whitman voice
but we'll start with
that next time.
All right, thanks.
