>> Alright, let's
get started please.
I am going to be filing
midterm grades later today.
Sorry for the delay.
I'll be contacting some of you
personally about your grades.
In some cases to say
congratulations on fine work.
In unfortunately more cases
to ask what's going wrong.
But one thing I do want to
you to understand is that most
of the work of the
course in terms
of evaluation is yet to be done.
You a short paper coming up.
You have a long paper coming
up, and you have the final exam.
Now, I think by my
calculation roughly speaking,
the exams in this course count
a total of about 35%, right?
15% for the midterm and
20% for the final that's
because at NYU final exams
don't last that much longer
than midterms as
opposed to other places
where there's a big, where
the final is sometimes three
times longer.
So, in those places the final
counts like 50% of your grade.
Here it's about 20.
But I'll make you this deal.
If you improve your grade on the
final exam, I will drop how much
that midterm grade
counted down to about 5%.
So it'll count, the final
will count a lot more.
And if you absolutely blow
away your performance,
I mean if you do so much
better on the final exam
than you did on the midterms.
So say you get an A on the
final having gotten a D
on the midterm, I will simply
think that you had a bad day
at the midterm exam and
discount it entirely.
Or even more, even better
perhaps, I will think
that you adopted a kind of
Franklinian perspective,
[ Laughter ]
>> identified your
errata and fixed them.
So you have a significant
incentive now to not to despair.
This is not cowardive
depravity we're talking about,
at least not in the
cases of most of you.
Not to despair and start to mail
it in just because your final,
your midterm grade isn't what
you and I had hoped it would be.
No, this is a time
to pull yourself
up by the bootstraps
and do better.
We are looking to reward
upward progression.
We are looking to espouse
perfectionism rather
than the idea that we're
all doomed and depraved.
So I want you to take
that seriously, alright?
There are in certain cases,
I will be asking you to come
in to see me because there's
certain levels of performance
where I think that something,
there's a crucial thing
that's missing in the way
that you're approaching
your work.
I don't actually care if
you've been blowing off,
if you tell me look sorry,
I just had a play that I was
in so I blow off your course.
I will actually not
worry about you as much,
because you're making a choice.
You're allowed to
make a choice, right?
You can choose to not
do well in this course.
That's fine.
I'm more concerned with
people who expected
to being doing better
and who haven't,
who don't know why things
aren't working out either
on the papers or the exams.
If you find that I have not
contacted you but you still feel
like you're in that boat.
Like you got a B minus and you
really thought you were going
to get an A minus, then come
and see either me or your TA
and we can talk to you about.
I think in many cases this is
about fixing your strategies
of reading and understanding
what's going on in the text.
Alright, any questions
about that?
Paper assignment will
go out by email tonight.
Remember it's not due Friday
but a week from Friday.
Very soon, and I think actually
I'm just going to put the prompt
for the final paper
on there as well
so you can start
thinking about it.
You should think about the final
paper basically as an attempt
to build on what you've been
doing in the earlier two papers.
Think of those as kind
of building blocks
as the final paper might be two
or three put together pieces
of analysis like the ones that
you've been doing but assembled
into a kind of larger argument.
In this case, an argument
that you will propose to us.
So we're going to ask
you for topic statements.
We'll take a quick look at
them and let you know if you're
on the right track
of the wrong track.
And when you do those topic
statements, we'll be asking you
to not only give us
a sort of hypothesis
about what you think you'll
argue but also give us a kind
of catalogue, appropriate
in talking about Whitman
to be talking about catalogues,
a catalogue of evidence
that seems to you likely
to be important to you.
And in general, we would like
you to find more evidence
than you can possibly use.
We'll ask you for a few
things, but you should have,
be in the position of needing
to pick the best evidence
to make the case that you want
to make and simply feeling
that you need to use
every single thing
that you thought of, okay?
So, you can talk about those
things in section this week.
Alright, Whitman, let's
look at some more Whitman.
Let's turn to the beginning
of Song of Myself actually.
This is on 2210 of
the anthology.
And then we'll move on to
talk about Emerson and think
about what I suggested
before, about the ways in which
that we might want to
temper our optimism
about Transcendentalism
now as we approach the unit
of the course that's
really devoted to slavery.
Alright, so Song of Myself,
which is given the title late,
later in its career,
begins this way.
I celebrate myself
and sing myself.
And what I assume you assume
for every atom belonging to me
as good belongs to you.
I just want to stop
and pause and think
about those three lines a little
bit more closely and think
about the ways in which they may
or may not encapsulate Whitman's
project, in Song of Myself
and in his writing as a whole.
I celebrate myself
and sing myself
and what I assume
you shall assume.
For every atom belonging
to me as good belongs.
You can think about there's
any number of ways to say this.
Let's go around and have
people different people
from the class say
it in different ways,
and I want to know what's
at stake in saying it in one
or more of those
particular ways.
So, somebody tell me where
you would place the stresses
on those words if you were the
one up here reading it aloud.
And close the door while
you think for a moment.
Anyone want to volunteer because
I do have the attendance sheets
still up here and I
can call on people.
Yeah?
>> [inaudible]
>> Okay, I want,
so say it out loud.
>> So, I celebrate
myself and sing myself
>> Okay.
>> I think that, I don't
know, I guess drawing on
>> I celebrate myself and
sing
myself, and what does that do.
>> I feel like if Whitman
is
trying to draw on past poets
and past poets always
speaking about God.
And he's kind of, he's
borrowing this I guess the theme
of self-divinity
>> Okay.
>> And he's trying, yeah.
>> So self-divinity,
thinking
about someone in contrast
to somebody like Edward
Taylor for example,
also formally experimentive,
but would not say I celebrate
myself and sing myself.
He starts thing with, I am
this humble crumb of dust.
I am this miniscule speck
that you should walk on.
Right? This is quite
different from that.
>> And he's not as
humble towards I guess,
if he was trying to,
if he was going to try
to mention a higher being,
he's not to humble
in his opening line.
>> Okay.
>> He's kind of placing
himself on a pedestal.
>> Okay so he's not
humble.
Would we tie that to
anybody else that we've read?
Where's this coming from?
Yeah?
>> Thoreau.
>> To who?
>> Thoreau.
>> Thoreau, how so?
>> [inaudible] conceited I
think
that emphasizes self-reliance
and having
>> You mean Thoreau or
Emerson?
You could mean both.
>> I mean both.
>>Okay. Right, because I
think Thoreau is right,
because he's interested
in himself
and in his particular
observations.
It's Emerson that says,
all mean egotism vanishes
in that moment, right?
Although he is trying to
talk about a connection
between himself, but it's
interesting again to renote
that phrase in Emerson.
It's not that all egotism
vanishes and I become
like Taylor, this crumb
of dust and the speck,
this particle amongst
the divine current.
We keep a certain amount of
egotism, a certain amount
of egotism is necessary
for self-reliance.
It's the mean egotism
that we want to get at.
It's almost that there's a sense
of a way of being self-reliant
or if you want egotistical
that nevertheless has a kind
of outward flow to it.
Maybe that's part
of what Emerson,
what Whitman is picking
up from Emerson.
Yeah?
>> I feel like you could
put
the emphasis on the word myself,
like that kind of a emphasize
the whole self-reliant part,
like it's almost
like he's saying
that he's doing it alone like.
Kind of by myself
whereas if he put it
on the words celebrating
[inaudible] it's more
about praising the
sacredness of the individual.
>> Okay, so we can think
about that dynamic as well.
There could be, you could
say I am so, you could say
if you celebrate, if you
stress yourself you are,
he's celebrating himself,
but there is a sense of being
by myself, right, while
you're celebrating.
And it might be that
if you don't want
that you might choose another.
I celebrate myself
and sing myself.
Not with other people,
he doesn't play nicely
with the other children.
>> Like he's the only
person he can count
on to celebrate himself.
>> I think that's very
good,
I think there's a tension
in the poem between
those different visions
of what it means to
celebrate yourself.
There's a sense in which
he is doing something
that is quite different if we
think about it from the kind of,
some of the past
histories of poetic forms.
He's not afraid to put himself
front and center, right,
I mean if you think
about the progression
of forms that we've looked at.
Puritan poetry is supposed
to be about venerating God.
Public poetry in the
Revolutionary era is supposed
to be about venerating
your country
or celebrating the
lives of famous people.
It's not supposed to
be about the self.
We start to move to lyric
experience when we get
to somebody like Bryant, right,
but even then Bryant
is describing,
he's creating a somewhat
idiosyncratic voice
but really stressing a
kind of communal theme.
The voice comes quietly
idiosyncratic.
It's not upfront
about itself, right,
it's meant to be
idiosyncratic in a way
of making its kind
of connection.
It's meant to be a more
personal kind of voice
and you might say the
impersonal marching rhythm
that you might find in so
much neo-classical poetry.
And it's meant to make a
connection to the reader
on the subject of death.
It's a meditation on death.
This is a meditation on
life in all of its fullness
and messiness, right, and part
of what he does is he
celebrates himself.
But I think there is a tension.
Is he alone doing this.
Emerson talks about meeting
somebody with a tyrannous eye.
Well maybe it's a kind of lonely
place to be if you're going
to have that tyrannous eye.
What about the second line.
What I assume you shall assume.
Yeah?
>> I'm having a little
difficulty.
When I first read it like
my brain puts a comma
after a [inaudible] even
though there isn't one.
So it comes off as
a very demanding
like what I assume you shall
assume, but instead when I look
at it that there
is no comma there,
what I assume you shall assume,
so he's guessing what someone
else is going to interpret?
>> I think that's
probable.
I think it's possible.
What I assume you shall assume.
What I assume you shall assume.
>> Like he's assuming
that they will
>> Say that three times
fast.
Okay. It's pos, I
would say that's right.
The lack of a comma does
make it possible to think of,
you shall assume as
the object of the verb,
what I assume you shall assume.
>> It's hard to get a
grasp
because there isn't a rhythm
because it is free verse.
It's hard to see
what [inaudible]
>> How else might we
think about that, yeah.
>> Well I guess this is a
kind of different point,
but first when I heard
the say, that it seems
like it doesn't match
because celebrating
and singing aren't necessarily
interpretative or analytical.
And then like every
[inaudible] is very material
and it doesn't really have
much to do with assumptions as,
I don't know I think there
are two ways that you can,
maybe I'm wrong and need
to look up the definitions
that I didn't, but it seems
that he could also mean
rather than using the verb
>> What, okay, let's
think about assume.
What might assume mean?
Yeah?
>> Assume as in to making
an assumption or like making
like an approximation.
[inaudible] I think
people mean now
but could also assume a form.
>> Okay that's good.
So what we take for granted,
what I assume, but
what I take up.
What I bear.
I assume your burden.
What I assume, you shall assume.
My poetic project
shall be yours.
Yeah.
>> I think you have to
read
that line directly with the one
from the one from Self-reliance
where Emerson says,
to believe your own thought,
to believe what is true for you
and your private part
is true for all men.
That is genius.
Or he also brings up the same
kind of nature in chapter five,
every universal truth
[inaudible]
to every other truth.
>> That's good.
I mean, I think one way
to think about it is
that it's a poetic statement
precisely those insights
from Emerson.
That there's a kind of,
there's something universal
about our nature, right.
Emerson says most people
are afraid to speak out.
They don't raise their hands
in section, and then they find
that someone else said exactly
what they were going to say
and maybe didn't even
say it quite so well.
Our own thoughts were
turned to us, he says,
with a certain kind
of alienated majesty.
There's a way in which
Whitman is plugging right
into that idea.
Anybody get bothered by this,
feel like it was a bit pushy?
What I assume you shall assume.
>> I don't read it that
way.
I also read it as
assuming as him taking on
but not necessarily
as taking on a form.
I feel like the first stanza
is his mission overall.
Like he talks about, the way
the rest of the poem falls
out with all of the
visual stimulus
and then he keeps picking
on and appropriating.
I think it's his mission
of almost removing the
shame from subjectivity.
That's the universal
element that we all have,
it's an awareness of self
as representation
almost like Franklin.
Like he's talking about every
atom of me belongs to you
because we all perceive.
That's just what it seems to me.
>> Why as good?
>> As good?
>> What does it mean, for
every atom belonging to me
as good belongs to you.
>> I think that's the
universal
principle that he's arguing.
He's using, his poetic
mission then is to use all
of these images to necessarily
represent these qualities
as in everyone's
experience is just as good.
There's no lesser
qualities, like,
which is why he argues the
essential unity of everything.
>> Okay that's good.
I think that's right.
I think there's a way
in which he's arguing
that sometimes we're
consubstantial.
It can seem a little pushy or
even imperialistic if you will
to say what I assume you assume.
It's like you don't
have a choice reader,
I'm making meaning and
you're going to take it up.
But then it's qualified,
why does he say
for every atom belonging to
me as good belongs to you.
That's a statement
about consubstantiality
or maybe even contingency
or chance.
The atoms in me are quite
literally could be in you.
They are, we're all
made of the same stuff.
Did you want to add something?
>> Yeah. Another kind of
way that I was looking
at it was kind of
in acknowledgement
of the relationship between
the writer and the reader.
As I go along, you're
following me.
What I assume, you're going
to read it and assume as well.
So there's all these
kind of [inaudible]
that he asks question that
he asks throughout the poem.
There's other lines that
kind of point to this,
>> Yeah I've talked
to you about the ways
in which I think we ought
to think about texts
as collaborations between
writers and readers.
And so there's a sense in which
we'd suggest that the meaning
of a text doesn't exist until
somebody takes it up takes it up
and reads it or speaks it
and engages with the author
and constructs that meaning.
People that are, that find
themselves a little perturbed
thinks that there's a
certain way in which
if that's true Whitman
is taking up a lot
of the oxygen in the room.
That he's taking up,
he's not leaving a lot
of room for you in there.
That, some people would
argue that there's a kind
of perfunctoriness to the way
in which he constructs a you.
That really it's just a, one
of these people who just talks
at you without leaving
much space
to do your own constructing.
I just want you to bear it.
I'm not saying that's what
I think you should believe
or even what I believe, but
there are people that read this
and find it a little
bit disturbing
and that would be the basis of
arguing that there's something
that should disturb us
about Whitman's poetry.
Yeah.
>> When I saw this, I kind
of
saw it as he's setting himself
up almost in the same way as
Thoreau and Emerson use nature
as an instrument to
explain the world.
He's kind of just saying
that he's kind of going
to be the instrument
to explain the world.
>> Okay that's good.
>> Making a
representation,
like using himself.
>> So then there's a
funny split, right.
I suggested to you
that maybe Emerson
or Thoreau finely are using
nature instrumentally right.
It's an object for them.
Something that gets
them someplace.
It's funny then to be Whitman,
if you're using the body
and yourself in that same way,
you're sort of objectifying
yourself.
Or you're even, you're
containing within you that kind
of subject object split
that Descartes writes about.
So that there's a secret kind
of way in which he writes
that maintains his
subjectivity but part of the way
in which he constructs
himself as a subject,
is to construct himself
as an object.
But remember that actually
shouldn't seem very strange.
Again, pointed it
out to you before.
It's a strategy of
personal narrative.
What's Franklin do in order
to write his autobiography?
He has to transform
himself into two things.
One is Franklin author and
what does Franklin author
write about.
Franklin author writes
about this thing called
Franklin character
so that there's a sense
in which Franklin has
to objectify his own life
in order to settle it down
and turn it into a story
and talk about himself even
if he talks of himself
in the third,
first person there's a sense
that he constructed that kind
of third person version
of himself.
So that's one of
the things I think
that Whitman's poetry
brings out.
In that sense it really is a
kind of personal narrative.
Anybody else find
themselves disturbed by assume
or anything that goes with it?
Yeah.
>> Well, I think
that it seems pushy
because it's very much
like a disclaimer.
It's like this [inaudible] that
you have to buy into in order
to find the rest
of the poem, like,
because obviously
Whitman is not the reader
but he's making this comparison,
and he's making this argument
that you have to believe in
order to like buy into the fact
that Song of Myself is not
some of what Whitman is.
Some of everyone.
>> Good I think that's
right.
I mean he asserts and
establishes the premise.
It is going to be, he's going
to have us buy it's going
to be about himself.
But it's also going to
be about everyone else,
and there's certain ways in
which he's trying to establish,
well I just want to point out to
you that there's a certain kind
of materiality here
that he's talking about.
Emerson would maybe use in
these first three lines the word
that Whitman deserves
for the fourth line
which is the word soul.
I mean, Emerson thinks that
what connects all of us together
and what connects us to
the divine is the idea
that we have this divine soul.
Whitman wants to make that
a little more problematic
because he thinks that
gives short shrift something
that he thinks is very
important or integral
to his self, namely the body.
So the first way, you
might say the first way
in which he asserts
our commonality is not
by going the soul route
but rather the body route.
By literally talking
about atoms.
We are all made of the
same matter and stuff.
You can say that's
his first premise.
He's going to get to the
soul and then he's going
to make the whole question
of the soul problematic
by suggesting that
the soul is something
with which he is in dialogue.
We get that in the fourth line.
I loaf and invite my soul.
I lean and loaf at my
ease observing a spear
of summer grass.
Which would suggest to us that
the soul is somehow not part
of the I or there's some part
of the I that's not
including the soul or,
it's an odd locution, and
you should think of it
in relation to Emerson.
This is one way in which
fundamentally he's deviating
from Emerson.
Emerson thinks that who
you are is your soul,
everything else is
contingent, right.
Everything else, even your own
body belongs to that not-me.
There's a certain way in
which Whitman is turning it
around at least for the start
and relegating the
soul to the not-me.
At least in terms of the
subjectivity of the soul
as it's first laid out here.
Did you have a, did you
want to say something?
>> Yeah. I saw that as
kind of acknowledging good
to me what good is to you.
So as you're saying the
commonality, like is he saying
that the good also
belongs to you as well
or is he just saying that,
>> Well I think that once
you
start to pull these lines apart,
they start to mean not
exactly only what you thought
they meant.
Every atom belonging
as good belongs to you.
It just might as well belong
to you or it's could be,
but then if you start
to think about it.
Every atom belonging to me
as good, belongs to you.
That would seem a little
artificial but is it excluded.
The idea that, well he doesn't
say might as well belong to you.
He sticks that word
good in there
which creates certain kinds
of syntactical resonances.
That's part of what
we have to look at.
I was just talking in office
hours today to somebody,
an economics person in
one of my other classes,
completely baffled by
the reading of poetry,
so just of just talked
to him by the way.
I mean if you come to
Whitman without thinking
about the other stuff that
we've been thinking about,
it can look baffling.
You might not understand
why is it
that this is poetry
and not prose.
What if you just ran it all
together, wouldn't it look
like a piece of prose.
And maybe you could do that.
Not all of it would work
that way, but I think part
of what we need to understand is
that Whitman is trying
to express something.
That, as Emerson says,
expresses the kind of,
that encapsulates
the entire country.
The experience of the country.
He's trying to get it all
down on paper you might say.
So that forces him to
explode previous forms.
All the other poets
have not done a good job
of capturing what is distinctive
about the United States.
Some of them complain that
it's an unpoetical country.
Some of them are just
flabbergasted by what they see.
Emerson says the same thing.
We're looking for the poet.
Where's the poet.
Part of the problem,
as he suggested
in the American Scholar, is
that we're too sycophantic
when it comes Europe.
We've listened too long to
the courtly muses of Europe.
But we don't have courts.
We don't have King's
courts heres.
We have law courts.
We have other kinds of things.
We have other forms and
Emerson wants to say
that those are poetical.
Banks and tarrifs and business
and all this other stuff is part
of the poetry of this country.
Whitman understands
that as well.
And a part of what he's
doing, you might say,
is exploding forms, but
once you start to understand
that and realize that.
I really want to
stress something
that almost was a throwaway last
time and I think is really true.
When we look at every other
poet that we've looked at up
until now, we're interested in
what they do with metrical feet.
We think about how
long their lines are.
Are they pentameter
lines, tetrameter lines.
Was it anapestic tetrameter
or was it iambic pentameter
as in Wheatley or what is
it that Taylor is doing
to these things and how come
it doesn't scan so well.
Ask yourself about
scanning Whitman.
What would it mean to
scan a line of Whitman.
What would it get you.
If I asked you to do a
close reading of Whitman,
which of the, I mean I sort
of said before do a
kind of checklist.
Look for stanzaic form, look
for line scheme, look for meter,
are those things going
to be of use to you
when you're reading Whitman.
Maybe not.
So what is going to
be of use to you.
Maybe some of the other
things we were looking for.
Larger rhetorical form.
And also moments when you
can just isolate the fact
that certain words
are placed in kind
of ambiguous relationship
to one another.
So that there's a kind
of ebb and flow of a line
which almost even
in a line it seems
to shift its meaning
depending on how you read it.
I think that's one of the things
that you must understand
about Whitman.
The poetry is designed, his
metaphor is the leaf of grass,
but the poetry itself is
designed to mimic water.
It ebbs and flows.
It has big bursting places
and times when it's quiet.
And he does, there is a lot
of imagery of water and rivers
and other kinds of things
going on in the poetry.
So it has different styles
and they're all encompassed.
So part of what I think you need
to do when you read his poetry
to really get decided is to
think about the larger project,
think about how he got here
from where other people were.
I mean why is this not, why
would you, if we put this
on the exam you'll
know it right?
You're not going to
mistake this one.
Oh by the way, I should
mention that in terms
of knowing it there will
be passages on the final,
but being able to ID them
is no longer the point.
Because it's very
distinctive, I mean,
all of these writers are except
for possibly where we could seek
to confuse you between
Emerson and Thoreau
and promise you we
won't do that.
So, Whitman is very distinctive.
In some sense in this
part of the course,
he's by himself as a poet.
And in some sense we want
to say he is both summing
up a poetic tradition and
also contradicting it.
And that's a way that a lot
of poetic traditions work.
Poets often repudiate
what's gone right before.
Sometimes trying to
create something new
but sometimes openly looking
back to earlier forms.
You might want to think is
Whitman only repudiating what's
gone before or is there any way
in which he's looking
back to something.
Can you think of any
other poetic forms
that you know about,
not necessarily just
from within the confines
of our syllabus,
that Whitman might be
invoking in this poetry?
Yeah.
>> Free verse.
>> Well, yes free verse is
what he's doing alright.
There's a sense in
which free verse is part
of what Whitman is
helping to create.
Poetry in the United
States doesn't look the same
after Whitman and in
part because he become,
he creates this thing
called free verse.
So that's of the moment,
but within the free verse.
I guess what I'm trying
to point out to you is
that it looks like free verse.
And you could just say,
well anything goes.
In the same way that people
who look at modern art think,
well my three year old sister
could've done that one.
Oh what does it take to
just draw a bunch of lines.
What does that mean,
that painting that's
just purely white.
But it means something
different if you look at it just
as an object than if you look
at it as the last in a series
of objects to which it refers
and which it contextualizes.
It's, I think that both of
them are valid responses.
I see a white painting
on the wall.
Looks like a white
painting on a wall,
but then if I see it has
a title and refers back
to something else, I
get another response.
And if I know things about
the things to which it refers,
I have perhaps a richer meaning
than I am able to construct.
I don't think the
first meaning is wrong.
It's just not as complex.
Just like if you're reading
Moby Dick and you don't know
that the book called the Bible
exists, your meaning is going
to be a little bit rich
as somebody who does know
that a book like,
called the Bible exists.
And it's going to be
a little less rich
who actually knows
what's in the Bible
and can get all the
dirty little jokes
that Melville has implanted,
because he doesn't believe
that people are actually
going to look stuff up.
So, okay let's talk a little
about other forms
that are invoked.
Yeah.
>> Virgil's Aeneid is
the first first line.
>> Sure why not.
>> Why not?
>> Why not.
Sure, absolutely.
[ Laughter ]
I sing of arms and a man.
Interestingly, he's talking
about himself, but why not sure.
We could even do that.
Yes, I would that
isn't necessarily,
that's probably not the
first thing you thought
of though right when
you read it.
That's the first
thing you thought of?
It could be.
>> Yeah it was.
>> Okay. Good, that's
fine.
I think that if it weren't the
first thing that you thought of,
it might be something that
you might think of later
as you start to realize
what's going on in the poem.
I mean, you could think
of it first if you think,
okay we know this is a poem.
It's meant to encapsulate
an entire culture.
And gee isn't that exactly
what the form of epic does.
It's meant to encapsulate
something about a culture.
Now Virgil is really
different right.
I mean there's a sense in which
Virgil is kind of narrative.
It's full of inset stories
but it's pushing a
particular narrative together.
It's about, the Aeneid is about,
you find yourself in the middle
of a story but the story really
begins with the sack of Troy
and moving forward to
eventually found what's going
to turn out to be Rome.
So it's a kind of narrative
but a national thing.
Whitman is doing a
national thing too.
So I think one of the things we
would say is, Whitman is trying,
one of the things he's trying
to do is, one of the way
in which he's looking to
older poetic forms is,
he's leap frogging
all of these forms
and if he finds an American
example it's not going
to one that's going
to be to his taste.
If he even knew Barlow's
Dunciad, it's exactly the kind
of poetry that he would not be
want to try, but he would want
to write an epic, that's in some
sense is a new world epic not a
sycophantic neo-classical
version of an epic.
So yes, there's probably an echo
of [inaudible] in these lines.
But think about the cataloging
that goes on inside the poem.
All of those different catalogs
of things, that he sees people,
that he sees, it's a little
less remarkable than Virgil,
although Virgil does
it as an echo of Homer.
There's also this epic
cataloguing that goes
on in the classical epics
by Homer and Virgil.
I mean, that's part of the
technique to show you who's
out there in the battlefield.
What they're wearing.
Just a catalogue of stuff.
And that's one of the
ways in which epic seeks
to get its entire
culture into the poem.
So I think one of the things
we would immediately say is
that what Whitman is
doing is signaling a kind
of democratic project,
but it's a project
that has certain
reference points
and epic would certainly
be one of them.
Both Homeric I would
suggest and Virgilian.
Anything else?
Are there any other
constraints that we might find
that Whitman is trying
to put on himself?
Yeah.
>> I don't know if
it's a constraint,
but I guess the conventions of
classical music is something.
I get the, like you said
before, the motions of water
and their arising and swells and
use of punctuation established,
like, pace in multiple ways.
>> I think you're
absolutely right.
Music is one of the things
Whitman is trying to do.
To rethink his project.
I mean, he was a big
fan of the opera.
And you would say
there's something operatic
about what Whitman is trying
to do in terms of big gestures.
There's almost like, it
has a structure of an opera
where we have moments that
are big showy set pieces,
the kind of opera that he
would've been listening
to in the middle of
the 19th century.
Just, you know, not quite
going to be Wagnarian.
It's going to be something else,
more like operas that have kind
of set pieces and then
moments of recitative.
I mean there's definitely
a model that he's using.
So you have the kind of
different moments in this thing,
where you have different
cataloguing moments.
Those are on the one hand maybe
epic on the other may function
as a kind of recitative.
You have other very kind
of lyrical and loud moments
that are lyrical soft moments.
You have moments of narrative,
dynamic things that are going,
all these are part of whatever
metaphor you want to use.
As part of the ebb and flow
of it or as different kinds
of set pieces within a
larger poem that tries
to do something beyond what
literary normally does.
Epic invocation is one of the,
music is definitely another one.
Thanks to the both of you.
Anything else that we
want to say about this?
Yeah.
>> I think it's
interesting
that I noticed
that there was no stanzas
or sections at first.
It was almost like he put
his constraints on himself
after he had written the poem.
[inaudible] like structure.
>> I think that's very,
it's hard to know
exactly why he breaks it
up into these set stanzas.
If you were going
to go and compare,
I mean I showed you
one little moment
where the word Manhattan
is interpolated
into this version
of it, but yeah.
There's a sense that one
of the things he does
is he possibly reigns
in his verse a little bit.
He makes it look a little
bit more conventional.
He takes out some of the
phrasing that is a little bit,
I don't know marked by youthful
exuberance but people think.
I mean I already told
you about the scholar
that writes a gay life
of Whitman and in order
to find the poems that
illustrate, he has to go to kind
of not even, not this one, sort
of the versions before this.
So there's a certain way
in which Whitman himself
is editing his own canon.
That's one of the
things that's kind
of remarkable about
him as a poet.
He takes his set of poems,
enlarges it over his career,
but keeps working on them.
Little bit like George
Lucas, yes.
>> I guess is it kind of
like a bloated soliloquy?
>> Well yeah, sure.
I think that's another
good thing.
We've talked a little about,
remember Melville earlier
in the course, we'll
come back to it again.
But Melville thought
of him as having kind
of Shakespearean ambitions and
I think Whitman doesn't tend
to talk about Shakespeare
as often,
but certainly there's
something dramatic.
I mean, Whitman was a fan of
the theatre, and he used to go
and when he was young he would
go to the old Bowery theatre
down there, the working
glass theatre.
He writes about it
later on as if it,
kind of romanticizing all those
young muscly men on the stage
and everybody kind of, there's
this democratic exuberance
of the audience.
So he knows about theatre
and there is something
theatrical about this.
There is a sense that this is
a kind of soliloquy writ large.
And it has some of that kind,
so a series of soliloquys,
so I think that's good.
I think Whitman whether you
think of it as epic or music,
opera, or theatre, there is the
performative aspect of it right.
Epics that were meant
to be performed.
The written version
of the Odyssey is one
version that we've gotten.
Virgil's is different
because he's evoking the
for written context.
But likewise, theatre
and music both
of these I think
there's this aspect
of performance that's definitely
part of what Whitman's project.
Even more than what we would
say in some of the other poetry.
I mean, you do, don't
you get the sense
that you're reading
Bryant's Thanatopsis.
It's not really meant
to be performed.
It's a kind of quiet meditation
that you probably
read to yourself.
And certainly Taylor's poetry
are all personal private
meditations that weren't meant
to even be seen by anybody else.
I think those are three very
good things to bear in mind.
Anything else that we might
like to say about Whitman?
One of the things, last things
that I would suggest to you is
that like both Emerson and
Thoreau, Whitman is interested
in a largeness that
includes the possibility
of self-contradiction.
So I just wanted to point
out one passage to you.
This is line 1323 towards
the end of the poem.
Well we can even go
back to the beginning
of that whole section there.
Section 321.
The past and present wilt I
have filled them, emptied them,
and proceed to fill my
next fold of the future.
And again there's a kind
of weird thing that's
going on there.
I mean, Emerson says we
got to tyrannize the past,
make use of it, but what does
it mean to make the past wilt
and to be filling up
the fold of the future.
Listen all up there, what
have you to confide in me.
Look in my eyes while I
snuff the sidle of evening.
Talk honestly.
No one else hears you.
And I stay only a minute longer.
It's clearly he's constructing
readers and listeners out there,
with which whom he
is in dialogue.
Do I contradict myself.
And this is the line
I wanted you to see.
Very well then.
I contradict myself.
I am large.
I contain multitudes.
Many things in me.
But you could also read it
as, I contain multitudes.
I keep them pinned
up, penned in.
Again there's that one
word, there's the kind of,
the kind of productive ambiguity
that you find in Whitman.
There's something tyrannical
about being the tyrannizing
poetic eye and
yet maybe what we need is
the tyrannizing poetic eye.
Yeah.
>> When there's this
coming
at the end of this poem,
the idea of him creating a
naturalidge [assumed spelling]
for America.
It's sort of like, he's
conflicting himself
because he's talking about
himself when referring
to an entire country of people
and the words multitudes
there could convey the sense
that it is America that conveys,
that contains the multitudes,
but it still is one.
>> That's right.
>> At the same time,
people
[inaudible] individually.
So I think there's
that contradiction.
>> I think that's great.
I mean there's, one
of the things we say
about Whitman is that, at least
this is the way that I tend
to read Whitman, is that unlike
Emerson, he takes up the kind
of cosmopolitan opportunity
that's there in the country.
I said that Whitman liked to
walk around the Lower East Side.
He didn't find himself
distressed by all the immigrants
and the people who were
coming to this country.
He works them into his poetry.
Now there's a sense in
which you could think
about what the dynamics
of this are.
What did I say about the melting
pot before, everybody goes
in whatever they are, and
they come out Presbyterian.
Well everybody, all the voices
go into here and they come
out Whitman, which you might
say is true of Emerson too,
he's very eclectic in his
rhetoric and it all comes
out sounding like Emerson.
But I think for me, there's a
greater attention to difference
and to bridging gaps and to
the energies you might say
of the city that kind of work
their way into even the lines
of the poetry that aren't about
the city, that I think of as
in some sense deeply
cosmopolitan in nature.
And again let me remind you,
well let me let you hear this.
>> Centre of equal
daughters, equal sons.
All, all alike endeared,
grown, ungrown, young or old.
Strong, ample, fair,
enduring, capable, rich.
Perennial with the Earth,
with Freedom, Law and Love.
>> That's from a wax
cylinder
recording and it's believed
by most scholars to
be the only recording
of Whitman that actually exists.
So that's Whitman's voice when
he's an older man in 1888.
But again there's that idea of
being equal, equal daughters
and equal sons, all, all
alike, endeared, grown,
ungrown, young or old.
Strong, ample, fair,
enduring, capable, rich,
perennial with the Earth.
There's a sense in what
Whitman wants to be is a kind
of a couple things I think.
One is a kind of cosmopolitan
presence that's able
to engage difference
and appreciate people
that are different
from one another and
yet he's also I think
a poet of union.
And sometimes he wants to bring
all these people together.
For me, the difference between
Emerson and Whitman is that,
Emerson wants to, Emerson is
not interested in the details
of other peoples'
lives, in the details
in which people experiences
are different.
He's not even interested
in the details
of his own bodily experience
at least not rhetorically.
Whitman is.
He's interested in all the
things that go into life
and he's trying to make
them all part of experience
that we can, we can appreciate.
I mean, late in the
poem he talks
about all these secret thoughts
and unvoiced things people are
afraid to say, and he wants them
to come out in the open.
So for me, Whitman is a lot,
adopt a kind of perspective
that we might really
think of as cosmopolitan.
This really comes
from David Hollinger,
intellectual historian
from Berkeley,
who talks about cosmopolitanism
in opposition to
multi-culturalism.
Multi-culturalism is this idea
of very separate traditions.
African-American, Asian
American, women's writing,
all these things separate.
We say that they all
count for something.
They all have dignity.
And we keep them separate.
We don't want to make inroads
from one discipline
from another.
We don't certainly want to
tell somebody that we don't
like their cultural practices.
Cosmopolitans want to engage in
conversation among other things.
They appreciate difference.
Difference is not
a problem for them.
For someone like Emerson who
I would call a universalist,
difference is a problem.
He solves it through the
question of the soul.
For multi-culturalists,
difference is also
kind of a problem.
We extensively appreciate
difference but we want
to keep the people who
are different, different.
We don't like mixing if
we're multi-culturalists.
We need to keep those
African American syllabi pure.
We need to keep that Asian
American department running.
Whitman might say, let culture
do what cultures going to do.
Which is going to be a lot
of creating and groping
and miscegenating, and
I think Hollinger gets
into some of that too.
Cosmopolitanism urges each
individual and collective unit
to absorb as much
varied experience
as it can while retaining
its capacity
to advance its aim effectively.
I think that's a
very good description
of what Whitman is trying to do.
His aims are democratic and
ultimately you might say,
his aim is to promote
the idea of union.
Both literally in terms
of the United States
and metaphorically.
Emerson is aware
of the difference,
the differences of people.
He doesn't write about it
so much in his own pieces,
but in his journal he does.
In his [inaudible] he writes
in 1845, asylum of all nations.
The energy of Irish, Germans,
Swedes, Poles, and the Cossacks,
and all the European tribes and
the Africans, the Polynesians,
we'll construct a new race,
a new religion, a new state,
a new literature, which will be
as vigorous as the new Europe
which came out of the old
smelting pot of the dark ages,
and that which earlier
emerged from the Pelasgic
and Etruscan barbarism.
But this is hard for him.
There's a kind of, there's a
way in which at other moments,
Emerson is bothered by what
he thinks of as the kind
of barbarism of some
of these races
which he's not sure
they can overcome.
You can look for moments in that
in Whitman when Whitman seems
to fall down on the job
and is not as cosmopolitan,
but I think overall Whitman
is somebody who's pushing the
envelope of what it
is possible to think
in the middle of
the 19th century.
And so, he really is a poet.
I think it's not accidental that
much of his experience comes
from the streets of New York.
A poet who is able to
appreciate differences
and take different people on
their own terms, but I do want
to suggest that Emerson
is interested
in this kind of commonality.
He overstresses commonality
whereas I think Whitman is,
I think this idea
of universal mind,
whereas I think Whitman is
much more interested in a sense
of diversity than that.
We are a set of minds
and he's trying
to bring them all together.
Emerson's interested in
creating something called
universal history.
And I would ask you to
think finally about the end
of this poem and think
about how this statement
about the generalizable
nature of all private facts,
what does that tell us about
how to read Whitman if anything.
Is Whitman at the end of Songs
of Myself deviating
from this project.
He's interested in timelessness
right, he's interested in trying
to capture moments of
local particular experience
that are going to resonate.
If you read Crossing
Brooklyn Ferry,
he articulates something
that's clearly wrong,
I mean we don't have the
same experience that he has.
We don't cross the East River
on the ferry very much anymore.
We have other ways
of going, subways
and bridges and other things.
But Whitman is certain that
there's something timeless
about that experience.
That he can connect to you
because you're having
essentially the same kind
of experience even
though it's going
to differ in its local details.
So look what he says
here, the end of the poem.
The spotted hawk swoops
by and accuses me.
He complains of my gab
and into my loitering.
He can poke fun at himself at
the end of this large project.
I too am not a bit tamed.
I too am untranslatable.
I sound my barbaric yawp
over the roofs of the world.
And I think that's a wonderful
figure for what this poem is.
The cry of a hawk,
the barbaric yawp.
Think about barbaric
there in relation
to this quote of Emerson.
We want to emerge
from barbarism,
that's the point for Emerson.
Whitman wants to in some
sense to delight in barbarism.
I want to stress that in a way
what Whitman is interested in is
in the kind of barbaric
nature of city experience
and in what Tom Bender from the
history department is called the
historic cosmopolitanism of New
York, part of urban experience.
So you see, think about what
happens at the end of the poem
as Whitman decides
that he's finally,
in so far as he's
embodied the nation
or represented the nation,
he's finally sort of gone
into the very dirt and soil
of a nation at the very end.
I bequeath myself to the dirt
to grow from the grass I love.
And the grass for him is
this great democratic figure.
The leaf of grass,
each one is special.
Each one seems to be alike
but put them all together,
you get a, you step back and
you see what a field looks like.
But that doesn't stop him
from appreciating a single
leaf of grass either.
I bequeath myself to the dirt
to grow from the grass I love.
If you want me again, look
for me under your boot soles.
And that's maybe a kind
of, I don't know if it is,
it's a kind of nod
to Edward Taylor.
Edward Taylor's talking about
how you're a crumb of dust.
Well, Whitman by the end recedes
into this kind of crumb stuff.
Dust is going to be under your
boot soles in the Earth itself.
You will hardly know
who I am or what I mean
but I shall be good
health to you nonetheless.
And filter and fiber your blood.
Failing to fetch me at
first keep encouraged.
Missing me one place,
search another.
I stop somewhere
waiting for you.
So there's a sense of time
but it's not quite the same
as this universal time.
You should think for
yourself about what it is.
What's the difference between
Emerson's universal history
and this notion of history that
Whitman is trying to evoke.
Now, thinking about union in the
moment that he's writing this
at first, 1885 is five years
after the fugitive slave law.
So you cannot think about
union without thinking
about the problem of slavery in
1850, in New York and anywhere
in the country at that moment.
So that, you might say that
if I suggested to you that one
of the subtexts or one of the
cultural contexts that we need
to keep in mind for
a full understanding
of Whitman's poetry
is a situation
in the New York streets, the
immigration and the aftermath
of the Irish famine,
the crowding
on the Lowest East side,
the question of what it is
that immigrants are going to do
to this country and I've said
to you that Whitman embraces
that change rather
than resists it.
Another crucial cultural context
is the fugitive slave law
and its aftermath.
So the fugitive slave law
is part of a larger pattern
of acts, well you might say
of Congressional debates,
that finally brings the
slavery question to a head.
It had sorted started
to become a problem
in the national imagination
with the onset
of the Mexican American war.
And the fugitive slave
law becomes a part
of this larger package of
legislation that becomes known
as the compromise of
1850 that was meant
to basically keep
the union together.
That was the design.
It was to keep the nation
together from splitting off,
to keep the south from seceding.
And as I said, part of
the problem that arose
with the Mexican war which
ended in 1848 by the treaty
of Guadalupe, Hidalgo.
And had a set of interesting
consequences, as a result of,
well let's think back before the
Mexican war what we have is a
proposal in Congress from David
Wilmot who's a representative
called the Wilmot Proviso which
said that any territory that was
to be gained from a
conflict with Mexico,
which was already
looming, would be free,
period, no slavery in them.
And this was, it caused a lot
of heated debate in the course
of the beginning of the
war, during the war,
and finally after
the war itself.
It was never passed, but one
of the things you can see is
that as a result
of the Mexican war,
a ton of new territory becomes
part of the United States
which had previously
been Mexico is now part
of the United States.
So all this stuff over here.
This is Mexico here, all
this stuff here is ceded
to the United States
from Mexico.
So all of a sudden the
people living here are part
of the United States and many
of them previously had thought
of themselves as Mexicans.
And of course they are
promised equal rights
as Americans blah blah blah.
That doesn't really happen.
Gadsden Purchase brings this.
Texas has already been annexed
by the United States in 1845.
It's a whole bunch of
new territory out here.
And so the question is, is this
stuff going to be slave or free,
and it causes all these debates
in the United States Congress.
The President at the time of
all of this is Zachary Taylor
who is a hero of
the Mexican war.
And Taylor basically is
someone who wants to have both
of California and New Mexico
admitted to the Union.
That's one of the things
he wants, but he wants it
to be admitted as free states.
So this causes a big problem.
The aging Whig party leader
Henry Clay offers a series
of compromises.
So the Whigs, the political
landscape is a little
bit different.
There is a Democratic party,
the Conservative party tends
to be the Whigs,
Republicans are just forming.
And in the end, Republicans
become the main anti-slavery
party with Lincoln.
At this moment, it's the Whigs
are sort of the conservatives
and they are the, Henry Clay
is interested in a series
of compromise resolutions that
can be a kind of alternative
to the Wilmot Proviso.
So he proposes that California
be admitted as a free state,
but, he says, there should
be no restriction on any
of these other territories
that are gained from Mexico.
And he also proposes that a more
stringent fugitive slave law
be passed.
Now there's been a
book, on the books,
there's been a fugitive slave
law that's been in effect
since 1793 but it's a
national law that supposed
to be enforced by the states.
So it doesn't have teeth.
The states are supposed
to enforce it,
but some of the states have
regulations prohibiting some
of the, especially in the
North, prohibiting any
of their law enforcement
people from enforcing that law.
So Clay calls for a new
law, one that's going
to have federal marshals be
the ones that are enforcing it.
And this creates a series of
debates which are, for students
of Congressional history,
one of the prime
moments for speechifying.
John Calhoun, this old guy,
he is the aging I don't
know what he's kind
of like a 19th century
version of Strom Thurman.
Does anyone remember
Strom Thurman?
But he's a southerner and he
speaks against the compromise,
and this is what
he's worried about.
He's worried about the fact that
if these states are allowed,
any states are allowed to come
in as free, what will happen is
that there will be a numerical
majority of states that are free
in the Senate and because the
South's population is bounded
by its territory
and will not grow,
there will also be a majority
in the House of Representatives
which is based on population.
As a result, he believes that
the inevitable tide is going
to turn against the south.
There will be a tyrannical
northern majority
and eventually, he thinks
it's inevitable that,
slavery will be abolished
and therefore the South's way
of life will be completely
destroyed.
So he says, if these measures
pass, the South will in order
to preserve itself,
its civilization,
will have to secede
from the union.
There can be no compromise
without secession.
Into this fray steps
Daniel Webster who features,
who's featured in
Emerson's address
on the fugitive slave law.
Webster is a senator
from Massachusetts
which is a state that's
opposed to slavery,
and he gives a famous reply
to Calhoun in which he says,
there is no such thing
as a peaceable secession.
You secede, we go to war.
Webster doesn't want that.
Pretty much nobody wants that.
So, Webster had opposed
the Mexican war.
He wasn't an imperialist.
He had supported
the Wilmot Proviso,
but he feared the possibility
of disunion even more
than he disliked slavery.
He really feared civil war.
So he sides with Clay and pleads
for the compromise of 1850
and for, what he calls,
a charitable spirit
towards the south.
Because he does agree with
certain southern complaints
that they have about the
way abolitionists have been
portraying their society.
He also supports Clay's demand
for a stringent fugitive
slave law, but there's a kind
of pragmatic bent
to his thinking.
He thinks look, the Western
territories are radically
different in climate
from the South.
The South's climate is conducive
to crops like tobacco and cotton
that need kind of workers
like slaves to pick them
and produce those raw materials.
Not going to be true
in the West, he says,
not going to be true
in California either.
It's basically a moot point.
Those will never
become slave cultures
in the way that the south has.
So why would we break
up the union now
over what is practically
a theoretical point.
In the midst of all
this, Taylor dies.
He doesn't stay in
office very long.
And he's succeeded by.
He's succeeded by.
He's succeeded by.
>> [inaudible]
>> Yeah.
>> [inaudible] Fillmore.
>> Never never good to be
13th, they always forget you.
He's a buddy of Clay's
and he sides with Clay
and the compromise passes.
So that is what Emerson
is writing about.
And in its final
form, the compromise
of 1850 contains four provisions
that should concern us
because they're related
to slavery.
It's a big ominous bill.
We're familiar with
those these days.
We've always been.
First one is, California is
admitted as a free state.
The rest of the Mexican
cession is organized
into two territories which
are called New Mexico and Utah
with no federal restrictions
on slavery.
They can do what
they want later on.
The slave trade, but not
slavery, is prohibited
in the nation's capital.
And, there is a stringent
fugitive slave law in addition
to requiring that the northern
states capture and return slaves
to their owners in the south.
The law even goes further and
deprives blacks of jury trial
or the right to testify
in their own defense.
It really sucks.
And it gets people in the
north absolutely outraged.
What they start to realize is
they can't sit by any longer.
Now, Massachusetts
is party to slavery.
Of course this is something
that's always been true.
It's part of what Harriet
Beecher Stowe will dramatize
for us.
That it's a national economy.
The south was never
exempted from benefiting
from the slave trade in so far
as it bought raw materials,
it was even part of the
same national system.
But now what's come home to
these people is that they are
by law required to abet
the slave catchers.
Everyone in the north now
becomes a slave catcher.
This and there are other things.
I mean yeah the slave trade
goes on in District of Columbia
and even California has slavery.
Indians are enslaved
in California.
So it's full of problems.
It doesn't actually solve
anything, and you might argue
that the compromise of 1850
makes civil war inevitable
rather than preventing it, which
just takes a little bit of time.
It creates a kind of
veneer of peace but one
that isn't going to last.
The fugitive slave law is tested
right away in Massachusetts.
A slave named Thomas Simms
is there, and he's captured
and then there's a restraining
order and it goes to trial,
and the chief justice of
Massachusetts returns Simms
to his owners in the south.
Does anybody happen to
know who the chief justice
of Massachusetts
was in that moment?
This guy, Lemuel Shaw.
Anti-slavery guy, but he
supports the Constitution.
Fugutive slave law is
the law of the land.
He has to find it, he doesn't
find it unconstitutional.
Do you know who this guy is?
He has a famous son-in-law.
>> George Bernard Shaw.
>> No. His son-in-law
has a different name.
It's Herman Melville.
>> Oh.
>> Wow.
>> We'll talk about this
again,
but in so far as context,
everything contexts,
slavery is not something
that simply an abstract
thing for Melville.
His father-in-law out rules
in what is arguably the
biggest slave case to date,
and Melville is somebody
who is aware
of his father-in-law's cases.
The term monomania which figures
largely in Melville's Ahab
or Ishmael's descriptions
of Ahab comes
from one of Shaw's cases.
We'll get to that.
I just want to strike
that note now.
Don't forget it.
Emerson is particularly bitter
about this, and we go back
to thinking about
the American scholar.
Remember what he says there
that men in history are bugs,
are spawn, all of
them behold the hero
or the poet their own greed
and crude being and are willing
to be less, are content
to be less
so that may attain
its full stature.
Later on, he goes on
in his writing he goes
on to develop a concept of what
he calls the representative man.
Somebody who embodies
self-reliance, a kind of hero.
He wishes we were all
representative men.
One of these representative
men is Daniel Webster.
Webster you might say is one
of Webster's culture heroes
which is why it's particular
disappointing for Emerson
to see Webster support
this compromise
and this fugitive slave law.
And if you have a
copy of the essay,
you might probably bring it now
and I'll put some
of it on the screen.
And I want you to look
at the way it begins.
This is the second version of
the address, shortly after 1850,
I mean I think the first of
these addresses is in 1850
when Emerson decides he has
to speak out on this question.
So, Emerson wanted to be aloof
from particular public
questions.
Political questions.
He wants to write a philosophy
that's universal in some way.
Find that he can't do that
in good conscience anymore.
Slavery is something different
and the fugitive slave law
has implicated everyone
and he has a moral
duty, he believes,
to speak out against it.
I do not often speak
to public questions.
They are odious and
hurtful, and it seems
like meddling or
leaving your work.
I have my own spirits in prison,
pirits in deeper prisons, whom
no man visits, if I do not.
And then I see what havoc
it makes with any good mind.
This dissipated philanthropy.
But he has to do it.
Anyway, let's turn the
page a little further on,
page 76 when he actually
gets into the swing of things
and starts talking
about Webster.
This is about the quote
that's on the board here.
Here's thinking about
an appearance
where he saw Webster
speaking at Bunker Hill.
He says, there was the
Monument and here was Webster.
He knew well that a
little more or less
of rhetoric signified nothing.
He was only to say
plain and equal things,
grand things if he had them.
And, if he had them
not, only to abstain
from saying unfit things,
and the whole occasion was
answered by his presence.
It was a place for behavior
much more than for speech,
and Webster walked through
his part with entire success.
Webster, culture hero.
And he goes, he's a
good speaker right.
His wonderful organization,
Emerson writes, the perfection
of his eloction and all that
thereto belongs, voice, accent,
intonation, attitude, manner,
we shall not soon find again.
Then he was so thoroughly
simple and wise in his rhetoric.
He saw through his matter,
hugged his fact so close,
went to the principle or
essential, and never indulged
in a weak flourish, though he
knew perfectly well how to make
such exordiums, episodes,
and perorations
as might give perspective
to his harangues
without in the least
embarrassing his march
or confounding his transitions.
In his statement
things lay in daylight.
We saw them in order
as they were.
And think about the things
that Emerson has said
in the American Scholar
about man thinking, right,
Webster is man thinking.
We're watching, thinking,
in action in contrast
to the cynic dopey command.
The partial man in the
divided or social state.
Or think about Thoreau's
talking about little statesmen
and divines who can't get back
and see the larger picture.
Webster was not that.
Webster was a big statesman.
He was able to see things.
If you think about
Emerson's belief
that a true theory will
be its own evidence,
it'll explain all
things, there's something
of a resonance of that here.
We saw things in order
as they were, he says,
though he knew very
well on occasion how
to present his own
personal claims
yet in his argument
he was intellectual.
It's no mean egotism
that's going to be here.
Stated as that pure
of all personality
so that his splendid wrath
when his eyes became lamps
with the wrath of the fact
and the cause he stood for.
His power of that like
all great masters was not
in excellent parts.
Again think about what Emerson
says in the American Scholar.
But total.
He's a total guy.
All the parts are
coming together.
He had a great and
everywhere equal propriety.
He worked with that closeness,
that hesion to the matter
in hand which a joiner
or chemist uses.
And the same quiet and sure
feeling of right to his place
that an oak or a
mountain have to theirs.
Webster is almost a
kind of force of nature.
Think about that.
The goal of nature, defining
a true theory that's its
own evidence.
Emerson says that
Emerson seems to have
that kind of rhetorical power.
He can make his argument
seem self-evident.
And Emerson, I don't know
how Emerson is at this,
but we criticized
Emerson frequently
for being nevertheless,
despite what he says,
a kind of fragmentary thinker.
Somebody who's assembled things
but maybe they don't
all go together.
There's all that kind
of leaping thought
and those contradictory moments.
That's not what we
find here in Webster.
Webster creates a sum total
which has a certain
kind of propriety.
So far so good, but
it turns out,
and this is what Emerson
is going to argue here,
is that Webster has a fatal
flaw despite all of this.
A flaw that we might think
of as his moral sensibility,
and as the essay
goes on a little bit,
you might say Webster seems like
somebody who, well Webster seems
like somebody who emerges
as a kind of anti-Emerson.
Or he lacks certain
things that Emerson has.
He seemed, so he goes, he
seemed born for the bar,
born for the senate, and took
very naturally a leading part
in large private and
in public affairs.
For his head distributed
things in their right places,
and what he saw so well
he compelled other people
to see also.
Great is the privilege
of eloquence.
There's something of that
tyrannous eye as well.
But the flaw comes in,
and Emerson goes on to say
that the history of this country
has given a disastrous important
to the defects of
this great man's mind,
and we're going to
talk about those.
Whether evil influences and
the corruption of politics,
or whether original infirmity,
it was this misfortune
of this country that with this
large understanding he had not
what is better than intellect,
and the essential
source of its health.
It is the office of the
moral nature to give sanity
in right direction of the mind,
to give centrality and uni,
and I want you to go
back and think again.
To map this back onto
the end of nature.
The ideal philosophy, however
smart it might make us,
is not enough.
It leaves us in the labyrinth
of our own perceptions.
We need something else.
There it's kind of
a spirituality.
Spirit is the thing we are
after not just idealism.
There's a sense in which what
Webster is lacking is a certain
kind of spirituality.
That's one thing.
Another thing is what
Emerson goes on to call,
a kind of sterility of thought.
So he says like, though
the whole thing is nice
and has an equal right, it's
almost like Emerson says
when I think about it,
he didn't say anything
that was actually that great.
No aphorisms.
The sterility of thought,
the want of generalization
in his speech and the curious
fact that with a general ability
that impresses all the world,
there is not a single
general mark.
Not an observation on
life and manners that can,
not a single valuable
aphorism that can pass
into literature from
his writings.
And who of course is the master
of the aphorism of maxim,
if not Emerson, just go back
to that Reebok's commercial,
just lay them all out there.
Who's so a man must
a non-conformist.
Speak related thought
and prove blah blah,
just that's what Emerson
is really good at.
Webster isn't.
And I think the essay is
making a kind of connection.
There's a way that we kind
of understand the flaw
in the moral nature by
understanding this inability
to synthesize or
generalize and distill things
down to their essence.
And you might say that's what
Emerson's philosophy is all
about in the end.
Distilling things down to
their essence and finding
in that essence self-reliance.
So that will be the way
that Emerson will think
about what I call
his universalism.
Webster is unable to do that and
therefore, in the crucial moment
when his moral sensibility
is needed most, it fails him.
If any man, Emerson says, had in
that hour possessed the weight
with the country
which he had acquired,
he could've brought
the whole country
to its senses, but he doesn't.
So one of the things
we might say
about the fugitive slave law
address is that it really is
in a certain way a lot like,
and this is Webster later on,
looked like a colleague of
mine in the English department.
Sorry I didn't say that.
He has a certain kind
of, you might say
that Webster has a
certain kind of flaw
which if we follow the logic
of Emerson had thought of him
as a kind of representative man.
Somebody who's sums
up the country becomes
a kind of national flaw.
We have a morally defective
nature as our country.
So you might say, what I want
to suggest to you therefore,
is that there are two different
moments in Emerson's writing
that we've looked at where
he's testing his philosophy
of self-reliance.
I've already talked to you about
one of them which is experience.
Can we maintain our belief
in the need for self-reliance
in the aftermath of the
most terrible grief.
And I've suggested that
what Emerson discovers
to his chagrin, maybe even
to his horror is, yes we can.
We lose our son to a
certain extent it's a tragedy
but we are left fundamentally
unchanged.
And he pulls himself
up by his bootstraps,
said that even among the
most bleak of these walks,
there's God there and it
gives him hope for the future.
This you might say is a testing
on the largest cultural grounds,
and what we might say is
that Emerson finds at the end
of this episode, that the
country really should listen
to him.
That the country is
lacking in self-reliance,
at least in so far
as it is embodied
in somebody like Webster.
Does Webster go for what
he knows to be right.
Is he self-reliant.
No. Webster goes for
compromise and for Emerson
that is a cultural disaster.
Okay. Next time we will start
to explore what the dimensions
of that cultural disaster are.
That thing that's left
unsolved from the Declaration
of Independence, that
thing called slavery.
Alright, thanks a lot.
