Walt Whitman is sometimes known as a "tweener". He is called this by some because he does not just fit into one literary period easily. He is between periods hence the name "tweener". Whitman was inbetween the Realism and the Modernism period. Realism was a writing period that focused lesss on the plot of stories and more on characterization. They were mostly things that could be real life events or were real life events. The charceters in writings from the realism period show a lot of how real life people could react to situations. Then we went to the Modernism period. Modernism period was very different. It focused a lot on losses. There was also a strong presense of religion and sometimes lies. They were two very different periods and Whitman fell right inbetween the two.
Walt Whitman was a poet during the 1800s, and he was not a tradtionally poet either. He sort of broke the whole idea everyone had about poetry and created a new type. Tradionally at this time it was all about rhyming and metric verses (Connors). Walt Whitman just did not believe that this type of writing represented our country well. Whitman instead wrote in free verse, and tackled some taboo topics of the time such as sex (Oliver). Whitman was not the inventer of free verse, but he did introduce it to America. It was first shunned by critics and not embraced, but eventually Americans learned to like and understand it (Oliver).
Whitman's poetry was full of sexual love and exalation of the body (Oliver). This shocked and startled many people because this was not a topic everyone spoke about at this time. It was extremely taboo. His poems were very graphic and filled with sexual actions and refrences. They even talked about homosexual love. It is said that some of poems had to be edited to be "family friendly". Many critics suggested the editing of them to make them less graphic and offensive including Emerson (Connors).
The story titled "from Song of Myself" is full of idea of individualism. The quote " I celbrate myself, and sing myself, and what I assume you shall assume, for every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you (Whitman 2). THis totally represents the idea of individualism and of being oneself because for god's sake he says he will celebrate himself and that others should too. A critic named Matt Longabucco has a big article on Whitman's career in literature. he says that the poet is not seperable from his physical body and the poet is one of the roughs. No stander about men and women is apart from them (Longabucca).Longabucca realized that Whitman did have a general set-up to his writings which I have also noticed when reading his poetry. The idea that he is a "tweener" shows that he can neither be considered a modernist or a realist writer. It is fair to say he is a tweener which is actually what I think a lot of writers are because it is hard to posess every single trait of a period because sometimes you have to go with one's own values even if they do not embody the period completely.
Connors, Judith. "Whitman, Walt." In Bloom, Harold, ed. Walt Whitman, Bloom's BioCritiques. Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishing, 2002. Bloom's Literary Reference Online. Facts On File, Inc. Web. 19 Mar. 2012.
Oliver, Charles M. "Whitman, Walt." Critical Companion to Walt Whitman: A Literary Reference to His Life and Work, Critical Companion. New York: Facts On File, Inc., 2005. Bloom's Literary Reference Online. Facts On File, Inc. Web. 19 Mar. 2012.
Longabucco, Matt. "'The Proof of a Poet'—Walt Whitman and His Critics." In Bloom, Harold, ed. Walt Whitman, Bloom's BioCritiques. Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishing, 2002. Bloom's Literary Reference Online. Facts On File, Inc. http://www.fofweb.com/activelink2.asp?ItemID=WE54&SID=5&iPin= BCWWh03&SingleRecord=True (accessed March 19, 2012).
Whitman, Walt. "from song of Myself." Comp. Jeffrey D. Wilhelm, Ph.D. and Douglas Fisher, Ph.D. Glencoe Literature. American Literature ed. Columbus: McGraw-Hill Companies, 2009. 533 . Print.
No comments:
Post a Comment