Walt Whitman: Revolutionizing American Poetry with 'Leaves of Grass', Ejercicios de Literatura Americana

¡Descarga Walt Whitman: Revolutionizing American Poetry with 'Leaves of Grass' y más Ejercicios en PDF de Literatura Americana solo en Docsity! Practice Quiz, Walt Whitman, “Leaves of Grass” 1Walt Whitman (1819-1892) revolutionized American poetry. Responding to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s call in his essay "The Poet” (1842) for an American bard who would address all “the facts of animal economy, sex, nutriment, gestation, birth,” Whitman put the living, breathing sexual body at the center of poetry, challenging convention of the day. Responding also to Emerson’s call for a “metre-making argument” rather than mere metres, Whitman defended traditional poetry scansion—division of rhythmic series into recurrent elements—and elevated diction to improvising form that has come to be known as free verse. At the same time Whitman adapted a wide- ranging vocabulary opening new possibilities for poetic expression. (false, rejected traditional poetry scansion) 2Whitman grew up in Brooklyn, New York. He left school at the age of 11, but by his mid-teens he was contributing pieces to one of Manhattan’s best newspapers, “The Mirror”. He would often cross the East River by river boat (the Brooklyn Bridge wouldn’t be build till 1883) to Manhattan. He exulted in the extremes of the city, where street-gang violence was countered by the lectures by prestigious individuals like Ralph Waldo Emerson. Whitman also attended operas on his journalist’s pass and heard the greatest singers of the times. He would later say that without the “emotions, raptures, uplifts” of opera he would never have written “Leaves of Herbage”. (false, “Leaves of Grass”) 3At the beginning of 1848, he was fired from the “Eagle” because he was opposed to the acquisition of more territory for slavery. Around this time he began writing poetry in a serious way, experimenting with form and prosody—the study of versification, especially metrical structure. Cutting articles out of British quarterlies and monthlies, he annotated them and argued with them in the margins, developing in the process clear ideas about aesthetics, such as his admiration of “fine”, or what he termed “artificial”, poetry. Around the end of 1854 he committed himself to poetry. (false, distrust of “fine” poetry) 4 In May, 1855, Whitman took out a copyright for “Leaves of Grass”, which was published in Brooklyn that same year along with an exuberant preface declaring his ambition to be the American bard. The poems, with their absence of standard verse and stanza patterns, also introduced the use of “catalogues”—journalistic and encyclopedic listings—that were to become a distinguishing character of his style, turning poetry toward realism. (true) 5In his essay “The Poet”, Emerson called for a poetry that captured the vitality and wide expanse of America, in need of constraints. This was the challenge Whitman initially sought to answer in his “Leaves of Grass.” Whitman sent out numerous presentation and review copies of his book, but met mostly silence. He received, however, an immediate response from Emerson, who visited him in December of 1855. Thoreau, who also admired “Leaves of Grass,” paid Whitman a visit in 1856, the year that the second edition of the book was published. (false, free of constraints) 6With the outbreak of the Civil War, in 1861, Whitman became a hospital attendant. In 1865 he was working as a clerk for the Department of the Interior to subsidize his earnings while doing hospital work. The new Secretary of the Interior, one James Harlan, read his “Leaves of Grass” and abruptly fired him on the ground that Whitman had written an obscene book. Nevertheless, a fourth edition was published in 1867, and a fifth in 1871. (true) 7Throughout the 1870s and early 1880s, Whitman was increasingly noticed by leading writers of the time, especially in England. Oscar Wilde would pay him a personal visit in 1882. Yet, in 1881, when a reputable Boston publishing firm was threatened with prosecution if it published the sixth edition of Whitman’s book, the project was scandalously abandoned. But the book was immediately taken up by another publisher, in Philadelphia, and published in 1882. The publicity brought on by the incident contributed to Whitman’s greatest sales in his lifetime, and his financial independence during the final two decades of his life. A poet of democracy, Whitman celebrated the mystical, divine potential of the individual. His work would subsequently have an enormous influence on later American poets, such as Hart Crane, Langston Hughes, Robert Lowell, and Allen Ginsberg, as well as on poets abroad, such as Federico García Lorca and Pablo Neruda. (false, not two decades—Whitman died in 1892) 14The Romantic English poet John Keats (1795-1821) once wrote that a poet has no identity, and for that reason he is always occupying another body. Whitman, however, while also seeming to occupy other bodies, seems to contradict this disclosure. He does not totally forfeit his own self. His self is a guiding star pointing the way to the poet’s own vision of social cohesion derived from face-to-face encounters and the fusion of diversity. Whitman claimed the ambition of his poems was to help “the forming of a great aggregate nation” (true, see, e.g., “I Hear America Singing”, Reader p. 509) 15In “One’s-Self I Sing,” Whitman proposes that all poetry emanates from the soul of the self, not as divine inspiration, as was the case with Dante’s Holy Spirit or with Milton’s feminine Urania (the Muse of Astronomy), but pouring freely out of the soul of the individual. Whitman, therefore, celebrates the self, and at the same time he criticizes the American dream, sustaining the potential of individuals to reach their dreams in the land of opportunity, America. When, in the first two lines of the poem he refers to the self, Whitman seems to mean not only himself but a community of selves in which everyone and anyone fits in an all pervading unity contained in the concept of the word Democratic. (false, praises the American dream, see “One’s-Self I Sing”, Reader, p. 509) 16In “As I Ponder’d in Silence,” the specter of representative poets from the past questions Whitman about his poems, saying great poets must write about war. Whitman responds that he is writing about the great war of all time—life—and the struggle between the body and soul. The poem suggests that this is the proper subject of modern day epic poems, and the brave soldier hero is any person who struggles for life. (True, Reader, p. 500) 17The poem “In Cabin’d Ships at Sea” suggests ships are symbolic of every individual. The sea represents the ever-expanding world. Whitman mentions the "whistling winds and music of the waves—the large “imperious waves" as pleasing (the "music") and yet dangerous ("imperious"). Whitman suggests we enjoy life in all its natural beauty when he mentions the beauty of day and night on the sea. The Ocean's poem in the second stanza explains the mysteries of the ocean described by using the five senses. The "ebb and flow of endless motion" contrasts the firm land that we are used to. He urges us to approach the "boundless vista, and the horizon far and dim". (true, Reader, p. 501) 18In “When I Read The Book”, Whitman is reflecting upon the ridiculousness of biographies/autobiographies. Whitman is saying, how can we reflect upon a man’s life? How can we judge an entire man’s life, because in the end, what are we really? Such a definition is impossible. His point is that there is no true way to accurately put a man’s life into words without being opinionated and taking a side. (true, Reader, p. 506) 19Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass” influenced future generations of American Poets. In “Poets to Come,” Whitman turns his attention to future poets and asks them to follow his lead in their writing; however, language alone, he feels, is inadequate for the task to come. He asks that future poets freely interpret his thoughts in their own way, for they will necessarily have different perspectives, and their considerations of what is right will be more in accordance with the times in which they live. (true, Reader, p. 510)