This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. Therefore it comes as no surprise that these two ideas appear in Whitman’s Preface in various conceptual configurations, allowing him to explore multiple dimensions of the American experience. Exactly the same can be said about the nation. Leaves of Grass Full Text - Book XXXIII: Songs of Parting - Song at Sunset - Owl Eyes Book XXXIII: Songs of Parting - Song at Sunset Splendor of ended day floating and filling me, Hour prophetic, hour resuming the past, Inflating my throat, you divine average, You earth and life till the last ray gleams I sing. Poetry, so to speak, is both substance and metaphor, it confronts the tangible reality and exists in the imagination. Accordingly, the poet-or more precisely “the great poet”-inevitably becomes the spokesman for the nation and accepts this ennobling and empowering responsibility with enthusiasm. In other words, poetry constitutes the core of and, concomitantly, finds its own final sanction in the American sense of nationhood, as if poetry nourished the nation as well as received its own nourishment from the nation. The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem” (5). These two central concepts are figuratively combined in the opening part of the Preface where Whitman writes: “The Americans of all nations at any time upon the earth have probably the fullest poetical nature. This programmatic statement, expressing Whitman’s utmost self-confidence as well as his faith in compatriots, has a double focus: poetry and nation. Walt Whitman’s Preface to the first edition of Leaves of Grass is a text manifestly highlighting the bond between esthetics and politics.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |