Whitman and Dickinson

This is Unit Ten of American Literature, part one of two: the two poets the exam is surest to test, solving one problem in opposite directions. Unit nine closed on a president redating his country in two minutes. This unit is the poetry written around that war, and its governing idea, which part two pays off, is a single problem taken two ways. Nineteenth-century American poetry had inherited English meters and English subjects, and both of these writers found them inadequate. Whitman's answer was expansion: he abandoned meter and rhyme for a line measured by phrase and breath, and stretched it until it could hold a whole country's trades and weathers. Dickinson's answer was compression: she kept the commonest form in her culture, the meter of a Protestant hymn, and packed into it dashes, unclosed rhymes and subjects hymns do not handle, until four lines could hold a death. One expands the line; one compresses it. A note on placement: the anchor puts both poets after eighteen sixty-five, among the realists, though Whitman's first edition is eighteen fifty-five, so on the exam either can appear in either period band. By the end you will be able to state the opposite problem each solved. To account for Whitman's life and his one book. To describe the catalogue and free verse. To place his war and Lincoln poems. And to correct the recluse legend and describe Dickinson's form.

One entry to frame the unit: the same problem, taken in two opposite directions, and a note about which period band holds them.

One expands; one compresses.

AML 0901 Two Poets Who Change What a Poem Can Be

Whitman and Dickinson are the two American poets the exam is surest to test, and they solve one problem in opposite directions. Whitman expands the line until it holds a nation. Dickinson compresses it until four lines hold a death. The anchor places both of them after eighteen sixty-five, so either can appear under either period band.

Four entries on Whitman's book: the working life behind it, the editions he kept revising, the claim in its preface, and how the long poem opens.

Printer, editor, nurse, always writing.

AML 0902 Walt Whitman Before *Leaves of Grass*

Second of nine children born to a Long Island farmer and carpenter, Whitman worked as a law clerk, schoolteacher, printer, journalist, newspaper editor, civil servant and hospital aide, and wrote throughout all of it. Contemporaries called him idle because he took long midday walks, a charge he answered inside his own poetry. The idleness became a poetic position.

One book, rewritten for a lifetime.

AML 0903 *Leaves of Grass* and Its Editions

Whitman published *Leaves of Grass* himself in eighteen fifty-five, a thin book of twelve untitled poems, and spent the rest of his life enlarging and revising it through edition after edition until the last one, so that the book grew along with the man and with the country. The editions differ enough to change readings.

The nation itself, read as a poem.

AML 0904 The 1855 Preface and the Poet as Nation

The preface to the first edition argues that the United States are themselves essentially the greatest poem, and that here the common people are the source of it. The poet's job, on that account, is to absorb the country as affectionately as the country absorbs him. The claim is about common people rather than about institutions.

I celebrate myself, and you too.

AML 0905 "Song of Myself": The Opening Claim

The poem opens by celebrating himself and assuming the reader shall assume the same, since every atom belonging to him belongs as well to you. He then loafs and invites his soul, observing a spear of summer grass. One self stands for all of them, and the boast is a claim about shared substance rather than about his own importance.

Three entries on technique: the device that carries his argument, the line he invented, and the subject that scandalized his reviewers.

Lists, until the listing argues.

AML 0906 The Catalogue and the Long Line

Whitman's signature device is the catalogue: long unrhymed lines listing trades, cities, bodies and weathers until the accumulation itself becomes the argument that everything belongs. The lines are shaped by repeated openings and by the breath rather than by counted feet. The repetition is structural rather than decorative.

Form by grammar, not by feet.

AML 0907 Free Verse: What Whitman Made Possible

Whitman abandoned meter and rhyme for a line measured by phrase and by breath, giving American poetry the option it has used ever since. Free verse is not formlessness: his lines are organized by parallel grammar and by a rhythm owed partly to the King James Bible. Free verse is organized, and it is not unshaped.

The body, admitted into the poem.

AML 0908 The Body, the Self, and the Democratic Voice

Whitman writes about the body without apology, treats desire as continuous with the soul, and refuses to rank the people he names. The insistence scandalized reviewers and cost him a government post, and it is inseparable from the democratic claim the poems are making. The frankness was the scandal of the book.

Five entries on loss: a poem about how he became a poet, the war that changed his tone, two elegies for Lincoln, and a compliment he printed without asking.

A lament, and a word from the sea.

AML 0909 "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking"

A boy on a beach watches a pair of birds, and when the female disappears he listens to the male's song of loss until the sea whispers the word death. The poem tells the story of a poet's making, and the discovery in it is that song comes out of grief. The poem explains the poet.

A poet turned hospital visitor.

AML 0910 *Drum-Taps* and the Civil War

Whitman went to Washington to find his wounded brother and stayed to nurse soldiers in the hospitals, and the war poems he gathered as *Drum-Taps* are quieter and harder than the earlier work: a night on a battlefield, a dressing of wounds, a face under a blanket. The war poems abandon the earlier exuberance.

A lilac, a star, a thrush.

AML 0911 "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd"

Whitman's elegy for Lincoln never names him, working instead through three symbols: the lilac that returns each spring, the western star that drops, and a hermit thrush singing in the swamp. The poem follows the coffin's journey across the country and turns the mourning into a carol of death. The president is mourned without being named.

Rhyme and refrain, from him.

AML 0912 "O Captain! My Captain!" and Its Odd Formality

The other Lincoln poem is Whitman's most conventional: rhymed, regularly stanzaed, and built on an extended figure of a ship brought safely to port with its captain dead on the deck. It was his most popular poem in his lifetime, and he came to resent it. His most popular poem is his least typical one.

A private compliment, printed publicly.

AML 0913 Emerson's Letter and Whitman's Use of It

Emerson read the first *Leaves of Grass* and wrote to greet Whitman at the beginning of a great career. Whitman printed that sentence on the spine of the next edition without asking, which annoyed Emerson and shows how deliberately Whitman managed his own reception. The self-promotion was part of the project.

Five entries on Dickinson: a legend the anchor corrects, a drawer of manuscripts, and the form that carries all of it.

Educated, travelled, and choosing home.

AML 0914 Emily Dickinson: The Life and the Manuscripts

Born in eighteen thirty into a prominent Amherst family, Dickinson was unusually well educated. The anchor is firm that she travelled outside Amherst and chose to stay home, and that the picture of a fragile recluse misrepresents a writer in complete control of her work. The anchor corrects the recluse legend directly.

Hundreds of poems, found afterwards.

AML 0915 The Poems Found After Her Death

Dickinson controlled who saw her poems, and fewer than a dozen were printed in her lifetime. After her death her sister Lavinia found hundreds of manuscripts, and editors regularized her punctuation and her rhymes before later scholars restored them. The first printed texts were altered by the editors who prepared them.

A hymn's shape, filled differently.

AML 0916 Dickinson's Form: Hymn Meter and the Dash

Dickinson built most of her poems on the common meter of Protestant hymns, alternating lines of eight and six syllables, and then unsettled it with dashes, irregular capitals and rhymes that do not close. The familiar frame makes the strangeness inside it land harder. The dash is a rhythm rather than a punctuation error.

Truth told at an angle.

AML 0917 Slant Rhyme and "Tell all the truth but tell it slant"

Dickinson's rhymes are usually slant: the consonants agree and the vowels do not, so the poem never quite settles. Her own line about telling all the truth but telling it slant, since the truth must dazzle gradually, states the method exactly. The poem describes the technique that it is using.

A courteous driver, and a grave.

AML 0918 "Because I could not stop for Death"

Death arrives as a civil suitor in a carriage, and the speaker, who could not stop for him, puts away her labour and her leisure and rides past a school, a field of grain and a setting sun to a house that is a swelling in the ground. The politeness of it is what makes the poem frightening.

That is Whitman whole and Dickinson begun. Part two finishes her and puts the two side by side. You can state the problem each poet solved and the opposite directions they took, and note that the anchor files both after eighteen sixty-five. You can account for Whitman, who worked as printer, editor and hospital aide, published one book himself in eighteen fifty-five and rewrote it for the rest of his life, and claimed in its preface that the United States are themselves the greatest poem. You can describe the catalogue, where accumulation becomes the argument that everything belongs, and the free verse measured by phrase and breath and organized by parallel grammar. You can place the beach poem in which song comes out of grief, the hospital poems that abandon his exuberance, the elegy that mourns Lincoln through a lilac and a star and a thrush without naming him, and the rhymed poem he came to resent. And you can correct the recluse legend, and describe a hymn meter unsettled by dashes and rhymes that refuse to close.