Whitman in Washington by Price Kenneth M.;

Author:Price, Kenneth M.; [Price, Kenneth M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, Incorporated
Published: 2020-08-25T00:00:00+00:00

Curiously, the poet who urged us to look for him under his bootsoles and who lived in modest places throughout his life, became ostentatious in the face of death, raising anew questions about nature, pastoralism, and home. Amanda Gailey has argued that the “larger purpose behind Whitman’s interest in the tomb … was an end-of-life attempt to shore up his legacy.”95 Like his publication of the Complete Poems and Prose, his tomb offered a second means of ensuring Whitman’s legacy, a prominent tangible monument supplementing Leaves of Grass. Whitman worried about an issue that had become more acute in an age of mass reproduction of versions, of copies, of paper: did it all amount to scattered ephemeral leaves? The tomb—et in Arcadia ego—attempted to mitigate that threat.

Typical statements about pastoral fit Whitman poorly. The view that he invoked the pastoral in wholly unironic or wholly ironic ways is too simple to accord with the evidence. Like most writers of his generation, he associated the Republic with nature, and he tried to fathom all of the Civil War deaths within that context. He recognized that if he wished to be the national poet, he had to reckon with extraordinary carnage. But there is an escapist tendency in pastoralism, and evading the war or the city was not Whitman’s approach in either his life or his writing. He strove to own rather than evade this cataclysm and build a more democratic society worthy of the sacrifice, not to restore the old order. Whitman’s poetry and prose of the war years and Reconstruction rarely invoke the pastoral to wax nostalgic about the past. He focused instead on the crises of the present and the vistas of the future.

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