Step Two: Proposal Presentation:

Argument Abstract:

 

In this final project, I will on exploring the ways in which Emily Dickinson and Toni Morrison have revolutionized the reading experience. Both women have consciously played with convention, occasionally accepting some elements of tradition, but more characteristically rejecting the rules of the past and recreating, transforming a literary genre and its impact. Though a seemingly unfit pairing, Dickinson and Morrison, as writers, have much in common. In this paper, I will be examining the way in which they have used a musical genre as a stencil for the structure of their work as well as their use of first and second person voice. By incorporating these elements into their work, Dickinson and Morrison, are facilitating a novel connection with the reader. They crave connection with their audience, drawing them in and requiring them to play a part in deriving meaning from the text. Dickinson and Morrison purposefully leave room in their writing for a reader, without which the work would be incomplete. These two amazing women have done something remarkable; they have created a text that is reader dependent; they have changed the reading experience.

 

Critical Source Abstract:

 

Orzeck, Martin, and Robert Weisbuch. Dickinson and Audience. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996. Print.

 

The twelve essays in this collection explore Dickinson’s concept of audience: for whom did she write; did she wish to publish her poems; was she seeking the perfect reader and who was that reader; what was her relationship to the public during her lifetime, to readers and critics now? Many critics argue that because Dickinson was such an obsessively private writer and rarely submitted her poems for publication, that she did not have an audience. While acknowledging this is true, a large number of her poems began their lives included in letters to friends. The letters themselves wonderfully empathetic and yearning, in turn for intense response, speak to a desire in Dickinson for intimate connection. This is proof that Dickinson did consider her audience and her poems bear the mark of communication. Clearly, her poems are not means of conventional communication, but her puzzling poetry provides an alternative means of interaction and challenges our expectations of writing. This volume of essays is significant because it is exclusively focused on Dickinson’s relation to audience–from the relatively few persons who received many of the poems to that vast, unseen, yet somehow specific other that any literary work addresses.

 

Key Passage:

 

Jazz: “But I can’t say that aloud; I can’t tell anyone that I have been waiting all for this all my life and that being chosen to wait is the reason I can. If I were able I’d say it. Say make me, remake me. You are free to do it and I am free to let you because look, look. Look where you’re hands are. Now,”(229).

733: The Spirit is the Conscious Ear.

We actually Hear

When We inspect—that’s audible—

That is admitted—Here—

For other Services—as Sound—

There hangs a smaller Ear

Outside the Castle—that Contain—

The other—only—Hear—

 

In these passages, Morrison and Dickinson facilitate a connection with reader by using first person to invite the reader into the text. It is as though the text itself is reaching out to the reader, asking him/her to join in the making of the meaning of the text. In the final lines of Morrison’s novel Jazz, the unnamed narrator seems to be shouting at the reader, demanding that they not only “look”, but make and remake it; interact with the text. By doing so, Morrison also echoes the presence of music in her text, invoking a call and response technique. Similarly, in “The Spirit is the Conscious Ear”, Dickinson encourages reader-engagement, while stressing the significant of sound. Both in the structure and content of this poem, Dickinson dwells on the Ear and the sensation of Hearing. Continually playing with the homonym “Hear” and “Here” throughout “The Spirit is the Conscious Ear”, Dickinson further alludes to the significance of sound in her poetry; “Hear” referring to the ability to perceive sound and “Here” referring to the poem itself. Though her poetry is rarely considered a musical innovation, it is Dickinson’s melody that massages the reader, stimulating and soothing him/her with the sensation of sound; creating an unconventional connection with the reader.

 

Future of Essay:

 

I will be investigating the related or different spiritual traditions they invoke, where reading and voice figure: the Bible, call and response, Dickinson’s hymns, African Spirituals, Jazz, the Blues, Slave Narratives.

Emily Dickinson and Toni Morrison

In this final project, I will on exploring the ways in which Emily Dickinson and Toni Morrison have revolutionized the reading experience. Both women have consciously played with convention, occasionally accepting some elements of tradition, but more characteristically rejecting the rules of the past and recreating, transforming a literary genre and its impact. Though a seemingly unfit pairing, Dickinson and Morrison, as writers, have much in common. In this paper, I will be examining the way in which they have used a musical genre as a stencil for the structure of their work as well as their use of first and second person voice. By incorporating these elements into their work, Dickinson and Morrison, are facilitating a novel connection with the reader. They carve connection with their audience, drawing them in and requiring them to play a part in deriving meaning from the text. Dickinson and Morrison purposefully leave room in their writing for a reader, without which the work would be incomplete. These two amazing women have done something remarkable; they have created a text that is reader dependent; they have changed the reading experience.

 

For this paper, as far as primary texts are concerned, I plan to draw from Toni Morrison’s Jazz and Dickinson’s “You’re right – ‘the way is narrow’” and “The Spirit is the Conscious Ear”. In regards to critical insight, I intend on looking to Susan Howe’s My Emily Dickinson, Martin Orzeck and Robert Weisbuch’s Dickinson and Audience, as well as Elizabeth Beaulieu’s Toni Morrison Encyclopedia (Carolyn Jone’s “Narravtive Voice”) along with several others.

 

Paragraph Preview:

Jazz: “But I can’t say that aloud; I can’t tell anyone that I have been waiting all for this all my life and that being chosen to wait is the reason I can. If I were able I’d say it. Say make me, remake me. You are free to do it and I am free to let you because look, look. Look where you’re hands are. Now,”(229).

733: The Spirit is the Conscious Ear.

We actually Hear

When We inspect—that’s audible—

That is admitted—Here—

For other Services—as Sound—

There hangs a smaller Ear

Outside the Castle—that Contain—

The other—only—Hear—

 

In these passages, Morrison and Dickinson facilitate a connection with reader by using first person to invite the reader into the text. It is as though the text itself is reaching out to the reader, asking him/her to join in the making of the meaning of the text.

 

Do You Hear What I Hear?

Emily Dickinson was sensitive to both the medium of sight and sound; she wrote for both the eye and the ear. Dickinson recognized that we depend predominantly on our sense of sight, thus, she incorporated visual features into her poetry. But she simultaneously stressed the importance of sound and listening. To Dickinson, sound succeeds where sight fails, passing through windows and doors, penetrating walls and floors, infiltrating corners and crannies (Fuss). Yet the contest between sight and sound presents a problem for the poet whose work requires both bodily senses fully and precisely to perceive her poems. Unfortunately, as a result of the printing, the vocal effects of Dickinson’s poetry are rarely perceived, becoming muted by the medium. This is exceedingly problematic; by neglecting the musical quality of her poetry, the entire essence of Dickinson is halved. It is with poem 733: “The Spirit is the Conscious Ear” that Dickinson deliberately draws our attention to the purposeful/powerful presence of sound in her poetry.  This small but significant poem embodies sound in both its structure and content. Dickinson’s poetry is essentially vocal, thus, it is critical that we, as readers, become attuned to her radical rhythms and lyrical lines.

All of Dickinson’s poems speak to the reader with their own distinct voice, a lyrical voice characterized by a familiar hymn metric pattern. Alternating between four and three-beat lines, her poems follow the rhythm of the adopted hymn. She effectively uses the predictability of the meter as a contrasting backdrop to her content. As Stevie Smith explains in the Poetry Foundation’s “Biography of Emily Dickinson”,

“while certain lines accord with their place in the hymn — either leading the reader to the next line or drawing a thought to its conclusion – the poems are as likely to upend the structure so that the expected moment of cadence included the words the speak the greatest ambiguity”(Smith).

 

This is evident in the third line of her second stanza, “Outside the Castle — that Contain –”. Dickinson does not distinguish what is outside or inside the Castle; however, the line melds with the meter of the hymn. In this sense, Dickinson plays with deceptive cadence in her text, leading the reader towards resolution but failing/refusing to finalize her thought.

Sound is also signified by the way in which Dickinson punctuates her poems. Punctuation guides both the readers’ eyes and voice as she moves through Dickinson’s poetry, making it possible for the original orality of her poetry has been translated to print. Most notable is Dickinson’s dash, which is musically significant in multiple ways. To begin, she invokes the dash as a way to reach out to the reader, as an invitation to join her; similar to way a ligature connects notes to be sung. In “The Spirit is the Conscious Ear”, Dickinson ends the last two lines of the first stanza with dashes as well as the first, third and fourth lines of the second. In a sense, it is as though Dickinson is calling out, purposefully leaving words unspoken, craving connection, awaiting the voice that “when we hesitate and are silent is moving to meet us,” (Howe 22). Susan Howe, one of the pioneers in revealing and responding to the interpretive possibilities in Dickinson’s manuscripts, elaborates on Dickinson’s creation of hesitation in her text:

“…she built a new poetic form from her fractured sense of being eternally on the intellectual borders, where confident masculine voices buzzed an alluring and inaccessible discourse…a ‘sheltered’ woman audaciously invented a new grammar grounded in humility and hesitation. HESITATE from the Latin, meaning to stick. Stammer. To hold back in doubt, have difficulty speaking” (21).

 

By invoking human/vocal hesitation, Dickinson’s dashes also represent her deviation from the convention of masculine discourse; by creating hesitation, her poems seem more accessible to people. Dickinson did not write poems that provide answers but rather provoke the process of discovery. Her pregnable poetry crafts a particular kind of connection with her reader. According to Smith, “she asks the reader to complete the connection that her words merely imply – to round off the context from which the allusion is taken, to take part and imagine the whole”. In her poetry, Dickinson structurally binds seemingly ill-fitted fragments in a harmonic hymn, using sound to symbolically show that connections are essentially everywhere.

In addition to the incorporation of dashes in its composition, “The Spirit is the Conscious Ear” also has variants that highlight the vocal significance of Dickinson’s poetry. The most essential being in line 6, “There hangs a smaller Ear”; “smaller” can become “minor”. This is particularly interesting because minor, musically speaking, refers to one of the two modes of the tonal system; identifiable by the dark, melancholic mood of the melody. By incorporating this variant as a music metaphor, Dickinson not only tints the poem with her characteristic tragic tone; she also uses it to highlight the “Ear” described in the first line, “The Spirit is the Conscious Ear.“. This “Ear” represents the opposite of its reciprocal mate, the minor “Ear” described later; thus, the “Ear” in the opening line can be considered major. Musically speaking, as complementary mode of the tonal system, music written in major keys has a positive affirming character. Also significant is the period that punctuates this opening line. Periods are a rare mark in Dickinson’s poetry and with close observation, we discover Dickinson’s pun: by coupling/concluding the phrase “the Conscious Ear” with a punctuation mark indicating a pause, placed at the end of spoken sentences and other affirmative statements, Dickinson reasserts the Conscious Ear as the Major Ear.

Finally, “The Spirit is the Conscious Ear” opens with a definition through which Dickinson privileges the sensation of sound over sight, ear over eye. The Spirit to which Dickinson alludes to is elusive, but based on its capitalization, we can assume its importance; given Dickinson’s interest in theology, it is more than likely that “The Spirit” refers to the Holy Spirit. By using “is”, the first line invariably becomes a statement of comparison between “The Spirit” and the “Conscious Ear”. In the world of Dickinson’s poetry, “definition proceeds via comparison,”(Smith). In her effort to understand “The Spirit”, Dickinson recognizes that she cannot say directly what it is; its essence is unnamable. Instead, Dickinson articulates connection created from correspondence. By connecting “The Spirit” with the vertebrate organ of hearing, responsible for sensing sound, elevates the audible essence of her poetry.

Overall, “The Spirit is the Conscious Ear” is a poem about her poetry. It is most representative of importance sound plays in Dickinson’s poetry. Both in the structure and content of this poem, Dickinson dwells on the Ear and the sensation of Hearing. Continually playing with the homonym “Hear” and “Here” throughout “The Spirit is the Conscious Ear”, Dickinson further alludes to the significance of sound in her poetry; “Hear” referring to the ability to perceive sound and “Here” referring to the poem itself. Though her poetry is rarely considered a musical innovation, it is Dickinson’s melody that massages the reader, stimulating and soothing him/her with the sensation of sound.

 

 

Works Cited:

 

Dickinson, Emily. “733: The Spirit is the Conscious Ear.” The complete poems of Emily Dickinson. Boston: Little, Brown, 1960. 359. Print.

 

Fuss, Diana. “Interior Chambers: The Emily Dickinson Homestead.” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 10.3 (1998): 1-46. Project Muse. Web. 20 Nov. 2011.

 

Howe, Susan. My Emily Dickinson. Berkeley, Calif: North Atlantic Books, 1985. Print.

 

Smith, Stevie. “Emily Dickinson: The Poetry Foundation.” Poetry Foundation. N.p., n.d. Web. 17 Nov. 2011. <http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/emily-dickinson>.

How to Read Dickinson – How to Have a Conversation

Reading Emily Dickinson is having a conversation with her. It’s helping her wrestle with and grasp concepts that present an intellectual, emotional, philosophical, any sort of challenge. Thus the critical components of her poetry are essentially critical components in a conversation. Her poems speak to the reader with their own distinct voice, a lyrical voice characterized by a familiar hymn metric pattern. Her poems follow both the cadence and the rhythm of the hymn from she adopted. Alternating between four and three-beat lines, this adopted-form is essential to Dickinson’s poetry. She effectively uses the predictability of the meter as a contrasting backdrop to her content. As Stevie Smith explain in the Poetry Foundation’s Biography of Emily Dickinson, “while certain lines accord with their place in the hymn — either leading the reader to the next line or drawing a thought to its conclusion – the poems are as likely to upend the structure so that the expected moment of cadence included the words the speak the greatest ambiguity”(Smith).

In addition to creating a conversation through the metric structure of her poetry, Dickinson also creates a connection by writing in the first person. In doing this, Dickinson both expresses her own thoughts, ideas, opinions and feelings while simultaneously connecting with the reader. By writing in the first person, she forces the reader to become the “I” in the poem, the speaker; the reader embodies the poem and forges a conversational connection with Dickinson.

Dickinson also utilizes punctuation to mimic the nature of personal conversation.  She invokes the dash as a way to both reach out to the reader – as an invitation to join her – and a way to create a hesitation that is natural in speech.  As Howe describes “she built a new poetic form from her fractured sense of being eternally on the intellectual borders, where confident masculine voices buzzed an alluring and inaccessible discourse…a ‘sheltered’ woman audaciously invented a new grammar grounded in humility and hesitation. HESITATE from the Latin, meaning to stick. Stammer. To hold back in doubt, have difficulty speaking” (21). Dickinson’s dashes represent her both defying the convention of masculine discourse and holding back in an effort to reach the reader. Dickinson does not write poems that give answers but rather provoke the process of discovering answers within oneself. Through her unconventional use of punctuation, especially her dashes, Dickinson’s poetry becomes alive, reaching out to the reader, engaging and encouraging them to find meaning. The deliberate dashes make Dickinson’s poetry as much an expression of the reader as her own ideas.

Dickinson’s poems reflect how central friendship and personal connection was in her life. Her poetic approach crafted a particular kind of connection with her reader. According to Smith, “she asks the reader to complete the connection that her words merely imply – to round off the context from which the allusion is taken, to take part and imagine the whole”. In her poetry, Dickinson structurally binds seemingly ill-fitted fragments in a harmonic hymn, symbolically showing that connections are essentially everywhere and with everyone.

Yet another way in which Dickinson creates a connection with the reader, is through her effort to define abstractions. Her poems frequently open with metaphorical definitions, such as “Hope is a feather”, the Spirit is a Conscious Ear”. By employing “is” the first line is invariably a statement of comparison. In the world of Dickinson’s ‘poetry, “definition proceed via comparison” (Smith). One cannot say directly what is; the essence is indefinable. Instead, Dickinson articulates connection created out of correspondence. In Dickinson’s writing, comparison is a reciprocal process; her metaphors observe not firm distinction; by defining one concept in terms of another she produces a new layer of meaning in which both terms are changed. In this sense, her poems/words circle around the transformation of terms, an incessant metamorphosis. The final lines of her poems, defined by their inconclusiveness, are anything but definite. Dickinson’s endings are really only beginnings. Again, circling back to the invitation of reader participation that is central to her poetry, ending her poems with inconclusive fragments are another way in which Dickinson initiates and nurtures a connection with her reader. It is as through she has contributed what she desires to the conversation only for the reader to bring his/her thoughts to create meaning.

 

Works Cited:

 

Howe, Susan. My Emily Dickinson. Berkeley, Calif: North Atlantic Books, 1985. Print.

 

Smith, Stevie. “Emily Dickinson: The Poetry Foundation.” Poetry Foundation. N.p., n.d. Web. 17 Nov. 2011. <http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/emily-dickinson>.

The Deliberate Dash

Thus far, the most intriguing part of Dickinson’s poetry has been her punctuation, particularly her dashes. I find this especially interesting because I frequently use dashes and slashes in my own writing but have always considered using them to be a sign of weakness in my writing, mostly an indicator of indecisiveness and incompleteness; in contrast, Dickinson’s dashes are deliberate and, thus, an essential part of her work. The definition of dash itself has a variety of meanings, most; however, refer to motion, often, a sudden quick or even violent movement. This definition helps to illuminate the function of Dickinson’s dashes. Her dashes make her work dynamic as they imply a development or movement between ideas.  Not only does Dickinson invoke dashes to express her own ideas, the dashes also are her way of connecting with the reader. A dash, physically, as an abrupt horizontal line in the middle of text, seems to simultaneously reach out to the reader as well as push him away. In this sense, her writing becomes alive; like Whitman and Emerson, her writing is organic, not only echoing the human condition but also becoming almost human itself.  Her poems are purposefully left incomplete as a reflection of the poem’s process of development and with her deliberate dashes, she puts responsibility on the reader to finish the work. “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain” is an example of the various functions of Dickinson’s dashes. She opens the poem with two, structurally identical stanzas that employ two dashes framing the middle word in the third line and one dash at the end of the forth.  The dash at the end of the forth line of the second stanza, “My Mind was going numb – “, serves three purposes: 1) it forces the reader to pause, a rest in her poetic melody and 2) it bridges the space between the second and third stanza. Paradoxically, Dickinson uses the dash to fragment language and to cause unrelated words to rush together. She then conclude the poem with “And Finished knowing – then – “. This line reminds me of the game that my family and I used to play on road trips. One of us, usually my father, would start telling a story then, after a paragraph or two, pass it on to someone else. Then that person, picking up from where my father left off, would tell more of the story. Dickinson invokes the same idea, she uses her dashes to pass off the poem to the reader. Dickinson does not write poems that give answers but rather provoke the process of discovering answers within oneself. Through her unconventional use of punctuation, especially her dashes, Dickinson’s poetry becomes alive, reaching out to the reader, engaging and encouraging them to find meaning. The deliberate dashes make Dickinson’s poetry as much an expression of the reader as her own ideas.

Democracy is a Body

Democracy is a body, and like a human body, a union contingent on connectedness. The physical human body is composed of various components-limbs, organs, etc. – all different but dependent on one another to function. The democratic body is composed of diverse people and relies on their connections and harmonious interactions. In his early poetry, Whitman celebrates the beauty of the body, praising the union of its parts and its perfection when put together. But his involvement in the Civil War exposes Whitman to sectionalism and violence that drastically disfigures the American democratic body. His experiences on the battlefield and in the hospitals during this period force Whitman to rethink and question the premises of his poetry; does democracy exist? Can a union be formed on the backs of broken bodies? How can he heal the humanity and restore harmony to the democratic body? Thus, Whitman’s Civil War poetry represents his greatest revision, as he reevaluates his identity and the purpose of his poetry. In baring witness to the war, Whitman plunges into a poetic puberty, a time when his writing is charged with confusion and passion; as his hands begin to gasp at something new, profound, pulsing with possibility, his poetry reflects a passionate release.

In order to understand how the Civil War changes Whitman’s poetry, it is critical to examine his exuberant expression of the body in his early work. In “I Sing the Body Electric”, Whitman praises the human body and celebrates its capacity for physical contact. He praises the primacy of the body as well as the importance in creating connections between people. As he expands on the co-dependency of all limbs and organs to create a physical body, he echoes the need for humans to bond in order to form a democratic body. In his exploration of the physical body, he establishes the interconnectedness of the body and the soul. He opens the poem with a set of rhetorical questions to which he returns towards the end, “And if the body does not do as much as the Soul?/ And if the body were not the Soul, what is the Soul?” (lines 7-8). Whitman asserts that the human body houses the soul and without a body, the soul cannot exist. By making the survival of the soul contingent on physicality, Whitman elevates the status of the human body. The human body is more than just the seat of sensual pleasure it is also the vehicle for spiritual transcendence. It is sacred. Furthermore, in displaying the importance of a traditionally trivial matter/object, Whitman echoes the essence of democracy. The idea that perfection is contingent on the connectedness of causal parts. A democratic body is dependent on people coming together as equals. As Folsom notes in his “Re-Scripting Whitman”,

“…the body—the entire body—would be Whitman’s theme, and he would not shy away from any part of it, not discriminate or marginalize or form hierarchies of bodily parts any more than he would of the diverse people making up the American nation. His democratic belief in the importance of all the parts of any whole, was central to his vision: the genitals and the arm-pits were as essential to the fullness of identity as the brain and the soul, just as, in a democracy, the poorest and most despised citizens were as important as the rich and famous,” (Folsom).

 

Folsom emphasizes that in Whitman’s eyes, the body and soul are equal components of humanity and are co-dependent. In this sense, Whitman echoes his theory of a radical union and equality that lies at the heart of his work.

“I Sing the Body Electric” continues with praise of both the bodies of men and women, and stresses intimate interactions. Whitman describes his desire “to pass them or touch any one, or rest my arm ever so lightly round his or her neck for a moment, what is this then?/…/There is something in staying close to men and women and looking on them, and in the contact and odor of them, that pleases the soul well,”(lines 48-50). Whitman emphasizes the power of physical interaction. It is more than a lustful indulgence; with physical contact comes spiritual communion. Whitman describes the lasting satisfaction that the soul finds in the physical closeness of people. Two bodies touching form one unit of togetherness, creating the spiritual ideal, the democratic body. Ending with a catalogue of human body parts, in each of which, the soul is present, he emphasizes his appreciation for each anatomical aspect of human beings; each equal, each essential, each embracing. Together they are more than a union; a democratic body in Whitman’s eyes is synergetic spirituality.

However, Whitman’s enthusiasm for the body is forever changed as a result of his encounters during the Civil War. Exposure to the traumatic and horrific scenes, encountering the bruised and bloodied bodies of the soldiers, literally and figuratively stained his poetry. One day while crossing the battlefield, Whitman comes across “a heap of amputated feet, legs, arms, hands, etc., a full load for a one-horse cart.” They were, as he writes in his journal, “human fragments, cut, bloody, black and blue, swelled and sickening,” and surrounding them “several dead bodies . . . each cover’d with its brown woolen blanket,”(Folsom). The sadness and scourge in this scene infected Whitman with a sense of reality that would revolutionize his poetry. The sight spurred painful confusion for Whitman; the poet who had so confidently celebrated the physical body, who had claimed that the soul existed only in the body, that the arms and legs were extensions of the soul, the legs moving the soul through the world and the hands allowing the soul to express itself – now was required to think about amputation. Disjointedness. What did physical disfiguration mean for the soul? What did broken bodies mean for the American democratic body?

Whitman’s efforts to make sense of such a horrific reality are evident in his poem “When Lilac’s Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d”. Although the poem is centered on death, Whitman’s outlook remains optimistic. He transforms what is traditionally perceived as a state of separateness and a time of suffering into a time of connectedness and peace. Whitman describes “…with the knowledge of death as walking one side of me/ And the thought of death close-walking the other side of me/ And I in the middle as with companions, and as holding the hands of companions,”(lines 119-122). The occurrence of death actually brings people together. As Whitman mourns a loss, he finds himself “holding hands with his companions”, becoming part of a community. Even when surrounded by death, there is still a physical closeness between people; people coming together and forming an intimate connection. Whitman goes on to explore an individual’s soul and body in relation to death,  “And the soul turning to thee O vast and well-veil’d death/ And the body gratefully nestling close to thee,”(lines 156-158). Note this passage expresses a sense of comfort and peace, not pain. Whitman does not perceive death as a process of detachment, but one of “nestling”. In his poem, Whitman welcomes death

“Come lovely and soothing death,

Undulate round the world, serenely arriving, arriving,

In the day, in the night, to all, to each,

Sooner or later delicate death,”(lines 136-140)

 

Whitman sees death as another part of life; one that everyone will eventually experience. One in which the soul and body of the deceased find peace and those mourning find a community. Thus, he elevates death’s embrace “– but praise! praise! praise! / For the sure-enwinding arms of cool-enfolding death,” (lines 136-143). In the arms of death, spiritual transcendence is possible. Overall, Whitman’s perspective on death reflects his belief in the existence of democracy and the reunification of America.

 

Whitman’s experience in the Civil War and the poetry he wrote during that period, are essential to Leaves of Grass. The Civil War challenged Whitman to rethink the conditions of humanity and democracy. Upon baring witness to the broken bodies scattered on battlefields and fearing the consequences of a fragmented union, Whitman questions himself: How does death effect democracy? and revisits the relationship between the body and the soul. His fascination with the body, so evident in his poetry, drew him to the hospitals, where he learned to face bodily disfigurements and gained the ability to see beyond wounds and illness to the human personalities that persisted through the pain, (Folsom). In “When Lilac’s Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d”, Whitman reveals the “well veil’d” death as an avenue of spiritual transcendence. Neither Whitman’s pre- nor post-Civil War poetry is more passionate or dull; neither is better or worse. Like the human body, Leaves of Grass would be incomplete in absence of either. It is necessary to read his post-civil war poetry because it represents the ultimate revision, but the revision would be impossible to see without reading its preceding counterpart. Like the democratic body and the human body that rely on connectedness of complimentary parts to function, Whitman’s Leaves of Grass relies on complementary poetry. His poems function like parts of a body; they are co-dependent – without the contrast between them,  it is impossible to truly understanding Whitman.

 

 

 

Works Cited:

 

Folsom, Ed, and Kenneth M. Price. ” “To the Battlefield”.” The Walt Whitman Archive. N.p., n.d. Web. 4 Nov. 2011. <http://www.whitmanarchive.org/biography/walt_whitman/battlefield.html>.

 

Folsom, Ed , and Kenneth M. Price. “Re-Scripting Walt Whitman: An Introduction to His Life and Work .” The Walt Whitman Archive. N.p., n.d. Web. 3 Nov. 2011. <http://www.whitmanarchive.org/criticism/current/anc.00152.html>.

 

Folsom, Ed . “Whitman Making Books/Books Making Whitman: A Catalog and Commentary.” The Walt Whitman Archive. N.p., n.d. Web. 3 Nov. 2011. <http://www.whitmanarchive.org/criticism/current/anc.00150.html>.

 

Whitman, Walt, Michael Moon, Sculley Bradley, and Harold William Blodgett. Leaves of grass and other writings: authoritative texts, other poetry and prose, criticism. Expanded and rev. ed. based on the Norton critical ed. of Leaves of grass ed. New York: Norton, 2002. Print.

 

Be not satisfied with words alone

I really found Folsom’s point about how much thought Whitman gave to the way in which his readers would encounter his text very compelling. His revision process was not limited to solely the reorganization of his poems, but he thought about the typeface, the texture of the physical book, the feeling of the spine in the reader’s hands, the weight of the pages as they are flipped between fingers, even the negative space on a page-the physical manipulation and presentation of his poetry was extremely important to Whitman. As Folsom explains in his afternoon lecture, Whitman believed himself to be a bookmaker, rather than a book writer. Being intimately involved in the printing of his poetry, gave him an anticipatory eye, allowing him to see how his poetry would take form when printed. He was an incessant editor-revisiting his work, revising it over and over again, each edition displaying an new effort to better articulate and achieve correspondence with the movements of the outside world. To Whitman revision very much meant rethinking the embodiment of the text.

Folsom elaborates on how Whitman’s second edition of Leaves of Grass essentially reflects Whitman’s effort to illuminate the unity between “the personal and public, to make the act of reading at once the most public act in American (everyone reading the same thing) and the most intimate (each reader penetrated by the words of the author whose book was held in hand),”(Folsom, Re-Scripting, Introduction). In this edition, he accentuates a male to male love, a conventionally private matter, openly in a public statement” of camaraderie that became a centerpiece of the edition of Leaves that he construed to be an “American Bible.”"(Folsom, Re-Scripting, Introduction). However, it is not just Whitman’s content that emphasize his ideas, his message is also embodied in the physical rendering of the book and the reader’s physical interaction with the text. In contrast to the first publication of Leaves of Grass, Whitman’s second edition is much smaller, approximately the size of a devotional book, allowing the reader’s contact with the book to be much more intimate. This edition can be carried around, nestled between the reader’s side and her arm, caressed by her hands. Whitman believed that poetry was derived from the whole body; thus, the whole body should read it. Whitman draws our attention to the fact that bodies are what we as humans share, making them the grounds for shared experience, which is what Whitman asserts lies at the heart of democracy.

Central to his new literary project as well as his understanding of democracy are his radical attitudes about race, which, Folsom points out, are accentuated in the first few lines of his notebook:

 

I am the poet of slaves and of the masters of slaves

. . .

I am the poet of the body

And I am the poet of the soul

I go with the slaves of the earth equally with the masters

And I will stand between the masters and the slaves,

Entering into both so that both shall understand me alike. (NUMP 1:67)

 

Here Whitman establishes that recognition of the value of a slave body is recognition of your own body’s worth. Folsom explains “that Whitman’s increasing frustration with the Democratic party’s compromising approaches to the slavery crisis led him to continue his political efforts through the more subtle and indirect means of experimental poetry, a poetry that he hoped would be read by masses of average Americans and would transform their way of thinking,” (Re-scripting, Ch. 2). His views concerning race and slavery relative to the condition of America are also highlighted in his works such as “I Sing the Body Electric”, in which he stresses the essential physical similarities between blacks and whites, and “Democratic Vistas”, which emphasizes the essential equality between the races to up-holding the ideal of democracy. Clearly, Whitman is intrigued with the charge of the human body and the shared experiences that stem from foundational similarities as being a uniting force that facilitates democracy. His investigation of this interest is evident in both the content of his poetry as well as his physical manipulation of text and the reader’s reaction/interaction with his text.

The Baptism of Sexuality

Whitman is intrigued by the intimacy in everyday life. In his cluster of poems, Children of Adam, he wrestles with the understanding two main types of relationships. The first relationship being “adhesive” which he describes as a same sex comradeship/companionship and the second being “amative” which is the love and relationship between a man and a woman. Throughout his cluster he compares and contrasts both relationships in an effort to look more closely at two of life’s most elusive and desired relationships.

Whitman’s exploration/ effort to better understand these relationships involves understanding human sexuality. In doing so, he also intentionally challenges the traditional Christian conception of sexuality as something indecent. The Christian perspective of sexuality stems from the story of Adam and Eve which was Whitman’s inspiration for the cluster’s title. According to Genesis, man was created in the like image of God, “Then the LORD GOD formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into the nostrils the breath of life; and then the man became a living being. And the LORD GOD planted a garden in Eden, in the east; and there he put the man whom he had formed” (Genesis 2:7-8). Then God, believing that it was not right for man to be alone, creates woman, to serve as his helper and partner. This expression indicates God’s will for community rather than isolation. God provided such community first through the creation of the animals, but none formed a relationship with Adam, and thus, God created woman. Upon waking from his sleep and first meeting woman, Adam“…leaves his father and mother and clings to his wife, and they become one flesh. And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed” (Genesis 2:24-25). For this partnership, a man leaves his own parental home and clings to his wife so intimately that they become one. Their mutual joy and affection are expressed in their unashamed nakedness with each other. However, Adam and Eve’s presence in paradise is ended when they eat the forbidden fruit of the tree of knowledge; having succumb to the serpent’s temptation and indulged themselves, “the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they we naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made loincloths for themselves” (Genesis 3:7). It is their awareness of their own nakedness and attempt to hide from God, that God comes to know that they ate form the tree of knowledge. God then, fearful that they would eat from the tree of life, expels them from Eden saying that, “Because you have done this…I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers”(Genesis 3:14-15). Finally, the “LORD GOD made garments of skin for the man and his wife, and clothed them”(Genesis 3:21). From this narrative, grew the Christian connotation of sexuality, intimacy in flesh between a man and a woman, with original sin. God’s law indicate that there will be enmity between man and woman and that their bodies will bear the burden of clothing as a reminder of the shame that nakedness invokes.

Whitman strives to reinvent the notion of sexuality, expressing it as something sacred, divine, natural and through which an individual can be free and grow spiritually. He insists on a returning of humanity to the Garden, to a place of peace and harmony with nature, by recovering sexual innocence. The opening poem, To the Garden the World, begins

“to the garden the world anew ascending,

Potent mates, daughters, sons, preluding,

The love, the life of their bodies, meaning and being,

Curious here behold my resurrection after slumber,

The revolving cycles in their wide seep having brought me again,

Amorous, mature, all beautiful to me, all wondrous” (lines 1-5)

Whitman opens with a “resurrection” and “ascension” of humanity, which is evidenced by the love and the beauty of their bodies. He further emphasizes the idea of man’s return to a place of peace and becoming one with something greater then himself, in his poem We Two, How Long We Were Fool’d,

“We are Nature, long have we been absent, but now we return…

We are seas mingling, we are two of the cheerful waves rolling over and interwetting each other…

We have circled and circled till we have arrived home again, we two…

We have voided all but freedom and all but our own joy” (lines 3, 15, 18-19)

Here Whitman reiterates the concept of return but pairs it with a personification of two seas that seem to be intimately engaged. Whitman’s repeated pairing of water with sexuality serves as a metaphor for the purity of intimate relations. For example,

Spontaneous Me- “The souse upon me of my lover sea, as I lie willing and naked”

Ages and Ages Returning at Intervals- “Bathing myself, bathing my songs in Sex”

In both of these lines, Whitman correlates covering oneself in water and human sexuality. It is as though he is baptizing sexuality, cleansing it of its original sin and, indirectly, all of those who fully embrace sensuality.

The Unplaced Puzzled Piece

Emerson is the unplaced puzzle piece. The curves and ridges of his writing are not unrefined making it difficult to place his prose in the overall puzzle of literary genres. As a result, his writing has been criticized for its unconventionality. But rarely when evaluating Emerson as writer do people take into consideration his process. Emerson’s prose is integrally intertwined with his writing process. It is impossible to scrutinize them separately. Emerson’s writing is the reflection of the experience he undergoes when composing it. For Emerson, the writing process is driven by human experience. This experience is one in which the writer is unified with nature, fully embracing all of its changes and spontaneity, so that his experience is one of incessant metamorphosis. His experience is elusive and ever-evolving, filled with organic qualities that shape his writing process so that it yields an unconventional prose; one that is brilliantly composed to mimic and invoke the experience of the writer. Emerson’s writing is an organic experience.

In his essay “Nature”, Emerson introduces the concept that nature serves as an intermediary entity between humanity and what lies beyond this world. To Emerson, nature is the medium through which that which exists beyond man may be revealed to him. In order to understand Emerson’s writing process and prose it is essential to examine this fundamental continuity between man and nature. The connection between nature and man is accentuated in the famous transparent eyeball passage. Emerson describes his experience in the woods, “Standing on the bare ground, my head bathe by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space- all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.” (29) This passage captures the core of Emerson’s concept of continuity between nature and man. Emerson uses the “transparent eye-ball” to describe the loss of individuality in the experience of nature, where there is no seer, only seeing: “I am nothing; I see all”.  It is in the absence of egotism that man becomes one with nature. Emerson also implies that a shared pulse evidences their connectedness; “the currents of the Universal being circulate through me”. And it is in this synced state that Emerson writes.

Understanding Emerson’s process of writing is also essential to understanding the characteristics of his prose.  To begin, Emerson believes that writing requires a place of solitude. He recommends, in his essay “Nature”, that the writer “…go into solitude, a man needs to retire as much from his chamber as from society. I am not solitary whilst I read and write, though nobody is with me” (28). It is only in the absence of others, free from all social shackles, that Emerson/the writer is able to liberate the thoughts that are locked in nature. He states that even on his own that he is not alone, rather, he, when detached from society, draws himself closer to nature.  Having resorted to a place of silence and solitude, “he then learns, that in going down into the secrets of his own mind, he has descended into the secrets of all minds.” (64). By sinking into his subconscious, Emerson is syncing himself with nature thus he is able to intimately connect with all of humanity. In contrast to the structured state of consciousness, the inner being is rooted to nature,

“The poet, in utter solitude remembering his spontaneous thoughts and recording them, is found to have recorded that, which men in crowded cities find true for them also. The orator distrusts at first the fitness of his frank confessions, –his want of knowledge of the persons he addresses,–until he finds that he is the complement of his hearers;–that they drink his words because he fulfill for them their own nature; the deeper he dives into his privatest, secretest presentiment, to his wonder he finds, this is the most acceptable, most public, and universally true. The people delight in it; the better part of every man feels, This is my music; this is myself. (64)

 

Furthermore, Emerson emphasizes that it is impossible to separate the product from the process– writing is a clear reflection of the state/the experience of the writer during the writing process. He also introduces the notion that the writing process is simultaneously spontaneous. Just as the observer, when experiencing nature, losses his identity, no longer existing/functioning as a seer, rather only the act of seeing exists. When the writer writes, it is just writing as he experiences nature. As he states in his essay “Experience”,

“I would gladly be moral, and keep due metes and bounds, which I dearly love, and allow the most to the will of man, but I have set my heart on honesty in this chapter, and I can see nothing at last…The results of life are uncalculated and uncalculable. The years teach much which the days never know…but the individual is always mistaken. It turns out somewhat new, and very unlike what he promised himself.”(207)

 

Emerson writes with his heart that beats at the same meter as nature’s pulse. He has surrendered himself to the rhythm of life, moving from note to note without an awareness of the overall melody. Emerson emphasizes that experience cannot be reduced to small observable events, only to be added back up again to constitute life. There is, on the contrary, an irreducible whole present in life and is at work through us. It paves our path and we follow it without knowledge of where it may lead. In sum, Emerson’s writing process is solitary and spontaneous and echoes his experience as one with nature.

Emerson’s process is laborious as he attempts to put human experience and nature in words. Both nature and experience are ever-changing, evolving, an elusive series of surprises, representing both in entirety via text presents its problems. How does one describe the infinity of nature and the evolution of experience within the finite form of word? As he states in his essay,  “Experience”, that “nature hates calculators; her methods are saltatory and impulsive. Man lives by pulses; our organic movements are such…Our chief experiences have been casual”(205). Emerson again draws on the notion that life is unpredictable and ever-evolving and that the most impressionable experiences are those that happen by chance. In this way, Emerson strengthens his principle assertion about the continuity that exists between nature and human experience. If human experience is an echo of the reality of nature, then to accurately convey nature one must convey human experience. Consequently, in order to make his writing surprising and unpredictable, incalculable, Emerson’s writing process must be uncalcuated and unpredictable, as his prose is a reflection of his process. If his prose is hard to follow, continuously surprising the reader, confusing her at times, enlightening her at others, then it accurately describes human experience and nature as the prose grows and evolves like experience.

Furthermore, Emerson exalts poetry as being the best way in which nature can be translated into the written word. In his essay “Poetry and Imagination”, he explains that “metre begins with pulse-beat, and the length of lines in songs and poems is determined by the inhalation and exhalation of the lungs…believe these metres to be organic, derived from the human pulse…” (304). Emerson elevates poetry because its rhythm echoes that of a human heart beat or breathing patterns. The rhythm/meter in the poem makes the words move and gives the text a pulse. In this sense, the poem is alive; it is organic, meaning it is living. Because the poem is organic/living itself, it is more apt to accurately convey life’s experiences. Yet it is imperative to remember that it is only through the poet and his experience in nature that the poem comes into existence. The poem is merely a reflection of the poet’s experience and process: “it is not metres, but a metre-making argument that makes a poem”(211). The poet is challenged to “…take the passing day, with its news, its cares, its fears, as he shares them, and hold it up to a divine reason, till he sees it to have a purpose and beauty, and to be related to astronomy and history and the eternal order of the world. Then the dry twig blossoms in his hand. He is calmed and elevated”(306). The poet must embody nature, immerse himself in it, so that he may share in her every experience, making his experience that of nature. The poet relinquishes himself to nature and, consequently, experiences life at its very roots. The poet’s experience is organic, and thus, “rightly, poetry is organic. We cannot know things by words and writing, but only by taking a central position in the universe and living in its forms. We sink to rise:–“(309). Again Emerson reiterates the fundamental continuity between man and nature, and how the experience of nature drives the process of writing and thus the prose or poetry that it results.

Overall, Emerson’s unconventional writing is a result of an organic process. His writing is essentially puzzling. If Emerson’s writing did not constantly change and evolve before its reader’s eyes then the writing would not be organic. It would not serve to support Emerson’s arguments; it would not accurately convey the experience of life. But, in order for the prose to be organic, the process must also be organic, alive with the pulse of nature. Thus Emerson becomes one with nature and his writing process, in meter with her melody, yields organic writing.

 

 

Works Cited:

Brewton, Vince. “Emerson, Ralph Waldo [Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy].” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. N.p., 24 July 2003. Web. 25 Sept. 2011. <http://www.iep.utm.edu/emerson/

 

Emerson, Ralph Waldo, Joel Porte, and Saundra Morris. Emerson’s prose and poetry: authoritative texts, contexts, criticism. New York: W.W. Norton, 2001. Print.

Emerson and Dillard

There are several aspect of Annie Dillard’s writing style and theory that are similar to that of Emerson. First, it is important to look at their unique style of writing, which in turn provides insight into their thought process and theory behind their writing. Both Emerson and Dillard structure their text in a series of smaller sections. Each section is both isolated and related to the section before it. It made me feel like I was dreaming, or an observer in the mind of another person dreaming. Pehaps this is one way to understand the writer’s mind in the process of writing, specificially, the mind of Dillard and Emerson. During the dream, everything seems to be loosely woven together to create one experience but in reality the process of dreaming is in constant flux, moving from one state to the next, broken in a bizarre series but encompassed in one experience. Dillard even cautions/advises against writing in externally stimulating environments ”Appealing workplaces are to be avoided. One wants a room with no view, so imagination can meet memory in the dark.” It is almost as though Dillard wants her mind to be captive to her subconscious, integrating her imagination with her inner self, only then will she be able to write. Similarly, Emerson believes that looking deeper into on self allows one to connect with truth and the overall whole. This paradox is yet another aspect of both dillard and Emerson’s writing. Both continually emphasis the hidden complexity in common things and writing as a way to uncover the truth of their relatedness. In this way, Emerson and Dillard seem very organic in their theory of writing and writing style.  Organicism focuses on the growth and quality of life in the universe, concentrating on the wholeness of the whole in a mystical light.  As defined by Stephen C. Pepper, “Organicism…is the world hypothesis that stress the internal relatedness or coherence of things. It is impressed with the manner in which observations at first apparently turn out to be closely related  (PB), and with the fact that as knowledge progresses it becomes more systematized. It conceives that value of knowledge as proportional to the degree of integration it has attained, and comes to identity value with integration in all spheres. Value in the sphere of knowledge is integration of judgments; in the sphere of ethics, it is integration of acts; in the sphere of art, it is integration of feelings. Finally, it conceives all of there contained in a total integration of existence or reality.” Emerson’s aim is to express the ultimate organization of all things in unity, which includes them as they are, a harmonious relationship of human experience with all the processes of nature, or the universe.