Literature Humanities 07-08

"The Poet" p.296

The poets made all the words, and therefore language is the archives of history, and, if we must say it, a sort of tomb of the muses. For though the origin of most of our words is forgotten, each word was at first a stroke of genius, and obtained currency because for the moment it symbolized the world to the first speaker and the first hearer...Language is fossil poetry. As the limestone of the continent consists of infinite masses of the shells of the animalcules, so language is made up of images and tropes, which now, in their secondary use, have ceased to remind us of their poetic origin.

What are they trying to prove?

Emerson and Whitman both kind of turned me off. I enjoyed reading both of them, but there was something there that really didn't make it for me. Whitman was constantly talking about grass and everyone growing and learning together spiritually, at least that's how I saw it. But did he really have that? He was a lonely old man who, despite having many friends, still felt lonely. In all his relations to democracy, it seemed to me the world could never work that way. The grass growing wild and free and among all others is a beautiful image, but can it still exist? I guess I was frustrated because the two talk of a *too* perfect world, and I couldn't see it. Emerson is also like this: is he ever self-reliant? Is anyone every really self-reliant? He needed people to support his way of life, did he not? They both spoke of something that they could never really comprehend, almost. It's like Whitman's inability to translate what he meant; does this translate to what both Whitman and Emerson preach? What are they trying to prove to the American reader by saying all this? I just saw the huge amount of idealism in both as a turn off, especially since now I'm not sure I understand exactly why the two wrote these. Do they contradict themselves? Haha sorry for the onslaught of questions; it was a frustrated stream of consciousness on my part. -Annie

Waldo & Walt

Having read Waldo and then Walt, two authors with similar philosophies, it would be interesting to first note some of their differences in personality, and then to consider what they together accomplished, as well as how they fit into the Western literary cannon we have covered in this class. My first topic has to do with how an author's personality is shown through his/her work. Though both Waldo and Walt were transcendentalists who expressed similar sentiments in their works, the personalities of these two that flowed through their respective writing seemed to me to be drastically different. In addition, I found it much easier to infer the personalities of these two authors than those of authors we have read previously. 1) Did anyone else feel this way? Why might you be able to picture Waldo and Walt's personalities better than, say, Montaigne's, even though his writing was also highly personal and he wrote "an honest book?" Can you always get a glimpse into an author's personality through his work? Could you at all paint me a picture of Shakespeare's personality from reading Hamlet? In this case, what did you feel were the personalities of Waldo and Walt; did they have similar personalities? Or have they merely reached similar philosophical conclusions while having very different personalities? My second topic has to do with the transcendentalist movement and how it fits into the contexts of the Lit Hum cannon and American history. It is an observed and much studied fact that generally Eastern cultures uphold collectivistic ideals while Western ones, notably the US, uphold the ideal of individualism. In Lit Hum, we have covered from Greek epics to Transcendentalism. 2) At what point in the Lit Hum reading list did this idea of the supremity and importance of the individual (as opposed to those of God, societal duty, or cultural customs as would be stressed in Eastern literature) start to emerge? Do you think Lit Hum works and movements like Transcendentalism were part of the force that pushed America to become the individualistic machine it is today? Bryan