Literature Humanities 07-08

"Song of Myself" p. 63

I know I have the best of time and space--and that I was never measured
and will never be measured.

I tramp a perpetual journey,
My signs are a rain-proof coat and good shoes and a staff cut from the
      woods;
No friend of mine takes his ease in my chair,
I have no chair, nor church nor philosophy;
I lead no man to a dinner-table or library or exchange,
But each man and each woman of you I lead upon a knoll,
My left hand hooks you around the waist,
My right hand point to landscapes of continents, and a plain public
road.

Not I, not anyone else can travel that road for you,
You must travel it yourself.

It is not far...it is within reach...

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

Vantage Point

About Whitman and Song of Myself: Whitman uses the grass metaphor especially at the beginning and end to get across the idea of commonality. On the first page he establishes the imagery of the narrator lying gently on the grassfield admiring a spear of the green. He then goes on to shoot through space to stress the omnipresence of his being in other humans. I feel that by establishing his proximity to the ground/grass, he is deliberately setting the opposite of the conventional God, the Almighty in Heaven, from high above observing all of us. And yet, this kind of proximity to the surface of us humans, I think, is less effective in communicating the everywhere that he can be in at the same time. I always find it easier to imagine an omnipotent being if I am at a high vantage point, where I can see everyone at the same time. But being close to the ground, to grass (that is not prevalent everywhere) and then telling us he sees everyone is just harder to get around. Is anyone troubled by the same or similar problem?