Tweet of the Week: Martin Tupper

Martin Farquhar Tupper was a writer and poet born in London in 1810. He is most famous for being the author of Proverbial Philosophy, a series of long didactic moralisings. Between 1856 and 1860, eight reviews, 7 of them from England, of Leaves of Grass mention Tupper in connection with Whitman.

Whitman in Popular Culture

1962 Old Crow Whiskey 

Blades O' Grass Cigar Box

Twilight Zone Episode Entitled: I Sing the Body Electric 

Critical Reception

The three critical responses I choose to look at all seem to have read Leaves of Grass as this sort of absurd and unexplainable piece of writing that goes against all classic characteristics of what poetry is. However, despite this opposition to what the critic would normally find to be aesthetically pleasing, there is a sense of beauty that exists, and is even perpetuated, by the critics inability to pinpoint what exactly it is. These three critics seem to focus completely on the images created through Whitman's expansive cataloging. For instance, one of the anonymous critics wrote, "Many of the lines are such perfect pictures in themselves, that an artist might draw them without reference to any other material, and produce pictorial compositions" (The Merchant's Magazine and Commercial Review 34). The most important thing seems to be the beauty that lies in the imagery the poem creates. This is due in large to the fact that these critics are working on the assumption that a poems beauty is created through the classic ideas of poetry structure in addition to the images created and they seem to be portraying Leaves of Grass as a success in spite of instead of because of the unusual structure.

Another critic says that "They are destitute of rhyme, measure of feet, and the like, every condition under which poetry is generally understood to exist being absent; but in their strength of expression, their fervor, hearty wholesomeness, their originality, mannerism, and freshness, one finds them a singular harmony and flow, as if by reading, they gradually formed themselves into a melody, and adopted characteristics peculiar and appropriate to themselves alone"(The London Weekly Dispatch). This critic explains exactly what it is without even realizing it. Instead of Leave's of Grass being beautiful despite is lack of normal poetic structure, this critic shows that this is actually the exact reason it is beautiful.

Whitman's contemporary critics that I read placed much of the volumes importance within the framework of knowing who Walt Whitman is and only touch on the thematic significance of the book. One anonymous critic writes, "He will soon make his way into the confidence of his readers, and his poems in time will become pregnant text-book, out of which quotation as sterling as the minted gold will be taken and applied to every form and phase of the inner or the outer life; and we express our pleasure in making the acquaintance of Walt Whitman, hoping to know more of him in time to come." So on one hand, some of these critics are aware of the destined greatness of Whitman but no one is able to specify reasons for this. The underlying themes of the book and the meaning beyond Whitman as the narrator weren't discussed very much.

Tweet of the Week: Frances Wright

Frances Wright was a Scottish American Immigrant born in 1795. She moved to the US in 1818 at the age of 23 and spent 2 years traveling the country. She was a writer, lecturer, feminist, abolitionist, and social reformer. She co-founded The Free Inquirer newspaper, wrote for various other journals, and founded the Nashoba Commune in Tennessee in 1825. Walt Whitman great admired her.

a song for occupations

I liked this poem a lot and one of the parts that stood out to me was when Whitman says in like 89-92 "If you were not breathing and walking here where would they all be? The most renowned poems would be ashes...orations and plays would be vacuums." Whitman is showing his equality and sameness to every reader by pointing out that he would not exist in the identity of a poet if we didn't exist. Therefore, we are just as important, if not more, than Whitman himself which seems to be a central theme in the poem.

In lines 1630-167 Whitman says,

      I do not affirm what you see beyond is futile...I do not
            advise you to stop,
      I do not say leadings you thought great are not great,
      But I say that none lead to greater or sadder or happier
            that those lead to.

I found these lines to be very beautiful and I think what he is saying is that it doesn't matter what it is that leads you in life or gives you purpose or what you look forward to that gets you through each day, but instead it is the action of purpose that is important.

The main differences I noticed in this poem throughout the various editions were a shift from using ellipsis to using dashes to connect ideas and sentences. In addition, the dashes that already existed in the 1855 edition became, for the most part, commas. This is similar to Whitman's changes in "Leaves of Grass." I think it further proves the ideas discussed in class regarding the increased anxiety that came along with a larger audience. Instead of the readers being people Whitman knew personally, there was suddenly a mass audience that he had less and less control over. So these grammatical changes, in addition to changing the look and style of the poem, also seem to suggest that he is attempting to take more control over how his text is going to be interpreted.

The most interesting change I noticed between the 1855 and the 1856 edition was in the lines:
   
      The wife, and she is not one jot less than the husband!
      The daughter, and she is just as good as the son!
      The mother, and she is every bit as much the father! (36-39)

In the 1855 edition the commas were dashes and the exclamation points were commas. The use of the exclamation points really stood out to me, although I'm not entirely sure why.

Leaves of Grass (from left to right)

Brooklyn 1855, Brooklyn 1856, Boston 1860-61,

New York 1869, Washington 1871, New Jersey 1876, 

Boston 1881-82, Philadelphia 1888, 

Philadelphia 1891-92 

tweet of the week

bowery b'hoy: the comedy of a culture in rapid transition


The Bowery b'hoy and his g'hal were iconic symbols of working class spirits in the two decades preceding the Civil War in New York City. During the 1830s the "Bowery was best known for its entertainment possibilities, which included cheap dancehalls, dime museums, billiard salons, rowdy theaters, performing animals, and boxing." This icon was based upon the culture and dress of the real working class people of New York and eventually became a character type "depicted in print and onstage, a symbolic figure that represented the rise of commercial culture and the decline in the status of skilled trades that were altering social relations."The American Museum, under Barnum's ownership in the 1840s and 1850s, put on exhibitions that attracted the working class Bowery crowd. However, due to his desire to bring in more respectable patrons, he replaced much of these exhibitions with moral stage dramas.

"B'hoy and g'hal are meant to evoke an Irish pronunciation of boy and gal and were commonly used slang words used by the Bowery crowd. The Bowery Boys gang were prominent in New York City's Five Points district. They were a nativist, anti-Catholic, and anti-Irish gang that are even written about in Herbert Asbury's Gangs of New York.