Chapter XIX of Life and Adventures of Jack Engle: An Autobiography (1852)— Walt Whitman’s recently rediscovered serialized novel—has been the focal point of virtually all attention given to the novel since its appearance in the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review in 2017. The chapter has been called a “magical moment,” a moment that foretells the coming of the Walt Whitman we know from the first edition of Leaves of Grass three years later.1 Indeed, there is much in the chapter that strikingly prefigures Leaves of Grass. The chapter details the visit of the novel’s protagonist, Jack Engle, to Trinity Churchyard in lower Manhattan. During his walk through the tombstones, Jack reflects on the dead beneath his feet and the living that he can hear on Broadway, just beyond the bounds of the shady, peaceful graveyard. He becomes enraptured in meditation about life, death, history, present, and country, and he even remarks on the “long, rank grass” growing above the graves. Yet, the chapter functions as more than a foreshadowing of the Whitman to come; it provides a glimpse into the influences of Whitman’s past as an editor, contributor, and consumer of newspapers. Though the chapter’s prefiguring of motifs and themes from Leaves of Grass has been central to previous readings, perhaps its most fascinating aspect is that it is distinctly unoriginal material, drawn from a decades-old newspaper literature trope that commonly featured a narrator experiencing an extended moment of romantic elevation while visiting Trinity Churchyard. Drawing and building upon an established tradition of graveyard poetry, the trope arose in the late 1820s, as other periodical texts about Trinity Churchyard simultaneously established the actual location as a site of America’s semi-mythologized national origins. The trope continued to develop throughout the Antebellum Period as a unique and popular vehicle, as we will see, for a nation grappling with its past, present, and future, and with unsettled questions of identity. This essay is organized in three sections, each with its own task. The first section, “Trinity Churchyard in American Culture, 1820-1855,” discusses the representation of Trinity Churchyard in the non-literary prose texts of American WWQR Vol. 37 Nos. 3/4 (Winter/Spring 2020)
{"title":"Walt Whitman, Trinity Church, and Antebellum Reprint Culture","authors":"Scott Zukowski","doi":"10.13008/0737-0679.2373","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.13008/0737-0679.2373","url":null,"abstract":"Chapter XIX of Life and Adventures of Jack Engle: An Autobiography (1852)— Walt Whitman’s recently rediscovered serialized novel—has been the focal point of virtually all attention given to the novel since its appearance in the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review in 2017. The chapter has been called a “magical moment,” a moment that foretells the coming of the Walt Whitman we know from the first edition of Leaves of Grass three years later.1 Indeed, there is much in the chapter that strikingly prefigures Leaves of Grass. The chapter details the visit of the novel’s protagonist, Jack Engle, to Trinity Churchyard in lower Manhattan. During his walk through the tombstones, Jack reflects on the dead beneath his feet and the living that he can hear on Broadway, just beyond the bounds of the shady, peaceful graveyard. He becomes enraptured in meditation about life, death, history, present, and country, and he even remarks on the “long, rank grass” growing above the graves. Yet, the chapter functions as more than a foreshadowing of the Whitman to come; it provides a glimpse into the influences of Whitman’s past as an editor, contributor, and consumer of newspapers. Though the chapter’s prefiguring of motifs and themes from Leaves of Grass has been central to previous readings, perhaps its most fascinating aspect is that it is distinctly unoriginal material, drawn from a decades-old newspaper literature trope that commonly featured a narrator experiencing an extended moment of romantic elevation while visiting Trinity Churchyard. Drawing and building upon an established tradition of graveyard poetry, the trope arose in the late 1820s, as other periodical texts about Trinity Churchyard simultaneously established the actual location as a site of America’s semi-mythologized national origins. The trope continued to develop throughout the Antebellum Period as a unique and popular vehicle, as we will see, for a nation grappling with its past, present, and future, and with unsettled questions of identity. This essay is organized in three sections, each with its own task. The first section, “Trinity Churchyard in American Culture, 1820-1855,” discusses the representation of Trinity Churchyard in the non-literary prose texts of American WWQR Vol. 37 Nos. 3/4 (Winter/Spring 2020)","PeriodicalId":42233,"journal":{"name":"WALT WHITMAN QUARTERLY REVIEW","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2020-05-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49004741","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"\"O You Singer Solitary\": Walt Whitman on the Closet","authors":"G. Schmidgall","doi":"10.13008/0737-0679.2335","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.13008/0737-0679.2335","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42233,"journal":{"name":"WALT WHITMAN QUARTERLY REVIEW","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2019-08-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42343787","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Walt Whitman's Seventieth Birthday Party and the Ghost of Ralph Waldo Emerson","authors":"Jerome M. Loving","doi":"10.13008/0737-0679.2334","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.13008/0737-0679.2334","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42233,"journal":{"name":"WALT WHITMAN QUARTERLY REVIEW","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2019-08-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48141857","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Jean Huets. With Walt Whitman: Himself in the Nineteenth Century, in America.","authors":"Brandon James O’Neil","doi":"10.13008/0737-0679.2340","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.13008/0737-0679.2340","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42233,"journal":{"name":"WALT WHITMAN QUARTERLY REVIEW","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2019-08-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66479113","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In his influential essay “The Poet,” Ralph Waldo Emerson argues that the Poet is one whose vision “turns the world to glass, and shows us all things in their right series and procession.” Responding to Emerson’s description of poetic activity and justifying his claim to the title of The Poet, Walt Whitman declares that “All is a procession, / The universe is a procession with measured and perfect motion” (“I Sing the Body Electric”). “Procession” can evoke the ceremonious and often sombre, as Webster’s 1844 definition confirms by positioning three common processional scenarios side-by-side—a clergy’s procession into church, a triumphal procession, and a funeral procession— followed by a quote, “Him all his train / Follow’d in bright procession,” from Milton’s Paradise Lost, representative of stately Old World poetic tradition. But Webster truncates Milton’s description of the celestial procession, omitting the wherefore of their movements: the procession followed in order to “behold Creation and the wonders of His might,” after which came “acclamation and the sound symphonious of ten thousand Harps,” enough to make the “empyrean ring.” Milton describes a heavenly celebration, a birthday party for the new Creation, complete with a choir, a band, and swingin’ incense. It is perhaps that celebratory strain that Emerson’s Poet can discern within the universe, rather than a funeral march or a victor’s triumphant entry through the gates of a captured city. The celebratory procession is the very basis of Whitman’s poetic project, in which the celebration of self sings its way into ever-widening circles, until all space and all time find symphonious inclusion. Like Milton’s angels on the first Sabbath, Whitman’s fans and followers have been celebrating a momentous birthday this year. Each party, performance, poetry reading, exhibition, and lecture has added its voice to a symphony that carries Whitman’s memory and his poetry around the world. It doesn’t take the sensitivity of Emerson’s nearly-di-
{"title":"A Whitman Bicentennial Album: The Celebratory Procession","authors":"Brandon James O’Neil, Ed Folsom","doi":"10.13008/0737-0679.2339","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.13008/0737-0679.2339","url":null,"abstract":"In his influential essay “The Poet,” Ralph Waldo Emerson argues that the Poet is one whose vision “turns the world to glass, and shows us all things in their right series and procession.” Responding to Emerson’s description of poetic activity and justifying his claim to the title of The Poet, Walt Whitman declares that “All is a procession, / The universe is a procession with measured and perfect motion” (“I Sing the Body Electric”). “Procession” can evoke the ceremonious and often sombre, as Webster’s 1844 definition confirms by positioning three common processional scenarios side-by-side—a clergy’s procession into church, a triumphal procession, and a funeral procession— followed by a quote, “Him all his train / Follow’d in bright procession,” from Milton’s Paradise Lost, representative of stately Old World poetic tradition. But Webster truncates Milton’s description of the celestial procession, omitting the wherefore of their movements: the procession followed in order to “behold Creation and the wonders of His might,” after which came “acclamation and the sound symphonious of ten thousand Harps,” enough to make the “empyrean ring.” Milton describes a heavenly celebration, a birthday party for the new Creation, complete with a choir, a band, and swingin’ incense. It is perhaps that celebratory strain that Emerson’s Poet can discern within the universe, rather than a funeral march or a victor’s triumphant entry through the gates of a captured city. The celebratory procession is the very basis of Whitman’s poetic project, in which the celebration of self sings its way into ever-widening circles, until all space and all time find symphonious inclusion. Like Milton’s angels on the first Sabbath, Whitman’s fans and followers have been celebrating a momentous birthday this year. Each party, performance, poetry reading, exhibition, and lecture has added its voice to a symphony that carries Whitman’s memory and his poetry around the world. It doesn’t take the sensitivity of Emerson’s nearly-di-","PeriodicalId":42233,"journal":{"name":"WALT WHITMAN QUARTERLY REVIEW","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2019-08-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43847378","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
京公网安备 11010802042870号
京ICP备2023020795号-1
扫码关注我们
求助内容：
应助结果提醒方式：