Whitman′s Drama of Consensus - Hardcover

Larson

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0226469077 ISBN 13: 9780226469072

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 1988

Synopsis

In this elegant study, Walt Whitman's democratic, consensual idealism emerges for the first time as truly central to his poetic achievement. Though Whitman's democratic idealism has often been dismissed as a blindness to the political complexities of his day, Kerry C. Larson argues that the poet was in fact vitally engaged in the problems of preserving social continuity at a time (1855-60) when the specter of disunion and fractricidal war grew increasingly ominous. Whitman conceived his poems as vehicles for social integration whose entire aim was to dramatize the joining of the many and the one, speaker and listener, universal and particular without subordinating either term. For Whitman, the poet's role was to be "the better President," the figure in whose person all contending interests and competing factions would be resolved. The importance of "drama" in Larson's title is borne out in his argument that Whitman's most memorable poems depict the goal of consent as an active process, something to be achieved rather than merely affirmed. By way of making this drama vivid, these poems project a fictive audience or interlocutor which, in being invoked by the poet, furnishes him with a partner in the ongoing dialogue of voices Leaves of Grass both embodies and records.

About this title

From the Back Cover

Consequently, even though the original composition of almost all the lyrics here examined falls between 1855 and 1865, I have chosen the final edition as my primary text in order to emphasize the basic continuity of Whitman's ambitions and the tensions that accompany them.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 1988
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0226469077
• ISBN 13: 9780226469072
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 296