Three American Poets

William Spengemann

Description

In Three American Poets, William C. Spengemann describes the very different sorts of poetry Whitman, Dickinson, and Melville wrote, their comparable reasons for writing as they did, and the posthumous critical effects of their having done so.

By linking these utterly singular poets and their work—verse connected by shared qualities of oddity, complexity, and difficulty—Spengemann illuminates the poets' efforts to create verse equal to the demands of a changing nineteenth century. All three responded to a widespread sense of loss—loss, above all, of Christian understandings of the origins, nature, and purpose of human existence, both individual and collective. All three, too, regarded poetry as the sole means of dealing with that loss and of comprehending not only a changing world but the old world from which the new one had departed, and hence the connections between the vanished, discredited past, the baffling present, and the as yet inscrutable future.

Spengemann suggests that the poetic eccentricities of Whitman, Melville, and Dickinson arose directly from their use of poetry as a vehicle of thought; each devised a poetic language either to attempt to recover a lost sense of assurance threatened by the collapse of traditional faith or to discover an altogether new ground of knowledge and being. Spengemann guides us in parsing their respective poetics with masterful readings closely attuned to diction, syntax, meter, and figure. His authoritative and empirical descriptions of the poets' verse and their respective characteristic aesthetics afford us heightened access to the poems and the pleasures peculiar to them, in the process making us better readers of poetry in general.

Sujets

• Comparative Literature
• Literary Criticism
• criticism
• América
• American poetry
• List of poets from the United States
• American literature
• General officer
• Poetry
• General
• Dickinson
• American
• Emily Dickinson
• Melville
• Herman Melville
• Walt Whitman

Informations

• Publié par: University of Notre Dame Press
• Date de parution: 30 avril 2010
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780268092726
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

S P E N G E M A N N T H R E E A M E R I C A N P O E T S
T H R E E A M E R I C A N P O ET S
Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and Herman Melville
T H R E E A M E R I C A NW I L L I A M C . S P E N G E M A N N
P O E T S
“To follow any poem, one must pay attention, frst, not
to what has been said about it but to what the poem itself
says—the words it uses, the way it uses them, and the
ways in which it puts them together. Wherever a poem
may end up taking the reader, the journey begins with
Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and Herman Melville
the words on the page. These are the vehicles
of poetic understanding.”
—f r o m t h e a f t e r w o r d
“The best part of a writer’s biography is not a
W I L L I A M C . S P E N G E M A N Nrecord of his adventures but the story of his style.”
— v l a d i m i r n a b o k o v
W i l l i a m C . S p e n g e m a n n
is the Patricia F. and William B. Hale, 1944, Professor in
Arts and Sciences Emeritus at Dartmouth College.
His books include The Forms of Autobiography,
A New World of Words, and two Penguin editions,
Nineteenth-Century American Poetry
and The Portable Hawthorne.
University of Notre Dame Press
Notre Dame, Indiana 46556
undpress.nd.edu
Cover Design: Faceout Studio; Jason Gabbert
Cover Image: ShutterstockThree American PoetsBy the Same Author
monographs
Mark Twain and the Backwoods Angel
The Adventurous Muse
The Forms of Autobiography
A Mirror for Americanists
A New World of Words
editions
Henry James: The American
Herman Melville: Pierre
Nineteenth Century American Poetry
The Portable HawthorneThree American Poets
t
Walt Whitman,
Emily Dickinson,
and
Herman Melville
WILLIAM C. SPENGEMANN
University of Notre Dame Press
Notre Dame, Indiana
tCopyright © 2010 by University of Notre Dame
Notre Dame, Indiana 46556
www.undpress.nd.edu
All Rights Reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Spengemann, William C.
Three American poets : Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson,
and Herman Melville / William C. Spengemann.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
isbn-13: 978-0-268-04132-8 (pbk. : alk. paper)
isbn-10: 0-268-04132-6 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. American poetry—19th century—History and criticism.
2. Modernism (Literature)—America. 3. Whitman, Walt, 1819–1892—
Criticism and interpretation. 4. Dickinson, Emily,
1830–1886— Criticism and interpretation. 5. Melville, Herman,
1819–1891— Criticism and interpretation. I. Title.
ps310.m57s64 2010
809.1'9112—dc22
2010004291
∞ The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and
durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity
of the Council on Library Resources.To—
Thom Weisel (B.A. Stanford University, 1963)
Karen Yanagisako (B.A. University of Hawaii, class of 1965)
Clay Medeiros (B.A. University of Connecticut, 1966)
Peter Carafiol (Ph.D. Claremont Graduate School, 1974)
Nik Gisborne (A.B. University College London, 1989)
Jess Roberts (B.A. Dartmouth College, 1997)
—and, in their name, students of six decades who taught me, or
caused me to learn, everything that is in all my books, this one is
gratefully dedicated.Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Preface xi
Whitman’s Modern Song 1
Sorting with Emily Dickinson 63
Melville the Poet 153
Afterword 205
Glossary 209
Works Cited 223Acknowledgments
I knew Barbara Hanrahan was out there, somewhere, waiting for this
book. I just didn’t know her name, and so looked for her in all the
wrong places. But now that I do know, I can thank her for bravely
taking it on, without holding her at all blameable for anything in it.
A number of friends read versions of these chapters and helped
sharpen their intended address: Andy Delbanco, Ann Fisher-Wirth,
Alan Gaylord, Jeff Hart, Gordon Hutner, Bob Mezey, Robert Milder,
Phil Pochoda, John Seelye, Tom Sleigh, Mickey Stern, and Roger
Wilkenfeld.
Debbie Hodges, my link to the electronic mystery,
wordprocessed, and endlessly reprocessed, leagues of scribble, always
word-perfect.
Sycha fine-combed the copy for fleas.
Katie Lehman, my copy editor, proved the reader for whom this
book was written.
Pat and Bill Hale, devoted friends of Dartmouth College,
endowed the Professorship that supported me while I wrote it.
ixPreface
Whitman, Dickinson, Melville: three American poets of the same
time and tongue, yet as poetically different from one another as
each of them is from every other American who wrote verse in En-
glish before 1900. Their differing poetic signatures are plain enough
to see and hear.
Outpouring Whitman:
Here rises the fluid and attaching character
The fluid and attaching character is the freshness and
sweetness of man and woman,
(The herbs of morning sprout no fresher and sweeter every
day out of the roots of themselves, than it sprouts fresh
and sweet out of itself).
Impacted Dickinson:
xiPreface
We thirst at first—’tis Nature’s Act—
And later—when we die—
A little water supplicate—
Of fingers passing by—
Impersonating Melville:
I saw a ship of martial build
(Her standards set, her brave apparel on)
Directed as by madness mere
Against a stolid iceberg steer,
Nor budge it, though the infatuate ship went down.
For all these mutual unlikenesses, the three often appear
together (if not arm in arm) in anthologies and literary histories under
the sign of “American Poetry”—as if that denoted something more
than “poetry written by Americans,” and even if it did, that three
poets so distinct and atypical could begin to represent it.
What then justifies their being singled out, as here, and
bundled together beneath the covers of a book? Are their poems
especially “American”—more so than, say, “The Star Spangled Banner”?
How so, exactly? Are Whitman, Dickinson, and Melville, as has often
been said, the very best American poets of their era? In that case,
what have their varied poetic excellences to do with their common
citizenship? Does the latter somehow account for the former? Or
are their nationality and poetic superiority merely coincidental? In
that case, why aren’t they studied more often alongside esteemed
poets of other nations? Are they good only in comparison to other
Americans?
Short of answers to such questions, all we have, so far, in the way
of a basis for treating the three together is their shared individuality.
On this ground, a comparison of sorts is possible, beginning with an
inventory of their differing ways of making unusual poems: the sorts
of words each used, their uses of the words chosen, and their ways of
putting words together. That, after all, is what any poem is: a certain
selection, deployment, and arrangement of words.
xiiPreface
As it happens, close inspection of their differing poetic
manners and methods uncovers an actual similarity among the verses of
Whitman, Dickinson, and Melville. However variously they wrote, all
three wrote from the outset for the same reason: in reaction to
evermounting assaults—scientific, philosophical, historical, political—
on Christian understandings of the origins and purpose of human
existence. Virtually every word written by the three can be traced,
more or less directly, to threatened belief.
So common had such reactions to spreading doubt become by
the 1850s, however, that those of Whitman, Dickinson, and Mel ville
link them no more closely to one another than to countless other
writers of their day—not just poets, be it said, and by no means just
Americans. What sets them apart from all but a few of their
contemporaries, and from every other American poet, is their
coincidentally shared view of poetry as not just a passive medium for the
expression of feelings regarding the problem of belief but a means
(the only one they knew or trusted) of solving it—whether by
recovering, somehow, the lost ground of assurance or by discovering
an altogether new ground of knowledge and being.
If no proofs, there are reasons to suppose that the poetic
eccentricities of Whitman, Dickinson, and Melville arise straight from
their use of poetry as a vehicle of thought. Whereas expressions of
widely entertained feeling—denial, dismay, anxiety, reassurance,
despair—admit of poetic convention, writing poetry to arrive
somewhere as yet unreached—perhaps unknown—calls for methods as
yet untried, hence individually fashioned. To assert membership in
an existing community of feeling, the poet employs a familiar form
and style. To think for themselves, however, poets must devise
languages of their own.
Verbally active, necessarily unconventional, and highly personal
in this way, the idiosyncratic verse of Whitman, Dickinson, and Mel -
ville can be thought of as proto-modernist, far more typical of poetry
written after, say, 1918 than that written by their contemporar ies.
This proleptic literary association goes a long way toward explaining
the linking of three such unlike poets—entirely unknown to each
other—and their posthumous rise together from disdain, obscurity,
xiiiPreface
and neglect to literary preeminence. What changed over time is not
themselves, of course, but the audience for printed verse, from a
large common readership eager for uplifting entertainment, to a far
more restricted, mainly academic audience for poems less
immediately accessible and hence in need of instruction and conducive to
critical debate. With the general defection of common readers, after
1900, from printed verse to recorded song for helpings of sentiment
and humor, and the simultaneous ouster of Latin and Greek from
the undergraduate curriculum in favor of modern-language studies,
Whitman, Dickinson, and Melville replaced the likes of Longf ellow,
Whittier, and Holmes as the most esteemed American poets before
Robert Frost.
If this change of poetic venue from the popular prints to the
academy brought Whitman, Dickinson, and Melville from nowhere
to center stage, it also separated printed verse as a whole from
immediate contact with its audience by interposing between poem
and reader a veil of pedagogical