happy birthday walt whitman song of myself civil war poetry may 31, 1819 west hills long island

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Happy Birthday Walt Whitman “Song of Myself” Civil War Poetry May 31, 1819 West Hills Long Island

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Page 1: Happy Birthday Walt Whitman Song of Myself Civil War Poetry May 31, 1819 West Hills Long Island

Happy Birthday Walt Whitman“Song of Myself”Civil War Poetry

May 31, 1819West Hills

Long Island

Page 2: Happy Birthday Walt Whitman Song of Myself Civil War Poetry May 31, 1819 West Hills Long Island

This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your live, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem…Leaves of Grass (1855)

Page 3: Happy Birthday Walt Whitman Song of Myself Civil War Poetry May 31, 1819 West Hills Long Island

Key Techniques

0Unrhymed / irregular meter (free verse)0Chant / rant / spoken rhythms0Anaphora0Vignettes0Lists

Self

Nation Poetry

Page 4: Happy Birthday Walt Whitman Song of Myself Civil War Poetry May 31, 1819 West Hills Long Island

I celebrate myselfAnd what I assume you shall assume,For every atom belong to me as good belongs to you.

I loafe and invite my soul,I lean and loafe at my ease…observing a spear of

summer grass

Houses and rooms are full of perfumes….the shelvesare crowded with perfumes

I breathe the fragrance myself, and know it and like it.The distillation would intoxicate me also, but I shall not let it.

The atmosphere is not a perfume….it has no taste ofthe distillation….it is odorless,

It is for my mouth….I am in love with it,I will go to the bank by the wood and become undisguised

and naked,I am mad for it to be in contact with me

Page 5: Happy Birthday Walt Whitman Song of Myself Civil War Poetry May 31, 1819 West Hills Long Island

A child said, What is the grass? fetching it to me with fullhands;

How could I answer the child?....I do not know what isis any more than he.

I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopefulgreen stuff woven.

Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic,And it means, Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow

zonesGrowing among black folks as among white,Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff, I give them the

same, I receive them the same.

Page 6: Happy Birthday Walt Whitman Song of Myself Civil War Poetry May 31, 1819 West Hills Long Island

Houses and rooms are full of perfumes….the shelvesare crowded with perfumes

I breathe the fragrance myself, and know it and like it.The distillation would intoxicate me also, but I shall not let it.

The atmosphere is not a perfume….it has no taste ofthe distillation….it is odorless,

It is for my mouth….I am in love with it,I will go to the bank by the wood and become undisguised

and naked,I am mad for it to be in contact with me

Page 7: Happy Birthday Walt Whitman Song of Myself Civil War Poetry May 31, 1819 West Hills Long Island

The runaway slave came to my house and stopped outside,I heard his motions crackling the twigs of the woodpile,Through the swung half-door of the kitchen I saw him

limpsey and weak,And went where he sat on a log, and led him in and assured

him,And brought water and filled a tub for his sweated body and

bruised feet,And gave him a room that entered from my own, and gave

him some coarse clean clothes,And remember perfectly well his revolving eyes and his

awkwardness,And remember putting plasters on the galls of his neck and

ankles;He staid with me a week before he was recuperated and

passed north,I had him sit next me at table….my firelock leaned in

the corner

Page 8: Happy Birthday Walt Whitman Song of Myself Civil War Poetry May 31, 1819 West Hills Long Island

Twenty-eight young men bathe by the shore,Twenty-eight young men, and all so friendly,Twenty-eight years of womanly life, and all so lonesome.

She owns the fine house by the rise of the bank,She hides handsome and richly drest aft the blinds of the

window.

Which of the young men does she like the best?Ah the homeliest of them is beautiful to her.

Where are you off to, lady? For I see you,You splash in the water there, yet stay stock still in your room.

Dancing and laughing along the beach came the twenty-ninth bather,

The rest did not see her, but she saw them and loved them.

The beards of the young men glistened with wet, it ran fromtheir long hair,

Little streams passed all over their bodies

An unseen hand also passed over their bodies,It descended tremblingly from their temples and ribs

Page 9: Happy Birthday Walt Whitman Song of Myself Civil War Poetry May 31, 1819 West Hills Long Island

I am the poet of the body,And I am the poet of the soul.

Walt Whitman, an American one of the roughs, a kosmos,Disorderly fleshy and sensual….eating drinking and

breedingNo sentimentalist….not stander above men and women or

apart from them….no more modest than immodest.

I speak the password primeval….I give the sign of democracy;By God! I will accept nothing which all cannot have their

counterpart of on the same terms.

Divine I am inside and out, and I make holy whatever I touch or am touched from;

The scent of these arm-pits is aroma finer than prayer,This head is more than churches or bibles or creeds.

Page 10: Happy Birthday Walt Whitman Song of Myself Civil War Poetry May 31, 1819 West Hills Long Island

Do I contradict myself?Very well then….I contradict myself;I am large….I contain multitudes.

I concentrate toward them that are nigh….I wait onthe door-slab.

Who has done his day’s work and will soonest be throughwith his supper?

Who wishes to walk with me?

Will you speak before I am gone? Will you prove alreadytoo late?

The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me….hecomplains of my gab and my loitering.

I too am not a bit tamed….I too am untranslatable,I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.

Page 11: Happy Birthday Walt Whitman Song of Myself Civil War Poetry May 31, 1819 West Hills Long Island

Mesmerism/Spiritualism

Women’s Movement

Swedenborgianism

Fourierism

Slavery

Western Expansion

Transcendentalism

Hucksterism and Celebrity Culture

Carpenter / Manual Laborer

Printer / Journalist

Volunteer Nurse

Free Love

Mid-19th CenturyPolitical Corruption and Incompetence

Teacher

New York Roughs

PhrenologyPre-Darwinian

evolutionary and geological

science

Pfaff’s Bohemians

Performance Culture

Theater Oratory

Music

Harmonialism

Market Capitalism

TechnologicalChange

Visual Arts

Urbanization

PhotographyLandscape and Genre Painting

Cultural Expositions

Page 12: Happy Birthday Walt Whitman Song of Myself Civil War Poetry May 31, 1819 West Hills Long Island

Timeline0 1848: Mexican Cession/ Seneca

Falls Convention0 1849: Gold Rush/ Asiatic Cholera

Epidemic0 1850: Compromise of 1850/

Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter 0 1851: Melville’s Moby Dick0 1852: Harriet Beecher Stowe’s

Uncle Tom’s Cabin0 1853: Crystal Palace Art and

Industry Exposition opens in New York

0 1854: Kansas / Nebraska Act, Fugitive Slave Anthony Burns captured in North and returned to slavery in South / Walden

0 1855 Brooklyn’s population hits 500,000 / Whitman first publishes Leaves of Grass

0 1856: Bloody Kansas / Charles Sumner beaten by Preston J. Brooks of South Carolina

0 1857: Dred Scott – no black citizenship and Missouri Compromise unconstitutional

0 1858: Lincoln Douglass Debates0 1859: John Brown takes Harper’s

Ferry and is captured and hanged / first U.S. oil strike in Pennsylvania

0 1860-61 Lincoln elected president / 11 states secede and form confederacy / firing on Fort Sumter / Battle of Bull Run

Page 13: Happy Birthday Walt Whitman Song of Myself Civil War Poetry May 31, 1819 West Hills Long Island

Open Letter to Emerson 1856

Always America will be agitated and turbulent. This day it is taking shape, not to be less so, but to be more so, stormily, capriciously, on native principles, with such vast proportions of parts! As for me, I love screaming, wrestling, boiling-hot days.

Page 14: Happy Birthday Walt Whitman Song of Myself Civil War Poetry May 31, 1819 West Hills Long Island

Beat! Beat! Drums!

Beat! beat! drums! ---blow! bugles! blow!Make no parely—stop for no expostulation,Mind not the timid---mind not the weeper or prayer,Mind not the old man beseeching the young man,Let not the child’s voice be heard, nor the mother’s entreaties,Make even the trestles to shake the dead where they lie

awaiting the hearsesSo strong you thump O terrible drums—so loud you bugles

blow.

Page 15: Happy Birthday Walt Whitman Song of Myself Civil War Poetry May 31, 1819 West Hills Long Island

The Wound Dresser (Section 3)

On, on I go, (open doors of time! Open hospital doors!)The crush’d head I dress, (poor crazed hand tear not the

bandage away,)The neck of the cavalry-man with the bullet through and

through I examine,Hard the breathing rattles, quite glazed already the eye, yet

life struggles hard,(Come sweet death! be persuaded O beautiful death!In mercy come quickly.)

From the stump of the arm, the amputated hand,I undo the clotted lint, remove the slough, wash off the matter and blood,Back on his pillow the solder bends with curv’d neck and

side-falling head,His eyes are closed, his face is pale, he dares not look on the

bloody stump,And has not yet look’d on it.

Page 16: Happy Birthday Walt Whitman Song of Myself Civil War Poetry May 31, 1819 West Hills Long Island

The Wound Dresser (Section 3 continued)

I dress a wound in the side, deep, deep,But a day or two more, for see the frame all wasted and

sinking,And the yellow-blue countenance see.

I dress the perforated shoulder, the foot with the bullet-wound,

Cleanse the one with a gnawing and putrid gangrene, so sickening, so offensive,

While the attendant stands behind aside me holding the tray and pail.

I am faithful, I do not give out,The fractur’d thigh, the knee, the wound in the abdomen,These and more I dress with impassive hand, (yet deep in

my breast a fire, a burning flame)

Page 17: Happy Birthday Walt Whitman Song of Myself Civil War Poetry May 31, 1819 West Hills Long Island

Come Up From the Fields Father

Come up from the fields father, here’s a letter from our Pete,And come to the front door mother, here’s a letter from thy dear son.

Lo, ‘tis autumnLo, where the trees, deeper green, yellower and redder,Cool and sweeten Ohio’s villages with leaves fluttering in the

moderate wind,Where apples ripe in the orchards hang and grapes on the

trellis’d vines,(Smell you the smell of the grapes on the vines?Smell you the buckwheat where the bees were lately

buzzing?)

Down in the fields all prospers well,But now from the fields come father, come at daughter’s callAnd come to the entry mother, to the front door come right away.

Page 18: Happy Birthday Walt Whitman Song of Myself Civil War Poetry May 31, 1819 West Hills Long Island

Reconciliation

Word over all, beautiful as the sky,Beautiful that war and all its deeds of carnage must in time

be utterly lost,That the hands of the sisters Death and Night incessantly

softly wash again, and ever again, this soil’d world;For my enemy is dead, a man divine as myself is dead,I look where he lies white-faced and still in the coffin—I

draw near,Bend down and touch lightly with my lips the white face in the coffin.

Page 19: Happy Birthday Walt Whitman Song of Myself Civil War Poetry May 31, 1819 West Hills Long Island

Over the Carnage Rose Prophetic a Voice

Over the carnage rose prophetic a voice,Be not dishearten’d, affection shall solve the problems of

freedom yet,Those who love each other shall become invincible,They shall yet make Columbia victorious.

Sons of the Mother of All, you shall yet be victorious,You shall yet laugh to scorn the attacks of all the remainder

of the earth.

No danger shall balk Columbia’s lovers,If need be a thousand shall sternly immolate themselves for o

one.

One from Massachusetts shall be a Missourian’s comrade,From Maine, and from hot Carolina, and another an

Oregonese, shall be friends triune,More precious to each other than all the riches of the earth

Page 20: Happy Birthday Walt Whitman Song of Myself Civil War Poetry May 31, 1819 West Hills Long Island

Over the Carnage Rose Prophetic a Voice (continued)

To Michigan, Florida perfumes shall tenderly come,Not the perfumes of flowers, but sweeter, and wafted

beyond death.

It shall be customary in the houses and streets to see manlyaffection,

The most dauntless and rude shall touch face to face lightly,The dependence of Liberty shall be lovers,The continuance of Equality shall be comrades.

These shall tie you and band you stronger than hoops of iron,I ecstatic, O partners! O lands! With the love of lovers tie you.

(Were you looking to be held together by lawyers?Or by an agreement on a paper? or by arms?Nay, nor the world, nor any living thing, will so cohere.)

Page 21: Happy Birthday Walt Whitman Song of Myself Civil War Poetry May 31, 1819 West Hills Long Island

Further Explorationwww.whitmanarchive.org

www.whitmans-brooklyn.org

Reynolds, David. Walt Whitman. Oxford University Press, 2005.

Miller, Matt. Collage of Myself: Walt Whitman and the Making of Leaves of Grass. University of Nebraska, 2010.