My Whitman Assignment

Whitman’s poem is indeed very large, and does contain multitudes. Of its several thematic strands is a huge, swooping travel narrative as the speaker of the poem journeys to North and South, through battlefields, fire, bridal chambers, birthing rooms, and farmlands to bring us a kind of comprehensive American experience.

For Tuesday: read around in Lands of the Slave and the Free: or Cuba, the United States, and Canada, a more traditional, prose travel narrative of a journey to America in 1857 by the Englishman Henry A. Murray. Note the many shared points of interest in 1850’s America upon which both Whitman’s and Murray’s travel narratives alight: for example, aqueducts, slavery, the shipping industry, "bridal chambers", American energy and industriousness, emigration, and railroads. Feel free to take Murray’s advice and skim (“If the reader finds me tedious in any details uninteresting to him, I trust that a judicious skipping of a few leaves will bring us again into an agreeable companionship.”) but read enough to get a good idea of the narrative.

Pay attention to how Murray constructs his narrative. What kind of metaphors does he use, what kind of language, what kind of tone and how is it communicated? If we take it as a given, that, in writing about America, both Whitman and Murray probably subscribe to some (very 19th century) German Romanticist notion of a national zeitgeist (i.e. Herder & Hegel's philosophy of history), what is your chosen object of interest constructed to say about America and the speaker's relation to it?

Now write a couple of paragraphs looking closely at a portion of Murray’s text that deals with something also included in Whitman’s, such as one of the above examples. How does Murray view the subject of interest, and what broader point does he use it to make about America? How does this portion of Murray’s text fit into his overall travel narrative?

Consider whether reading Murray on the same subject now informs your reading of the subject in Whitman, and why, or why not. Does Whitman’s handling of the subject convey the same emotion or idea as Murray’s? Is an understanding of Murray’s point of view on the subject perhaps implied within Whitman’s? Consider what conventions of the travel narrative Murray might be including with which Whitman might be playing, and how Whitman is using them to speak about America.

Try to make the assignment open up the poem, and if after beginning it, you find the subject you chose isn’t conducive to saying anything interesting, choose another one.