ENGD59 Topics in American Poetry: The Poems of Walt Whitman (1855-1891)
Instructor: Neal Dolan
Meeting Times: Mondays 12-3pm
“Which way does your beard point tonight, Walt Whitman?” Allen Ginsberg asked a specter of America’s greatest poet who appeared to him late one evening in a California supermarket circa 1956. The question was not entirely in jest. It recognized Whitman’s stature as a prophet and exemplar of modern liberal-democratic moral consciousness -- a role to which he brazenly appointed himself in his revolutionary free-verse poem of 1855, Leaves of Grass, and which he expanded upon in six subsequent editions until his death in 1892. This course works chronologically through most of the astounding major poems that Whitman wrote during these years. We explore how they sought to provide new fundamental orientation -- towards self, birth, death, sex, history, time, politics, nationality, God(s), nature -- to readers, including ourselves, inhabiting what Whitman understood and embraced as the newly individualistic, egalitarian, and technologically advanced conditions of modern existence.
Note: Pre-1900 course
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