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Whitman’s Rhetoric of Death and the Civil War

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For Whitman, death is a productive stage in the infinite and progressive development of the human soul. It also provides a solid spiritual basis for nurturing each individual consciousness with a strong sense of self. Whitman thought it necessary to empower the individual through death for the democratic future of the restored nation after the Civil War. His death poems, therefore, combine the private and public spheres and are characterized by many binaries―progressive and conservative, social and individual, realistic and sentimental. However, much of Whitman scholarship has failed to explore the complex implications of death in his poetry, reading his texts as an ideologically conservative apology for the patriotic cause of war or as a progressive critique of the dominant cultural and religious discourses. Whitman’s death poems cover a wide range, from his transcendentalist convictions about the afterlife to a memorializing of the private and public trauma and wounds. In his rhetoric of death, he identifies death with nature and affirms the natural law of eternal regeneration through the speaker’s awakening, as can be seen in “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” and “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.” Whitman’s idea of perennial resurrections within the material world cannot completely silence the voices of doubt and anxiety about death, but it does revitalize a libertarian confidence in American democracy and confederate harmony among the states with its emphasis on the divinity inherent in every human being.

Abstract

For Whitman, death is a productive stage in the infinite and progressive development of the human soul. It also provides a solid spiritual basis for nurturing each individual consciousness with a strong sense of self. Whitman thought it necessary to empower the individual through death for the democratic future of the restored nation after the Civil War. His death poems, therefore, combine the private and public spheres and are characterized by many binaries―progressive and conservative, social and individual, realistic and sentimental. However, much of Whitman scholarship has failed to explore the complex implications of death in his poetry, reading his texts as an ideologically conservative apology for the patriotic cause of war or as a progressive critique of the dominant cultural and religious discourses. Whitman’s death poems cover a wide range, from his transcendentalist convictions about the afterlife to a memorializing of the private and public trauma and wounds. In his rhetoric of death, he identifies death with nature and affirms the natural law of eternal regeneration through the speaker’s awakening, as can be seen in “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” and “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.” Whitman’s idea of perennial resurrections within the material world cannot completely silence the voices of doubt and anxiety about death, but it does revitalize a libertarian confidence in American democracy and confederate harmony among the states with its emphasis on the divinity inherent in every human being.

참고문헌 (18)

  1. Davis, Robert Leigh, "Whitman and the Romance of Medicine" (1997), U of California P
  2. Getaways, Ted, "Civil War Poems in Drum-Taps and Memories of President Lincoln, In A Companion to Walt Whitman", pp.522~538 (2009), Blackwell
  3. Kuebrich, David, "Minor Prophecy: Walt Whitman’s New American Religion" (1989), Indiana UP
  4. Lewis, R. W. B., "Always Going out and Coming In, In Harold Bloom", pp.99~125 (1985), Chelsea House
  5. Mark, Ivan, "The Trial of the Poet: An Interpretation of the First Edition of Leaves of Grass" (1976), Columbia UP
  6. Mancuso, Luke, "A Companion to Walt Whitman", pp.290~310 (2009), Blackwell
  7. Pearce, Roy Harvey, "Whitman Justified: The Poet in 1960, In Harold Bloom", pp.65~86 (1985), Chelsea House
  8. Pollak, Vivian R, "Death as Repression, Repression as Death: A Reading of Whitman’s “Calamus” Poems, In Walt Whitman of Mickle Street: A Centennial Collection", pp.179~193 (1994), U of Tennessee P
  9. Reynolds, David S, "Walt Whitman’s America: A Cultural Biography" (1995), Knopf
  10. Rowe, John Carlos, "At Emerson’s Tomb: The Politics of Classic American Literature" (1997), Columbia UP
  11. Scheick, William J, "Death and Afterlife, In A Companion to Walt Whitman", pp.325~340 (2009), Blackwell
  12. Sweet, Timothy, "Traces of War: Poetry, Photography, and the Crisis of the Union" (1990), Johns Hopkins UP
  13. Thomas, Wynn, "Fratricide and Brotherly Love: Whitman and the Civil War, In The Cambridge Companion to Walt Whitman", pp.27~44 (1995), Cambridge UP
  14. Whitman, Walt, "Memoranda During the War and Death of Abraham Lincoln" (1962), Indiana UP
  15. Whitman, Walt, "Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts 6" (1984), New York UP
  16. Whitman, Walt, "Prose Works, 1892 I" (1963), New York UP
  17. Whitman, Walt, "Walt Whitman: Poetry and Prose" (1996), Library of America
  18. Zweig, Paul, "The Wound-Dresser, In Walt Whitman", pp.143~157 (1985), Chelsea House

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