This dissertation recasts the history of sociology in the United States by focusing on one the discipline’s most surprising and neglected sources: the poetry of Walt Whitman (1819 -1892). Tracing the period in intellectual history—from, roughly, the end of the U.S. Civil War to the country’s entry into World War II—in which sociology emerged from a confluence of reform movements and cohered in the university, I seek to demonstrate how the recirculation of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass across some of the founding texts of social science in the United States helped furnish the conceptual vocabulary for a compassionate, impartial and distinctively “American” sociology. The first half of the project situates the development of Whitman’s poetry in the discursive milieu of nineteenth-century “Social Science”—the movement of intellectuals and activists that applied philosophical ideals to Gilded Age “social problems.” I argue that Walt Whitman engaged and merged the terms and images of social science into his poetry, helping to transform and ferry its rhetoric into concepts then imbibed by modern social theorists. The latter half of the thesis turns to an examination of the poet’s presence in the instituting texts of academic sociology. Fusing the comparative methods of the “history of ideas” with more recent trends in reception theory and book studies, I survey documents from a range of Progressive Era institutions. Plotting interpretations of Leaves of Grass by some of the nation’s earliest social scientists—including Daniel Brinton, Edward A. Ross, Robert Park, Ruth Benedict and Howard Odum—across an array of monographs, lectures, letters, journal articles and protest speeches, I consider the deployment of Whitman against the then-forming backgrounds of cultural anthropology, social control theory and the sociology of race in the early twentieth century. In the end, my project aims to reassemble the literary foundation of American culture’s “sociological imagination” by using Whitman’s presence at its matrix as a case study.

Focusing on the three-year period from 1859 to 1862 during which the poet Walt Whitman frequented Pfaff's Beer Cellar on Broadway in New York, this dissertation examines how the barroom and its unique clientele shaped the poet's life and writings. This project demonstrates that Pfaff's functioned as an American saloon and a popular salon and argues that the communities of beer cellar regulars Whitman joined there made Pfaff's the most significant social and literary space of his career. Whitman's participation in two social and intellectual communities at Pfaff's was vital to his literary production before and during the Civil War. While Whitman prepared the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass for publication, he joined a group of writers and artists at the beer cellar--a group now recognized as the first American Bohemians. Later, he became a central figure in the "Fred Gray Association," a little-known group of young Pfaffians. This dissertation shows that Whitman's membership in the Bohemian coterie influenced his writing and revision of his homoerotic Calamus poems, first published in Leaves of Grass (1860). It also reveals that Whitman's time with the Fred Gray members served as a foreground for his volunteer work in Washington's wartime hospitals, where he not only attempted to recreate the beer cellar environment as best he could under terrible conditions, but he also continued to practice the theories of affection he put forth in Calamus . By studying Whitman's years at Pfaff's through an interdisciplinary approach that draws on methodologies ranging from cultural studies and literary history to gender and sexuality studies, this dissertation makes significant contributions to several fields of literary study. In addition to offering a fuller understanding of Whitman's literary production at Pfaff's, it contributes to biographical studies of the poet by drawing connections between his personal and professional transitions from temperance writer to bar-hopping Bohemian, and, finally, from a Pfaffian poet to a hospital volunteer. This study also adds to the history of sexuality by places Whitman's Calamus poems, which are counted among his most sexually radical, in the context of nineteenth-century debates concerning gender and sexuality. It also explores the counter-cultural communities that formed at Pfaff's and illuminates how Whitman's writing is intertwined with the space of the barroom and his relationships to its inhabitants. Finally, this dissertation illustrates how underground networks respond to the larger social and cultural milieus that they both exist within and position themselves against.

This dissertation examines the way the work of two nineteenth-century American authors, Walt Whitman and Edgar Allan Poe, borrowed from, challenged, and even worked to support prevailing cultural attitudes, conventions, and ideas regarding death, mourning and memorializing as they produced their poems and tales, articulated their thoughts regarding the purpose and act of producing and reading literature, and designed their material book or magazine objects. Using both new historicist and book studies methodologies, it exposes how these writers drew upon literary, ritual, and material practices of this culture, and how, in turn, this culture provided an interpretive framework for understanding such work. In its initial three chapters, which focus largely on Edgar Allan Poe, this dissertation revisits Poe's aesthetic philosophies ("The Poetic Principle" and "The Philosophy of Composition"), much of his most notable Gothic work (such as "Annabel Lee" and "The Raven"), readers' responses to this work, and his own attempts or designs to mass-produce his personal script (in "A Chapter on Autography," "Anastatic Printing," and his cover for The Stylus) in order to revise our understanding of his relationship to this culture and its literary work, exposing a more sympathetic and less subversive relationship than is usually assumed. It illumines how Poe's aesthetic philosophies were aligned with those that undergird many of the contemporary mourning objects of the day, how his otherwise Gothic and macabre literature nevertheless served rather conventional and even recuperative ends by exposing the necessity of and inviting readers to participate in culturally sanctioned acts of mourning, and how he sought to confirm the harmony between his work and more conventional "consolation" or mourning literature by actively seeking to bring that work (and the "self" that produced it) visibly before his readership in a medium that this culture held was a reliable indicator of the nature and intent of both that work and its producer - namely his own personal script. In its latter three chapters, this dissertation illuminates Whitman's own extensive use of mourning and memorial conventions in his work, disclosing the way his 1855 Leaves of Grass relied, in both its literary and physical construction, upon the conventions of mourning and memorial literature, detailing the way his 1865 book of Civil War poetry Drum-Taps sought to unite a national body politic by creating a poetic and material text capable of allowing a grieving public readership to reconnect with and successfully mourn their dead, and how his 1876 Two Rivulets, overtly conceived of as a memorial volume, made use of the conventions associated with mourning and memorializing to bring readers to a more democratic understanding of "self" that Whitman believed would transform America into the democratic utopia it was destined to become. In revealing the way in which these authors' works reflect and reflect upon this culture, its ideologies, rituals, and practices, the dissertation also illumines an otherwise critically underexplored connection between these two writers. It details the influence of Poe's work on Whitman's poetic project, and borrows from Whitman's critical response to Poe in order to recast our understanding of Poe's literature in the manner detailed above. Thus, this dissertation offers new interpretations of some of the period's most canonical literature, alters our thinking about the relationship of these authors to each other and to nineteenth-century sentimental culture, and, finally, exposes a curious interdependence between Gothic and more transcendental literature that has implications not only for reading the work of Whitman and Poe, but for interpreting these literatures more generally.

This survey follows the development of working-class poetry from Whitman to contemporary poets. It begins by considering how the need for working-class poetry emerged. Whitman’s “Song of Myself” sought to democratize poetry both my challenging previous poetic formal conventions and broadening the scope of included subjects. Williams also challenged formal expectations, but both were limited by their historical and socioeconomic position. To combat this, I include the twentieth-century poets Ignatow and Levine who began in the working class so they could speak truths that had not been published before. Ignatow includes the phrase “dream of completion” which encapsulates various feelings of the working class. This dream could include moments of temporary leisure, but also feeling completed by societal acceptance or understanding. Finally, I include the contemporary poets Laux, Addonizio, and Espada. They complicate the “dream of completion” narrative with issues surrounding gender and race, and do not seek to find resolution.

Informe de Seminario para optar al grado de Licenciado en Lengua y Literatura Inglesa

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The rediscovery of a number of Walt Whitman's early fictions prompts a discussion of where they belong within the larger web of Whitman scholarship. Though we have been aware of the existence of these writings for quite some time, frequently these works return to obscurity soon after being discovered due to the lack of research regarding them. This thesis presents an alternative framework whereby these novels can be integrated into a hypertextual model centered on Leaves of Grass (1855) and Whitman's overall authorial identity. I build on Ed Folsom and Kenneth Price's work creating a hypertext archive incorporating Whitman's works, allowing constraints associated with traditional print form to be overcome. My analysis centers on the recently rediscovered novel The Life and Adventures of Jack Engle (1852) due to its unique publication date. Because we possess so little of Whitman's public writing from the immediate leadup to his first publication of Leaves of Grass, I focus on tracing linguistic and thematic development across the two works. With the help of digital textual analytical tools, I find specific links between the works and argue that Whitman used the novel to experiment with transcendental language and themes that would characterize his later poetic voice. Based on this connection, novels like The Life and Adventures of Jack Engle thrive due to their ability to offer new perspectives on the source text of Leaves of Grass. Within this model, Leaves of Grass also gains new importance due to highlighting the value of the satellite texts like The Life and Adventure of Jack Engle, remedying their previous ambiguous value when isolated. I then discuss how this hypertextual model aids scholars to more easily incorporate Whitman's fiction into future research due to the increased accessibility it provides. Finally, the thesis discusses how this model repositions the role of the archive as more than simply a receptacle of preservation. Instead, it now operates as a source of redefinition by providing artifacts that reimagine period and authorial narratives through this hypertextual model.

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