A study of the significance of Walt Whitman's use of geography in Leaves of Grass.

Walt Whitman has long been celebrated as a Romantic writer who celebrates the self, reveres Nature, claims unity in all things, and sings praises to humanity. However, some of what Whitman has to say has been overlooked. Whitman often questioned the goodness of humanity. He recognized evil in various shapes. He pondered death and the imperturbability of Nature to human death. He exhibited nightmarish imagery in some of his works and gory violence in others. While Whitman has long been called a celebratory poet, he is nevertheless also in part a writer of the Dark Romantic.

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Walt Whitman was a feminist, and this assertion can be supported by excerpts from his prose, poetry, and conversation. Furthermore, the poet's circle of associates, chronology, and place of residence also lend credence to the hypothesis stating Whitman's subscription to feminist credos. A pro-feminine attitude is evident in much of Whitman's work, and his ties to the women's rights movement of the nineteenth century do influence the poet's portrayal of women. But the section of poems titled "Children of Adam" proves to be an anomaly in Walt Whitman's feminist attitudes. Instead of portraying women as equals, able to walk a path of equanimity with males, the women of "Children of Adam" are often obscured in linguistic veils or subjugated to the poet's Adamic rhetoric.

Inspired by Walt Whitman's "A Song of Myself," this collection of poetry explores a narrative of the American Dream and intergenerational grief through a queered self.

Thesis advisor: Robert Kern / In this paper, I argue that Walt Whitman alters his poetic program from his first to second edition of Leaves of Grass. By intensifying the emphasis on individuality and personality, Whitman overcomes the limitations of his vastness by allowing for intimate contact with a future reader. I continue to argue that the poem "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" exemplifies the emphasis on individuality and personal union. Instead of assuming a relationship with his reader, Whitman sets for himself the goal of making this relationship possible. / Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2004. / Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: English. / Discipline: College Honors Program.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Boston University / PLEASE NOTE: Boston University Libraries did not receive an Authorization To Manage form for this thesis or dissertation. It is therefore not openly accessible, though it may be available by request. If you are the author or principal advisor of this work and would like to request open access for it, please contact us at open-help@bu.edu. Thank you. / This dissertation examines the photographs created by Edward Weston during his travels through the United States in 1941 and intended for a luxury reprint of Walt Whitman's Leaves ofGrass published by the Limited Editions Club in 1942. By contrasting the hundreds of photographs Weston made now residing in archives and collections with the forty-nine images ultimately selected and arranged by the Club's director, George Macy, I argue that Weston's larger, more complex and diverse version of America more closely resembled Whitman's text than his publisher's limited selection. Moreover, this under-examined body of work promotes a new understanding of Weston's late oeuvre; inspired by cross-country travel, Whitman's poetry, and other artists, Weston tackled new subject matter, experimented with different styles, and synthesized artistic and documentary modes in his photographs. Chapter I introduces the commission, the role of Weston's wife Charis Wilson in the project, the timely choice in 1941 of pairing Whitman and Weston, both of whom challenged boundaries of their respective media, and the outcome of the book's design. Chapter 2 turns to an analysis of the sequence of the first ten images as representative of Macy's caption-driven approach to the book, which generally discouraged the probing of close relationships among images. The chapter concludes with an analysis of the images themselves paired with close readings of select poems in order to establish the parallels in sensibility of the two artists. Chapters 3 through 5 broaden the discussion by including Weston's unpublished images from the 1941 trip. Focusing on Weston's portraits, Chapter 3 discusses Weston's diverse sitters-African and Native Americans and womensometimes selected while researching ethnography. Chapter 4 focuses on landscapesindustrial, urban, desert, and rural-in which he engaged with popular American imagery and created art and documentary images. Chapter 5 analyzes Weston's photographs of plantation ruins and cemeteries in Louisiana, and folk art and customs for which he recorded examples of American ethnography. Through examination of these images, a new picture of Weston emerges as not only a modernist art photographer, but also a photographer with deep interests in American people, landscape, and culture. / 2031-01-01

My dissertation tracks the development of literary advertising in the United States during the late-nineteenth century through the emergence and evolution of Walt Whitman as a recognizable brand name. Situating the strategies of Whitman and his publishers within the broader context of nineteenth-century literary advertising, I trace the roots of modern publishing practices back to the experiments of a generation of American authors and would-be promoters. At the intersection of the professional author's ascent in the United States and the growing centralization and sophistication of the advertising trade, a new anxiety surfaces in the world of nineteenth-century American publishing: how best to sell the literary text and, in turn, market its author. Whitman's attempts to promote himself and Leaves of Grass--efforts that were sometimes prescient, occasionally ludicrous--focus this study of a period in literary advertising when professional authorship was a relatively new reality, poetry was widely read, and the rise of the literary celebrity was in the making. The multiple publications of Leaves of Grass may not, in their time, have defined this moment of American literary history, but retrospectively they invite us to consider how poets and publishers distinguished their literary commodities and authorial personas in rapidly expanding and increasingly unpredictable literary markets. This dissertation develops an important new dimension to the study of Whitman and the culture of literary celebrity: an in-depth examination of the promotional artifacts circulating in and around Leaves of Grass--the newspaper advertisements, circulars, print ornaments, promotional schemes, posters, broadsides, engravings, book covers, and critical annexes that were as central to Whitman's brand as his poetry. This book-studies oriented methodology challenges us to consider the role "non-literary" elements have played in the reception and consumption of literary works, especially in establishing the iconic status of authors like Whitman. Each chapter is devoted to a marker of the Whitman brand--an image, symbol, or promotional strategy that served as a metaphoric trademark of the poet and his distinct textual product. Chapter 1, "`No other matter but poems': Promotion Paratexts and Whitman's Gymnastic Reader," examines the use of promotion paratext to advertise the first three editions of Leaves of Grass and the sophisticated reading practice these texts recruited. Chapter 2, "'I announce a man or woman coming': The Poet as Printer's Fist," looks at Whitman's use of the "manicule" (a small pointing hand) as a symbol of the poet's function reproduced in and on Leaves of Grass. Chapter 3, "`Anything honest to sell books': Autograph-hunting and the Whitmanian Imprimatur," considers Whitman's relationship to the culture of autograph collecting and his innovative use of his own signature as a promotional device. Chapter 4, "Am I Not a Man and a Poet?: Branding Walt Whitman," examines the two most famous faces of the Whitman brand--Whitman the Bowery boy rough and Whitman the Good Gray Poet--revealing how those seemingly conflicting personas became the target of racialized critiques during the 1860s.

Side-by-side, surprisingly, in the appendix of the Buffalo Historical Society’s publication Obsequies of Red Jacket at Buffalo, E. Pauline Johnson and Walt Whitman memorialize Red Jacket’s reburial on October 9, 1884, with their respective poems, “The Re-interment of Red Jacket” and “Red Jacket, (From Aloft.).” Through this textual showdown, this report interrogates the usefulness of the vanishing Indians narrative, instead interpreting the event as the locus of a heterogeneous, spiritual contest over bodies and their potential significations. Although orchestrated by Buffalo’s European American elites, the reburial also included representatives from the Six Nations tribes, among them Mohawk Ely S. Parker as well as Johnson. Paying attention to heterogeneity, whether differences in religion, tribal affiliation or class, at the event allows us to understand the varying stakes of the conflict, from debates over Christianity to immigration to the establishment of literary and social relations. While Whitman, nearing the end of his life, contemplates proper memorialization in “Red Jacket, (From Aloft.),” Johnson deploys the elegy to lay claim to her Native ancestry and burgeoning literary career. Monumentalizations often attempt to conceal such heterogeneity by creating the illusion of a dominant, national narrative. Alive within these events, nevertheless, a different image persists, one that preserves the messy debates over religion, land settlement, immigration, citizenship and transforming Native governments that actual memorialization ceremonies create. / text

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2000. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 249-258). Available also in a digital version from Dissertation Abstracts.