Becoming America - An Exploration of American Literature from Precolonial to Post-Revolution, 2018a

BECOMING AMERICA
REVOLUTIONARY AND EARLY NATIONAL PERIOD LITERATURE
4. How does the unnamed narrator of “Bartleby, the Scrivener” fail
Bartleby? Does his failure leave the narrator unredeemable? How might
the narrator’s treatment of and relation to Bartleby connect with the
(possible) meaning of the Dead Letter Oce?
4.24 WALT WHITMAN
(1819 – 1892)
The following content originally appeared in Writing the Nation: A Concise
Introduction to American Literature 1865 to Present by the University System of
Georgia, and is used in accordance to license CC BY-SA 4.0.
The second of nine children and
born in 1819 to a Long Island farmer and
carpenter, Walt Whitman is both the
journeyman poet of American-ness and
its champion. A journalist and newspaper
editor throughout his life, Whitman
worked as a law clerk, a schoolteacher,
a printer, a civil servant, and a hospital
aide, but he was always writing; from his
teenage years until his death, his byline
was on constant view. Contemporary
reports suggest that Whitman was an
industrious worker but that he was often
accused of idleness because his habit of
long midday walks contrasted sharply
with nineteenth-century attitudes
toward work. In “Song of Myself,”
Whitman addressed these critics directly
by writing, “I loafe and invite my soul,/
I lean and loafe at my ease observing
Image 4.22 | Walt Whitman
a spear of summer grass” (4—5). For Photographer | G. Frank E. Pearsall
Source | Wikimedia Commons
Whitman, too much industry dulled the
License | Public Domain
ability to celebrate the ordinary. In the
preface to the rst edition of Leaves of Grass in 1855, Whitman expounds on his
love for the common: “Other states indicate themselves in their deputies . . . but
the genius of the United States is not best or most in its executives or legislators,
nor in its ambassadors or authors or colleges or churches or parlors, nor even in its
newspapers or inventors . . . but always most in the common people.” Whitman’s
love for the common people that he encountered and observed in the urban centers
of the north is expressed in all of his poetry; if his British contemporary Alfred Lord
Tennyson is the national poet of mourning, then Whitman is the national poet of
celebration.
Page | 1422