Bloom's How to Write about Walt Whitman (Bloom's How to Write About Literature)

273 Pages·2009·2.33 MB·English

by  Frank D. Casale

B L O O M’ S
How to write about
frank d. Casale
Introduction by Harold Bloom
Walt
Whitman
Bloom’s How to Write about Walt Whitman
Copyright © 2010 by Infobase Publishing
Introduction © 2010 by Harold Bloom
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Bloom’s Literary Criticism
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Casale, Frank D.
Bloom’s how to write about Walt Whitman /Frank D. Casale ; introduction by
Harold Bloom.
p. cm.—(Bloom’s how to write about literature)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-60413-310-3 (hardcover: acid-freep aper)
ISBN 978-1-43812-768-2 (e-book)
1. Whitman, Walt, 1819–1892—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Criticism—
Authorship. 3. Report writing. I. Bloom, Harold. II. Title. III. Series.
PS3238.C18 2009
811'.3—dc22 2009004596
Bloom’s Literary Criticism books are available at special discounts when purchased in
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Cover design by Alicia Post
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Cover printed by Art Print Company, Taylor PA
Book printed and bound by Maple Press, York PA
Printed in the United States of America
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Contents
Series Introduction v
Volume Introduction vi
How to Write a Good Essay 1
How to Write about Walt Whitman 42
“One’s Self I Sing” 60
“Starting from Paumanok” 68
“Song of Myself” 82
“I Sing the Body Electric” 103
“A Glimpse” 113
“When I Heard at the Close of Day” 120
“Whoever You Are Holding Me Now in Hand” 128
“First O Songs for a Prelude” 138
“Cavalry Crossing a Ford” 147
“The Wound Dresser” 153
“O Captain! My Captain!” 164
“When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” 171
“Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” 179
“Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” 188
“When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer” 197
“A Noiseless Patient Spider” 212
“Passage to India” 219
“Song of the Broad Axe” 229
“Song of the Exposition” 240
“The Compost” 249
Index 258
serIes
IntroduCtIon
Bloom’s How to Write about Literature series is designed to inspire
students to write fine essays on great writers and their works. Each
volume in the series begins with an introduction by Harold Bloom, medi-
tating on the challenges and rewards of writing about the volume’s sub-
ject author. The first chapter then provides detailed instructions on how
to write a good essay, including how to find a thesis; how to develop an
outline; how to write a good introduction, body text, and conclusion;
how to cite sources; and more. The second chapter provides a brief over-
view of the issues involved in writing about the subject author and then
a number of suggestions for paper topics, with accompanying strategies
for addressing each topic. Succeeding chapters cover the author’s major
works.
The paper topics suggested within this book are open-ended, and the
brief strategies provided are designed to give students a push forward
in the writing process rather than a road map to success. The aim of
the book is to pose questions, not answer them. Many different kinds of
papers could result from each topic. As always, the success of each paper
will depend completely on the writer’s skill and imagination.
v
How to write about
walt wHitman:
introduction
by Harold Bloom
Begin by clearing your mind of the nonsense that our nation’s great-
est writer can be understood merely in terms of his homoerotic
orientation. We live in an age of academic and journalistic slogans
that usurp the place of deep reading and clear thinking. A disciple of
Emerson’s doctrine of self-reliance, Walt Whitman thought and wrote
for himself and for the elite reader. Though his enabling fiction was
that he addressed a large body of uneducated fellow Americans, that
was a trope or metaphor for his poetic stance. Then and since, he is a
subtle, difficult, evasive great poet, hermetic and nuanced, who calls
out to what is free, solitary, and yearning in only the most sensitive and
informed readers.
Very little criticism of Whitman is useful, because his mind and art
so frequently are underestimated. His “free verse” is formal, elegant, and
carefully controlled, under the rhetorical influence of biblical poetry.
The poet-critic John Hollander precisely notes that Whitman’s inno-
vations make invalid our weak distinctions between poetic formalism
and supposedly “free” verse: “. . . their formal modes as well as their com-
plex articulations of those modes are all in themselves subtle and power-
ful formal and metaphoric versions of more traditional ones.”
vi
H2W Whitman_FNL.indd 6 10/30/09 2:09:33 PM
How to Write about Walt Whitman vii
The first maxim in writing about Walt Whitman’s poetry is to read
and reread it very closely and then chant it aloud carefully and slowly.
After that, ask yourself: What has it in common with, and how does it
depart from, Milton or Tennyson? Whitman and Tennyson admired each
other, though the American bard appealed far more to Swinburne, D. G.
Rossetti, and G. M. Hopkins among their contemporaries. His influence
on British poetry has been minimal, except for Hopkins, D. H. Lawrence,
and Dylan Thomas.
A good entry into Whitman’s poetry is to study his imagery, as he
is one of the most intensely metaphorical of all poets. Another fecund
starting point is to consider his original and startling mythology of the
self.
Above all, do not condescend to Whitman. He knows more about you,
whoever you are, than you know about him. Paradoxically, prolonged
reading of Whitman may not bring you closer to him, but you will come
to know yourself more truly and more strange.

How to wrIte
a Good essay
By Laurie A. Sterling and Frank D. Casale
While there are many ways to write about literature, most assign-
ments for high school and college English classes call for analyti-
cal papers. In these assignments, you are presenting your interpretation
of a text to your reader. Your objective is to interpret the text’s meaning
in order to enhance your reader’s understanding and enjoyment of the
work. Without exception, strong papers about the meaning of a literary
work are built upon a careful, close reading of the text or texts. Careful,
analytical reading should always be the first step in your writing process.
This volume provides models of such close, analytical reading, and these
should help you develop your own skills as a reader and as a writer.
As the examples throughout this book demonstrate, attentive reading
entails thinking about and evaluating the formal (textual) aspects of the
author’s works: theme, character, form, and language. In addition, when
writing about a work, many readers choose to move beyond the text itself
to consider the work’s cultural context. In these instances, writers might
explore the historical circumstances of the time period in which the work
was written. Alternatively, they might examine the philosophies and ideas
that a work addresses. Even in cases where writers explore a work’s cultural
context, though, papers must still address the more formal aspects of the
work itself. A good interpretative essay that evaluates Charles Dickens’s use
of the philosophy of utilitarianism in his novel Hard Times, for example,
cannot adequately address the author’s treatment of the philosophy with-
out firmly grounding this discussion in the book itself. In other words, any
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