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Fillard-Thévenet, Claudette. "Walt Whitman poète des éléments." Lille 3 : ANRT, 1991. http://catalogue.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb37605070r.
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Fillard, Claudette. "Walt Whitman, poète des éléments." Paris 4, 1987. http://www.theses.fr/1987PA040072.
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Alors que de nombreux critiques ont souligné l'importance des quatre éléments dans l'œuvre de Whitman, une étude approfondie de leur influence sur l'imagination, la sensibilité, et l'art poétique de l'écrivain fait cruellement défaut. L'emploi par Whitman de "elements" ou de termes apparentés montre avec quelle facilité on passe des éléments aux aliments et à ces "ailments" que l'anglais associe à la souffrance. Dejà se trouve ébranlée la vision traditionnelle d'un optimisme à toute épreuve. Si l'on essaie d'évaluer le role spécifique de chacun des éléments dans l'œuvre, on s'aperçoit que si l'eau est à la hauteur de sa réputation, l'air, la terre, et le feu ont besoin d'être rehabilites. Le feu surtout, dont le statut particulier et perturbant a ete indument minimise. Mais l'exploration se fait beaucoup plus fructueuse si l'on se debarrasse du carcan de la quaternite elementaire pour recourir a une approche plus diversifiée. Un examen attentif du role joué par les éléments dans la célébration par Whitman du "corps électrique", dans sa conception de l'espace et du temps et ses tentatives changeantes de domestication de la mort, ou son rituel de l'union et sa quête infatigable de l'un, conduit à des conclusions séduisantes et parfois inattendues. L'un des aspects les plus fascinants de l'œuvre ainsi placée sous l'objectif élementaire réside en la réalité protéenne d'une poésie aux perspectives illimitées, extraordinairement moderne, tout aussi ouverte que la route d'un de ses chants. Elle a le pouvoir de rajeunir éternellement. .While many critics have stressed the importance of the four elements in Whitman's works, a thorough study of their influence on his imagination, sensitivity and theory of poetry has long been overdue. Whitman's use of "elements" and some cognate words shows how easily "elements" become "aliments" and "aliments", and unsettles the traditional vision of the poet's unruffled optimism. Trying to assess the specific role of each of the four elements in his writings, one realizes that if water is equal to its reputation, air, earth and fire are worth rehabilitating. Fire, above all, seems to have a peculiar, disturbing status which has been unduly minimized. But the exploration becomes much more rewarding when one gets rid of the straitjacket of the elementary "quaternion" and resorts to a more variegated approach. A careful perusal of the part played by the elements in Whitman's celebration of the "body electric", in his conception of space and time and variable
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Kolbe, Ben. "Walt Whitman's split poetic personalities." Waltham, Mass. : Brandeis University, 2009. http://dcoll.brandeis.edu/handle/10192/23301.
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Mackay, Daniel. "Advertising the soul : Walt Whitman's luciferic voice in twentieth-century American poetry /." Connect to title online (ProQuest), 2008. http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=1594829931&sid=2&Fmt=2&clientId=11238&RQT=309&VName=PQD.
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Choay-Lescar, Pauline. "Formes de l'absence chez Walt Whitman." Paris 3, 2000. http://www.theses.fr/2000PA030099.
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En depit des apparences, l'absence semble etre au coeur de l'oeuvre de whitman. Absence fondatrice, on la trouve dans l'intention poetique de l'auteur qui s'autocree et par lameme cree l'amerique a partir d'un neant originel ou d'une page blanche. Il donne a voir un monde autre ou le corps est un texte, support de l'ecriture de soi, et le texte une parole. Absence creatrice, elle apparait dans leprocessus creatif meme, a travers les moyens mis en oeuvre - comme la negation - pour modeler et informer cette nouvelle realite. Grace a un jeu subtil de miroirs et d'echos, metaphores, metonymies et hypallages multiplient les signifiances a l'infini, instaurant un espace imaginaire fluide ou le texte, affranchi de toutes contraintes, parvient a s'enoncer seul. Mais l'absence destructrice, qui engendre le doute et le desespoir, est toujours presente et malgre les strategies qu'il deploie pour se dissimuler, pour se soustraire aux frontieres du moi du monde, du lexique, et de la syntaxe, whitman finit par se laisser happer par le mot meme de << mort >>. En definitive, c'est l'absence destructrice qui triomphe : la mort demeure une enigme et la creation poetique une illusion.
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Moores, Don. "The essentially mystical Walt Whitman : an elucidation of the mystical dimension in Leaves of grass /." Click for abstract, 1997. http://library.ctstateu.edu/ccsu%5Ftheses/1500.html.
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Thesis (M.A.)--Central Connecticut State University, 1997.Thesis advisor: John A. Heitner. "... in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Masters of Arts in English." Includes bibliographical references (leaves 90-92).
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Hecker-Bretschneider, Elisabeth. "Bedingte Ordnungen : Repräsentationen von Chaos und Ordnung bei Walt Whitman, 1840-1860 /." Frankfurt am Main ; New York : P. Lang, 2009. http://d-nb.info/994722680/04.
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Austin, Kelly. "A poet of the Americas Neruda's translations of Whitman and North American translations of Neruda /." Diss., Restricted to subscribing institutions, 2005. http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=1003847081&sid=1&Fmt=2&clientId=1564&RQT=309&VName=PQD.
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Green, Charles B. "Passing into print: Walt Whitman and his publishers." W&M ScholarWorks, 2004. https://scholarworks.wm.edu/etd/1539623452.
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Few scholars have attempted to conduct a close examination of Whitman's relationship to his publishers in the context of Leaves of Grass. In their "Typographic Yawp: Leaves of Grass , 1855--1992," Megan and Paul Benton present a minimal, but interesting examination of the typographic story of Leaves, but they ignore three of the editions and deal with author-publisher relations only superficially. Other articles examine individual editions of Leaves of Grass, but none really explore what Whitman's complicated relationships with the publishers of his time tell us about the conditions for his work and for authorship in mid-nineteenth-century America. Most studies tend to focus on Whitman's poetry, rather than on issues associated with his publication history. In his Disseminating Whitman: Revision and Corporeality in Leaves of Grass, for example, Michael Moon carefully examines various editions, but chooses to concentrate on Whitman's poetic revisions and program, rather than discussing aspects related to the publication story behind Leaves of Grass. This study will try to address this gap in Whitman scholarship and, in so doing, try to answer the following questions: Were Whitman's ambitions for his Leaves of Grass fulfilled? Did he ever reach his intended audience?
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Sowder, Michael. "Whitman's ecstatic union : conversion and ideology in "Leaves of grass /." New York : Routledge, 2005. http://catalogue.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb40057342z.
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Yu, Shiu-kong Bartholomew. "Fused though antagonistic elements : a study of Walt Whitman's paradoxical vision of life /." [Hong Kong : University of Hong Kong], 1985. http://sunzi.lib.hku.hk/hkuto/record.jsp?B1236826X.
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Rumeau, Delphine. "Épopée et modernité : Walt Whitman, Pablo Neruda, Édouard Glissant." Paris 10, 2008. https://acces.bibliotheque-diderot.fr/login?url=https://doi.org/10.15122/isbn.978-2-8124-4073-1.
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La rencontre de l’épopée avec l’esthétique et les valeurs de la modernité est une source de tensions fécondes. Loin de constituer un modèle obsolète, le genre demeure une référence essentielle pour les poètes du Nouveau Monde dont les œuvres affichent une vocation fondatrice. Le choix de ce corpus américain est aussi fondé sur des relations d’intertextualité, notion au cœur des questions génériques. La valorisation de l’espace comme objet épique permet l’invention d’un vers qui s’adapte à la géographie. Elle pose aussi la question de la référence poétique : contre le repli du texte sur le travail des signifiants, l’épopée affirme l’importance de la fonction référentielle du langage et la vocation totalisante du poème. L’épopée moderne procède aussi à des changements temporels : elle n’est plus un répertoire de récits accomplis, mais une histoire à projeter. Même si le passé conserve une place importante chez Neruda et Glissant, le futur devient le temps de référence. La représentation héroïque est également bouleversée, puisque les valeurs de la démocratie, autant que celles du communisme, interdisent de cristalliser l’éclat de la geste sur un individu exemplaire et réclament au contraire un héroïsme collectif. Enfin, c’est tout le système d’énonciation qui est transformé par ces déplacements temporels et axiologiques : il bascule du récit au discours, dont la première personne devient le pivot, engageant la question de l’adresse et de la communication poétique. Si le genre connaît ainsi des modulations importantes, il continue d’informer la poésie moderne, arrimant l’engagement immédiat à la durée et à la complexité de la pensée épiqueHowever contradictory the terms “modernity” and “epic” might sound, the reference to the genre remains crucial for modern poets, especially those from the New World with political intentions and collective identity claims. The inscription of epic features within a modern perspective is a source of creative tensions. The choice of the works was grounded on the strong intertextuality that binds them, a key notion in generic issues. First, space supersedes history as the central focus of writing, which aims at encompassing the continent’s landscapes and giving them an unprecedented literary shape. This also raises the question of the referential function of language, often challenged by modern poetry: the epic claim is somehow an act of faith in the possibility of naming the world and in the aptness of words to do so. As history gives way to geography, the future tends to become the dominant tense in Whitman: the narrative continuum thus yields to a more fragmented vision. Heroic representation is also challenged by democratic values: how can heroism be diffracted into a plural agent? Similarly, Neruda and Glissant’s chief concern is to incarnate a collective heroism whose triumph lies ahead in the future. Contrary to Whitman, though, the reconstruction of the past is a fundamental preliminary to the emergence of a collective identity
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Szendrey, Stephen P. "Queering the Literary Landscape: Allen Ginsberg and Walt Whitman." Ohio University Honors Tutorial College / OhioLINK, 2010. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ouhonors1275685833.
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Woodbury, Rachelle Helene. "Animism in Whitman : "Multitudes" of interpretation? /." Diss., CLICK HERE for online access, 2006. http://contentdm.lib.byu.edu/ETD/image/etd1390.pdf.
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Janssen, David. "Walt Whitman's Poetics of Labor." PDXScholar, 1993. https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/open_access_etds/4593.
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The purpose of this thesis is to organize and examine Walt Whitman's poetic representations and discussions of laborers and labor issues in order to argue that form a distinct "poetics" of labor in Leaves of Grass. This poetics of labor reveals that Whitman was attempting to enlarge the audience for American poetry by representing American society at work in poetry. Whitman also used labor as a poetic subject in order to justify the work of the poet in that society. In this sense, Whitman's poetics of labor is comprised of numerous demonstrations of his argument for the labor of poetry because the representation of America at work is contained within the work of the poet. The organization of this thesis rests upon a distinction between the work of the hands and the work of the mind. This distinction resonates in nineteenth century American literature, and it is especially important to debates about the status of the writer in a working democratic society. This question figures prominently in the works of Emerson and Thoreau, and a central issue for both of them is whether or not the writer should participate in the work of the hands. Whitman engages in this debate as well, and argues that the poet can participate in all kinds of work through poetic representation. He participates by representing workers in poetry, and in Whitman's argument the poet then becomes a representative of those workers. A central premise of this thesis is that Whitman's poetry of labor demonstrates an attempt to ensure that America works according to Whitman's interpretation of democracy. This is most apparent in poems where he directly addresses his working audience, and those addresses reveal a specific ideology behind Whitman's poetics of labor. That is, Whitman attempts to level the implicit hierarchical organization of different kinds of work. For instance, in such poems as "Song for Occupations" and "Song of the Broad-Axe," Whitman engages in a conversation with manual laborers in an effort to acknowledge their value and significance to the democratic process. As he celebrates their contribution, he also associates his own work with them, and argues for the · usefulness of such poetry to that process as well. In such poems as "When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer'' and "To A Historian," Whitman addresses those who labor with the mind in order to include them in the dialogue, and also to argue that the majority of that work needs to be revised because its claim for authority perpetuates hierarchical distinctions. Whitman offers poetry as a solution, and argues that it is central to democracy because it "completes" all labor by fusing the work of the community with the work of shaping individual identity that comes from reading and writing poetry. This thesis draws upon New Historicist methodologies and approaches to Whitman in order to reconstruct the significance of labor in Whitman's poetics. The poetry which directly addresses laborers and labor issues in Leaves of Grass forms the basis of the argument, but Whitman's relevant prose is considered in detail as well. In particular, Democratic Vistas is examined for its claims that the "work" of poetry is itself incomplete. "Work" is used here to refer both to the aesthetic object and the effort involved in reading it. In other words, Whitman argues that the work of poetry, like the work of democracy, is a continuous, recursive process.
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Harris, Kirsten. "The love of comrades : Walt Whitman and the British socialists." Thesis, University of Sheffield, 2011. http://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/14573/.
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In this thesis I exam me how fin de siècle British socialists engaged with Walt Whitman and his work. These were generally considered to be one and the same: the speaker in Leaves of Grass was understood to be Whitman, and Leaves of Grass was read as an extension of his personality. This underscores the appropriation of Whitman for the labour cause: his admirers not only used his words, but claimed the poet himself, often as a prophet as well as a poet. I argue that just as Leaves of Grass influenced the development of radical mystical and socio-political thinking, so were its reading and reception shaped by these ideological frameworks. I explore this relationship through articles, poems, books and speeches, many of which have received little or no critical attention, demonstrating how personal responses to Leaves o{Grass had an effect on the wider socialist community. Each chapter is concerned with a different socialist, or group of socialists, who read and responded to Whitman: first, Bolton's 'Eagle Street College', a reading group devoted to the poet; second, Edward Carpenter and his Whitmanesque poems in Towards Democracy; third, a selection of journalists who wrote in socialist publications; fourth, William Clarke and his book-length critique of Whitman. I finish with a comparative study of the use of 'Pioneers! 0 Pioneers!' by different figures within the socialist movement. My critical approach focuses specifically on the literary and political impact of the relationships between Whitman and his nineteenth-century 'disciples', complementing recent biographical scholarship in this field. The significance of Whitman to British socialism has long been recognised; however, though aspects of it have been critically discussed, this is the first extended study of the ways in which Whitman was responded to, interpreted, and used by British socialists.
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Hubert, Denise Dawn. "Walt Whitman, poet of the body : stylistics of (dis)embodiment." Thesis, University of British Columbia, 2007. http://hdl.handle.net/2429/32832.
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This thesis proposes a unified theory for reading and interpreting Leaves of Grass
(1891-92), by American poet Walt Whitman (1819-1892). This theory proceeds from the
premises that spiritual themes are foundational for the poems, and that Whitman's chief
poetic aim is to lead readers toward a spiritual understanding of human experience. This
theory proposes that the material and spiritual realms coexist and interact continuously,
and that human comprehension of an organized, coherent cosmic scheme is possible
within the framework of material, temporal life, thanks to the innate divinity of the
human being.
This project employs linguistic pragmatic theories to examine the subjectivity of
Whitman's speaker's consciousness in terms of how it situates and represents itself, and
how it relates to the real and conceptual worlds around it. I analyse cohesion (M.A.K.
Halliday) and flow of consciousness (Wallace Chafe) in Whitman's poetry to illustrate
that he deliberately employs stylistics of disembodiment and de-situation to shift the
focus of his poetry away from the material world, toward the spiritual realm.
This analysis is broken into themed segments: 1) the speaker and his conception
of his self (poems analysed include "Song of Myself and "Starting from Paumanok"); 2)
the speaker's interpersonal relationships (poems analysed include "I Sing the Body
Electric," "The Sleepers," and "Whoever You Are Holding Me Now in Hand"); and 3)
the speaker's interaction with his nation and cosmos (poems analysed include "Crossing
Brooklyn Ferry," "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd," and "A Noiseless Patient
Spider"). These poems reveal a speaker with privileged conceptual access to the spiritual realm,
which he interprets for readers, hoping this will spark them to develop their own cosmic
awareness. The speaker redefines elements of the material world, like the body and its
desires, or political life in a democracy, illustrating that these have spiritual significance;
they forge connections between souls. Consequently, these spiritual connections valorize
mundane pursuits. Moreover, this process of redefinition, or translation, charges his often
eroticized discourse with spirituality, rendering it appropriate as public, national
discourse for the United States in the latter half of the nineteenth-century.Arts, Faculty of
English, Department of
Graduate
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Lundy, Lisa Kirkpatrick. "Reverberating Reflections of Whitman: A Dark Romantic Revealed." Thesis, University of North Texas, 1999. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc279061/.
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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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Nautiyal, Nandita. ""This self is Brahman" : Whitman in the light of the Upanishads." Thesis, McGill University, 1996. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=26747.
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This thesis examines the reasons why Walt Whitman has been a "puzzle" to literary critics for well over a century. It shows the correspondence between Walt Whitman's work and the mystical tradition of East as also interpreted by American Transcendentalists. Enquiry into "self" is the central theme of most of Whitman's work. Two aspects of this enquiry have been investigated in this thesis and compared with the Upanishads: the development of self; and the use of contradictions as a means of conveying meaning. Both aspects support the view that Whitman displays a worldview not in accordance with the popular Western view in which God and man are entirely different and can never meet on equal terms. Whitman's view can be compared to that of the American Transcendentalists and Neoplatonists which finds a sympathetic chord in the native European tradition of humanistic values as well as in the Upanishads. Whitman works from a state of consciousness that is different in spirit and structure from the Hegelian dialectical principle which has wielded so much influence over Western thought. Whitman's poetry is remarkably akin to that of the Upanishadic writers in whose consciousness the subject and object have fused into one. Whitman is shown to draw his ideas from a depth of the human psyche that is often associated with Eastern thought but which is also present in the West. Four stances of self in Whitman's work have been identified which are seen to be related to, but not identical with, four states of consciousness in the Upanishads. The thesis concludes that not only is there a remarkable degree of correspondence between Walt Whitman and the Upanishads, both in respect to development of the self and use of contradictions, but that interpreting him in the light of the Upanishads provides another modern opportunity for meeting of the East and the West.
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Keller, Kristen T. ""Any man translates, and any man translates himself also," Whitman, Martí, and the moving text." Pullman, Wash. : Washington State University, 2010. http://www.dissertations.wsu.edu/Thesis/Spring2010/k_keller_042310.pdf.
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Moores, Donald J. "Mystical discourse as ideological resistance in Wordsworth and Whitman : a transatlantic bridge /." View online ; access limited to URI, 2003. http://0-wwwlib.umi.com.helin.uri.edu/dissertations/dlnow/3103714.
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Hecker-Bretschneider, Elisabeth. "Bedingte Ordnungen Repräsentationen von Chaos und Ordnung bei Walt Whitman, 1840 - 1860." Frankfurt, M. Berlin Bern Bruxelles New York, NY Oxford Wien Lang, 2007. http://d-nb.info/994722680/04.
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Armstrong, David Grossman. "The true believer : Walt Whitman Rostow and the path to Vietnam /." Digital version accessible at:, 2000. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/utexas/main.
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Gambarotto, Bruno. "Walt Whitman e a formação da poesia norte-americana (1855-1867)." Universidade de São Paulo, 2006. http://www.teses.usp.br/teses/disponiveis/8/8151/tde-21052007-145634/.
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O objetivo desta dissertação é analisar alguns dos momentos decisivos do processo de formação da poesia norte-americana, marcados pelas quatro primeiras edições (1855, 1856, 1861,1867) de Leaves of Grass, de Walt Whitman. A escolha desses momentos sublinha o caráter engajado do projeto poético de Whitman, que não visava à mera aclimatação da poesia européia no Novo Mundo, mas sim à constituição formal de uma poesia norte-americana adequada à realidade social de seu país. Nesse sentido, a leitura das quatro primeiras edições de Leaves of Grass pressupõe dois movimentos complementares: o entendimento dessa poesia enquanto resposta aos inúmeros conflitos que perpassam as décadas de 1850 e 1860 norte-americanas, quando a modernização, encabeçada pela industrialização e pelo trabalho livre, entra em choque definitivo com estruturas sociais de origem colonial, baseadas tanto na exploração do trabalho escravo como na própria constituição descentralizada da república; e a configuração literária desses problemas, em que veremos elementos constitutivos da poesia romântica européia em relação dialética com formas locais de expressão, muitas vezes estranhas ao quadro literário do Velho Mundo, mas reforçadas pela pretensão de se fazer valer (não sem contradições) uma literatura de caráter nacional. Para tanto, nossa análise toma não apenas a longa tradição de estudos hitmanianos, que atualmente têm se dedicado à revisão histórica de Leaves of Grass centrada quase que exclusivamente na experiência social norte-americana, mas a própria tradição crítica brasileira, na qual se consolidou um importante corpo de conceitos e debates acerca da posição periférica das literaturas do Novo Mundo em relação à Europa, o que nos permite tanto colocar a literatura de Whitman em um quadro mais abrangente de formação literária como observar ali algumas questões comuns às experiências brasileira e norte- americana para a consolidação de seu sistema literário, tais como o caráter empenhado da elite literária; a busca de novas formas; a representação e afirmação, na lírica, do indivíduo e da natureza do país; as questões éticas e econômicas ligadas ao problema da escravidão; e a relação ambígua e contraditória com os movimentos literários europeus.The purpose of this dissertation is to analyze some of the decisive moments in the making of North American poetry, determined by the development, from 1855 to 1867, of the four initial editions of Walt Whitman\'s Leaves of Grass. The choice of these remarkable moments serves to underline the engaged feature of Whitman´s poetical accomplishment, which implied not the mere transposition of European literary thought into the New World, but mainly the formal constitution of a national poetry fit for the social environment of the United States. In this sense, the analysis of these four Leaves of Grass´ editions (1855, 1856, 1861, 1867) presupposes two complementary ways: firstly the acknowledgment of Whitman´s poetry as a response to the social tensions in North American midnineteenth century, when modernity, led by free labor and industrialization, collides with colonial and pre-modern social structures, based upon slavery and the very descentralized commercial Republic constitution; secondly the literary configuration of these tensions, in which we observe elements of the literary Romanticism dialetically linked to local forms of expression, some of them alien to the literary achievements of the Old World, but reinforced by the founding project of a national literature. To attend these questions, this dissertation recovers the long tradition of Walt Whitman studies - dedicated in the present time to the historical revisioning of the poet´s works centered almost exclusively in the North American social experience - by the light of the Brazilian critical tradition, in which very important concepts and debates over the periferical position of New World literatures were consolidated. This theoretical perpective allows us not only to place Leaves of Grass in a wider perspective of New World literatures but also to build a indirect comparative view that rests upon some important questions to the North American and Brazilian literary traditions, as the engaged ethos of their literary elites; the search for new literary forms; the lyrical affirmative representation of national individuals; the economical and ethical responses to slavery; and the ambiguous and contradictory relation with European literary movements.
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Franklin, Kelly Scott. "Out of place: Walt Whitman and the Latin American avant-gardes." Diss., University of Iowa, 2014. https://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/5755.
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The poetry, prose, and personality of Walt Whitman have attained a truly global circulation, and scholarship continues to reveal his complex and lasting impact on literature, art, and politics around the world. This dissertation reveals Walt Whitman's extensive appropriation by the Latin American avant-garde, an artistic current that encompassed dozens of regional, national and transnational vanguardia movements across the Americas from roughly 1918 through the late 1930s. My work tells the story of how these pugnacious literary and artistic communities used Whitman as the raw material for a self-consciously "modern" art, as they circulated, adapted, and repurposed the US poet and his texts. The dissertation moves from south to north, beginning in Chile, proceeding to Nicaragua and Mexico, and ending with Latino writers in the United States. "Out of Place: Walt Whitman and the Latin American Avant-Gardes" argues that the literary and political appropriation of Whitman becomes a part of these movements' active participation in the hemispheric and global conversation of their day. What these aggressive avant-garde groups find useful, provocative, or generative in Whitman, then, offers us a unique perspective that cannot be left out of American literary studies. For as they wrestle with Whitman and the concept of "America," as they adapt Whitman into their notions of art, of nation and of language, and as they read him against the backdrop of globalization and modernity, a new Walt Whitman emerges, a vanguardista Whitman who sheds new light on the enduring relevance of his own radical project of making a poetry for the Americas.
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Hennequet, Claire. "L'identité poétique de la nation. Walt Whitman, José Marti, Aimé Césaire." Thesis, Paris 3, 2014. http://www.theses.fr/2014PA030085/document.
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Dans l’Amérique et les Caraïbes des XIXe et XXe siècles, l’œuvre du poète national est au cœur d’un trafic d’images qui nourrit un lien social fragile dans un temps où les collectivités reposent moins sur un lien direct entre leurs membres que sur un lien imaginé. Prenant ses distances vis-à-vis des représentations en circulation à son époque, comme les représentations exotiques de la nature, le poète offre une vision démocratique ambitieuse pour l’avenir de la communauté à travers des images nouvelles du territoire, du peuple, de l’esclavage et de l’histoire. L’ethos auctorial encourage l’appropriation de ce discours par le lecteur en désignant le poète comme figure de référence. Mais c’est surtout à travers son procédé d’écriture qui met à mal les normes littéraires de son temps que celui-ci est à même d’influer sur la société. Plutôt qu’ils ne parviennent à saisir l’esprit de leur peuple, Whitman, Martí et Césaire participent par leur travail sur le fragment, les formes populaires ou le tremblement du sens à la création d’un devenir collectifIn 19th and 20th centuries America and West Indies, the national poet’s works lay at the centre of a traffic of images. This traffic feeds the fragile social ties of young collectivities, at a time when communities are bound by imagination rather than by direct contact between their members. Distancing themselves from the representations of the community circulating at that time, like the exotic images of the New World’s nature, the poet offers an ambitious democratic vision for the future which is channeled through images of the territory, the people, slavery and history. The poet’s ethos encourages the reader to appropriate this discourse by presenting the author as a role model. However, it is mainly thanks to his style, at odds with the literary norms of his time, that the poet is able to act upon society. Whitman, Martí and Césaire do not so much contrive to capture their people’s spirit, as they participate through their work on the fragment, on popular poetical forms or on the destabilizing of meaning, in the creation of a common devenir
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Preston, Nathaniel H. "Passage to India and back again : Walt Whitman's democratic expression of vedantic mysticism." Virtual Press, 1994. http://liblink.bsu.edu/uhtbin/catkey/902498.
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Democracy and mysticism are two prominent themes of Walt Whitman's writings, yet few critics have explored the connections that may exist between these areas. Some critics have noted that Whitman holds an ideal of "spiritual democracy," in which all people are equal due to their identity with a transcendent self such as that found in "Song of Myself," but they have not identified the best philosophical model for such a political viewpoint. I believe that the parallel between Whitman's thought and Vedantic mysticism, already developed by V. K. Chart and others, may be expanded to account for Whitman's political thought. Past studies of Whitman and Vedanta have focused only on the advaitic aspects of his writing, but in his later years he came to adopt a visistadvaitic stance similar to that of Ramanuja. In the political sphere, his concept of a Brahmanic self shared by all people led him to not only believe that all people are equal, but that they also possess the capacity to become contributors to a democratic society. Whitman felt that the poet was the primary means by which the masses could attain mystical consciousness and the concomitant social harmony. The ideal poet described in Democratic Vistas and the Preface to the 1855 Leaves of Grass serves as a mediator between the people as they are and Whitman's ideal of a completely unified democratic society and thereby parallels the Vedantic guru's function of bridging the relative and absolute levels of reality.Department of English
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Delchamps, Vivian. "“Of the Woman First of All”: Walt Whitman and Women's Literary History." Scholarship @ Claremont, 2014. http://scholarship.claremont.edu/scripps_theses/420.
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This thesis contemplates Walt Whitman's role in the lives of 19th and 20th century women writers and his significance to early American feminism. I consider the ways women inspired him to develop pro-feminist ideas about maternity, womanhood, and female liberation.
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Davidson, Ryan J. "Affinities of influence : exploring the relationship between Walt Whitman and William Blake." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2014. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/5590/.
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This project explores the nature and extent of the relationship between Blake and Whitman. I examine their works to find affinities in tone, style and themes and seek to understand the origin of these affinities. The resultant discoveries, however, lead to the conclusion that, because of Whitman’s lack of exposure to Blake’s work, these affinities must be accounted for through a coterie of indirect influences on Whitman. Over the course of the introductory chapter, I establish the critical proclivity of connecting William Blake and Walt Whitman, providing examples of such critical interpretation; in addition, I provide an introduction to the key figures, terms, and works with which this thesis engages. The work of the second chapter of this project is to uncover in Whitman’s work, before he could have read Blake, those elements that are read as points of contact between them. Through close readings, I show that those aspects of Whitman’s work which are read as points of contact between Blake and Whitman predate Whitman’s exposure to Blake’s work, and so necessitate an engagement with influences shared by Blake and Whitman. The third chapter articulates the notion that a variety of influences affected Whitman’s composition of Leaves of Grass, and these various influences serve as an explanation for those apparent similarities between Blake and Whitman discussed in chapter two. The final element this chapter engages with is that of nineteenth-century periodical culture; this aspect of the influences articulated in this chapter provides a secondary explanation for the similarities discussed in the second chapter. The fourth and fifth chapters focus on the 1860 and 1867 iterations of Leaves of Grass and the 1867 and 1871–72 versions of Leaves of Grass, respectively, both with special emphasis on the poem that would become “Song of Myself.” The changes seen throughout these iterations will be used to understand Whitman’s evolving prosody as well as his changing public persona. These chapters also engage with the work of Swinburne, in chapter five, and of Gilchrist, in chapter four, as integral elements of this mediated influence of Blake on Whitman. In the final chapter of this work, I summarize my findings, suggest possible avenues for further inquiry, and discuss the implications of this research. There is a trend in Anglo-American literary criticism to see the relationship between America and England as adversarial rather than generative. The concluding chapter of this work will explore the idea of the Anglo-American literary tradition as a continuum—a complex of acceptance, extension, transformation, and refusal—and place the relationship of Whitman to Blake accurately on this continuum.
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Katsaros, Laure. "Le rivage dans la poesie americaine : walt whitman, hart crane, george oppen." Paris 7, 2000. http://www.theses.fr/2000PA070070.
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Cette these examine le theme du rivage dans la poesie americaine de walt whitman a george oppen. Espace de fondation en amerique, le rivage constitue le point de depart du grand periple whitmanien a travers le continent americain. Chez hart crane, c'est un point de jonction entre la mer et le continent. Pour george oppen, c'est un point de rupture, qui creuse la distance entre le poete et l'espace. Chez ces trois poetes, le rivage n'est pas seulement un paysage. Il suggere aussi une pratique d'ecriture fondee sur la fluidite. Cette these s'appuie egalement sur des recits d'explorateurs du seizieme et du dix-septieme siecle pour montrer la centralite du rivage dans la pensee et la litterature americaines.
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Robbins, Timothy David. "Walt Whitman and the making of the American sociological imagination, 1870-1940." Diss., University of Iowa, 2015. https://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/6490.
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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.
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Conrad, Eric Christopher. "The Walt Whitman brand: Leaves of grass and literary promotion, 1855-1892." Diss., University of Iowa, 2013. https://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/1838.
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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.
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Sanchez, Rachel Marie. "The "real language of men" and the "dialect of common sense" in the prefaces of William Wordsworth and Walt Whitman." Pullman, Wash. : Washington State University, 2009. http://www.dissertations.wsu.edu/Thesis/Spring2009/r_sanchez_042309.pdf.
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Kenaston, Karen S. "An Approach to the Critical Evaluation of Settings of the Poetry of Walt Whitman: Lowell Liebermann's Symphony No. 2." Thesis, Online resource, 2003. http://www.library.unt.edu/theses/open/20031/kenaston%5Fkaren/index.htm.
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Thesis (D.M.A.)--University of North Texas, 2003.Original copy accompanied by 3 recitals, recorded Apr. 27, 2000, Nov. 28, 2000, and Oct. 31, 2001; videocassette not dated. Lacking in UMI copy. Includes bibliographical references (p. 141-149).
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Leonard, Gay Lynne. "Poetic ingress a study of opening lines in Whitman, Dickinson, and Lanier /." Access abstract and link to full text, 1987. http://0-wwwlib.umi.com.library.utulsa.edu/dissertations/fullcit/8711962.
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Saraiva, Junior Gentil. "Re-creating Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass into portuguese." reponame:Biblioteca Digital de Teses e Dissertações da UFRGS, 2008. http://hdl.handle.net/10183/15552.
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Este trabalho está focalizado na tradução criativa da poesia de Walt Whitman para o português. O termo utilizado para nos referir a este processo é recriação, ou seja, uma tradução que vai além da tradução literal (que privilegia apenas os significados), buscando um trabalho de reconstrução conjunta de significados e significantes, dada a relação profunda existente entre ambos (o capítulo 3 trata desse método de tradução criativa, aqui indicado, além de abordar temas relacionados a este na poesia, como verso livre, ritmo, metro, etc.). Esse termo foi emprestado de meus mestres neste tipo de tradução, que são os poetas Concretistas brasileiros: Haroldo de Campos, Augusto de Campos e Décio Pignatari. Em inglês, utilizamos essa palavra com hífen, “re-creation” (e seus derivados), devido ao fato de que “recreation” indica apenas recreação, divertimento, e não um “criar de novo”. É preciso lembrar que o precursor neste campo tradutório, da tradução a qual também é criação, foi Ezra Pound, que nos trouxe a idéia de renovação constante da poesia via tradução, e recebe atenção mais aprofundada nas seções 3.2 e 3.3. Há outras traduções da obra de Whitman em português, inclusive uma edição completa de Folhas de Relva pela Martin Claret (2005), das quais fornecemos um histórico na seção 2.2, entretanto, nenhuma delas foi feita de modo semelhante ao nosso. Deste modo, o trabalho que apresentamos aqui é inédito, embora não seja completo. No corpo desta tese, no capítulo 4, apresentamos a recriação de vinte peças literárias, entre poemas e livros, do conjunto de Folhas de Relva, que é o volume que engloba a poesia completa de Whitman. Dentro das recriações apresentadas aqui, está o poema “Do Berço Infindamente Embalando,” que faz parte de Detrito-Marinho, o qual havia sido acrescentado como anexo em minha Dissertação de Mestrado. O poema foi revisado e corrigido e foi incluído aqui para que a seção Detrito- Marinho ficasse completa. Na seção 2.1 há uma explicação da história editorial de Folhas de Relva. Além do contexto histórico dessa publicação, o capítulo 2 apresenta uma análise crítica da obra e do autor e discute um símbolo central nas Folhas, que é o cálamo. A recriação do livro “Cálamo”, bem como de “Descendentes de Adão” e “Canção de Mim Mesmo,” integra o texto da minha dissertação de mestrado (SARAIVA, 1995).This work focuses on the creative translation of Walt Whitman’s poetry into Portuguese. The term that we use to refer to this process is re-creation, which is a type of translation that goes beyond literal translation (which favors the signified), searching for a work of conjoined reconstruction of signified and signifiers, due to the profound relation that exists between them (chapter 3 explains this method of creative translation; it also discusses the themes that are related to this in poetry, such as free verse, rhythm, meter, etc.). The term re-creation was borrowed from our masters in this type of translation, the Brazilian Concretist poets: Haroldo de Campos, Augusto de Campos and Décio Pignatari. In English, we use this word hyphenated, “re-creation” (and its derivatives), due to the fact that “recreation” indicates only diversion, an activity that is performed for relaxation and pleasure, and not “creating again”. It is necessary to remember that the precursor in this translatorial field, of translation which is also creation, was Ezra Pound, who brought us the idea of constant renewing of poetry via translation, and who is given more attention in sections 3.2 and 3.3. There are other translations of Whitman’s works in Portuguese, including a complete edition of Leaves of Grass by Martin Claret publishing house (2005), of which we provide an account in section 2.2, however, none of them was carried out in a similar way to our own. Thus, the work we present here is original, although it is not complete. In the body of this dissertation, in chapter 4, we present the re-creation of twenty literary pieces, among poems and books, from Leaves of Grass, which is the volume that assembles the complete poetry of Whitman. Within the re-creations presented here, there is the poem “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking”, which is part of Sea-Drift, and which had been added as an annex to our Master’s thesis. This poem has been revised and corrected, and has been included here in order for the Sea-Drift cluster to be complete. In section 2.1 there is an explanation about the publishing history of Leaves of Grass. In addition to the historical context of this publication, chapter 2 presents a critical analysis of the works, author, and a central symbol in the Leaves, which is the calamus root. The re-creation of “Calamus”, as well as of “Children of Adam” and “Song of Myself” appears in our Master’s thesis (SARAIVA, 1995).
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El-Desouky, Ayman Ahmed. "The self-begetting modern : figuring the human in Whitman and Joyce /." Full text (PDF) from UMI/Dissertation Abstracts International, 2000. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/utexas/fullcit?p3004257.
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Brown, Bryce Dean. "Whitman's Failures: "Children of Adam" in the Light of Feminist Ideals." Thesis, University of North Texas, 1991. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc503937/.
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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.
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Borges, Frankslayne Paranista de Oliveira. "A tessitura epilírica de leaves of grass." Universidade Federal de Goiás, 2012. http://repositorio.bc.ufg.br/tede/handle/tede/3099.
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In this dissertation we will discuss Walt Whitman’s poetry in the aspects that articulate the lyric and the epic in an epilyric unity, taking the 1892 edition of Leaves of Grass as its study object. We shall ascertain the theoretical assumptions of modernity and modern poetry characteristics, which are crucial to the understanding of the poet’s aesthetic and ideological project, as delivered in his preface for the 1855 edition, as well as his importance to modernism in poetry in the following century. Subsequently, we shall examine carefully the subjectivity expressed in the book at issue, which is polymorphically shaped, as it’s showed by the categories proposed by Kinnaird (1962) and Bloom (2001). Finally, we shall find how Whitman used aspects of the epical literature to construct his oeuvre and carry out his design to become the national poet of the United States.
Nesta dissertação trataremos da poesia de Walt Whitman sob os aspectos que articulam o lírico e o épico numa unidade epilírica, tendo como objeto a obra Leaves of Grass em sua edição de 1892. Averiguaremos, ainda, os pressupostos teóricos da modernidade e as caracterizações da poesia moderna, fundamentais para a compreensão do projeto ideológico e estético do poeta, demonstrado em seu prefácio de 1855, bem como da sua importância para o próprio modernismo na poesia no século seguinte. Em seguida, nos aprofundaremos no estudo da subjetividade expressa na obra em questão, que se configura polimorficamente, como demonstram as categorias propostas por Kinnaird (1962) e Bloom (2001). Por fim, verificaremos como Whitman lançou mão de aspectos da literatura épica para construir sua obra e executar seu projeto de ser o poeta nacional estadunidense.
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Whitley, Edward K. "American bards James M. Whitfield, Eliza R. Snow, John Rollin Ridge, and Walt Whitman /." College Park, Md. : University of Maryland, 2004. http://hdl.handle.net/1903/1739.
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Thesis (Ph. D.) -- University of Maryland, College Park, 2004.Thesis research directed by: English Language and Literature. Title from t.p. of PDF. Includes bibliographical references. Published by UMI Dissertation Services, Ann Arbor, Mich. Also available in paper.
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Costa, Elisa Maria Carrancho Sá. "A América, a universalidade e a espiritualidade na poesia da Reconstrução de Walt Whitman." Dissertação, Porto : [Edição do Autor], 2001. http://aleph.letras.up.pt/F?func=find-b&find_code=SYS&request=000119101.
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Este trabalho analisa a poesia da Reconstrução de Walt Whitman sob a égide de três temas: a América, a universalidade e a espiritualidade, que são articulados tendo como base os pressupostos teóricos expostos por ralpho Waldo Emerson no ensaio "Circles". Problematiza-se em torno da demanda da identidade individual e da nação, em que o "eu" busca um lugar colocando-se no centro de uma sucessão de círculos concêntricos e explora-se as relações levadas a cabo pelo "eu" com a América real e a América mítica, analisando as formas como o poeta articula as noções de americanidade/universalidade, espacialidade/a- espacialidade e temporalidade/atemporalidade
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Bellot, Marc. "Walt whitman a l'epreuve de la pensee emersonienne. La legitimation de l'eros par l'ethos." Amiens, 2000. http://www.theses.fr/2000AMIE0003.
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Cette etude porte sur l'interaction des pensees de deux auteurs romantiques du dixneuvieme siecle americain, le philosophe ralph waldo emerson et le poete walt whitman. Les critiques considerent generalement que la pensee whitmanienne s'est largement inspiree de celle d'emerson dont elle aurait integre les principaux postulats. Cette interpretation fait du poete le disciple du philosophe, tout enlui reconnaissant un certain degre d'originalite, en particulier dans la creation du vers libre et dans le traitement novateur de la sexualite. En somme, si la pensee emersonienne est consideree dans sa coherence, il n'en irait pas de meme de la pensee whitmanienne qui ne serait qu'un calque de la precedente, meme agremente de quelques fulgurances dont il serait malaise d'expliquer les occurences. Or, une analyse attentive de la pensee de whitman fait apparaitre de nombreuses divergences d'avec celle d'emerson. Ces ecarts discursifs refletent en realite une pensee elle-meme coherente, logique, originale et intrinsequement whitmanienne, qui s'imbrique dans la pensee d'emerson afin de servir ses desseins propres : c'est alors qu'apparait, sous le tonitruant discours whitmanien de porteparole prophetique de la liberte et de la democratie americaine un autre discours, plus interiorise, qui releve du cryptage, du non-dit et de l'aveu, et qui place tout au long des poemes de subtils indices qui rendent manifeste au lecteur le desir d'attirer son attention sur la presence d'une discursivite parallele sous-jacente qui vise a desaliener un homoerotisme refoule en tentant de le legitimer par impregnation dans l'ethos emersonien. La pensee whitmanienne serait donc moins influencee par la pensee emersonienne qu'elle n'aurait instrumentalisee cette derniere afin qu'elle offre le cadre conceptuel convenable pour accrocher une discursivite novatrice de la liberation totale de l'ensemble du paradigme de l'humain.
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Blalock, Stephanie Michelle. "Walt Whitman at Pfaff's Beer Cellar: America's Bohemian poet and the contexts of Calamus." Diss., University of Iowa, 2011. https://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/2047.
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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.
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Lindeen, Karilyn. "Walt Whitman and the American Civil War: from Wound Dresser to Good Gray Poet." Thesis, Kansas State University, 2016. http://hdl.handle.net/2097/32590.
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Master of ArtsDepartment of History
Charles W. Sanders, Jr.
Today, Walt Whitman is considered a famous nineteenth-century American poet. At the outbreak of the American Civil War however, he was underrated and underappreciated by American readers. Three editions of his book of poetry, Leaves of Grass, were not received well by American readers and his future in writing looked bleak. This was despite the fact that Whitman’s literary friend, Ralph Waldo Emerson, wrote an encouraging review of the first edition, which Whitman included in the second and third iterations. Ironically, Whitman’s career made a turn for the better when his brother, George Washington Whitman, was reported to be among the wounded or killed in the Battle of Fredericksburg on December 13, 1862. A dedicated family man, Whitman immediately boarded a train in New York and headed for Falmouth, Virginia, to check on his brother’s wellbeing. Whitman visited several makeshift hospitals before coming across Chatham Mansion, the temporary Union Hospital Headquarters. He saw at the base of a tree a pile of human limbs that had been tossed out of a first floor window following amputations. The scene was horrific and he paused to record what he saw in his diary. This experience forever changed Whitman the man and Whitman the poet and the transformation was evident in his subsequent writing, as Whitman first took on the persona of what I have designated as the Wound Dresser and years after the war the Good Gray Poet. This evolution changed the public perception of Whitman, and it occurred in phases. The initial phase was before the war, his work was considered obscene among American society due to his previous publications. The second transformation in Whitman was initiated by fear of personal loss when his brother was listed among the wounded and dead at Fredericksburg and the sight of the amputated limbs at Chatham Mansion. Had Whitman been exposed to the war slowly over time, the effect might not have been so profound, but Chatham was an earth shattering event in his life, as he admitted. The third phase was the result of daily exposure for years to the wounded and dying in the hospitals. He developed a personal connection with the men and was determined to stay with them, despite direct orders from hospital doctors that he should return home for his own physical and emotional recovery. His experience in the hospitals had transformed from a middle aged healthy man to a frail and brittle shell, evident in photographs of him during these years. The final phase was marked by the transformation in his writing. It was in this phase that Whitman created the most memorable and remarkable Civil War poetry that is still celebrated today. It was this poetry that caused American’s to revere him as the “Good Gray Poet.”
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Costa, Elisa Maria Carrancho Sá. "A América, a universalidade e a espiritualidade na poesia da Reconstrução de Walt Whitman." Master's thesis, Porto : [Edição do Autor], 2001. http://hdl.handle.net/10216/13052.
Full textAbstract:
Este trabalho analisa a poesia da Reconstrução de Walt Whitman sob a égide de três temas: a América, a universalidade e a espiritualidade, que são articulados tendo como base os pressupostos teóricos expostos por ralpho Waldo Emerson no ensaio "Circles". Problematiza-se em torno da demanda da identidade individual e da nação, em que o "eu" busca um lugar colocando-se no centro de uma sucessão de círculos concêntricos e explora-se as relações levadas a cabo pelo "eu" com a América real e a América mítica, analisando as formas como o poeta articula as noções de americanidade/universalidade, espacialidade/a- espacialidade e temporalidade/atemporalidade
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Elliott, Clare Frances. "William Blake's American legacy : transcendentalism and visionary poetics in Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2009. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/753/.
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This thesis examines William Blake's American legacy by identifying a precise American interest in Blake that can be dated from Ralph Waldo Emerson's early reading of Songs of Innocence and Experience in 1842. Chapter one will show that the New England Transcendentalists - primarily Emerson, but also Elizabeth Peabody and readers of the transcendentalis publication The Harbinger - were reading Blake's Poetical Sketchse in the 1840's. This American interest in Blake's poetry will be presented against a background of British neglect of the English poet until after 1863 and the publication of Alexander Gilchrist's Life of William Blake. Chapter one provides details of Emerson's reading of Blake. According to Walter Harding, Emerson owned a copy of Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience. This was given to him by Elizabeth Peabody in 1842, is inscribed 'R.W. Emerson from his friend E.P.P.', and has notes throughout in Emerson's hand. Indeed, a diary entry of Henry Crabb Robinson (1848) refers to discussions between himself, Emerson and James John Garth Wilkinson about Blake. Drawing on the Transcendentalists' reading of Blake's poetry, chapter two will read Emerson's essay in light of his interest in the English poet. Some critical attention has been given elsewhere to Blakean passages in Emerson's essays, but it has been fleeting. Richard Gravil is the critic who makes the most effort to record Emerson's interest in Blake, but does so sporadically and mainly as a footnote to a larger point about transatlantic Romanticism more generally. Richard O'Keefe's 1995 study, Mythic Archetypes in Ralph Waldo Emerson claims that Emerson was not reading Blake until after 1863; this thesis will challenge that assumption. Chapter two also examines Emerson's later essays and offers a new reading of Society and Solitude (1870) and Letters and Social Aims (1875) by placing these collections alongside a consideration of Blake's prophetic poems, Poetical sketches (1783) and Songs of Innocence and Experience (1794). Chapter three will then show that, in 1868, a transatlantic discussion about the affinities between Whitman's and Blake's poetry emerged simultaneously. Algernon Charles Swinburne opened the discussion in Britain with the publication of his study William Blake, which ended with a long proclamation on the merits of the American poet, Walt Whitman, whose Blakean affinities Swinburne identified as being worthy of critical attention. That same year, in the United States, John Swinton, editor of the New York Times, was reading Blake's poetry aloud at social gatherings and passing off Blake's poems as Whitman's work to audiences familiar with Leaves of Grass. These discussion concerning the similarities between Blake's and Whitman's poetry dwindled into a critical silence in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, but are reopened here in the form of a transatlantic discussion of Whitman's Leaves of Grass. This thesis queries why a readership of Blake's poetry should have featured so ealry in New England when the British appetite for it was not whetted until after the Gilchrist revival in 1863. My argument suggests that by reading Blake, Emerson and Whitman together, new readings of each of them can profitably be made. By exploring the Blakean affinities in Emerson and Whitman, their visionary qualities - like those found in Blake's prophetic works - become freshly apparent. It will also be argued that something distinctly American can be discerned in Blake's poetry. This original approach to Emerson and Whitman challenges their critically ingrained reputation as writers of America individualism by reinstating them as the heirs to Blake's American legacy.
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Nigm, Soad Mohammad Ali Mostafa. "The idea of America in the works of Robert Southey, Joel Barlow and Walt Whitman." Thesis, University of Newcastle Upon Tyne, 2011. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.555963.
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The aim of this thesis is to investigate the impact of contemporary political upheavals on the formation of the idea of America in the writings of Robert Southey (1774-1843), Joel Barlow (1754-1812) and Wait Whitman (1819-1892). Focusing on three epic poems, the thesis considers Southey, Barlow and Whitman as epic writers during a period of great national and international turmoil, and analyses the relationship between the articulation of national identity and the conflicted politics of the day. I will argue that each of these writers, affected by contemporary events and dangers that threatened the unity and stability of the nation, attempted, through his work, to achieve national unity or create national identity. These attempts, I will argue, led to the formation of an idea of America that would serve the national identity of early nineteenth-century Britain in Southey's Madoc (1805), post-Revolutionary America in Barlow's Columbiad (1807) and mid-nineteenth-century America in Whitman's Leaves of Grass (1855). The thesis examines how the epic provided the three writers with the means to reflect and comment on the political events which posed a threat to nationalism in their times. Chapter One explores Southey's endeavours in Madoc to inspire ambition and unify the nation in the face of a strong enemy. Chapter Two explores how far Barlow succeeds, in The Columbiad, in creating an American identity for the early Republic that would make her a model to be imitated by the whole world. Chapter Three examines Whitman' s new form which granted America literary independence. Through focussing on Whitman's treatment of the Mexicans, Native Americans and black people, in his prose and verse, the chapter argues that Whitman's attempt to create a new democratic identity for America was not altogether successful. The thesis argues that the idea of America is transformed from a colony in the first chapter, moving through half-independence in the second chapter, and towards complete independence and colonization in the third chapter. This will expose how the identities established by the three poets, through their depiction of America, become imperialist identities.
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Ribeiro, Flavio Diniz. "Walt Whitman Rostow e a problemática do desenvolvimento: ideologia, política e ciência na Guerra Fria." Universidade de São Paulo, 2008. http://www.teses.usp.br/teses/disponiveis/8/8138/tde-04072008-160534/.
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O objetivo principal desta Tese é produzir uma leitura crítica da construção, por Walt Whitman Rostow, do desenvolvimento enquanto ideologia e enquanto política de Estado dos Estados Unidos no contexto da Guerra Fria. O desenvolvimento é concebido como uma política econômica internacional principalmente para resolver o problema da necessidade de expansão internacional do capitalismo como sistema mundial no pós-guerra, sob a hegemonia americana. O confronto político-ideológico capitalismo versus comunismo é certamente relevante, mas secundário. Uma forte ideologia do desenvolvimento se torna necessária para induzir os chamados países subdesenvolvidos a adotar o desenvolvimento como seu objetivo maior, o que a política internacional do desenvolvimento poderia ajudar a promover oferecendo empréstimos internacionais e assistência técnica. Uma vez aceito, um esquema como esse poderia garantir o funcionamento de uma nova ordem capitalista internacional, em substituição ao velho colonialismo. Walt Whitman Rostow é talvez o intelectual mais importante na criação e na promoção do desenvolvimento como ideologia e como política de Estado. Esta Tese é centrada na sua produção teórico-política sobre o desenvolvimento, abrangendo o período que se considera como efetivamente criativo desta produção, ou seja, até a sua definição da seqüência de estágios-de-crescimento em As Etapas do Crescimento Econômico. Um Manifesto Não-Comunista. Também se analisa a busca de W. W. Rostow por uma fundamentação teórica por meio de sua crítica a Marx e à abordagem estrutural-funcional nas ciências sociais.This Thesis\' main objective is the production of a critical reading of the Walt Whitman Rostow\'s construction of the development as an ideology and as a State policy of the United States in the Cold War context. The development is conceived as an international economic policy mainly to solve the serious problem of the need for international expansion of capitalism as a world system, in the post-war period, under the American hegemony. The political-ideological confrontation capitalism versus communism is certainly a relevant one, but secondary. A strong ideology of development becomes necessary to induce the so called underdeveloped countries to adopt the development as their primary goal, which the international development policy could make easier by the supply of international loanable funds and technical assistance. One accepted, this scheme would guarantee the functioning of a new international capitalistic order, replacing the old colonialism. Walt Whitman Rostow is perhaps the most important intellectual in the creation and promotion of the development as an ideology and a State policy. This Thesis is centered upon his theoretical-political production about the development, covering the effective creative period of this production, that is, until Rostow\'s definition of his stages-of-growth sequence in The Stages of Economic Growth. A Non-Communist Manifesto. There is also an analysis of Rostow\'s search for theoretical foundations by means of his criticism of Marx and of the structural-functional approach in the social sciences. .
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Waggoner, Eliza K. "America Singing Loud: Shifting Representations of American National Identity in Allen Ginsberg and Walt Whitman." University of Dayton / OhioLINK, 2012. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=dayton1336052921.
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Marsden, Steven Jay. ""Hot little prophets": reading, mysticism, and Walt Whitman's disciples." Texas A&M University, 2004. http://hdl.handle.net/1969.1/1213.
Full textAbstract:
While scholarship on Walt Whitman has often dealt with "mysticism" as an important element of his writings and worldview, few critics have acknowledged the importance of Whitman's disciples in the development of the idea of secular comparative mysticism. While critics have often speculated about the religion Whitman attempted to inculcate, they have too often ignored the secularized spirituality that the poet's early readers developed in response to his poems. While critics have postulated that Whitman intended to revolutionize the consciousness of his readers, they have largely ignored the cases where this kind of response demonstrably occurred.
"Hot Little Prophets" examines three of Walt Whitman's most enthusiastic early readers and disciples, Anne Gilchrist, Richard Maurice Bucke, and Edward Carpenter. This dissertation shows how these disciples responded to the unprecedented reader-engagement techniques employed in Whitman's Leaves of Grass, and how their readings of that book (and of Whitman himself) provided them with new models of identity, politics, and sexuality, new focuses of desire, and new ways in which to interpret their own lives and experiences.
This historicized reader-response approach, informed by a contexualist understanding of mystical experience, provides an opportunity to study how meaning is created through the interaction of Whitman's poems and his readers' expectations, backgrounds, needs, and desires. It also shows how what has come to be called mystical experience occurs in a human context: how it is formed out of a complicated interaction of text and interpretation (sometimes misinterpretation), experience and desire, context and stimulus.
The dissertation considers each disciple's education and upbringing, intellectual influences, habits of reading, and early religious attitudes as a foreground to the study of his or her initial reaction to Leaves of Grass. Separate chapters on the three figures investigate the crises of identity, vocation, faith, and sexuality that informed their reactions. Each chapter traces the development of the disciples' understanding of Whitman's poetry over a span of years, focusing especially on the complex role mystical experience played in their interpretation of Whitman and his works.