THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: Walt Whitman

Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The 2024 syllabus can be found here. This episode, of which the first 10 minutes are free, concerns the poetry of Walt Whitman, particularly his epic-lyric Song of Myself. First I set the scene of 19th-century American poetry, and then I discuss Whitman’s biography and his life-long 40 years’ work on Leaves of Grass. I also establish that Whitman’s celebrated “free verse” is not as free as it seems but is carefully controlled by a series of potent poetic techniques rooted in tradition. Then we read excerpts of his manifesto-like Preface to Leaves of Grass with its call for a poetry commensurate with an America that is itself the greatest poem. Next we sample resonant passages from Song of Myself. I explore Whitman’s complex concept of the self; his embrace of all forms of otherness from the sexual to the racial to the social to the natural; his use of symbolism (especially the symbol of grass itself) and its relation to that of contemporaneous writers like Emerson, Hawthorne, and Melville; his intense auto-eroticism and bodily address to the reader; and his sense of the poet’s mission and destiny. Finally, I examine two other poems: “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” with its revision of Poe’s “Raven” and expansion of Whitman’s poetic to include the Gothic and decadent, and “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” a richly symbolic pastoral elegy for Lincoln and all those lost in the Civil War. Please like, share, comment, and enjoy!—and please offer a paid subscription so you don’t miss the rest of the American literature sequence, including forthcoming episodes Emily Dickinson and Henry James, not to mention the archive of episodes on modern British literature from Blake to Beckett and our previous sequences on the works of Joyce, including Ulysses, and on George Eliot’s Middlemarch. The slideshow corresponding to the lecture can be downloaded below the paywall: