Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Sood, Arun

Titel

"A Modern Poet on the Scotch Bard": Walt Whitman's 1875 Essay on Robert Burns

Ist Teil von

• Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, 2015-03, Vol.32 (4), p.230-236

Ort / Verlag

Iowa City: Dept. of English, The University of Iowa

Erscheinungsjahr

2015

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Elektronische Zeitschriftenbibliothek - Frei zugängliche E-Journals

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Without the race of which he is a distinct specimen, (and perhaps his poems) America and her powerful Democracy could not exist to-day-could not project with unparallel'd historic sway in the future.3 The esteem of Whitman, as well as praise by Ralph Waldo Emerson,4 certainly contributed to Burns becoming "an idol of both cultural and literary proportions for the nineteenth-century American reading public. First premising to thee, reader dear, that the undersigned has been courteously summoned by letter and ticket to more than one of to-night's supper anniversaries, the way may then be clearer and the reason why for thoughts like the following, not of extravagant eulogium, with voice pitched high and fervent to the pleasant smell of hot Scotch, but alone by the fireside in the invalid room, weighing the canny Caledonian bard in friendly scale, yet seeking to strike the eternal averages. [...]the idea that Whitman admired Burns for his linkage to "American liberty" or politics is thrown into question through his assertion that the poet "attempts none of these themes" (218). The 1875 essay is blatant in its criticism of the nineteenth-century culture of commemoration, a significant observation in that many of Whitman's literary contemporaries regularly composed works for such occasions, "suppers," and events as previously outlined. [...]Whitman is far more visceral in his criticisms of Burns's poetry in the earliest draft ("a poet of the third, perhaps fourth class"), moderating his analysis with each edit, resulting in a final essay that, perhaps, represents a glossed version of his truer sentiments.12 One certainty is that in reading all three drafts of Whitman's essay on Burns, it becomes apparent that his opinions extend far beyond mere blind adoration.