Walt Whitman and the Americas

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

No poet writing in English has been more influential in the Americas than Walt Whitman. The Good Gray Poet has given us a corpus of work that every subsequent generation has followed, revised, rejected, and reimagined. It is my contention that if we are to understand América, then we must understand Whitman. Was he the great beacon of social justice or a virulent racist? Was his vision of the Americas laudatory or condemnable? To answer these questions, we have to not only understand Whitman, but also understand ourselves. One of the most surprising facets of contending with Whitman is explicating how he was taken up by various groups of Americans: by Black poets in the U.S. like Langston Hughes (himself incredibly popular in Latin America), June Jordan, and Lucille Clifton; by Latin American Poets like José Martí (who once heard Whitman read his poetry live), Ruben Darío, Pablo Neruda, and Gabriela Mistral; and by Queer poets, most famously Allen Ginsberg and also Mark Doty. This class will be divided into two main sections: first, we will read Whitman and then we will read those who resisted and reimagined him. Along the way, we will consider questions of justice, of what we do with problematic literature, of various theories of influence, and, more than anything, of what it means to be part of the Americas.