I Hear America Singing
不妥罗显斌
(陕西师范大学外国语学院, 陕西西安710062)
2002 年11 月陕西师范大学学报(哲学社会科学版) Nov. ,2002第31 卷专辑Journal of Shaanxi Normal University (Social Science) Vo1. 31 Sup.【Abstract】Whitman had a lifelong attachment to the grammatical form of the prent participles and the poetic “I”. In this thesis, I propod that the devices constitute an esntial part of his poetics and that they reflect and express some of this poet’s most fundamental ideas and beliefs about life and poetry. Here I ud I
HEAR AMERICAN SINGING, as illustration, in the hope that some of the conclusions I made here would help us to understand his other poems better.
【Key Words】poetic I ; prent participles ; parallelism; Romanticism
工商银行汇率I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear Tho of mechanics, each one singing his as it should be blithe and strong The carpenter singing his as he measures his plank or beam The mason singing his as he makes ready for wok , or leaves off work The boatman singing what belongs to him in his boa
t , the deck hand singing on the steamboat deck The shoemaker singing as he sits on his bench , the hatter singing on his stands The wood cutter’s song , the plough boy’s song on his way in the morning or at noon intermission or at sundown The delicious singing of the mother , or the young wife at work or the girl wing or washing Each singing what belongs the day ———at night the party of young fellow , robust , friendly Singing with open mouths , their strong melodious songs.
Part one
“I’m large , I will contain multitudes” wrote Whitman , expressing his distain for that “foolish consistency” which Emerson declared to be the “bugbear” of small mind. In fact Whitman was as many - sided as American life, which he sought to prent through the lyric - epic of reprentative character. However, he was known to few readers in his own life and fiercely attacked by tho rare American critics who noticed him at all. Today he has been translated into almost every languages in the world and is universally considered one of the greatest poets He was born on a Long Island farm, the son of a poor Quaker farmer - carpenter. He left school at eleven to work first as an office boy and, later, became a typetter, schoolmaster, editor, and journalist in succession. Even when he was still a typetter, he began contributing short stories to his own and other journals. But all the writings were conventional and dull short stories and some very poor ntimental vers. Thro
ughout 1854, he immerd himlf in Emerson’s essays. He
himlf said many years later“, I was simmering, simmering. Emerson brought me to boil” In 1854 - 1855, the thirty - five year old ex - journalist privately printed the first edition of an electrifying book , which many now considered the first volume of truly modern poetry , THE LEAVES OF GRASS. Whitman immediately nt a copy of the book to Emerson, who responded with a dazzling letter of thanks, written on July 11, 1855. I am not blind to the worth of the wonderful gift of “GRASS”. I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed ———I give you my joy of your free and brave thought ———I greet you at the beginning of a great career ⋯But Longfellow and all Emerson’s literary friends , excerpt for Thoreau , were so unanimous in their denunciation of the book that Emerson began to doubt his own judgment . The enlarged cond edition of LEAVES OF GRASS appeared in 1856 and David McKay brought out the fifth edition, also the so - called deathbed edition in 1892.
In 1873, Whitman had a paralytic stroke. He thus spent is last 20 year writing a little, revising and editing a great deal. He died in 1892 in New Jercy; Whitman was a daring experimentalist. His early poems are in the conventional rime and meter, but apparently found necessary to find new poetic techniques befitting to American poems Thus in his first preface to LEAVES OF GRASSS in 1855, W
hitman spoke the need of the American nation for a totally new kind of poetry.
The poetry of other land lies in the past ———what they have been. The poetry of America lays in the future - what the States and their men and women are certain to be ———the truest and greatest. Poetry can never again in the English language be expresd in arbitrary and rhyming meter, more than the greatest eloquence or truest power and passion.
However he never underestimate (in theory at least) the need for poetry to besubtly and necessarily always rhythmic and distinguished easily enough (from) pro. But for the rhyme and the movement of his lines, he went to three different sources.
The first was deeply American art of oratory. This was intimately associated with the pulpit oratory of the great puritan speakers in the colonial days as well as with the contemporary political tradition of reprentative government and free election. One of Whitman’s ambition was to be an orator. He was regular in his attendance at the debating club, which he joint at sixteen. He spent whole days walking along the acoast practicing speeches to himlf or reciting Shakespeare’s passages to himlf. That is why every
reader has noticed how often Walt Whitman says “I”. There are few pages of LEAVES OF GRASS wi
thout at least some form of the first person pronoun. Yet “I” is not the pronoun that most markedly distinguishes Whitman’s poems. “You” is. Ezra Greanspan called this reader - awareness“vocative technique”. The poems sound like performance with the author addressing “the listener up there”.
The cond major source for Whitman’s rhythm was the Italian opera. “But for the opera I could never have written LEAVES OF GRASS. ”Mathiesn comments in the American Renaissance.
It is possible also to e likeness to music in the varied repetition of some of his catalogs; or to go 286 farther and note that his method in a poem is to prent a main motif, which is repeated, amplified, and recapitulated The third more predictable and more easily identifiable influence was the Atlantic Ocean.
He got most of him rhyme from the sound of its surf. He loved the restless Atlantic. The ocean forms the subject as well as the rhythm of his best poems. This can be illustrated in “out of the cradle endlessly rocking”
最好的处理器Part two
蒸花样馒头
When I began reading this poem, what stroke me most was the consistent recurrence of the prent
participles and the poetic “I” in this poem. They led me to study his other poems. My conclusion is: Whitman had a lifelong attachment to the grammatical form of the prent participles and the poetic “I”.
His u of them are not arbitrary and at random. I would like to say that they constitute an esntial part of his poetics and that they reflect and express some of this poet’s most fundamental ideas and beliefs about life and poetry. In this thesis, I’d like to make a tentative rearch on the two devices ud in I HEAR AMERICAN SINGING in the hope that some of the conclusions I make here would help us to understand his other poems better.
This poem gives me an impression that Whitman nds out his “I” to report on what he es and hears. ——— mechanics, woodcutters, mother and girls, carpenter and peoples from all levels of life working and enjoying themlves. He rendered the catalogs unified as a formal whole. The primary technique ud here to prent this picture is the parallelism, which is constructed from regular repetition of the participle phras. Here we can e the devices rve as unifying or organizing principles.
To begin with, I will talk about the participial principle. It is one of the
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basic building blocks of I HEAR AMERICA SINGING. The prent participles stand in relation to each other. The effect of the participial phras, in a structural arrangement of parallelism, is to carry the potentiality of the persona forward and onward, as it were, without limitation. Here in I HEAR AMERICA SINGING, Whitman imagined the dynamic power of the nation as an activity ———singing. The mechanic the carpenter, the mason, the wood cutter, etc. ———each person parately “singing” his or her individual songs. But where in the “picture” each person performs his or her role parately. It appears in the reader’s mind like a gallery containing a limitless array of randomly lected portraits, through which it takes its reader on poet - guided tour with its potentiality for vitality, breath, fullness and variety. This is the kind of spectacle that both excite Whitman’nsibility and challenge his imagination to construct its fitting verbal reprentation. He did find it in the parallel participles, which blends the singing individual into a harmonious America song.
Prent participles also allows him to realize his kinetic vision of life ———a “sprawl”———as a cealess motio; of experience as an ongoing process of lf - propelled thrust out into the world ;of his time and place as a fluid continuation , transcending beginning and end , as it were , with the potential energy of verbal to convey his n of the sprawling vitality of modern life to his contemporary audience .
In order to do so, in this poem, he employed a highly active vocabulary made up largely of prent participles to keep up the basic action, the eing and recording of the scenes ordinary life, flowing and progressing, the various elements of the scenes moving toward one another . To image this scene without tho words would deprive it of its underlying dynamism of American life.
As we can e in this poem the location and time of the scenes have been shifting with no clearly defined center in the scene. It can be said to be nowhere and everywhere. Since there is no inherent or “authorized” system by which to understand and order his sighting and hearing. Whitman was confronted with the poetic task of contriving a verbal and organizational prentation out of the “disorder”. Whitman found in his poetic “I” an extraordinarily congenial vehicle for his vision of freedom and unrestraint. In this poem, the real weight of the scene is transferred from the objects viewed (the working place) to the subjective viewer “I”. Here Whitman nd out his “I” as a reprentative American, exploring what he considered reprentative金点子广告电子版
situations of Americans working and enjoying them. For him, “I” is one of most revealing phenomenon of his poetry, but “who am I?” The answer is “I am Whitman” and “I am not Whitman” ,“I am anyone , anywhere and anytime” I am on the building site. I am in the day hearing the mason, the woodcutter singing. I am in the nightclub eing the young fellow enjoying himlf.
In short, the two device : the prent participle and the poetic “I”allows Whitman to incorporate in his poem the principle of inclusiveness by which life is characterized and to give a free play to an imagination that was remarkably liberalized , for its time , from the constraints of specificity and linearity.
They also allow Whitman transform the prosaic facts of life into his energized poetic form by transporting “I” to distant places to e and hear. In short, they rve as a unifying center in the other sprawling poem.
Bibliography:
1. Carroll C.Calkins, The story of America, New York: The Readers Digest Association, Inc, 1975
2. Elisabeth B. Booz, A Brief Introduction To Modern American Literature 1919-1980, Shanghai: Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press, 1982
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气候英语3. 柯恩, Landmarks of American Literature, 北京: 三联书店, 1988
4. Wu Dingbo, An outline of American literature, Shanghai: Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press, 1998
5. Edited by W. P. Trent, J. Erskine & S. P. Sherman, The Cambridge History of English and American Literature, Cambridge, England: University Press, 1997
