INTRODUCTION
INTRODUCTION
I DREAM’D in a dream I saw a city invincible to the
Attacks of the whole of the rest of the earth.
I dream’d that was the new city of
Friends, love, it led the rest,
It was seen every hour in the actions
Of the men of that City,
And in all their looks and words.
-Walt Whitman,
(“I Dreamed in a Dream,” 1860)
American Poetry is as good a starting point as any other for the
understanding of American culture. It is, as Roy Harvey Pearce pointed out years
ago, an “Inside narrative5,1 of the story of that culture. The main elements of that
culture consist of, on the one hand, an acute sense of personhood, of being part of
the brave new world and the great American landscape and being in the American
grain, and on the other, an equally strong sense of living apart from that world, of
being in an adversarial relation to that culture, of being in a state beyond culture.
All poets in all cultures stake certain status-claims. The Greek word for poet
meant seer, the Romans called him Vates or prophet and in India the poet means a
rishi (seer), a deergadarshi (one who sees far) and a margadarshi (one who is a
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path-finder). In America too, the poet has made certain claims to status, or to put it
in another way, status has been thrust upon him.
The American poet, in more than ordinary measure, seems to be aware of
his relation to his culture. He can be, in the terms set out above, either American in
a provincial way, celebrating tiie landscape and honoring local materials, however
poverty-stricken it might appear to some observers, or he can be heavily at odds
with that culture, questioning it and rejecting it. Richard Wilbur speaks of his long
and loyal quarrel with America, and this attitude of his can be applied to a large
range of American poets. In other words, in the best American poets what Pearce
calls the “Tea saying” goes hand in hand with the “nay saying”. One thinks of the
celebrating impulse in Whitman as also his “Drum Taps” dirge; one thinks of Allen
Ginsberg’s
“Howl” but at the same time notes that for all his condemnation of
America he himself, in tone of voice and accent, is proud of his American identity.
Pearce was surely right to say that “the history of American poetry is the history of
a search for the discipline authorized by one’s sense of oneself as a person living
fully in the world and yet capable of imagining what it would be like to live apart
from it”.2 In this yea-nay saying the poets repeatedly play variations on the basic
themes of American culture-themes like the idea of the ‘Just City on the Hill’, the
notion of individual freedom contending with the equally strong impulse to
community, the urge for an American grammar, syntax and sensibility to supplant
the influence of England. This poetic tradition is profoundly human and
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encompasses a poetry of men, and makes for something like a unity of the tradition
where in the great society of poetry, poets separated by vast stretches of times can
be seen to have affinities. One such line, perhaps, is the one which links Emerson
to Whitman and Whitman to Hart Crane and Ginsberg. The Whitman line has been
potent and a large number of American poets have complex and varied relations
with him. A poet on this showing would like to enter into a pact with him as Ezra
Pound did, or finish his work by altering, elaborating or distorting his agenda. A
notable contemporary poet in this respect is Louis Simpson, but one can add
several names to Simpson’s, notably the Projectivist poets, the Deep Imagists are
an individual talent like Theodore Roethke. Wallace Stevens and T.S. Eliot have
something in common with Edgar Allan Poe and Emerson, a point often not
noticed. Robert Frost is the father-figure for contemporary poets like Howard
Nemerov, Richard Wilbur and John Hollander. It is a most important point as to
whether Sylvia Plath or Adrienne Rich can be read without reference to Emily
Dickinson whose own brand of the “confessionaF is noteworthy. So also without a
Black woman poet like Phillis Wheatley, one wonders if the brilliant poetic output
of so many Black writers would have been possible at all. Thus the American
poetic tradition shows both continuity and change, but change is possible only on
the basis of something to change from, and clearly American poetry provides such
points of reference.
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Walt Whitman (1819-1892) is arguably America’s most influential poet
providing lines of continuity in the American poetic tradition with major poets of
our century like Pound, Ginsberg, Olson, Louis Simpson, all of whom have made
their pact with Whitman. Whitman’s great poem ‘Leaves of Grass ’ went through
several editions after its first appearance in 1855. Emerson’s essay “The Poet was
one of its enabling texts. Emerson spoke of the materials in America which could
be transformed into poetry, and ‘Leaves’ fulfilled Emerson’s hope. That was
clearly the reason why Emerson responded to ‘Leaves of Grass’ with so much
enthusiasm: “ I am not blind to the worth of the wonderful gift of ‘Leaves of
Grass'. I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has
yet contributed ... I greet you at the beginning of a great career, which yet must
have had a long foreground somewhere, for such a start”. Whitman’s “foreground”
was, the life he led as a voracious reader of literature, as experiencer of the
vastness of America, as teacher and as journalist. Whitman’s wide human
sympathies and his love of people are important elements in his great democratic,
national epic. It preaches compassion, togetherness and companionship. The form
of4Leaves of Grass ’ is adequate to the subject matter. The long rolling lines, the
cascading rhythms, the passionate and spontaneous outpouring of personal feeling,
make it a unique expression of America. No poet after Whitman could ignore the
poem and when Whitman died in 1892, he died secure in the belief that he had set
the agenda for the future American poetry in a decisive manner.
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Carl Sandburg (1878-1967)
The American poets who made poetry ‘new’ were also the first seekers of a
community worth having in an age that divided personality and culture. The
individual had to be restored, the self saved, and personality defended. Society
seemed too much of an artifice; its culture too expansive to hold men. Naturally,
manifestations of this culture-which the modem mind has identified in the stark
emblems of the city and the machine-came to be looked upon with horrified
fascination. T.S, Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Hart Crane sought order, each according to
his dire need and potency of vision. The modem city, they felt, stood out there: a
thing to be wondered at rather than desired, its otherness maintained by conscious
will, its strangeness reinforced by poetic fancy.
Carl Sandburg was perhaps alone among the modem American poets to
view the city from within. He alone seems to have made a valiant effort to perceive
the modem city as an essentially democratic institution whose supreme function
and legitimacy in modem life are much less disputed than those of his own art.
Sandburg’s view, essentially un/anti-poetic in its assumptions, compelled a
recognition of the physical reality of the city on terms not so congenial to the poet.
The city could at best be the subject for a couple of poems, but certainly not the
proper subject for a proper poet. Sandburg’s early poetry, however, resolves this
problem by humanizing the city, without idealizing it. If ‘ The People ’ could be a
proper subject for a poet of democracy, the city could as well be a subject of no
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less significance. He would sing rather of urbs populi, the city of the people. The
poet of the prairie found nothing unusual in “The land and its people holding
memories... keeping old things that never grow old” (‘Prairie’, p.83). The city
could live as well; it could think, feel, act, recall and respond the way its
inhabitants do. One could speak of its life, its soul; in other words, of its sentience
that marks it as a distinctive living presence. The City, Yes; as well as its people.
Sandburg could now celebrate them both in his exultant moods; run them down,
too, in his occasional bouts of foul temper.
This thesis is a study of Cities in the American Poetry with special
reference to the ‘City Poetry’ of Walt Whitman representing nineteenth
century, and another city poet Carl Sandburg of twentieth century. The
purpose of this study is to focus on America’s city and city life as revealed in
the poetical works of Walt Whitman and Carl Sandburg.
Today the United States is a thoroughly urbanized nation-only 3.4 percent of
the population still farms, and everyone else, regardless, of the size of the
settlement employed in urban type jobs. Cities like magnets are drawing more and
more country people into its factories, counting houses and offices. Some people
have found adventure and fortune but others frustration, loneliness, and tragedy.
This contrast and antagonism between country on the one hand and the city on the
other has continued to elicit the interest of sociologists and novelists and the poets.
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The study was found relevant as it could throw light on this important
theme, which could enhance the understanding of every citizen in modem
civilization about cities .The study includes five chapters with an introduction and
conclusion. The chapters have been organized with a view to identifying the
features of American cities and city life as depicted in the poetry of Walt Whitman
and Carl Sandburg.
In this study, ‘City Poetry’ has been studied in two separate chapters. The
third chapter presents Walt Whitman’s ‘Urban Crowd,’ and the fourth chapter
presents Carl Sandburg’s ‘City of the Big Shoulders’.
The city as a negative point of reference is well illustrated in early Romantic
poetry by William Wordsworth’s ‘Tintem Abbey’ (1798) and ‘Michael’.3 (1800).
In neither of these poems is the country-city antithesis given an explicit thematic
extension; the country (or nature) is the source of moral good, and the city exists
only remotely as an alternative and possibly destructive mode of life. The poet has
thus ceased to think of “my-stery” in terms of the individual and his place within
the “huse fermenting mass of humankind' (lines 635-36). Immersed in reverie and
beyond/the reach of common indication then suddenly experiencing the vision of
the beggar, he extends the questions of man’s origin and destiny to existence itself.
The earlier question of identity and relationship to city (“next-door neighbor” are
“Strangers, not knowing each the other’s name”) now has its larger symbolic
embodiment and appear in the much broader terms of life. The “admonishment”
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the poet senses pertains to the abyss between what man can know or discard of
himself (and others) in the social or geographical sense, and what he is inseparable
of knowing with regard to the mystery of his complete spiritual being. Thus for a
moment man in the city began to be seen as an image of man in the universe,
knowing little of himself and less of his cosmic surroundings.
At the same time it must be admitted that many of the greatest American
writers have not displayed anything like a fondness for or even, for that matter,
must interest in the actualities of urban experience in America far from it. To
recognize just how far, we need only try to recall the way city life is depicted in the
work of the poets in the main line that leads from Emerson to Walt Whitman,
Frost, Fitzgerald Hemingway, and Faulkner. Which of these writers may be said to
have given an adequate specification of city life in America?
Which is not
vulnerable to the charge of neglect, whether benigh or malign, of urban reality.
The two who on first though may seem most deserving of exemption from
that charge are Whitman and James. But only at first for though it is true that
NewYork is the setting for much of Whitman’s poetry, his NewYork is less like a
city any one ever inhabited than it is, in Richard Chase’s apt at words, a
paradoxically urban pastoral world of primeval novelty.4 A major poet, Walt
Whitman has been acknowledged as one of America’s most prominent city poetwho introduced the city to American literature. Against the grain of his age, he
celebrated the inhabitants of NewYork and the feel of city living, and devised
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poetic forms that were open to the diversity, pace, and scale of urban life. At the
same time-he is often taken as the poet of the individual self, the ‘Solitary Singer.’
The tension between the public and the personal in Whitman’s poetry has
stimulated critical studies of the almost solipsistic privacy of Whitman’s poetics, as
well as reflections on the gregarious solitude of modem urban living.
Unlike the English romantics, Whitman did not dislike the city and glorify
the village. Rather, he was proud of the fact that he was an American, both of the
city and the village. He could evoke the turbulent chaotic city in a few vivid words.
For him the city symbolizes companionship, friendship, comradeship of the
possibilities of such relationships existing in the masses of the people living in the
city.
Whitman believes in individualism. Most of Whitman’s poems measure and
remeasure the Magic Prison of individualist consciousness. Whitman drew back
from the privacy and interiori:y toward which his poetic thinking tended,
recognizing that it reduced his experience to spectacle and illusion. He sought for
grounds on which his vision might be both stabilized and communicated. Although
some of the poems, like ‘Song of Myself,’ rely on the act of faith that the ‘I and
the Life Force ’ are one, others look for a more secular mediation.
Whitman insisted that his life in NewYork was the foundation of his poetry.
He wrote the first three editions of 'Leaves of Grass ’ (1855, 1856 and 1860) while
a resident of NewYork and it was in NewYork that he underwent his miraculous
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transformation from printer to journalist to poet. Walt Whitman thought of himself
as a man of the city. He was, as he wrote in the "Song ofMyself: ‘Walt Whitman,
a kosmos, of Manhattan the son’ (line-52).
Whitman’s family moved to Brooklyn from Huntington, Long Island by the
time he was four and his childhood was spent in what was, at that time, the rapidly
growing suburban city across the East River from NewYork. Running errands as
an office boy and later, as a printer’s apprentice, Whitman had ample opportunity,
even as a child, to become familiar with both of the cities on the East River. At the
age of fifteen, having lost his printer’s job in an employment squeeze that followed
NewYork’s great fire of 1835, Whitman moved back to Long Island and taught
school in several rural communities. When employment opportunities for printers
improved Whitman returned to NewYork in 1841 to work in the pressroom of Park
Benjamin’s New World. From this time until 1863, when he settled in Washington,
Whitman was a continuous resident of NewYork and Brooklyn. During this period,
as NewYork grew from a promising port town (of about 300,00) into a metropolis
of over a million, the third largest city in the Western world, Whitman was actively
involved in the life of the city as a printer, editor, and writer for several NewYork
newspapers and magazines.
By the time Whitman wrote “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” NewYork was no
longer the city that the narrator of “The Man of the Crowd” contemptuously
referred to as small and uncrowded by European standards. America’s undisputed
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leader in commerce, industry, and banking, the port of entry for millions of
immigrants, NewYork had become, by the middle of the 1850’s, a city of crowds,
rapidly spreading northward on Manhattan Island. As American Journalists had
marveled at the innumerable streets and immense crowds of the metropolises of
Europe in the 1820’s and 1830’s. European journalists had begun to do the same
with the American metropolis. Bayard Still writes, of the European journalism of
this period:
“Gone was the condescension with which British travelers had viewed
Broadway a generation earlier. By the fifties they were willing to admit that
London could not provide its equal. Not even the cluttered and dirty condition of
many of the city’s streets and pavements, which most of the foreign visitors
continued to criticize, or the obstructing festoons of telegraph wires over head
checked their admiration for a city whose monster hotels, handsome shops, and
“stately mansions” equaled if not surpassed old world standards”.5 (125-6).
Since his own growth, into a kosmos, and into the poet of “Leaves of
Grass,” was parallel to that of NewYork, Whitman may have felt a particularly
close identification with his native city. In any case, he suggests, in “Specimen
Days”, that the amplitude of the NewYork, a “Kosmos” in its own right, played an
important role in the development of his poetic imagination.
The panoramic and impressionistic nature of Whitman’s apprehension of the
city does not lend itself to concrete and particularized representation. In such urban
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poems as “Mannahatta, ” Broadway “City of Ships,” “A Broadway Pagaent”, or
“Give Me the Splendid Silent Sun”, it is impossible to find even the degree of
particularity one finds at the opening of ‘‘"The Man of the Crowd.” This lack of
particularity may help to explain why critics have found it so hard to discuss these
poems. Because they represent cnly general motions and tones, Whitman’s city
poems often appear to be excessively abstract and distanced. They seem to blend
everything together, and, to a large degree, they are indistinguishable from each
other. Reading Whitman’s descriptions of NewYork, some readers have reluctantly
concluded that, however much enthusiasm Whitman may have had for the city, he
had little of substance to say about it.
The panoramic harmony of Whitman’s representations of the city also may
not be accounted for by the suggestion that it reflects the way in which Whitman
actually perceived NewYork. Whitman understood, every bit as much as
Hawthorne, that the panoramic "full sweep” was infect a denial of the complexity
of what was taken in by it. He demonstrates this vividly in “Democratic Vistas”
where he offers one of the most characteristic of his urban descriptions:
“The splendor, picturesqueness, and oceanic amplitude and rush of these
great cities, the unsurpass’d situation rivers, and bay, sparkling sea-tides, costly
and lofty new buildings, facades of marble and iron, of original grandeur and
elegance of design, with the masses of gay color, the pre ponderance of white and
blue, the flags flying, the endless ships, the tumultuous streets, Broadway... the
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assemblages of citizens in their groups, conversations,
trades, evening
amusements, or along the by quarters-these I say, and the like of these completely
satisfy my senses ofpower, fullness, emotion, and give me, through such senses
and appetites, and through my aesthetic conscience, a continued exaltation and
absolute fulfillment”. (Prose Works, 2:371)
Laying the groundwork for a conception of urban spirituality, Whitman
accepts precisely those qualities of urban life that, according to the romantic poets,
made it a antithetical to poetic or spiritual experience. Unlike Wordsworth, who
felt that the incomprehensible multiplicity and transience of urban impressions
caused the city to appear to be terrifyingly unreal, a “Second-Sight Procession”,
Whitman imaginatively embraces crowds that are explicitly referred to as
consisting of fleeting and “unfathomed” surfaces. In fact, Whitman’s sense of the
world as a “necessary film” of1 appearances ” is an important component of his
ecstasy and power at the end of the poem. As he writes in “Song of the Open
Roadf the “certainty of the reality and immortality of things”, the goal of
“Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” is not something immediately visible in reality but
something “provoke (d) -out of the souF, by “the float of the sight of things” (152).
His language, in these assertions, specifically stresses the sufficiency of the
insubstantial. The modem world of unfathomed and fleeting images is sufficient,
because consciousness can provide what it lacks. As Whitman asserts at the
conclusion of “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry, ” the objects of the harbor are not
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themselves lasting, but they may be “used”. They are not eternal but may “furnish
their parts towards eternity.”
“Song of Myself demonstrated the exhilaration of a Self standing face-to
face with the All. But it also hinted at its loneliness and the solipsism of its vision.
Consciousness incessantly reverses form and field, from World-in-Mind to Mind-in
World. On what basis can the solitary Self corroborate its vision of the universe? on
what basis can it address another as “Tow”? Where could Whitman find the ground
of mutual faith that would bind him together with dumb real objects common folk,
and his poetic language? He had first represented that conflict as it struck the
innocent sensibility of the child who, in the first edition of “Leaves of Grass”, went
forth from the pastoral world into’ the destabilized experience of the city:
[....] The sense of what is real... the
thought it after all it should prove
unreal,
The doubts of daytime and doubts of
Night time....
The curious whether and how,
Whether that which appears is so...
Or is it all flashes and specks?
Men and women crowding fast in
The streets.... If they
Are not flashes and specks what are they?
(“There Was a Child Went Forth,”v,1,151)
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In the city streets, amid “phantoms" and “ shows” and “facades" Whitman’s
poetry first confronted the dissolution of a world conceived as I and Not- Me. The
transitory crowds of men and women in the streets, the encounter with artifice and
illusion, at once exhilarated Whitman and alienated him. These antithetical
emotions he reconciled by adopting the pose of the spectator, both in and out of the
game-one whose aesthetic visual detachment might neutralize his intense tactile
and auditory attraction. In some of the city poems Whitman may appear most
completely isolated in his own subjectivity. The objects of consciousness fade into
flashes and specks, dreams or dots; the spectatorial self, recognizing its own bad
faith, recedes through an infinity of masks. However, at some points in these
poems consciousness itself may recede, delivering us into the presence of an
injured fireman, a gang of bricklayers, or a woman awaiting her lover, Whitman’s
cosmos endlessly turns itself inside out.
In the first three editions of “Leaves of Grass”, Whitman sought to stabilize
this reversal by appealing to a You in the form of an ideal readership whom he
addressed through an expansive political rhetoric and through the conventions of
popular illustration. In the ‘Calamus Poems’ and in the Satan poems of ‘Drum
Taps', he retreated from public poetry into cozy intimacy with the camerado-reader
whom he could touch through the pages of his book. In ‘Drum-Taps’ he
capitulated to America’s actual readers, donning the mask of the ‘Good Gray
Poet,' affecting first a patriot’s and then a mourner’s sentiments about the war, and
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employing recognized conventions about pectoral poetry. But in truth he most
successfully consolidated the role of the citizen poet-bard, American, reader; /,
Not-me. You-in two poems of city experience that germinated together from a few
lines jotted in a notebook (N.I. 142-43) “There Was a Child Went Forth”{1855)
and ‘Crossing Brooklyn Ferry ’. It is through the city itself, in these poems, that he
finds a bridge between reality and the soul, between You and I. And he finds it
through the mystery of the eyesight.
These poems draw upon the conventions of pictorial art, like much of
Whitman’s poetry.
They expand upon those moments of dilation in which
Whitman was able to relinquish his urge to absorb his subject into syntax of his
own utterance, here men and women, streets, and ships enact the rhythms of their
own being. At the same time, they enact the rhythms of visual perception, as does
“A March in the Ranks.” And “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” achieves, finally, an
enactment of corporate identity, encompassing Whitman, New York, and the
reader within a civitas that resolves the daytime and night time doubts that so often
undermined his efforts to take on the role of citizen poet^Crassmg Brooklyn
Ferry” can properly be regarded as an American variant of that genre defined by
Meyer Abrams as the “Greater Romantic Lyric”.6
So to classify it may seem odd to reductive, like calling a moose a variant of
the English deer; or-given the tenuousness of Whitman’s acquaintance with the
British Romantic poets and the scarcity of such lyrics in the work of earlier
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American poets whom he may have known-a comparison founded only on
coincidental analogies. However, recognizing its kinship with poems like “Tintern
Abbey” and Coleridge’s Dejection Ode is essential as a first stage in describing
Whitman ‘s most successful effort to unite poet, subject and reader through his
words.
“Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” is a carefully structured poem. It is quite
different from “Song of Myself’, where all structure seems problematic, and from
such poems as “Salut au Monde'.”,
Shore”, “This Compost’
“Our Old Feuillage”, “By Blue Ontario’s
“a Song of the Rolling Earth,” and the other bardic
declamations whose lines so often seem unsequenced and even interchangeable
from one poem to another. “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” has a dramatic structure
comparable to that of “Frost at Midnight” and “Tintern Abbey” in which an inward
crisis is introduced and resolved. Typically the crisis, according to Abrams, is that
separation between subject and object, or poet and the world, that the romantics
termed “dejection”, and it is through a meditation on the landscape that this
division is overcome. “When the Romantic poet confronted a landscape, the
distinction between Self and Not-Self tended to dissolve.”7 The dominant mood of
“Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” is exaltation, not dejection; but readers who come to it
along the route from “Song of Myself’ through “ There Was a Child Went Forth”
will realize that its joy, like that of Emerson’s Self-Reliance”, is a hard-won
triumph over dejection.
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James A.W. Heffeman says that “the English romantic poets and painters
draw the beholder into their landscapes and thus seek to dissolve the opposition
between the outer world and the inner one”. The means of doing this, he says, was
a “language ofpower, a language that turns a known andfamiliar, landscape into
something extraordinary”.
a
He concludes; “Ultimately, I believe, the synoptic study of romantic poetry
painting allows us to see romanticism as the representation of temporalized space.
We commonly associate romantic literature with relentless temporality-with
process, development, and becoming rather than being, with the fear of stasis that
paradoxically accompanies and complicates the desire for timelessness. But the
correspondences between romantic poetry and painting force us to recognize that
romantic temporality is wedded to space”. (Heffeman, The Re-Creation of
Landscape, p .226). For Heffeman’s British poets and painters, this temporality is
primarily inward-the process by which “a verbally pictured landscape (gives) us
the picture of poets mind”.9 In “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,\ the sensory perception
of space moves outward to admit us to a time-bound urban world that is finally, the
one we share with Whitman and he with us.
Whitman was the first important American poet to celebrate science. He
rejected the romantic that science despoils the virgin purity of nature and preys on
the poetic imagination. “He violated the spirit of science the better to gratify his
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cosmic affirmations and mystical worldview. Despite his putative defense of
science, Whitman was imbued with a Romantic mentality”.10
The third chapter also deals with “Whitman’s Urban Crowd'. Whitman
prefers to stress his delight in belonging to the crowd, omnivorously devouring. As
William James points out, “ Whitman felt the human crowd as rapturously as
Wordswroth felt the mountainsis one of the unquestioned commonplace of
Whitman’s criticism, (qtd. Brand Dana The Spectator and the City in Nineteenth
Century American Literature. 156).
A call in the midst of the crowd, My own voice, orotund sweeping and final.
(Leaves of Grass 76).
A voice heard from without yet recognized as originating from within-“Afy
own Voice” as “a calF heard from within “the crowd." Whitman’s speaker makes
the ecstatic claim of the mystic, that he stands at once inside and outside himself,
within the crowd which comprises the city, enough to hear his own voice.
Whitman has escaped the vacuity into which most of his nationalist poetry
lapses if he had kept his vision more firmly directed toward his own firsthand
experience-if the horizon of his poetry had more often coincided with the horizons
of NewYork City and Washington. These cities, especially the former, were the
best space within which to try the claims of Self and Mass, One and All. Then
and now, the city is where we live out the conflicts in this claims. Before its own
horizons became as diffuse as those of “Salut au MondeV’ and "Our Old
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Feuillagethe city was where one might discover how the Self could be nurtured
and its claims tempered by such intermediating structures as household,
neighborhood, and the communities of shared political, religious, or ethnic faith-all
the ‘free associations’'’ by which, critics said, Americans seek to lessen the solitude
of democratic individualism.
This receiving of the world with free sense is exactly the function of
Whitman’s processionals. Seeing processionally is Whitman’s most radically urban
way of seeking the soul, a way of freeing people from the hold of money and
ownership to seek possession of
themselves, in Karl Manheim’s terminology,
through the ecstasy which comes with recognition of oneself in others. Whitman’s
lesson of city, his vision of ecstatic community, lies in the turn in consciousness,
which the unspeakable life of the street brings home.
The first chapter reveals some facts about the city in literature. The city in
literature has examined some of the literary paradigms that have helped us
conceptualize the city from its origins to post modernism. In seeing the city as a
product of the literary imagination we are, infact, examining it as text. The city has
also been a powerful image in literature since literature began. As an image, the
city is too large and complex to be thought of as only a literary trope. The chapter
also includes some references of other city poets T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden and
Wordsworth etc.
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The second chapter presents, how from the very beginning (1630),
Americans have been in a process of city building. The chapter includes “The
Cities of Modernism.” When we think of modernism, “we cannot avoid thinking
these urban climates, and the ideas and campaigns, the new philosophies and
policies that ran through the Berlin, Vienna, Moscow and St. Peterburg around the
turn of the century and into the early years of the war; through London in the
years immediately before the war; through Zurich, NewYork and Chicago during
it; and through Paris at all times
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The fourth chapter focuses on Carl Sandburg’s "City of the Big Shoulders”.
Deeply influenced by Whitman, Sandburg rejected the concept of the isolated poet
who creates art out of a unique consciousness, instead, he viewed himself as a
modem bard whose aim was an extension of his culture. He wanted to be
“commensurate with the people” as Whitman, in his preface to “Leaves of Grass”,
said the American bard must be. Sandburg wanted to help create a new cultural
consciousness by reflecting and synthesizing facets of the American experience in
his time, especially the spiritual condition of the people. That purpose is most
obvious, perhaps, in his book length poem, "The People, Yes’ (1936), but it is
evident as well in ‘Chicago Poems ’(1916), ‘ Cornhuskers ’ (1918), ‘Smoke and
Steel’{1920) , 'Slabs of the Sunburnt West ’ (1922), ‘Good Morning, America’
(1928), and in some of his later poems. As Archibald Mac Leish said in a memorial
tribute that later became his introduction to the ‘Complete Poems of Carl
22
Sandburg’ (1970), “If ever a man wrote for a particular people, however he may
have reached in his heartfor all people, it was Carl Sandburg”13.
The social theme is repeated in “Mill Doors” in protest against the human
cast in the greatly expanded industrialism. The tragic situation is fearlessly held up
for public examination as the poet dramatically evokes the plight of those who are
“Old before they are young.”
Steel-and Concrete witnesses gazing down in
San Antonio on the little old A lamo
Gazing down in Washington on the antiques of
Pennsylvania Avenue: what are these so near my
Feet far down?
(The People, Yes. lines 5528-5530)
America’s Cities are a very vital component of national life. Sandburg has
given them a correspondingly important place in his poetry. To him a city is not
merely a name or a place on the map; it is an aspect of American Civilization
contributing to industrial and economic development of the nation.
Carl Sandburg’s ‘The People, Yes’ (1936) is an elaborately articulated
poem to America’s strength whose potential the poet perceives rightly in her
people. It is the longest poem wi:h its one hundred and seven sections of uneven
merit. The People, Yes, as ever in Sandburg, belong to the city. The People, Yes
faithfully records their speech and physical movements; still life and images of the
23
city; sounds, colors, and smells, and the feel of open spaces and dark enclosures. A
remarkable feature of this poem’s panoramic range and rambling mode of
progression is the kind of integration and focus they nevertheless achieve by
projecting the city as the literal environment of action. The city in The People, Yes
is more than a decor or a functional back-drop. It is the vast deep and the
multitudinous expanse from which and to which the people keep flowing.
If the tumultuous bustle of the city streets appears to be rather low-keyed in
this poem, it is only because such moderation is consistent with Sandburg’s urgent
purpose to uphold supremacy of man over the artifacts of human intelligence and
power.
The fifth chapter deals with the two great ‘City Poets’, Walt Whitman and
Carl Sandburg’s representation of the ‘human experience’ in the city. This chapter
also focuses on how Whitman gave new dimension to the city and city life, by
exploring the question of what cities do to consciousness and what consciousness
may in turn do with the city. Whitman’s city poetry reveals a great deal about his
understanding of modem urban civilization and a type of literature that can be
created in it.
Sandburg gives a realistic view of American life of the twentieth century.
He exults in the achievements of America, as did Whitman before him; he glories
in the great cities and in the ingenuity of the American people, as Whitman did.
Whitman is generally admitted as having exerted considerable influence upon
24
Sandburg. Sandburg poetry is sometimes referred to as a continuation of the
Whitman tradition. There are wide differences between the poetry of the two men,
yet there is no doubt that the Whitman influence upon the living poet is
recognizable and that Sandburg owes a debt to Whitman.
25
INTRODUCTION
Bibliography:
1 .Mohan Ramanan.ed.
Four Centuries of American Poetry. Madras:
Macmillan India Limited, 1996.xL
2. Mohan Ramanan.ed.
Four Centuries of American Poetry. Madras:
Macmillan India Limited. 1996.xii.
3. Thomas Huchinson. The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, ed rev,
ed., Earnest de Selincourt, NewYork: Oxford University Press, 1969
4. Richard Chase. Walt Whitman Reconsidered. London: Victor Gollanez
Ltd,1955.95.
5. Brand, Dana. The Spectator and the City in Nineteenth-Century American
Literature.U.S.A: Cambridge University Press, 1991.157.
6. Abrams, Structure and Style in the Greater Romantic Lyric.
From
Sensibility to Romanticism, ed. Fredrick New York: W. Hilles and Harold Bloom,
1966.527-60.
7. Abrams, Structure and Style in the Greater Romantic Lyric.
From
Sensibility to Romanticism, ed. Fredrick New York: W. Hilles and Harold Bloom,
1966.553-551.
8. Heffeman, The Re-Creation of Landscape. 120-21.154.
9. Heffeman, The Re-Creation of Landscape. 226.
26
10. Article appeared in Sceptical Inquirer. March-April 2003.V27:2 p.51(4)).
11. Brand Dana The Spectator and the City in Nineteenth Century American
Literature. U.S.A: Cambridge University Press, 1991.156.
12. Malcolm Bradbury & James Mfarlane Modemism.ed. New Jeresy:
1976,p.96.
13. Archibald MacLeish, ‘Introduction’. The Complete Poems of Carl
Sandburg. NewYork: Harcourt, 1970,p. XX.