Hauptseminar Walt Whitman and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

On July 4 of the year 1855 (beginning to be celebrated as Independence Day) Walt Whitman published a slim volume of poetry Leaves of Grass in response to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s call for a new kind of poetry that could express the country’s budding sense of national pride as well as its growing occupation with often reproachful self-scrutiny. Whitman’s book found only a small community of readers. Emerson was among these readers, sending a word of praise to the ambitious author who gladly abused the praise in the second, considerably expanded edition of the volume of 1856. Whitman’s second Leaves of Grass, however, spoke to an audience that had been changed by another poet, no less ambitious than Whitman. In November 1855 Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, an erudite, but slightly boring former Harvard professor, had managed to do what Walt Whitman might have aimed at before him: Longfellow became America’s first Pop Poet when he published the long poem The Song of Hiawatha, an Indian epic about learning, love and loss in America. This Kitsch-poem in trochaic tetrameters reached unprecedented mass audiences in North America and Europe (roughly 50.000 copies sold within the first year), evoking parodies and mocking imitations as well as serious impersonations of its noble savages Minnehaha and Hiawatha. Playing Indian now became the favorite pastime of those who loved American poetry and as Alan Trachtenberg has noted in Shades of Hiawatha, this life of performing Indianness became a perfect entrance gate into Americanness for all immigrant readers who desperately sought to belong to the expanding nation and who celebrated the nation in ways that Whitman rather than Longfellow found immensely pleasing. In this course we will explore in depth the amazing rivalry between these two nineteenth-century literary giants in the race toward an internationally recognized American poetry. Participants are expected to purchase and read Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha and Whitman’s Leaves of Grass prior to the beginning of the class. Anglistik Universität Duisburg-Essen SoSe 2014 Professorin Buchenau Barbara