@Roscoe Christopher ARYEH She may plausibly be the smartest, bravest, and most relevant intellectual in the West. I'd run her against Pinker or Peterson or pretty much anyone the academy might otherwise put up in terms of super-fluency and being well read.
Whitman flips the post modern sound bite “all reality arises out of language” right on its head. His language is lined with flesh, a whole carnal stereophony, so the opposite rings true “all language arises out of reality!”
What is killing western civilization and bringing on authoritarian rule is ubiquitous lack of self-restraint and self-discipline. I have read and pondered Whitman quite a few times. There are many fine sentiments and striking poetic passages, but ultimately Whitman helped liberate people from the strictures of "traditional" morality and promoted in its stead ultimately enslavement to their passions. How Whitman could write against the grotesque grasping selfishness, arrogance and irresponsibility of the robber barons and politicians (Democratic Vistas) while simultaneously extolling arrogantly the essential importance of one solely deciding what is right for oneself is ironic. Didn't he have any idea how they were akin to him, but in their own materialistic way and without a haze of poetic imagery? Whitman demonstrates the egotistical autodidact's strengths, myopia and dangerous predilections. Whitman emerged from the People just at a time when deep-felt and sincere adherence to Protestantism was nearly everywhere practically dead. He told people that the issues of God and morality really don't matter and that it always was up to them and within them to decide all the "big questions" as it suited them -- and that Nature was to be their sure guide. Besides the refusal to see the reality of how society is constituted, it has to lead to chaos in people's minds. If you can't see how that would certainly be a recipe for disaster, I can only shake my head.
Brilliant analysis - I would offer the idea that Whitman’s ego is transcended . The “I” he speaks of unabashedly is not his identity but, like an Eastern mystic, he is letting his voice be a vessel of the Holy Spirit as expressed in the living world around him. He’s showing a way to experience the world at hand in a way that isn’t categorised or intellectual but felt and alive - he’s the Romantic counterpart of Emerson. I think the danger in reading him is to presume he’s self-aggrandising instead of submitting to the awe of the universe (I am large, I contain multitudes - people can read that as a rallying cry for the ego, a endless fragmenting and categorising of one’s identity, instead of it’s more dialectic intent - “listen to me, hear me, get passed the perceived contradictions and judgements and hear me dammit!” ❤
That's fair, but also, it seems like he is offering a substitute for religion in his leaves poem, Abrahamic mostly which lack structure. Surely he isn't wrong about the beauty of experienced life but much like all things too favored in the age of dissolution in US like comodified meditation/buddhism free of actual moral structures, absurdism and other ideologies of "freedom", they don't really appear substitutes for Abrahamic faiths, just copes to bare the remains of the protestant work ethic in a godless world, or maybe for the leftists to inject some beauty in their otherwise dialectical materialist hellscape gracefully. It seems to lack the coherence of the faiths is claims to replace. It's beautiful non the less, like a manic overture about the beauty of now, or Ekhart Tolle's bogus enlightenment without the hard work of meditation, that we all and he knows is probably bullshit. Recognizing a multiplicity of viewpoints and acknowledging the value of each one gives each of us a kind of materialist unshakable right to existence against a religious hierarchy, so it seems the value of Whitman are to beleaguered masses under some weight of Protestanism or another dogma, as if it is too heavy after escaping the Catholic church, or in our age of dissolution escaping the increasing social justice faith. Hey, you're a beautiful cog in the machine, it's fine, those stuffy church/synagogue/masques/wokes are the problem, but you being preyed upon by capitalism, that's the solution, you're free, this is all there is, subscribe to my podcast.... American exceptionalism rings a bit hollow in the age of a big tech take over and consolidation of power. It just seems like those who love Whitman really love him. Maybe it's a personality difference and perhaps he isn't meant to bring structure but mere beauty to those stultified by structure.@@aaronvaunts41
Modern science and economics changed the world far more than any poet. 99% of people have never read Whitman properly and of those who have even fewer are in any sense ‘influenced’ by it. No offense intended but this type of thinking just pearl clutching knee jerk conservatism.
@@levcimacRead the poems. Read his notebooks. It's there. He had a long history of picking up stagecoach drivers and omnibus drivers. He had passionate affair with a young man named Fred Vaughan. To state there is no evidence is an outright straight-washing.
She is censoring herself here understandably to promote "Break, Blow, Burn" - an absolute classic - but it is in her magnum opus "Sexual Personae" where you get the unsentimental, laser-like perception of Whitman for what he was: a perverse Late-Romantic American decadent, a crass American Swinburne minus the sing-song. The Paglia of "Sexual Personae" was no cheerleader for opening oneself to the glut of Nature and one of her great lines in the book is "Repression makes meaning and purpose." Exactly. I don't think many people read Whitman or Ginsberg (I was at a party at Ginsberg's E. Village apartment and one of his students boasted Ginsberg had slept with a man who had slept with Whitman.) It is understandable that people would have a problem with Whitman lines like "Winds whose soft-tickling genitals rub against me" or the Decadent voyeurism of poems where he is hovering over sick, dead or dying young males in Civil War hospitals. Even virile D. H. Lawrence recoiled from him calling his poetry "a mush... a hotch-potch... the awful pudding of One Identity." It's the voyeur poems where I think you get the real Whitman and where Paglia is utterly brilliant in "Sexual Personae" - I will quote from a few paragraphs: "Whitman loves to linger in imagination by the beds of the sleeping and sick, a taste he later put into action in Civil War hospitals. "The Sleepers," which I compared to Blake's "Infant Joy," is a rhapsody on this subject. "I wander all night in my vision. / Stepping with light feet, swiftly and noiselessly stepping and stopping. / Bending with open eyes over the shut eyes of sleepers." He stands in the dark, passing his hands "soothingly to and fro a few inches from them." He goes "from bedside to bedside," visiting children, corpses, drunks, onanists, idiots, spouses, sisters, everyone asleep or dead. In class Milton Kessler spoke of ""The Sleepers"' "ghoulishness" and "prurience." The poet makes "a magical godlike gesture" over the sleepers, who are "like fetuses": "He creates them. They are all helpless before him." Whitman's sympathy and identification are based on aggression and invasion. The poem has a skopophiliac tyranny: the omnipotent eye forces passivity on the objects, denying them personal consciousness. Whitman, normally the Dionysian enemy of hierarchy, spreads all mankind before him from horizon to horizon, in abject postures of subordination. The sleepers are matter awaiting the impress of his mind. His criminal trespass, a violation of their dreams as well as bedrooms, has a hushed erotic excitement. The poem is a psychosexual breaking and entering, and Whitman is the vampire who walks by night. Whitman claims to shatter false laws, banishing sexual secrecy and shame. But his jovial exhibitionism is a mask. "The Sleepers" shows the scope of his self-concealment. As in "Kubla Khan," the eyes of the crowd are closed to the poet, but now it is the poet who closes them. "The Sleepers" is a nocturnal patrol through the city of the dead. Whitman's relation to people is tense. He does not genuinely celebrate their otherness, their multiple identities, for these condemn him to solitude. Hence he "infolds" them in archaic night, drowning them in the democracy of dissolution. His taut self-curtailments are a Decadent closure." It is this hard, unflinching psychological examination and revisionism of Whitman, James, Dickinson and other American icons that made her a hit with college professors in the early Nineties, I had two who brought "Sexual Personae" into class and read from it laughing more than a few times because she is very funny as she sets about demolishing the mawkish, myopic uncritical academic assumptions about these writers. Whitman loves to imagine pierced or drowned beautiful young men, something any other college professor would silk over and yammer about "meaning" while Paglia rightfully calls it "lubricious death-connoisseurship." At her absolute best she catches artists in the act and unmasks them. She wrote "The artist makes art not to save humankind but himself. Every benevolent remark by an artist is a fog to cover his tracks, the bloody trail of his assault against reality and others." With regard to Whitman, she calls bullshit on his virility: "Whitman's sexual prowess is also not what it seems. Unable to trust his poetry's hermaphroditic message, he spent a lot of time advertising a virility that has since proved to be false." She calls his poetic sexual posturing "pscyhography." He's resurrected the Great Mother to such a degree he must "overemphasize his maleness to retain his own sex in the surging female nature of his poetry." She hilariously and brilliantly refers to Henry James' late decadent style as "the heavy ritual transvestism of a eunuch-priest of the mother goddess." Whitman is also that, but served up as a strutting virile hobo bard. When you write about "Straining the udder of my heart for its withheld drip" then spume how you are "turbulent, fleshy, sensual, eating, drinking and breeding" it's a self-correction, or as Paglia says ""Leaves of Grass" makes us listen to the tiresome rattling of an imaginary saber." That is, Whitman's trumpeting his own masculinity. Whitman is always praised as being "democratic" and that's certainly true, but not in a good way. Democracy is dissolution. In the hermaphroditic melting pot of Whitman's poetry, the porridge is all you are left with. As Will Durant wrote of Nietzsche's distain for democracy: "Such a society loses character; imitation is horizontal instead of vertical - not the superior man but the majority man becomes the ideal and the model; everybody comes to resemble everybody else; even the sexes approximate - the men become women and the women become men." Now from Whitman: "I say it is great to be a woman as to be a man. / And I say there is nothing greater than the mother of men... The womb, the teats, nipples, breast milk, tears, laughter." There is no priapism in Whitman that is not a ruse, the poetry is enervating rather than innervating.
So maybe that explains why the Wes Anderson character in Dead Poets was so bothered by Whitman, comparing him to a short blanket that always leaves your feet cold. My own unschooled impression is that Whitman loved America too much with his mouth to sufficiently hide what America made him feel with his body...just saying though.
@@averayugen7802 Well, I can tell you this about Whitman, he was raging pedophile who was tarred and feathered in a town he taught at for having sex w/ his students. He may have "loved America" whatever that means - he also liked young boys' booty holes. I'm sure Michael Jackson "loved America" too. Until his trial anyway. Or maybe more AFTER the trial, he bought the parents off via settlement - the America way now!
@@hakmagui9842 You have to see him properly for what he was before you can form an opinion of him artistically that's worth any salt, and for that you have to read the Whitman entry in Paglia's "Sexual Personae." Look, Whitman was tarred and feathered in a Long Island town (if I remember correctly) for having sex with his boy students - how many times you read that in your American history books? So when he's creepily hovering over and aroused by dying young boys in Civil War hospitals or making himself out to be a dying fireman phallically penetrated, you have to ask yourself "What is going on here?" Unlike the Europeans, we never had a high culture to speak of, which is why we invented modern pop culture and Hollywood easily. Unlike the Europeans, our problem is not repression, but regression, which is behind our individuality and anarchism that is alien to Europeans. Here is just one paragraph from Paglia's "Sexual Personae" on him and I'll leave it at that: "Whitman invents the American nature-mother, a heaving cycle of birth and death gorged with objects and persons. She is “the ocean of life,” “the fierce old mother.” She is voluptuous darkness, archaic night: “Press close bare-bosom’d night-press close magnetic nourishing night!” Whitman corrects Wordsworth’s benign maternalism without resorting to Coleridge’s horrific vampirism. By bardic instinct rather than learning, he revives the cosmology of the ancient mother cults. He imagines a turbulent world-pregnancy: “Urge and urge and urge, / Always the procreant urge of the world … always substance and increase, always sex.” He hears “Voices … of the threads that connect the stars, and of wombs and of the fatherstuff.”10 The all-mother encompassing this propagating universe is sexually dual. Whitman is son-lover and priest of the hermaphrodite goddess, with whom he unites through impersonation. He wants to assimilate all being into the self, imagined as a capacious sac. The epic catalogs of Leaves of Grass are the poet’s gluttonous self-fecundation or female swelling, a portrait of the artist as Great Mother, a Universal Man-Woman."
@@edwardrichardson8254 Paglia's writings on Whitman seem like masterly stuff so I have to thank you for the quote, and I believe you are right about regression (though not that its a problem). Whatever can be broken should be broken, in Pound's words, and I think Paglia wrote what she did about Whitman to authenticate and increase our appreciation of him, not to give us tools to vent our moral indignation at the ill-effects of decadent art on western culture. I'm just wondering which side of the coin you're on since you seem to know quite a deal about Whitman and poetry in general. What's the verdict? I'm also not sure if I agree that knowing Whitman objectively is the only way to understand his poetry. His poetry in fact presents an ideal figurative universe that centers around himself, viz. an un-objective fictive construct. This means for me that the "what" of Whitman could actually be misleading. Art is not an objective world, it is where subject and object coalesce in a universe of fulfilled desire and accomplished meaning. The Southold story was hearsay, but even if it were true, to subordinate our understanding of Whitman's poetry to an external "objective" event or state of mind seems in-exact at best... it should at least not be taken as a starting point for our engagement with the man's poetry. Isolating aspects of his personality to make sweeping judgments about his art therefore does not seem attractive to me... but who am I? No one in particular. Ignore me if I offended you at all.
![Blox Fruits Dragon Rework Update [Full Stream]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/EqDAp8udhm0/mqdefault.jpg)
Please keep these Paglia uploads coming I love them!
Paglia... only intellectual left in America 🇺🇸
Thanks for the wonderful upload🙏☮️
@Roscoe Christopher ARYEH
She may plausibly be the smartest, bravest, and most relevant intellectual in the West. I'd run her against Pinker or Peterson or pretty much anyone the academy might otherwise put up in terms of super-fluency and being well read.
@@spiritualpolitics8205 nah no way, peterson is vastly more intelligent.
@@spiritualpolitics8205 Theres an hour plus sit down talk between them on Dr JBP's page!!
@@irabernstein
Yes it's the best thing I've ever seen on RUclips.
@@li6706 if put Paglia over Peterson. Way more formal work out there.
The quality of the commentary and questions from the callers is amazing. I'm slightly ashamed to say that I was very pleasantly surprised by it.
In a perfect world, there would be thousands of Camille Paglia uploads on RUclips. I find myself returning to the few there are, including this one.
Same here. She's so cool.
Whitman flips the post modern sound bite “all reality arises out of language” right on its head. His language is lined with flesh, a whole carnal stereophony, so the opposite rings true “all language arises out of reality!”
That's true, even though he worked with language; nature is where his mind and eyes really were.
This was an utter delight. Thank you.
she is a INTERnational treasure.
Thank you for this upload
If you have this type of stuff in your recommended, we are friends.
What fun!
any idea where i could listen to more episodes of this radio show?
The world champion tongue twister got arrested. I hear they’re going to give him a tough sentence.
What is killing western civilization and bringing on authoritarian rule is ubiquitous lack of self-restraint and self-discipline. I have read and pondered Whitman quite a few times. There are many fine sentiments and striking poetic passages, but ultimately Whitman helped liberate people from the strictures of "traditional" morality and promoted in its stead ultimately enslavement to their passions. How Whitman could write against the grotesque grasping selfishness, arrogance and irresponsibility of the robber barons and politicians (Democratic Vistas) while simultaneously extolling arrogantly the essential importance of one solely deciding what is right for oneself is ironic. Didn't he have any idea how they were akin to him, but in their own materialistic way and without a haze of poetic imagery? Whitman demonstrates the egotistical autodidact's strengths, myopia and dangerous predilections. Whitman emerged from the People just at a time when deep-felt and sincere adherence to Protestantism was nearly everywhere practically dead. He told people that the issues of God and morality really don't matter and that it always was up to them and within them to decide all the "big questions" as it suited them -- and that Nature was to be their sure guide. Besides the refusal to see the reality of how society is constituted, it has to lead to chaos in people's minds. If you can't see how that would certainly be a recipe for disaster, I can only shake my head.
Pretty much.
Brilliant analysis - I would offer the idea that Whitman’s ego is transcended . The “I” he speaks of unabashedly is not his identity but, like an Eastern mystic, he is letting his voice be a vessel of the Holy Spirit as expressed in the living world around him. He’s showing a way to experience the world at hand in a way that isn’t categorised or intellectual but felt and alive - he’s the Romantic counterpart of Emerson. I think the danger in reading him is to presume he’s self-aggrandising instead of submitting to the awe of the universe (I am large, I contain multitudes - people can read that as a rallying cry for the ego, a endless fragmenting and categorising of one’s identity, instead of it’s more dialectic intent - “listen to me, hear me, get passed the perceived contradictions and judgements and hear me dammit!” ❤
That's fair, but also, it seems like he is offering a substitute for religion in his leaves poem, Abrahamic mostly which lack structure. Surely he isn't wrong about the beauty of experienced life but much like all things too favored in the age of dissolution in US like comodified meditation/buddhism free of actual moral structures, absurdism and other ideologies of "freedom", they don't really appear substitutes for Abrahamic faiths, just copes to bare the remains of the protestant work ethic in a godless world, or maybe for the leftists to inject some beauty in their otherwise dialectical materialist hellscape gracefully. It seems to lack the coherence of the faiths is claims to replace. It's beautiful non the less, like a manic overture about the beauty of now, or Ekhart Tolle's bogus enlightenment without the hard work of meditation, that we all and he knows is probably bullshit.
Recognizing a multiplicity of viewpoints and acknowledging the value of each one gives each of us a kind of materialist unshakable right to existence against a religious hierarchy, so it seems the value of Whitman are to beleaguered masses under some weight of Protestanism or another dogma, as if it is too heavy after escaping the Catholic church, or in our age of dissolution escaping the increasing social justice faith. Hey, you're a beautiful cog in the machine, it's fine, those stuffy church/synagogue/masques/wokes are the problem, but you being preyed upon by capitalism, that's the solution, you're free, this is all there is, subscribe to my podcast.... American exceptionalism rings a bit hollow in the age of a big tech take over and consolidation of power.
It just seems like those who love Whitman really love him. Maybe it's a personality difference and perhaps he isn't meant to bring structure but mere beauty to those stultified by structure.@@aaronvaunts41
Well said
Modern science and economics changed the world far more than any poet. 99% of people have never read Whitman properly and of those who have even fewer are in any sense ‘influenced’ by it. No offense intended but this type of thinking just pearl clutching knee jerk conservatism.
What is the name of this show?
Thank you! Is this new?
I dote on myself. There is all that lot of me, and all so luscious...
Whitman speaks not of sexuality, but true DEMOCRACY; why is that that so difficult for Americans to understand?
Not sure he really knew what he was talking about. Maybe he would agree.
Harold Bloom thought Whitman was primarily an onanist, a fantasist, whose erotic life was mostly imaginary.
Don't know about H Bloom's take on Walt Whitman, I do know Bloom was Paglia's mentor. I treasure this woman's thoughts
It's hard to believe that Walt didn't do plenty of cruising.
Bloom compared Whitman to Shakespeare. High praise.
I adore her, but no. Walt was gay. Full on gay. I don't know why she would deny the very core of his being, but there it is.
Because itnis not known for certain. Whitman never said it explicitly, nor is there any objective evidence.
@@levcimacRead the poems. Read his notebooks. It's there. He had a long history of picking up stagecoach drivers and omnibus drivers. He had passionate affair with a young man named Fred Vaughan. To state there is no evidence is an outright straight-washing.
She is censoring herself here understandably to promote "Break, Blow, Burn" - an absolute classic - but it is in her magnum opus "Sexual Personae" where you get the unsentimental, laser-like perception of Whitman for what he was: a perverse Late-Romantic American decadent, a crass American Swinburne minus the sing-song. The Paglia of "Sexual Personae" was no cheerleader for opening oneself to the glut of Nature and one of her great lines in the book is "Repression makes meaning and purpose." Exactly. I don't think many people read Whitman or Ginsberg (I was at a party at Ginsberg's E. Village apartment and one of his students boasted Ginsberg had slept with a man who had slept with Whitman.) It is understandable that people would have a problem with Whitman lines like "Winds whose soft-tickling genitals rub against me" or the Decadent voyeurism of poems where he is hovering over sick, dead or dying young males in Civil War hospitals. Even virile D. H. Lawrence recoiled from him calling his poetry "a mush... a hotch-potch... the awful pudding of One Identity." It's the voyeur poems where I think you get the real Whitman and where Paglia is utterly brilliant in "Sexual Personae" - I will quote from a few paragraphs:
"Whitman loves to linger in imagination by the beds of the sleeping and sick, a taste he later put into action in Civil War hospitals. "The Sleepers," which I compared to Blake's "Infant Joy," is a rhapsody on this subject. "I wander all night in my vision. / Stepping with light feet, swiftly and noiselessly stepping and stopping. / Bending with open eyes over the shut eyes of sleepers." He stands in the dark, passing his hands "soothingly to and fro a few inches from them." He goes "from bedside to bedside," visiting children, corpses, drunks, onanists, idiots, spouses, sisters, everyone asleep or dead.
In class Milton Kessler spoke of ""The Sleepers"' "ghoulishness" and "prurience." The poet makes "a magical godlike gesture" over the sleepers, who are "like fetuses": "He creates them. They are all helpless before him." Whitman's sympathy and identification are based on aggression and invasion. The poem has a skopophiliac tyranny: the omnipotent eye forces passivity on the objects, denying them personal consciousness. Whitman, normally the Dionysian enemy of hierarchy, spreads all mankind before him from horizon to horizon, in abject postures of subordination. The sleepers are matter awaiting the impress of his mind. His criminal trespass, a violation of their dreams as well as bedrooms, has a hushed erotic excitement. The poem is a psychosexual breaking and entering, and Whitman is the vampire who walks by night. Whitman claims to shatter false laws, banishing sexual secrecy and shame. But his jovial exhibitionism is a mask. "The Sleepers" shows the scope of his self-concealment. As in "Kubla Khan," the eyes of the crowd are closed to the poet, but now it is the poet who closes them. "The Sleepers" is a nocturnal patrol through the city of the dead. Whitman's relation to people is tense. He does not genuinely celebrate their otherness, their multiple identities, for these condemn him to solitude. Hence he "infolds" them in archaic night, drowning them in the democracy of dissolution. His taut self-curtailments are a Decadent closure."
It is this hard, unflinching psychological examination and revisionism of Whitman, James, Dickinson and other American icons that made her a hit with college professors in the early Nineties, I had two who brought "Sexual Personae" into class and read from it laughing more than a few times because she is very funny as she sets about demolishing the mawkish, myopic uncritical academic assumptions about these writers. Whitman loves to imagine pierced or drowned beautiful young men, something any other college professor would silk over and yammer about "meaning" while Paglia rightfully calls it "lubricious death-connoisseurship." At her absolute best she catches artists in the act and unmasks them. She wrote "The artist makes art not to save humankind but himself. Every benevolent remark by an artist is a fog to cover his tracks, the bloody trail of his assault against reality and others." With regard to Whitman, she calls bullshit on his virility: "Whitman's sexual prowess is also not what it seems. Unable to trust his poetry's hermaphroditic message, he spent a lot of time advertising a virility that has since proved to be false." She calls his poetic sexual posturing "pscyhography." He's resurrected the Great Mother to such a degree he must "overemphasize his maleness to retain his own sex in the surging female nature of his poetry." She hilariously and brilliantly refers to Henry James' late decadent style as "the heavy ritual transvestism of a eunuch-priest of the mother goddess." Whitman is also that, but served up as a strutting virile hobo bard. When you write about "Straining the udder of my heart for its withheld drip" then spume how you are "turbulent, fleshy, sensual, eating, drinking and breeding" it's a self-correction, or as Paglia says ""Leaves of Grass" makes us listen to the tiresome rattling of an imaginary saber." That is, Whitman's trumpeting his own masculinity.
Whitman is always praised as being "democratic" and that's certainly true, but not in a good way. Democracy is dissolution. In the hermaphroditic melting pot of Whitman's poetry, the porridge is all you are left with. As Will Durant wrote of Nietzsche's distain for democracy: "Such a society loses character; imitation is horizontal instead of vertical - not the superior man but the majority man becomes the ideal and the model; everybody comes to resemble everybody else; even the sexes approximate - the men become women and the women become men." Now from Whitman: "I say it is great to be a woman as to be a man. / And I say there is nothing greater than the mother of men... The womb, the teats, nipples, breast milk, tears, laughter." There is no priapism in Whitman that is not a ruse, the poetry is enervating rather than innervating.
So maybe that explains why the Wes Anderson character in Dead Poets was so bothered by Whitman, comparing him to a short blanket that always leaves your feet cold. My own unschooled impression is that Whitman loved America too much with his mouth to sufficiently hide what America made him feel with his body...just saying though.
@@averayugen7802 Well, I can tell you this about Whitman, he was raging pedophile who was tarred and feathered in a town he taught at for having sex w/ his students.
He may have "loved America" whatever that means - he also liked young boys' booty holes. I'm sure Michael Jackson "loved America" too. Until his trial anyway. Or maybe more AFTER the trial, he bought the parents off via settlement - the America way now!
Unsure whether or not you dislike Whitman because of all this, but that may be because of my own love for decadent romanticism.
@@hakmagui9842 You have to see him properly for what he was before you can form an opinion of him artistically that's worth any salt, and for that you have to read the Whitman entry in Paglia's "Sexual Personae."
Look, Whitman was tarred and feathered in a Long Island town (if I remember correctly) for having sex with his boy students - how many times you read that in your American history books?
So when he's creepily hovering over and aroused by dying young boys in Civil War hospitals or making himself out to be a dying fireman phallically penetrated, you have to ask yourself "What is going on here?"
Unlike the Europeans, we never had a high culture to speak of, which is why we invented modern pop culture and Hollywood easily. Unlike the Europeans, our problem is not repression, but regression, which is behind our individuality and anarchism that is alien to Europeans.
Here is just one paragraph from Paglia's "Sexual Personae" on him and I'll leave it at that:
"Whitman invents the American nature-mother, a heaving cycle of birth
and death gorged with objects and persons. She is “the ocean of life,” “the
fierce old mother.” She is voluptuous darkness, archaic night: “Press close
bare-bosom’d night-press close magnetic nourishing night!” Whitman
corrects Wordsworth’s benign maternalism without resorting to Coleridge’s
horrific vampirism. By bardic instinct rather than learning, he revives the
cosmology of the ancient mother cults. He imagines a turbulent world-pregnancy: “Urge and urge and urge, / Always the procreant urge of the
world … always substance and increase, always sex.” He hears “Voices …
of the threads that connect the stars, and of wombs and of the fatherstuff.”10 The all-mother encompassing this propagating universe is sexually
dual. Whitman is son-lover and priest of the hermaphrodite goddess, with
whom he unites through impersonation. He wants to assimilate all being
into the self, imagined as a capacious sac. The epic catalogs of Leaves of
Grass are the poet’s gluttonous self-fecundation or female swelling, a
portrait of the artist as Great Mother, a Universal Man-Woman."
@@edwardrichardson8254 Paglia's writings on Whitman seem like masterly stuff so I have to thank you for the quote, and I believe you are right about regression (though not that its a problem). Whatever can be broken should be broken, in Pound's words, and I think Paglia wrote what she did about Whitman to authenticate and increase our appreciation of him, not to give us tools to vent our moral indignation at the ill-effects of decadent art on western culture. I'm just wondering which side of the coin you're on since you seem to know quite a deal about Whitman and poetry in general. What's the verdict?
I'm also not sure if I agree that knowing Whitman objectively is the only way to understand his poetry. His poetry in fact presents an ideal figurative universe that centers around himself, viz. an un-objective fictive construct. This means for me that the "what" of Whitman could actually be misleading. Art is not an objective world, it is where subject and object coalesce in a universe of fulfilled desire and accomplished meaning. The Southold story was hearsay, but even if it were true, to subordinate our understanding of Whitman's poetry to an external "objective" event or state of mind seems in-exact at best... it should at least not be taken as a starting point for our engagement with the man's poetry. Isolating aspects of his personality to make sweeping judgments about his art therefore does not seem attractive to me... but who am I? No one in particular. Ignore me if I offended you at all.
O, Sancta Simplicitas!
Okay?
Politically though, he waved the flag of Manifest Destiny. See Weinberg
Not a fan of the Begley reading. Trying too hard to elevate what is already atop the mountain.
The interviewer is annoying. And I find her comments shallow.