Multicultural Poetics

Re-visioning the American Canon

Nissa Parmar

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781438468440, 9781438468457
• eBook ISBN: 9781438468464
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Multicultural Poetics provides a new perspective on American poetry that will contribute to the evolution of contemporary critical practice. Nissa Parmar combines formalist analysis with cultural studies theory to trace a lineage of hybrid poetry from the American Renaissance to what Marilyn Chin deemed America's "multicultural renaissance, " the blossoming of multicultural literature in the 1980s and 1990s. This re-visionary literary history begins by analyzing Whitman and Dickinson as postcolonial poets. This critical approach provides an alternative to the factionalism that has characterized twentieth-century American poetic history and continues to inform literary criticism in the twenty-first century. Parmar uses a multiethnic, multigender method that emphasizes the relationship between American poetic form and cultural development. This book provides a new approach by using hybridity as the critical paradigm for a study that groups multiethnic and emergent authors. It thereby combats literary ghettoization while revealing commonalities across American literatures and the cross-fertilization that has informed their development.

1

EMILY DICKINSON AND WALT WHITMAN

The “Beginners”

Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson were both “beginners” … “beginners” aren’t starters-out on a path others have traveled. They are openers of new paths, those who take the first steps …

—Adrienne Rich

Adrienne Rich’s essay “Beginners” (1993) presents Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson as the start or “beginn[ing]” of American poetry, and this idea is now critically commonplace. However, Rich’s description and the title of her essay are drawn from Whitman’s poem “Beginners,” and she emphasizes both poets as “strange” and, quoting the poem, “dreadful” to “their place and time” (What Is 91). Rich’s observations remind the reader that both poets were the literary rebels and revolutionaries of their day and beyond. Their centrality to the canon comes not in spite but because of their “strange[ness].” Both rebelled against the European poetic and cultural traditions that so influenced their contemporaries and predecessors, and their revolution was achieved through the hybrid and democratic nature of their poetics. Therefore, contrary to the dominant literary history of the twentieth century—a history characterized by boundaries, divisions, and deference to the aesthetic—hybridity and politics lie at the heart of the American poetic canon.

Whitman and Dickinson’s work is hybrid because it “problematizes boundaries” between poetic genres and forms. It additionally mixes. Dickinson mixed meters, forms, and discourses. Whitman mixed literary genres, modes, and traditions as well as socioeconomic and cultural groups. Blurring boundaries, mixing, and the signature techniques of each poet—Whitman’s catalogues and free verse and Dickinson’s dashes—exemplify their intention to create poetic forms that reflected the democratic ideologies of the nation’s inception and rebelled against the Eurocentric culture and canon that continued to dominate American culture and inform social structures despite over fifty years of political independence.

Thus, their poetic revolutions were driven by America’s post-colonial status and part of an effort to forge a distinctly American, culturally and socially reflective poetic. The necessity of this poetic revolution is evident in the writing of another revolutionary of the period, Ralph Waldo Emerson. While the United States had established its fiscal, industrial, and technical might, its culture lagged as Emerson argues in the essay “The American Scholar” (1837):

Perhaps the time is already come … when the sluggard intellect of this continent will look from under its iron lids and fill the postponed expectation of the world with something better than exertion of mechanical skill. Our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close. The millions that around us are rushing into life, cannot always be fed on the sere remains of foreign harvests. Events, actions arise, that must be sung, that will sing themselves. Who can doubt that poetry will revive and lead in a new age … (Nature 83–84)

Emerson’s prose provided a distinctively national and revolutionary philosophy for the “new age” of American culture but, William Carlos Williams wrote, formally “Emerson did not entirely escape” the influence of the Eurocentric and “false” “cultural strain.” “He was a poet, in the making lost” (Selected Essays 155, 135, 139). Instead, the revolutionary new poetry for a “new age” of post-colonial American cultural development was provided by Dickinson and Whitman. This chapter presents Whitman and Dickinson as post-colonial poets and employs Homi Bhabha’s concepts of hybridity in conjunction with analysis of their poetic form and identity. It thereby culturally relocates the poets and their democratic and revolutionary poetics in an alternative, political, hybrid, and multicultural American poetic history that challenges dominant critical constructions of “The Social Function of Poetry” in America.

While the work of both poets is hybrid and democratic in impulse, Whitman and Dickinson’s poetic revolutions were very different in nature. In the opening inscription of Leaves of Grass (1892 edition), Whitman’s first-person speaker announces to the reader:

One’s-Self I sing, a simple separate person,

Yet utter the word Democratic, the word En-Masse. (3)

The lines overtly declare his political intentions, his synthesis of self and nation, and exemplify the hybrid merger of prose and poetry and lyric and epic through which the poet achieved his formal revolution. His revolution returns to ideologies of the American Revolution and, like his Revolutionary predecessors, Whitman engaged Native America to generate a distinctively American poetic persona. The figure of the Native American informed one manifestation of his poetic identity, the Native American Adam. Meanwhile Native American languages and oral traditions contributed to the development of his formal techniques and facilitated Whitman’s rejection of traditional verse forms governed by rhyme and meter. His culturally hybrid persona and poetic were further intended to resolve the poet’s contradictory promotion of both manifest destiny and democratic multiculturalism. Despite the virtual impossibility of resolving this contradiction, the poet’s, as deemed by James E. Miller, “Lyric-Epic,” his self-mythologizing “Song of Myself,” is also his mythopoesis of an idealized American democratic society.

While Whitman’s revolution is overt, Dickinson’s is elliptical, and she recognized that it would not be realized until some future time. As she writes in Poem 839, it was therefore:

Unfulfilled to Observation—

Incomplete—to Eye—

But to Faith—a Revolution

In Locality— (Poems 386)

Her “Revolution” was “Unfulfilled to Observation” in the sense that it was, during her lifetime, a private revolution, which required “Observation,” or readers, to be fulfilled. Formally, it was derived by synthesizing the popular and public ballad form, evident in the quatrains of Poem 839, with a lyric sensibility. This synthesis reflects the public orientation of her private poetic. It was further a “Revolution / In Locality.” The poet’s “Lexicon” defines local as “pertaining to a place” (Webster).1 Dickinson’s poetic revolution was grounded in her locality, New England and America. However, local is also defined as “pertaining to a fixed or limited portion of space” (Webster). In contrast to Whitman’s democratic, expansive poetic with its incorporative persona, catalogues of the nation’s diverse geography and inhabitants, and free verse form, Dickinson’s democratic revolution is shaped by the constraints of her gender and social position and intimately bound with the concepts of containment and “circumference.” Both are reflected in the variety of female personas Dickinson’s speaker inhabits in her nationally grounded poetic exploration of the identities of poet and woman. They are also evident in the incorporation of iambic pentameter within her ballad meter structures to reflect and challenge the Old World patriarchal structures implicit in the poetic forms and meters inherited from Great Britain. Her dashes actively and democratically engage the reader, as do Whitman’s catalogues. Like his free verse, they opened up her poetic form, altered the poetic line, and influenced the development of poetry in America.

The second stanza of Poem 839 suggests the future significance of her revolution:

Unto Us—the Suns extinguish—

To our Opposite—

New Horizons—they embellish—

Fronting Us—with Night. (86)

While her voice and presence are often overwhelmed by Whitman’s in this study and the work of poets of the American Strain, her poetic was no less significant to the generation of “New Horizons” of American poetry and the strain’s (r)evolutionary tradition. The first part of this chapter establishes that tradition by illustrating the revolutionary, hybrid, and democratic nature of Whitman and Dickinson’s poetic form. The second part examines the cultural significance of their poetic personas. The conclusion locates their work, Whitman’s in particular, as a poetic “beginn[ing]” intended to lead to the emergent poets and poetries of the late twentieth century. Thus, theirs was not only a post-colonial revolution but a rebellion against the “false” “cultural strain” and the dominant Eurocentric national culture and poetic canon that must be continued by the “Poets to Come” of the American Strain.

THE HYBRID REVOLUTION

While Whitman and Dickinson were certainly neither alone in the efforts to generate a reflective national literature nor the only cultural revolutionaries, they were unique in translating revolution into poetic form. Their “strangeness” is ultimately born of the mutually informing revolutionary and hybrid nature of their work. Their work is formally hybrid because of their revolutionary and democratic intentions; their work is revolutionary because it is hybrid.

“Their Presidents Shall Not Be Their Common Referee So Much as Their Poets Shall.”

Larzer Ziff observes that in 1776, Americans declared “their political independence from Great Britain, but it was not until 1837 that they received … what Oliver Wendell Holmes called, ‘their intellectual declaration of independence’ ” (16). This “declaration,” quoted in the introduction to the chapter, was Emerson’s essay “The American Scholar.” Its content was provoked by America’s post-colonial culture, and it set the stage for Whitman’s arrival.

Despite American political independence, Ziff argues that the nation’s line of cultural development suggested:

The history of the [American] culture would be the history of European man in the new world, bringing to it institutions best fitted to subdue it. American civilization might differ from that of European countries in that it blended people of different stocks and was distinguished by a high degree of mobility, both social and geographical. But classes, or at least distinct social groupings, would stabilize, and the necessarily different American institutions would nevertheless exist to protect the very same elements of human continuity that were protected by the institutions of European civilization. (10)

To impede this Europeanized line of development and counter the predominance of the “false” “strain” of culture, Emerson envisioned, as he writes in “Nominalist and Realist” (1844), an American “Adam” (267), a “new man” (274) who might cast off “subdu[ing]” European institutions and provide an alternative to the “European man in the new world.” Emerson also sought an American bard. In “The Poet” (1844), he observes that America has yet to produce a poetic “genius” who might “with sufficient plainness or sufficient profoundness … dare to chaunt our own times and circumstance” (281).

In 1855, with the publication of the first edition of Leaves of Grass, Whitman answered Emerson’s call for a national bard in the poetic persona of the “new man” and American “Adam.” Emerson’s writing indicates the importance of poetry in developing a national culture and identity—“poetry will revive and lead in the new age” (Nature 84)—and Whitman further asserted that poetry might act as a political force. In the preface to the 1855 edition he wrote:

Of all nations the United States with veins full of poetical stuff most need poets and will doubtless have the greatest and use them the greatest. Their Presidents shall not be their common referee so much as their poets shall. (Leaves of Grass 619)

Whitman asserts the poet as a nation’s true head of state, suggesting both the political and cultural power of poetry. However, his statements also emphasize the country’s need for poets. This need is attributable not only to the nation’s lack of a distinctive national literature and culture, but to the distance between America’s legal, social, and cultural reality and its democratic founding principles. These ideologies are prevalent across editions of Leaves of Grass and central themes of “Democratic Vistas” (1871), which emphasize repeatedly the necessity of a national literature, and in particular poetry, to the realization of “American democracy” (Leaves of Grass 760).

Whitman focused on poetry because he believed poetic form and political and social structure to be intimately related. As he put it in “By Blue Ontario’s Shore,” “feudal processes and poems” must be “left” “behind” and “the poems and processes of Democracy” “assumed” (293–294). The lines call for destruction of the imported European poetic canon, and further suggest that a nation’s poetry, specifically its poetic form, is inextricable from its governmental and social structures. The political agency of the poet therefore arises from his or her ability to alter or perpetuate established social structures through poetic form.

“A Revolution in Form and in the Traditional Conceptions of Literature Itself”2

Whitman’s signature formal techniques—long lines, catalogues, and parallel structure have long been linked with his claim to be “the poet of democracy” (Miller, Leaves 5). However, it was through hybridity—the blurring and problematization of boundaries between literary genres and modes—that he achieved the “revolution in content” and “in form” of his democratic poetics. Applying Homi Bhabha’s conceptualization of hybridity to one of Whitman’s formal techniques, the catalogue, reveals that Whitman’s poetic structure not only suggests democratic social structure but enacts it through the reader’s role in the process of the poem.

While the idea of Whitman as a political poet is not novel, it does run counter to the well-entrenched political/aesthetic binary that dominated the American poetic center for much of the twentieth century. The predominance of the binary explains Betsy Erkkila’s preface to Whitman the Political Poet (1989). In it she announces, “Whitman the Political Poet. The title is at once a statement of subject and a challenge. It is an attempt to restore a series of linkages—Whitman, political, poet—that have been torn asunder in the wake of Modernist, Formalist, and New Critical strategies” (v). Erkkila also squarely locates her study in the canonical debates of the period. She observes:

We have learned that Whitman is best and most interesting as a personal rather than as a political poet; indeed that he is at his worst and most problematic as an artist when he is being most political. What is at stake here is an American canon, a particular way of reading and interpreting literature and a literary profession grounded in the assumption that aesthetic value is an indwelling essence detached from ideological interest and the messiness of history. (7)

The book is a leading example of one of the two trends in multicultural critiques of the poet’s work that evolved in its wake. It presents Whitman’s poetics as an idealized, albeit problematic, model of American democracy.3 The second trend emphasizes the contradictions arising from Whitman’s poetic project and the failure of the poet’s form to achieve his intentions. This view is exemplified in David Simpson’s “Destiny Made Manifest: The Styles of Whitman’s Po...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction In “the American Strain”
• Chapter One Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman: The “Beginners”
• Chapter Two William Carlos Williams: “A Sort of Song”
• Chapter Three Adrienne Rich: “A Whole New Poetry Beginning Here”
• Chapter Four Marilyn Chin: “The End of a Beginning”
• Chapter Five Sherman Alexie: “Tradition Is Repetition”
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Back Cover