An American Style - Assignment Example

An American Style How candor, individualism and an appreciation for the natural world shaped the American voice If the colonial period helped the burgeoning American nation to define itself, the American Renaissance defined the American voice for its people. It was a voice the emerged in sharp contrast to the voice of Great Britain or indeed any traditional voice that had come before. It is perhaps no surprise that the American voice should seek to distinguish itself from its former parent: “We had thrown off the political shackles of England; it would not do for us to be servile in our literature,” writes Nina Baym in her analysis of the development of American literature. (148) In fact, though, the American voice was more than a reaction against traditional literary forms. Its emergence reflected the values held by the teenage America: a determination to speak clearly and forthrightly, an appreciation for the individual and individual experience with all its quirks and idiosyncrasies and an almost religious devotion to the specific details of nature and the everyday world of common people. Perhaps no American writer is more representative of these values than Walt Whitman. In his much-quoted “Preface” to Leaves of Grass, Whitman writes: “What I tell I tell for precisely what it is. Let who may exalt or startle or fascinate or sooth I will have purpose as health or heat or snow has and be as regardless of observation. What I experience or portray shall go from my composition without a shred of my composition. You shall stand by my side and look in the mirror with me.” (28) Whitman’s poems talked candidly about his lovers — male and female — as well as his struggles, his vanity, his joys and his sorrows. Whitman believed that his honest conversation made his poetry better than technical excellence could: “How beautiful is candor! All faults may be forgiven of him who has perfect candor. Henceforth let no man of us lie, for we have seen that openness wins the inner and outer world and that there is no single exception.” (31-32) Though she was more oblique in her writings, the same is true for Emily Dickinson. Though her veiled, hinting poems outwardly seem the very antithesis of Whitman’s booming, confessional stanzas, the two poets share a distinctly American voice. Like Whitman, Dickinson believed in candor in poetry, and her demure barbs are as outspoken as Whitman’s: “’Faith’ is a fine invention When Gentleman can see — But Microscopes are prudent In an Emergency.” (131) When Dickinson wrote “I like a look of Agony/ Because I know it’s true” (132) she expressed the very American opinion that emotion was meant to be addressed as part of everyday life, a sentiment that meshes perfectly with Whitman but flies in the face of literary guidelines up to that point. But the American voice was honest and emotional in its honesty. Perhaps one of the best examples of this is in the Second Inaugural Address of Abraham Lincoln, when he plainly acknowledged the philosophical problems with war. There is little propaganda and much honesty in Lincoln’s comparison of North and South here: “Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God; and each invokes his aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces, but let us judge not lest we be judged.” (72) Another notably American ideology that emerged during the American Renaissance was a strong sense of the importance of the individual. The brash, arrogant beginning of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass serves as rallying cry for the American voice: “I celebrate myself and sing myself.” (36) The individual, as strange and flawed as he may be, was the central point of experience and conversation. Unlike previous literary traditions that demanded social context to create universal meaning, the American Renaissance made it acceptable to dwell on the individual as an individual. Whitman believed that to be a great poet, a poet had to be first a great American and that to be a great American, a poet had to be first an individual. “He is a seer … he is individual … he is complete in himself … the others are as good as he, only he sees it and they do not. He is not one of the chorus … he does not stop for any regulation … he is the president of regulation.” (25) Emily Dickinson’s life was as eccentric and individual as Whitman’s, though in quite a different way. Living in seclusion, writing intensely personal poetry, Dickinson celebrated the individuality of experience despite the fact that her narrow life afforded her relatively few experiences. Her philosophy covered a small space but reached deep into it. She was concerned with the individual experience and particularly with her own individual experience, with the reach and limitations of her own knowledge and experience. In one poem, she writes about how identity is ultimately an isolated experience: “This Consciousness that is aware Of Neighbors and the Sun Will be the one aware of Death And that itself alone Is traversing the interval Experience between And most profound experiment Appointed unto Men — How adequate unto itself Its properties shall be Itself unto itself and none Shall make discovery. Adventure most unto itself The Soul condemned to be — Attended by a single Hound Its own identity. (146) Even Lincoln celebrated the individual experience in The Gettysburg Address, praising the individual soldiers who perished in the battle there by saying “the world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.” (24) The individual was, perhaps for the first time in history, genuinely of more importance than society as a whole. “An individual is as superb as a nation when he has the qualities which make a superb nation,” writes Whitman. (36) Finally, the American voice was one that was preoccupied with the natural world and the specifics of ordinary life. Works of the American Renaissance are full of small, specific details that illustrate the manifest importance of everyday life over some idealized version of reality. America may have been the ideal world, but it was no abstract utopia and it did not pretend to be. Dickinson’s nature poems are as precise as a naturalist’s observations: Watching a bird, she notes how he bites a worm in half before sipping some dew from the grass and moving away from a crawling beetle before flying off. (Dickinson, 134-135) She describes the minutia of life” After death, she “hear[s] a Fly buzz” (38). She records the events of daily life and the natural world with an observer’s cool impartiality: The death of flower from frost gets the same treatment as the death of a loved one. Like Dickinson, Whitman embraces the ordinary as the source for poetic meaning. “Nothing is better than simplicity,” Whitman says. “Nothing can make up for excess of lack of definiteness.” (28) His poems are definite and full of details: from the “ya-honk” sound of goose in flight (44) to the machinist rolling up his sleeves (45) to the “brown mash” at a cider mill (59), Whitman has an eye for detail as specific and doting as a lover’s — and indeed, he considers himself a lover of the world and his poetry the ultimate lovemaking: “Smile O voluptuous cool-breath’d earth! Earth of the slumbering and liquid trees! Earth of departed sunset — earth of the mountains misty-topt! Earth of the vitreous pour of the full moon just tinged with blue! Earth of shine and dark mottling the tide of the river! Earth of the limpid gray of clouds brighter and clearer for my sake! Far-swooping elbow’d earth — rich apple-blossom’d earth! Smile, for your lover comes.” (50) Indeed, the American Renaissance resonates with detail — Dickinson and Whitman are only the two extremes of a spectrum that included many writers, including Rebecca Harding Davis, Mark Boykin Miller Chestnut and Frederick Douglass. The American Renaissance helped the United States to create its voice by expressing the concepts that the American people most valued. With a desire to celebrate and catalog the natural world and everyday life, a passion for individualism in all its forms and a premium placed on candor even above skill, the American Renaissance created a uniquely American voice, one that remains a literary and cultural touchstone for modern day Americans. WORKS CITED Baym, Nina. (1989) “Melodramas of Beset Manhood.” In David Richter, (Ed.) The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Dickinson, Emily. (1986) The Collected Poems. Cambridge: The Belknap Press. Lincoln, Abraham. (1953) In The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln. Rutgers: The State University Press. Whitman, Walt. (1968). Leaves of Grass. New York: Doubleday. Read More