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ISSUES FOR DISCUSSION OR INVESTIGATION

  • Choose one of the suggested sections of "Song of Myself" (or another) and search for all the 'foreign' words, phrases, images, and references you can find. How does he try to incorporate such items into his overarching portrait of America, both linguistically and visually? Does the line between 'native' and 'foreign' ever become blurred? In what ways do you see Whitman as a 'nativist'?
  • Research the visual representation of immigrants, emigres, and other foreigners in the U.S. during the antebellum period.
  • Read other poems in Leaves of Grass that explicitly address America's relation to the rest of the world: "Salut au Monde!", "A Broadway Pageant," "Starting from Paumanok," or "Passage to India."
  • Research the influence of Whitman in another country, using Walt Whitman and the World (cited below) as an initial point of reference.


FURTHER READING

  • Gay Wilson Allen and Ed Folsom, eds. Walt Whitman and the World (U Iowa P, 1995). Indispensable anthology on Whitman's global reception; contains a detailed bibliography by country
  • Larry J. Reynolds, European Revolutions and the American Literary Renaissance (Yale UP, 1988). Detailed treatment of events in Europe in 1847-8 and their reception in the U.S.
  • Ed Folsom, Whitman's Native Representations (Cambridge UP, 1994)
  • David Reynolds, Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography (New York: Knopf, 1995). Overview of political and social conditions during Whitman's lifetime


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