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- Title
American Renaissance Poetry and the Topos of Positionality: Genius Mundi and Genius Loci in Walt Whitman and William Gilmore Simms.
- Authors
Kerkering, John D.
- Abstract
Explores American Renaissance poetry and the topos of positionality in the works of William Gilmore Simms and Walt Whitman. Effort to renew critical attention to Simms; Publication of Simms' "Poems: Descriptive, Dramatic, Legendary, and Contemplative" in 1853 and its proximity to the 1855 publication date of Whitman's "Leaves of Grass"; Eclipse of Simms by Whitman; Whitman's populist declaration that the proof of a poet is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it; Whitman's affectionate absorption of his country that made his work particularly relevant; Presentation of Whitman's poetry as a kind of "policy" for preserving union; Whitman's formulation of a universal 'conjunctive principle' whose manifest structure is the sequence of end-stopped, nonequivalent, but equipollent lines; Reason the U.S. absorbs Whitman rather than Simms; Poetry's social policy than its literary quality.
- Subjects
UNITED States; WHITMAN, Walt, 1819-1892; SIMMS, William Gilmore, 1806-1870; AMERICAN poetry; AMERICAN poets; AMERICAN literature; POEMS: Descriptive, Dramatic, Legendary &; Contemplative (Book); LEAVES of Grass (Book : Whitman); SOCIAL policy; POETRY (Literary form); VICTORIAN (Literary period)
- Publication
Victorian Poetry, 2005, Vol 43, Issue 2, p223
- ISSN
0042-5206
- Publication type
Literary Criticism
- DOI
10.1353/vp.2005.0024