American Studies 100: Cover Image Version 2.0

Since today is the last day of my second run-through of my class American Studies 100: A History of American Culture in 21 Examples, I thought I'd post the (slightly) revised cover image.  The syllabus (pdf) is pretty much what it was when I taught it in the fall -- the order switched a little bit (often for practical rather than pedagogical considerations), tweaked a few of the readings, but mostly it was the same.  (I didn't change any of my examples.)  But here's the cover image (without accompanying text):

And, just to correlate with the picture, here are the 21 examples which I used to outline the history of American culture:

1. Minstrel Shows
2. Central Park
3. A Sears & Roebuck Catalog, 1898
4. Hull House
5. Coney Island
6. The Five Foot Shelf (a.k.a. The Harvard Classics)
7. D. W. Griffith, The Birth of a Nation (1915)
8. Billy Sunday Sermons
9. Louis vs. Schmeling (New York City, June 22, 1938)
10. The Lone Ranger (radio and TV show)
11. Billie Holiday, "Strange Fruit" (words & music by Abel Meeropol)
12. Jackson Pollock, Number 1, 1950 (Lavender Mist) 
13. Drive-in Movie Theaters
14. Bob Dylan at the Newport Folk Festival, 1965
15. Charles Schultz, Peanuts
16. The Moon Landing, 1969
17. Roman Polanski, Chinatown (1974)
18. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial (Maya Lin, 1982)
19. Fast Food 
20. Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Joss Whedon, 1997 - 2003)
21. Steroids in Baseball

For more details on the ideas & reasoning behind the class, see this post, or the whole syllabus (pdf).

It was a fun class to teach.  Next year I'm teaching in the history department, rather than American studies, again; but I'd like to teach it again sometime, if I ever get the chance.

Quote of the Day

Of course it should not be too surprising to find out that your life story has included an event, something important, that you have known nothing about -- your life story is in and of itself something that you know very little about.

-- Philip Roth, I Married a Communist, p. 15

I'm rereading this to teach next week.  Quite, quite fabulous.  (Then again, I assigned it: of course I'd think that...)

Your First Jazz Album

So I've been listening to a lot of jazz in the last few weeks.  It wasn't a totally new thing for me: I'd heard some before, and had almost a dozen jazz albums.  But I'd never listened to much, and I hadn't known that much about it; I had enough book learning to teach what I teach, but it was a weak area for me*.  I certainly hadn't listened to any (for non-work purposes) in quite a while.  (The mark of this was that when I decided I wanted to hear some, it wasn't on my computer, unlike most of my rock, folk and classical; it was all in CD format, so I had to go down to storage, dig through, get the cds, and add them to my itunes in order to hear them.)  But what began as the merest whim -- partly driven by the thought that my class on Holiday was approaching, and I ought to balance things out any more, partly by the fact that Barry Eisler recommended Junko Onishi, and I listened to a bit she's great -- rapidly snowballed into an obsession, and pretty much all my leisure time recently has been devoted to listening to, and reading about, jazz.

So I thought I'd tell you about it.  And I thought I'd begin at the beginning -- not the beginning of jazz (wherever you decide to draw that particular line), but the beginning of an individual person's engagement with Jazz.  Of course it won't be the absolute beginning -- who, growing up in our culture, hasn't heard snatches over loudspeakers. as background music in movies, and so forth.  But the beginning of listening to any in any sort of a serious sustained way -- even, one might say, the beginning of listening to any on purpose.  Sitting down to hear an album.

What should you listen to?

One might think it's a tricky question.  Jazz is, after all, a whole musical world, with a huge tradition, a wide variety of sounds and styles, and a lengthy back catalog.  It's not really that different from asking what rock album, or what classical music, should one listen to first.  There are a hundred different answers, right?

Wrong.

There's one.

You listen to Miles Davis's 1959 album Kind of Blue.

It's strange how obvious it is, but it is also completely, truly obvious.  Anyone who tries to deny it is either being willfully perverse, or simply trying to be different.

Now, I'd heard Kind of Blue before: it was one of the dozen albums I got out of storage.  I'd had it for decades -- ever since, probably when I was in college, I asked my father what one album I should listen to if I wanted to listen to a jazz album. and he walked me into a record store** and asked a rather gobsmacked clerk the same question.  Naturally, inevitably, I walked out with the obvious choice.

Why is it so obvious?  Because -- quite unusually, as far as art goes -- Kind of Blue combines four different, key things:

• It is, undeniably, a masterpiece of the art;
• It was an art-changing album, incredibly influential and innovative;
• It was and is beloved by jazz fanatics;
• It was and is beloved by people who don't otherwise like jazz at all;
• It was and is incredibly popular, selling more (I believe) than any other jazz album, ever
• It is something you can listen to over and over until you've played it so much that it's worn down the grooves in your record just from playing the mp3.  

Now, getting all of those things into one package is extremely rare -- in fact, I can't, at the moment, think of another example.  A piece of art that is both admired by the experts and widely popular even with people who don't otherwise don't know, or don't care for, the art at all?  A piece that is both a masterpiece, and a breakthrough innovation, and one of the most popular examples ever?  Seriously, does that ever happen?  Usually the great stuff is hard and inaccessible; usually the accessible stuff is scorned by the cognoscenti; usually the popular stuff isn't very good.  But Kind of Blue has it all.

It has other things going for it.  It's by Miles Davis -- he's the bandleader, and composed or co-composed all the tracks, in addition to playing trumpet -- who was unquestionably one of the handful of major musicians ever to play jazz.  But most of the sidemen are giants, too.  John Coltrane, an almost equally influential figure to Davis, played tenor sax on the album; Cannonball Adderley, yet another major figure, played alto sax.  Bill Evans, a fourth giant, played piano on four of the five tracks, and co-wrote two (and the original liner notes.)  If you're ever going to go beyond one album -- even to as many as five, and unquestionably if you go up to, say, twenty -- then you'll encounter those sidemen again as bandleaders in their own right (Coltrane definitely, Evans quite probably, Adderley probably).  So by listening to Kind of Blue first, you get to know (if you read the credits and listen carefully) not just one, but several of the major figures in Twentieth Century jazz.***

As a starting place, Kind of Blue is just bloody perfect.  People who don't usually like jazz like it, so it's a good place to start, since you'll probably like it.  But people who do like jazz not only think it's brilliant, but know that it's a landmark of the tradition.  It's not just an easy way in: it's the rich heart of it.

If you ask people what five or ten albums to start with, you'll get a lot of different answers.  (Here are ten: one, two three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten.)  But Kind of Blue is on every single list.  Some of the lists include comments along the lines of "Any list that doesn’t include Kind of Blue as essential listening is worthless and can be instantly disregarded. Hell, I could make this #1-10 and still have a good list."

Now it's possible to find lists of this sort without Kind of Blue on them.  (Here are two: one, two.)  Most of these seem to be deliberate attempts to be different -- not to list what everyone else is listing.  The first of those two begins by writing "It's too easy for someone to recommend John Coltrane, Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk.  This aught [sic] to get you off to a different start."  But of course the comment is self-refuting.  It's easy, if you know something about jazz, to list those.  But that's because you know something about jazz; the list is supposed to be for someone who doesn't.  Also, it's easy because everyone knows what ought to be on such lists.  Being different for its own sake has its place, but getting people into the basics of something isn't it.  (Those lists are useful... for moving on from the first top ten.  Not what they declare themselves to be, but what they, in fact, are.)

In fact, I must admit, while the whole album is clearly the first album to listen to, one track -- the first, "So What" --is clearly the most famous.  In my current obsession I've been listening to mostly albums, but I have also looked at (if only for guidance in selection) four different anthology albums, all multi-disk sets which aim to introduce listeners to jazz.  (I think they're frequently used for college courses; at least one was designed specifically for that.)  The four that I've looked at -- so far as I can tell, the four major ones (but, again, I'm new to this) -- are:

• The 1973 collection called The Smithsonian Collection of Classic Jazz, edited by Martin T. Williams, which seems to have been the first of these for jazz;
• The 5-CD anthology called Ken Burns Jazz: The Story of American Music, which was released in 2000 to accompany the PBS documentary of the same title;****
• The accompanying four-CD set that goes along with Gary Giddins and Scott DeVeaux's 2009 book Jazz, a history of (and musical introduction to) the art, which seems to have become the standard textbook for introductory college classes on jazz (I have a library copy and have flipped through it, and as far as I can tell it looks quite good);
• The 2011 collection called Jazz: The Smithsonian Collection, which is supposed to be an updating of (and replacement for) the earlier Williams-edited one.

Unsurprisingly, there's fairly limited overlap between the four.  (It would be surprising if there was a lot; it would be equally surprising if there was none.)  But one song that all four contain is "So What" from Miles Davis's Kind of Blue.

Now, what should be the second album is much harder -- after one, we have a legitimate difference of opinion.  I hope to get into that in a later blog post.  And beyond that it gets really complicated: if the lists of top tens are different, the lists which contain 25 or 50 or 100 albums are increasingly so (about which too I hope to have more to say anon).  Increasingly you see different views of the matter; different tastes emerge.  And at some point, of course, the explorer will start to develop their own.  Yeah, high numbers are complicated.

But the first one?  It's not hard.  In fact, it's kind of simple.

Kind of obvious.

Kind of blue.

________________________________
* The way my course on the history of American culture is structured (if you click through you can see the syllabus), I focus on 21 examples, each touching on various different themes and issues.  One of those 21 is "Strange Fruit", written by Abel Meerpol and sung by Billie Holiday.  Now, I had a (single) Holiday album on my computer even before this recent obsession.  But in the classes I devoted to the song last semester, I spent much more time on the history of lynching, and the history of popular front culture (out of which cultural milieu Abel Meerpol sprang), than I did on the history of jazz (and most of that was about Holiday personally).

** I doubt they had many records by that point -- we bought it on CD.  But I don't seem to recall them ever being called cassette stores or CD stores.  Music stores, I guess.  But we also called them record stores.  Until we just started calling them "iTunes".

*** I don't know much about the other three players on the album -- remember, I'm just starting out.  My sense is that they weren't figures of the stature of Davis, Coltrane, Evans and Adderly.  Maybe I'll soon discover otherwise.  (They certainly were all sidemen on a lot of major projects.)  But, to complete the credits: Wynton Kelly played piano on the one track that Evans didn't play on.  Paul Chambers played double bass on the album (and played on a lot of major albums by both Davis and Coltrane).  And Jimmy Cobb played drums; as of right now, he is the last surviving musician to have played on Kind of Blue.

**** In addition to the 5-CD set, there was also a series of 22 albums, each serving as a "best of" of one of 22 jazz musicians.  (You certainly can't fault PBS for inadequate merchandising.)  And there was also a single CD called The Best of Ken Burns Jazz, which was a "greatest hits" of the 5-CD greatest hits selection -- a distillation of the distillation, all of jazz in 20 tracks.  One of those 20, naturally, is "So What" off of Kind of Blue.

Sentences One Finds Oneself Saying During Class

Federalist 10 is about dealing with threats from the left; Federalist 51 is about dealing with threats from the right.

(PS: Yes, I know that this terminology is anachronistic.  Don't hock me a chonic.)

Damnable Heresy

I think I find Nina Simone's version of "Strange Fruit" to be more powerful than Billie Holiday's version.

<ducks>

Quote of the Day

Well the Lone Ranger and Tonto,
They are riding down the line,
Fixing everybody’s troubles,
Everybody’s except mine --
Somebody must of told ’em
That I was doin’ fine.

-- Bob Dylan

Actually, my class has finished our unit on the Lone Ranger, but I forgot to put this up while we were still doing it.

Quote of the Day

The Lone Ranger himself contains not a single internal contradiction. He can change reality, but it can't change him. He travels, smashes, shoots, leaps, gallops, shouts The excess of movement hides the fact that he never learns how the process works. All the hero's agitation ultimately aspires to the world's repose, to it's stabilization. The return of the reader's security coincides with the final frame, in which the chorus identifies the character, echoing their famous last words. Another identical episode is waiting: the fracture of order, the hero's timely arrival, fluctuating fortunes, solutions, return to repose, a new quest.  Goodness, success, and fame are accumulated in every adventure, but they never add up to anything, because a person who's never been sick can never get better. The Lone Ranger rides so fast that it's hard to accept the fact that he's always in the same place, marking time. For this reason, you can read any set of episodes in any order you like. What the hero in fact desires is for the place where he's intervened to become like him: immutable and consummate.

-- Ariel Dorfman, The Empire's Old Clothes: What the Lone Ranger, Babar, and Other Innocent Heroes Do to Our Minds (2009), p. 86

(Yes, we're in the middle of our unit on the Lone Ranger in my class on the history of American culture.)

Lines Which, I Fear, May Seem To My Students To Apply To the Text They Are Drawn From

...which they are supposed to have read for today's class:

...in illustrating of any point touching the stirring personages and events of the time he would be as apt to cite some historic character or incident of antiquity as that he would cite from the moderns. He seemed unmindful of the circumstance that to his bluff company such remote allusions, however pertinent they might really be, were altogether alien to men whose reading was mainly confined to the journals.

-- Herman Melville, Billy Budd, Chapter 7

...except that in fact none of my students will note the irony, since for those who understand that passage it won't apply, and those who really do feel that frustration won't understand this passage either.

Ah students! Ah humanity!

Syllabus for American Studies 101: Myths and Paradoxes

Last week, I posted my syllabus for my new course, an introductory course in American Studies; next up, the syllabus for my other new course, a different introductory course in American Studies.

I'm formatting it differently. Again I'll start with the "About this Course" introduction I put on the syllabus. But then I'm posting the section on the graded work for the class, since it's more offbeat than was the assigned work for my other class, so I thought I'd highlight it by putting it on the actual blog. And lastly, since the class really makes no sense without the specific readings assigned for each unit, I'm listing those, too. (In the coursepack, each subsection of the syllabus is prefaced by a title page, with an image: I'm using those images as headers here, just to spruce up the post.)

As was true for the other class, while I'm basically pleased with how this course came out, it's still a first draft; it will most likely change when I offer it in the spring semester (based on how things went this time around, of course).

Now, without further ado...

About This Course

This course is about the myths and paradoxes of America. We will examine six ideas, each of which is a myth -- not (particularly) in the sense of being fictional, but in the sense of being an organizing idea (aspiration, self-description, ideological belief) which is applied to this country. Each is also, in itself, paradoxical, as well as being in a paradoxical relationship to the others. We will examine each myth/paradox through a variety of approaches, including literature, philosophy, history, sociology, songs, art and others, hoping to gain a richer understanding of each of these ideas than any single approach would give us.

Those six ideas, in the order we will consider them, are:

Freedom
Democracy
Individuality
Equality
Opportunity
Identity

Note that these are hardly the only six that I could have chosen. There were lots of others myths that I considered, and which, had we but world enough and time, I would have us look at too. (Some examples include newness/youth, empire, community (republic/union), progress -- and many others.) But they are six of the most important ones.

We will be looking, as we examine these ideas, at a series of conflicts. First, each of these ideas is contested, which means that people argue over what it means (and what it should mean) and how it works. So each idea is an intellectual battleground between those with different beliefs and agendas. Second, each of these ideas, as ideals, are (in some ways) in conflict with the reality in America. Further, this conflict between the myth and the reality can lead to a variety of responses . (Reject the myth as false? Work to make it true? Deny that it could be false?) And third, each of these ideas is (according to some people) in conflict with others -- perhaps democracy and freedom are in conflict, or perhaps individuality and equality, or perhaps opportunity and identity.

Finally, of course, all of these ideals are tied up, in various complex ways, with others. People often use various ones of them synonymously -- perhaps democracy means equality, or freedom means democracy, or equality means opportunity, or individuality means exploring one's identity -- or is it rather refuting it? These complexities means that we will engage with all six ideas throughout the term, even as we try to focus our discussions primarily on the one at hand. (As we explore these issues with our mélange of readings, one thing to bear in mind is that almost all of these readings could be shifted to a different unit.) But the interrelations here are a feature, not a bug. These ideas are important in part because they relate in such complex ways.

In addition, of course, to their relation to the seventh, unspoken yet ubiquitous idea on our agenda: "America" itself.

Response Papers

There will be no final exam, in-class tests or longer writing assignments in this course.

Apart from attendance and class participation -- which will be counted seriously -- the grades in this class will be determined by near-daily one page response papers. Each response paper should be a page in length, and should primarily be a response to the reading due in that day's class (although comparisons and contrasts with other readings and ideas from the class will certainly be worthwhile). These responses will be graded √/√-/√+ (or, in rare cases, no credit).

The baseline expectation for the class is that you will do 35 one-page response papers. Note that there are 42 days of class in the semester, meaning that you are expected to do one nearly every day. The seven that you don't do are intended to deal with sickness, emergencies and other exigencies of life that may crop up. But it is your responsibility to hoard the passes until really needed; if you "spend" them early, and then get caught out in genuine emergencies or illness, your grade will still go down. You should, at the very least, save three or so for genuine emergencies; anyone who has to do a response paper the final week of the term is either unlucky or planning poorly -- probably the latter.

Response papers can be about any of the readings due on a particular day. If there are multiple readings due on that day, then you don't need to discuss them all -- one will do. All that is required is that you have a response to the reading. Obviously you will need to be particularly intelligent or thoughtful or creative to get a √+, but a √ will be given just for a plain, ordinary, response. (Evidence that you've seriously misunderstood the reading, or genuinely poor writing (i.e. not just a mistake or two), will merit a √-. Handing in only one sentence (rather than a page), or not discussing the reading at all, or other, similar things will result in getting no credit.)

Please note that no more than one response can be turned in per class, nor will late responses be accepted. If you have not turned in a response paper by class time, then that day will be one of your skipped responses.

Also note that on days you don't do a response paper, you are still required to do the reading, attend class and participate in the discussion.

If you turn in 35 response papers which receive a grade of √, you will get a B for the class (assuming normal participation and attendance). Grades of √+ will raise your grade, and grades of √- will lower it. Turning in fewer than 35 responses will lower your grade significantly. Extra credit will be given for turning in more than 35 responses (but bear in mind, again, that only one response paper per class will be accepted -- the only way to do more than 35 is to not use up all of your skips).

The reason that I am making this the only form of assignment is two-fold: first, I want to make sure that everyone does the reading (since it is the heart of the course); and second, I want everyone to think about the reading. This class is not about memorizing information or learning facts, but about thinking about these issues. Do that in your response papers and you'll do fine.

This class is a marathon, not a sprint. The work in it is not something that can be done in bursts; it requires steady application of effort. Make sure you get off to a good start, and then keep a steady pace throughout.

Class Assignments

Note: I haven't reproduced the specific days when each assignment is due. Some days we discuss more than one reading; some readings get more than one day.

Prologue: America

Langston Hughes, "Let America Be America Again"
"Extracts" (supplied by a Sub-Sub Librarian)
Ralph Waldo Emerson, "The American Scholar"

Unit One: Freedom

David Hackett Fischer, Liberty and Freedom (Introduction, pp. 1-13)
David Hackett Fischer, Albion's Seed (excerpts on Freedom Ways)
Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (brief excerpt)
Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (chapters 1-2, 5-7 & brief excerpt from chapter 10)
Walt Whitman, Democratic Vistas (excerpt from opening)
William Graham Sumner, What Social Classes Owe to Each Other (chapters 1-2 only)
Ronald Reagan, "A Time to Choose"
Langston Hughes, "Refugee in America" (aka "Words Like Freedom")
Franklin Delano Roosevelt, "Four Freedoms"
Martin Luther King, "The Birth of a New Nation"
Lynyrd Skynyrd, "Free Bird" (lyrics)
Kate Chopin, "The Story of an Hour"
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, "Yellow Wallpaper"
Henry David Thoreau, Walden (a few very brief excerpts)
Emma Lazarus, "The New Colossus"
David Hackett Fischer, Liberty and Freedom (excerpts on the statue of liberty)
** Liberty and freedom as images (look at slideshow, which has been posted separately on blackboard; we'll view & discuss the images in class)

Unit Two: Democracy

James Madison, Federalist Papers, #10 and #51
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (excerpt)
John Dewey, "Creative Democracy"
Mark Twain, "The Curious Republic of Gondor"
Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma (excerpt)
Elizabeth Cady Stanton, "Declaration of Sentiments from Seneca Falls"
Leonard Cohen, "Democracy" (lyrics)
Martin Luther King, "Letter from Birmingham Jail"
Herman Melville, Billy Budd (entire book)

Unit Three: Individualism

Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Self Reliance"
Edgar Allan Poe, "The Imp of the Perverse"
W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (Forethought & Chapters 1, 6 & 11)
David Riesman, et. al., The Lonely Crowd (Chapter 1)
Tracy Chapman, "Fast Car" (lyrics)
Henry David Thoreau, "Civil Disobedience"
Walt Whitman, "Song of Myself"

Unit Four: Equality

Thomas Paine, excerpt from "Dissertation on First Principles of Government"
Chris Hayes, Twilight of the Elites (Chapter 2)
Plessy v. Ferguson (excerpt)
Brown v. Board of Education (excerpt)
Anne Moody, Coming of Age in Mississippi (chapters 10-11)
Bob Dylan, "Only a Pawn in Their Game" (lyrics)
Kurt Vonnegut, "Harrison Bergeron "
William F. Buckley, "Why the South Must Prevail"
Ayn Rand, "The Age of Envy" (excerpt)
Shirley Jackson, "The Lottery"
Octavia Butler, Fledgling (entire book)

Unit Five: Opportunity

Richard Weiss, The American Myth of Success (Introduction)
Horatio Alger, "Henry Trafton's Independence"
Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives (Chapters 15 & 20, plus some additional images)
Carl Sandberg, "Chicago"
Bruce Springsteen, "The River" (lyrics)
LBJ, "To Fulfill These Rights"
Elizabeth Anderson, The Imperative of Integration (Chapter 6)
Barbara Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dimed (entire book)
Stephen Sondheim, Assassins (entire book)
Stephen Sondheim, Assassins (listen to music)

Unit Six: Identity

Philip Gleason, "Identifying Identity"
James Baldwin, "The Discovery of What It Means to Be an American"
Barbara J. Fields, "Ideology and Race in American History"
Peggy McIntosh, " White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack"
Randolph Bourne, "Trans-National America"
Walter Benn Michaels, The Trouble with Diversity (Chapter 5)
** Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Stills (1977 - 1980) (This series of black and white photographs by American artist Cindy Sherman is online at the web site of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.  The link is to the first one; please look at all the ones they have online (there are 70 of them). Note: the name of this series is "Untitled Film Stills"; the following work that Sherman did was another series, this one called "Untitled". We're going to focus on the former. Basically, when you see color, you can stop (unless you're interested, ¬of course).Dar Williams, "When I Was a Boy" (lyrics)
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (entire book)


Coda: America

Langston Hughes, "Let America Be America Again"


Update: Broken link to Cindy Sherman's Untitled Film Stills fixed, typos corrected.

Update 2: Changed the final unit to reflect a mid-course revision of Unit Six (I shuffled the order of the readings, and replaced Baldwin's essay "Encounter on the Seine" with his essay "The Discovery of What It Means to Be an American".)  I've also decided to eliminate the coda (nice idea but we're short on time).

_______________________
Credits for unit images (in order):

J. M. Flag, US Army recruiting poster, 1917
Samuel Jennings, Liberty Displaying the Arts & Sciences, 1792
Alfred R. Waud, The First Vote, 1867
Composite of three images from series: Nancy Burson, Mankind, 2003
Barry Deutsch, A Concise History of Black-White Relations in the U.S.A., 2008
Margaret Bourke-White, Kentucky Flood, 1937
Composite of eight images from series: Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Stills, 1977 - 1980

Some Worries Date Back Longer Than You Think, Education Edition

...exemplifying the whole spirit of our big colleges -- their insatiable desire for more students and more funds, their readiness to resort to the same methods as those by which hustling business men promote their enterprises, their forgetfulness of the higher and finer aims of learning in the mere perfecting of mechanical means.... Most of our big colleges and universities have drifted into the adoption of methods that are too suggestive of the "drummer" and the advertising man.

-- The Nation, October 7, 1909, p. 321

This is from an unsigned editorial about Harvard president Charles Eliot's Harvard Classics (aka "the five foot shelf"), which had just come out. I can't confirm it, but Hugh Hawkins, in Between Harvard and America: the Educational Leadership of Charles W. Eliot (Oxford, 1973) claims (p. 376, n. 11) that this piece was written by Fabian Franklin (1853 - 1939), at the time the associate editor of the New York Evening Post.

Syllabus for American Studies 100: The History of American Culture

As I've alluded to, but haven't yet spelled out, this year I'm teaching two introductory-level American studies courses (both this semester and again next semester). The classes are American Studies 100: The History of American Culture, and American Studies 101: Myths and Paradoxes. Apart from the course titles and descriptions, I was given a pretty free hand. Of course, both preparing and teaching a new class are a lot of work -- and doing two, particularly in an area you haven't taught before (this is my first time teaching American Studies as such, although most of my history classes have been cross-listed and some have even been offered as 'concurrent' AS courses with the same title/number in a different department) is pretty nuts. And coming up with two introductions to one subject -- even with the direction provided by the course titles -- was yet another level of craziness. (The courses, by the way, had to be independent -- neither was a prerequisite for the other -- but also non-overlapping, as some people would take both (and majors were required to take both.))

It was a busy summer.

But I'm basically pleased with how the courses came out, at least for the first go-around (updates will be made before the spring versions, based on the first run). So I thought I'd post the syllabi in case anyone's interested. First up: Amst100. What I'm going to do is to put here, on the blog, the title page, the general information about the course, and the list of items (you'll know what that means when you get to it). Then I'll link to the complete syllabus as a pdf document on Google Docs for anyone who wants to read the details of the assignments, etc. So, without further ado...

About This Course

It's ridiculous, of course: you can't sum up American culture in fifteen weeks. We might as well all go home.

...but, uh, since we shan't --

The approach of this class will be to work through examples: not precisely representative ones, since they don't represent the whole, but suggestive ones: ones that will introduce a lot of themes and issues that you will encounter again, should you go on to study American Culture further -- or just live in it. More specifically, we shall be talking about twenty-one things, where a "thing" can be a work of art, an event, a place, a genre, or any of a number of other more specific nouns. This is a history of American culture in twenty-one examples, the way we might have a history in five volumes, or in five minutes. Which is to say, it is limited by them, contained within them: they are meant to be, not complete, but informative.

Even apart from the limitations inherent in the example form, there have been a lot of other limitations involved in narrowing a culture down to fifteen class weeks. Two in particular are worth noting. First, our temporal focus shall be on the last hundred and fifty years -- mostly, indeed, the last hundred. American culture (depending on how you define it) goes back at least to the seventeenth century, if not before. But for the purposes of pedagogy, we will focus on the more immediate history of the culture we all live in.

Second, we shall take "culture" in a somewhat (but not extremely) narrow sense. The word is often used quite broadly, to include patterns of work, family, and such things. We will be talking about culture in a narrower sense: movies, television, paintings, food, memorials, sermons, sporting events, amusement parks, scandals, comics, cultural events, and so forth. But, of course, sometimes "culture" is used just to mean things like books, paintings and music. We will include those, but we'll go somewhat further than simply that.

The examples have been chosen with the hope of touching on many of the forms, modes, and issues which have been important in American culture, given those limitations. We will be touching on a lot of issues about which entire courses can be offered -- the history of American popular music, television, theater, film, painting, sports, comics, commercial culture, etc. (Indeed, you can take many of those classes here at Hobart and William Smith, should you be so inclined.) Thus we will be experiencing, of necessity, quick glances rather than long stares at these issues.

Nevertheless, we will cover a fairly broad ground. We'll be looking at two TV shows (and one TV event), one radio show (and one radio event) and one theatrical play. We'll be discussing one park, one historical monument and one amusement park. We'll talk about one painting and one comic strip. We'll do one unit on Jazz, and one on Folk and Rock music (specifically, their intersection). We'll talk about a preacher, a settlement house, a set of books, a type of movie theater, a type of food and a store catalog. We'll touch on sports twice, on public media events at least once and several controversies. We'll look at something from the Western genre, the Mystery/Noir genre, and the Fantasy/Science Fiction genre. Issues that will come up include race relations, commercialism, immigration, nativism, urbanism, suburbanism, cars and drugs.

It'll be a wild ride. We're going big, taking on too much, trying to do and have it all. After all, this is a course on American culture, ain't it?

The 21 Examples

1. Minstrel Shows
2. Central Park
3. A Sears & Roebuck Catalog
4. Hull House
5. Coney Island Amusement Park
6. The Five Foot Shelf (a.k.a. The Harvard Classics)
7. D. W. Griffith, The Birth of a Nation
8. Billy Sunday Sermons
9. The Lone Ranger (radio and TV show)
10. Louis vs. Schmeling (New York City, June 22, 1938)
11. Billie Holiday, "Strange Fruit" (words & music by Abel Meeropol)
12. Jackson Pollock, Number 1, 1950 (Lavender Mist)
13. Charles Schultz, Peanuts, 1961 - 1962
14. Drive-in Movie Theaters
15. Bob Dylan at the Newport Folk Festival, 1965
16. The Moon Landing, 1969
17. Roman Polanski, Chinatown
18. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial
19. Fast Food
20. Buffy the Vampire Slayer
21. Steroids in Baseball

***

If you want to read the complete syllabus, it is available as a pdf online here.

Quote of the Day

A marvelous little phrase from Jane Addams's Twenty Years at Hull House, said very much in passing, as a comparison with something else:

...that curious surprise we experience when we first come back into the streets after days given over to sorrow and death; we are bewildered that the world should be going on as usual and unable to determine which is real, the inner pang or the outward seeming. (Chapter 4)

Yeah, I've felt that.

One Small Grave For a Man, One Giant Diminishment for Mankind

My semester begins tomorrow, and I'm teaching two brand-new classes (more on this soon), so I've been spending full time getting ready for the past week -- so full, in fact, that I've barely opened a newspaper (or the modern equivalent, a browser window). I've just been working, preparing my classes. One of which will include a two-day unit on the moon landing of July 20, 1969. Finally, this evening, ready as I'll ever be, I went to Garry Canavan's web site for the first time in days and days... and see his links about the death of Neil Armstrong.

Having read quite a bit about Mr. Armstrong, his achievements and their cultural impact made the impact on me all the greater, I think, but it would have been pretty great anyway. But I can say with solid grounds that the sense diminishment -- how small we, as a species, have become since that moment forty-three years, one month and six days ago. As Pamela Sargent put it (in Tor.com's fun symposium of SF writers' memories of the moon landing (done for the fortieth anniversary)), "Humankind’s hopes these days are more limited and more desperate, confined to hoping that we can save our own planet from an ecological catastrophe."

I liked Esquire's obituary for Mr. Armstrong (via GC), and Charles Peirce's words at the same site too. Here's a bit of the obituary:

The idea still fills people with childlike disbelief and wonder. Once upon a time, a man walked on the moon. With Armstrong's death, we're mourning, not so much a man, as a conception of the world in which human beings believed themselves to be capable of anything....

...our technologies promise us so much less than they used to: "You can play Angry Birds any time you like" rather than "you can stand on different planets." But also, we've grown up, left behind our unrealistic optimism. The real question of our moment is whether the amazing power of engineers will destroy the planet we have rather than whether they will bring us to new ones. We have come to understand that human beings are bound to the earth. Forever. This terrestrial understanding isn't wrong. It's just smaller than the hope that motivated Armstrong.

And here's a bit of Peirce:

What he thought when he looked at, night after night, is a perspective lost to all but eight old men. Sooner or later, there will be none of them left. On that day, like today, we should mourn for what we once thought we were. From that day forward, I fear, it is all going to sound like myth and magic, and the tales that the old men told around the ancient fires.

Words of diminishment: thus words not really about Neil Armstrong at all, but about us. (But that is true of a lot of eulogies, a lot of obituaries, a lot of funerals.) About how little we have become. But, again, having read a lot on this topic very recently, this is only the most recent occasion for this sentiment, the last one being the fortieth anniversary three years ago. The next one will be at the fiftieth, perhaps, or maybe at the next death. And then, of course, we'll forget it again, until the next one. The moon landing, once a proud achievement of humankind, is now a depressing occasion for shivering in the shadow of the greatness of the past. Easier to think about other things. And there are, indeed, courses to prepare, children to raise, and blogs to write, to say nothing of apocalyptic crises to avert. So we'll wait, and not feel the diminishment again, until the calendar or the grave gives us reason to. (Or -- for my students and myself -- when the syllabus demands it.)

For one giant, leaping moment in 1969, because of what he did, humanity looked up and felt able to stride across worlds. But ever since that leap, we have all felt smaller in its shadow.

When we remember to.

Gerry Canavan headlined the news "A Thousand Years from Now They’ll Wonder If He Was Real", which put me in mind of the marvelous moment from Chapter Five of Gene Wolfe's Shadow of the Torturer, set millennia from now, in a wrecked and ruined future:

Many of these were so old and smoke-grimed that I could not discern their subjects, and there were others whose meaning I could not guess... I came upon an old man perched on a high ladder. I wanted to ask my way, but he seemed so absorbed in his work that I hesitated to disturb him.

The picture he was cleaning showed an armored figure standing in a desolate landscape. It had no weapon, but held a staff bearing a strange, stiff banner. The visor of this figure's helmet was entirely of gold, without eye slits or ventilation; in its polished surface the deathly desert could be seen in reflection, and nothing more.

The warrior of a dead world affected me deeply, though I could not say why or even what emotion it was I felt....

The man who took that picture died yesterday. Let us hope that we do not live to see his accomplishment hang as a forgotten painting in an old museum, in a painting used to train apprentices to clean because it isn't worth anything. (And even in the decaying world Wolfe portrays, the moon is green, because before we gave up it was irrigated.)

Neil Armstrong, rest in peace.

Poem of the Day: A Dramatic Monologue by Robert Frost

I love Robert Frost dearly, but I must admit that most of my favorite ones are among the shorter ones -- no longer, say, than After Apple Picking or Mending Wall. When confronted with one of his longer poems, somehow, it's a bit easy to blink and slide on to a shorter one.

But it's a mistake: some of his long poems are amazing. For instance this one I'm about to reprint entire.

Before I do, however, I thought I'd share with you the passage that I saw quoted which led me to track down the rest and read the whole -- so that if anyone should be tempted (as I am) to blink, you'll have something which might serve as a counter-impulse to continue. This is the passage that I saw quoted:

That's a hard mystery of Jefferson's.
What did he mean? Of course the easy way
Is to decide it simply isn't true.
It may not be. I heard a fellow say so.
But never mind, the Welshman got it planted
Where it will trouble us a thousand years.
Each age will have to reconsider it.

....which is kind of amazing. A simply fabulous reflection on that amazing text.

But the context is really good too. So if that intrigues you, do read the whole thing:

The Black Cottage

We chanced in passing by that afternoon
To catch it in a sort of special picture
Among tar-banded ancient cherry trees,
Set well back from the road in rank lodged grass,
The little cottage we were speaking of,
A front with just a door between two windows,
Fresh painted by the shower a velvet black.
We paused, the minister and I, to look.
He made as if to hold it at arm's length
Or put the leaves aside that framed it in.
"Pretty," he said. "Come in. No one will care."
The path was a vague parting in the grass
That led us to a weathered window-sill.
We pressed our faces to the pane. "You see," he said,
"Everything's as she left it when she died.
Her sons won't sell the house or the things in it.
They say they mean to come and summer here
Where they were boys. They haven't come this year.
They live so far away—one is out west—
It will be hard for them to keep their word.
Anyway they won't have the place disturbed."
A buttoned hair-cloth lounge spread scrolling arms
Under a crayon portrait on the wall
Done sadly from an old daguerreotype.
"That was the father as he went to war.
She always, when she talked about war,
Sooner or later came and leaned, half knelt
Against the lounge beside it, though I doubt
If such unlifelike lines kept power to stir
Anything in her after all the years.
He fell at Gettysburg or Fredericksburg,
I ought to know—it makes a difference which:
Fredericksburg wasn't Gettysburg, of course.
But what I'm getting to is how forsaken
A little cottage this has always seemed;
Since she went more than ever, but before—
I don't mean altogether by the lives
That had gone out of it, the father first,
Then the two sons, till she was left alone.
(Nothing could draw her after those two sons.
She valued the considerate neglect
She had at some cost taught them after years.)
I mean by the world's having passed it by—
As we almost got by this afternoon.
It always seems to me a sort of mark
To measure how far fifty years have brought us.
Why not sit down if you are in no haste?
These doorsteps seldom have a visitor.
The warping boards pull out their own old nails
With none to tread and put them in their place.
She had her own idea of things, the old lady.
And she liked talk. She had seen Garrison
And Whittier, and had her story of them.
One wasn't long in learning that she thought
Whatever else the Civil War was for
It wasn't just to keep the States together,
Nor just to free the slaves, though it did both.
She wouldn't have believed those ends enough
To have given outright for them all she gave.
Her giving somehow touched the principle
That all men are created free and equal.
And to hear her quaint phrases—so removed
From the world's view to-day of all those things.
That's a hard mystery of Jefferson's.
What did he mean? Of course the easy way
Is to decide it simply isn't true.
It may not be. I heard a fellow say so.
But never mind, the Welshman got it planted
Where it will trouble us a thousand years.
Each age will have to reconsider it.
You couldn't tell her what the West was saying,
And what the South to her serene belief.
She had some art of hearing and yet not
Hearing the latter wisdom of the world.
White was the only race she ever knew.
Black she had scarcely seen, and yellow never.
But how could they be made so very unlike
By the same hand working in the same stuff?
She had supposed the war decided that.
What are you going to do with such a person?
Strange how such innocence gets its own way.
I shouldn't be surprised if in this world
It were the force that would at last prevail.
Do you know but for her there was a time
When to please younger members of the church,
Or rather say non-members in the church,
Whom we all have to think of nowadays,
I would have changed the Creed a very little?
Not that she ever had to ask me not to;
It never got so far as that; but the bare thought
Of her old tremulous bonnet in the pew,
And of her half asleep was too much for me.
Why, I might wake her up and startle her.
It was the words 'descended into Hades'
That seemed too pagan to our liberal youth.
You know they suffered from a general onslaught.
And well, if they weren't true why keep right on
Saying them like the heathen? We could drop them.
Only—there was the bonnet in the pew.
Such a phrase couldn't have meant much to her.
But suppose she had missed it from the Creed
As a child misses the unsaid Good-night,
And falls asleep with heartache—how should I feel?
I'm just as glad she made me keep hands off,
For, dear me, why abandon a belief
Merely because it ceases to be true.
Cling to it long enough, and not a doubt
It will turn true again, for so it goes.
Most of the change we think we see in life
Is due to truths being in and out of favour.
As I sit here, and oftentimes, I wish
I could be monarch of a desert land
I could devote and dedicate forever
To the truths we keep coming back and back to.
So desert it would have to be, so walled
By mountain ranges half in summer snow,
No one would covet it or think it worth
The pains of conquering to force change on.
Scattered oases where men dwelt, but mostly
Sand dunes held loosely in tamarisk
Blown over and over themselves in idleness.
Sand grains should sugar in the natal dew
The babe born to the desert, the sand storm
Retard mid-waste my cowering caravans—

"There are bees in this wall." He struck the clapboards,
Fierce heads looked out; small bodies pivoted.
We rose to go. Sunset blazed on the windows.

-- Robert Frost, North of Boston (1914)

Two pedantic footnotes:

1. Anyone interested in why Frost calls Jefferson "the Welshman", and whether he was right to do so, should look here for more information.

2. Most online reprintings omit the space between the preantepenultimate and the antepenultimate lines, but it's there in the original printing, and I think it improves the poem. What can I say? In poetry, sometimes punctuation makes all the difference.

The Evolution of Section 1 of Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself"

I have long known that the first edition of Walt Whitman's seminal book of poetry Leaves of Grass, published in 1855, was much shorter than the final edition (the so-called "death-bed edition" of 1891-1892.) (The first edition had twelve poems in it; the last (depending on how you count) ten or more times that.) I was less focused on the fact that, in addition to poems being added, the older poems were rewritten as the editions went on. And only in the last day or two have I taken note of the fact that that rewriting was a gradual process, as various poems I've come to know and love in their final forms only took those final forms in the 1881-1882 edition. (The death-bed edition was unchanged, save for a number of poems added as "annexes" at the end.)

In this post I thought I'd trace the changes in the first section of "Song of Myself" -- probably Whitman's most famous,* and arguably his greatest, poem, and certainly the most famous and greatest one from the first edition of Leaves of Grass. And, not incidentally, my personal favorite too.

(Note: all the texts here are from the astonishing Walt Whitman Archive, which has both text and scanned-page-image versions of all the editions of Leaves of Grass, as well as a really amazing amount of Whitmania. If you're at all interested in Whitman, check it out.)

First I should mention that, the title of the work underwent several changes. In the 1855 edition, the poem later known as "Song of Myself" was basically untitled.** There were no numbers (the final text was divided into 52 sections). The opening words were:

I CELEBRATE myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease . . . . observing a spear of summer grass.

And that's it: there's then another stanza break, and the next words are the words that (in the final text) start section two ("Houses and rooms are full of perfumes"). Note that the ellipsis in the final line above is in the original.

In the second edition of 1857, a mere two years later, the poem has acquired a title: "Poem of Walt Whitman, an American.". Its opening is as follows:

I CELEBRATE myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me, as good belongs to you.

I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease, observing a spear of summer grass.

That is, substantially the same, but the ellipsis is gone.

In the 1860 edition, the poem's title has been shortened to "Walt Whitman". The text is unchanged -- save for the addition of a capital letter on soul's s -- but each subsection is now numbered:

1 I CELEBRATE myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me, as good belongs to you.

2 I loafe and invite my Soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease, observing a spear of summer grass.

These numbers do not correspond to the section numbers of the final text; one is given to each stanza, so there are 366 in total, far more than the 52 sections of the final text.

In the 1867 edition, the only difference is that the commas at the end of the first, second and fourth lines have become semi-colons. In the 1871 edition, nothing at all has changed in the opening.

Then, in the 1881-1882 edition, there are a host of changes, as the poem takes on its final form. First, it first takes on the title "Song of Myself", by which it has since been known. Secondly, the poem is now divided into 52 sections rather than numbering each stanza. And the first section takes on its final form:

I CELEBRATE myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.

My tongue, every atom of my blood, form'd from this soil, this air,
Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their parents the same,
I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin,
Hoping to cease not till death.

Creeds and schools in abeyance,
Retiring back a while sufficed at what they are, but never forgotten,
I harbor for good or bad, I permit to speak at every hazard,
Nature without check with original energy.

The commas are back. And the first line is filled out -- "I celebrate myself" has become "I celebrate myself, and sing myself". I definitely prefer the latter, but I don't know if it's because it was the first I got to know well.

But there are two wholly new stanzas, adding a substantial amount of text between the "spear of summer grass" and the "houses and rooms" which starts section 2.

They are not, however, original to the 1881 edition. Rather, they were moved to "Song of Myself" from a different poem -- the poem that would become known as "Starting from Paumanok".

"Starting from Paumanok" does not exist in any form in either 1855 or the 1857 editions. In the 1860 edition, however, a set of prefatory stanzas -- numbered, as were the stanzas of "Walt Whitman" (aka "Song of Myself"); there were 66 total -- were added before the words "I celebrate myself", which had previously been the first words of the first poem. In the 1860 edition those prefatory verses were titled "Proto-Leaf", and the 11th and 12th stanzas were as follows:

11 In the Year 80 of The States,
My tongue, every atom of my blood, formed from this soil, this air,
Born here of parents born here,
From parents the same, and their parents' parents the same,
I, now thirty-six years old, in perfect health, begin,
Hoping to cease not till death.

12 Creeds and schools in abeyance,
Retiring back a while, sufficed at what they are, but never forgotten,
With accumulations, now coming forward in front,
Arrived again, I harbor, for good or bad—I permit to speak,
Nature, without check, with original energy.

Close to the two stanzas that would be added to section one of "Song of Myself", but not identical -- a few lines never made it into "Song of Myself" -- particularly the first line ("In the Year 80 of The States") and the middle of the second stanza ("With accumulations, now coming forward in front,/Arrived again..."). And there are some minor changes of punctuation and line formatting.

"The Year 80 of The States", incidentally, is presumably dated to the Declaration of Independence, which would place it from July 14, 1856 - July 13, 1857. Whitman was born on May 31, 1819, so for most of that year he was 37 years old, turning 38 shortly before the end of the period. Nevertheless, in this version Whitman describes himself as "thirty-six years old"; he wouldn't update (correct?) that until the 1881-1882 edition (at which point he was 62). Oh, and it was Balboa, not Cortes, Mr. K.***

In the 1867 edition, the prefatory verses had become "Starting from Paumanok", and is divided into sections, although each stanza is still individually numbered. Section 4 of the newly-titled poem reads:

11 In the Year 80 of The States,
My tongue, every atom of my blood, form'd from this soil, this air,
Born here of parents born here, from parents the same, and their parents the same,
I, now thirty-six years old, in perfect health, begin,
Hoping to cease not till death.

12 Creeds and schools in abeyance,
(Retiring back a while, sufficed at what they are, but never forgotten,)
I harbor, for good or bad—I permit to speak, at every hazard,
Nature now without check, with original energy.

The extra lines from the second of those two stanzas are gone. As if in compensation, the final line gains the word "now". And the punctuation is still different -- the second line is in parentheses, there's the m-dash in the third, and a few commas are different. The first stanza is changed largely in line breaks and punctuation (including, oddly, the previously normal word "formed" becoming here "form'd").

The 1871 edition made no changes in those verses.

Then, in 1881-1882, they are not only given a few changes, but are translated from the fourth section of "Starting from Paumanok" to being the second half of the first section of (the newly christened) "Song of Myself".

Which I've already quoted.

I haven't yet read through all the various versions side by side, or even the 1855 version and the final 1881-1882 text side-by-side, to see how this goes through the whole poem. My sense is that, given the transposed stanzas, this section goes through larger changes than most. But I don't know. I do know that a fair number of Whitman scholars apparently prefer the 1855 version -- and that, based on this little exercise, I -- so far -- don't.

Still, it's all interesting. At least to people given to Nortonian pedantry (are you reading the footnotes?)

_________________________
* Its only competitor for this title, I think, is O Captain! My Captain!, which is widely taught in schools -- but which is also utterly uncharacteristic of Whitman, as atypical a work (at least in form) as he ever wrote (at least in his mature period).

** It was headed with the words 'Leaves of Grass', the title of the book of the whole, as were half of the dozen poems included, but it's not really a title and has never been taken as such.

*** Or was it? It seems there are counter-arguments to this oft-made puff of Nortonian pedantry (who knew?): see C. V. Wicker, "Cortez-Not Balboa", in College English, Vol. 17, No. 7 (Apr., 1956), pp. 383-387, expanded on in Charles J. Rzepka, "'Cortez: Or Balboa, or Somebody like That': Form, Fact, and Forgetting in Keats's 'Chapman's Homer' Sonnet", in Keats-Shelley Journal , Vol. 51, (2002), pp. 35-75. (Links to stable JSTOR cites for those with library-granted access.) I only skimmed the first of them, but it seems to me like Wicker has a pretty decent argument.

Whitman's "Reconciliaition"

Angus Fletcher, in his article on "Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass" in The New Literary History of America (1999, Greil Marcus & Werner Sollors, eds.), says of Walt Whitman's "Reconciliation" that it is "as powerful as anything [Whitman] ever wrote". (p. 312) (Fletcher mentions this, by the by, as a counter-example to the rule that Whitman's best poems tend to be his longer ones.) He quotes it, in its entirety. I'd never read that poem before (although some Whitman poems are among my favorite poems of all time, I've never read all of Leaves of Grass straight through), so I read it, liked it, and decided to put it up on this blog.

But I found something odd. Different sites with the text -- say, Barttleby's presentation of it and the ebook available on Project Gutenberg -- punctuated it differently, -- quite differently, in fact. It occurred to me that this might simply be the sloppiness of online texts; but since I also knew that Whitman rewrote his poems between the many editions of Leaves of Grass, I thought I better check out the originals. Fortunately that fabulous site has page images of the various different editions that Whitman put out of Leaves, so I could go straight to the source. And, indeed, the difference in punctuation do date to the difference between the editions.

I thought I'd show you both.

Here is the poem as printed in the 1867 edition of Leaves of Grass:

Reconciliation

WORD over all, beautiful as the sky!

Beautiful that war, and all its deeds of carnage, must in time be utterly lost;

That the hands of the sisters Death and Night, incessantly softly wash again, and ever again, this soil'd world:

…For my enemy is dead—a man divine as myself is dead;

I look where he lies, white-faced and still, in the coffin—I draw near;

I bend down and touch lightly with my lips the white face
in the coffin.

-- Walt Whitman, 1867

And here is the poem as published in the so-called "deathbed edition" of 1891:

Reconciliation

WORD over all, beautiful as the sky,

Beautiful that war and all its deeds of carnage must in time be utterly lost,

That the hands of the sisters Death and Night incessantly softly wash again, and ever again, this soil'd world;

For my enemy is dead, a man divine as myself is dead,

I look where he lies white-faced and still in the coffin—I draw near,

Bend down and touch lightly with my lips the white face in the
coffin.

-- Walt Whitman, 1891

If you want to see the actual page images, click on the links on Whitman's name and it will take you to the pages where you can see them.

So far as I can tell, there is only one difference in the actual words (as opposed to punctuation) of the poem: in the very last line, the 1867 version omits an "I" which can be understood. Thus, the 1867 version reads "I draw near;/I bend down and touch lightly...." where the 1891 version reads "I draw near,/Bend down and touch lightly....". Apart from that, the words are the same.

But, to me at least, they read as very different poems. The punctuation changes the rhythm, the focus, the tone, even (arguably) in places the plain meaning of the words. It's really quite astonishing. I've noted before how much punctuation can change the feel and meaning of a poem, but this is pretty dramatic.

I'd always thought that, for Whitman, you were pretty much covered if you had the first (1855) and the last (1891) editions of Leaves. But here is a real, significant, interesting change between two fairly late editions. -- O dear.

Which do you prefer? Why? Leave thoughts in comments.

And please insert here your preferred form of the pun (salt to taste) that this poem is called "Reconciliation" (meaning between the North and the South after the Civil War), and that this post is about reconciling two different versions of the same poem.

Update: this post accidentally posted while I was still writing it, so if you read it in its first few minutes, the ending may have changed and a few infelicities may have been corrected.