Whitman breaks out during Romantic era, many Romantic tendencies; but also some Realistic tendencies.

Broad question: What Romantic and Realistic styles or subjects appear in Whitman, and how does he resolve these different impulses or interests?

opportunity to refresh: How is Whitman's poetry still poetry, despite absence of formal mechanisms? What formal mechanisms remain? How does an "American style" of poetry result?

Sandberg and Ginsberg: peruse briefly for sake of continuity, influence of Whitman

Wolfe: how may prose style reflect Whitman's poetic style? What other Romantic features?

parallelism (+ anaphora)

Question: how or in what respects may Whitman's style or subject be considered either Romantic or Realistic?

Question: how does Whitman's revolution in style accommodate or complement his revolution in subject matter?

Wolfe

Questions:

In what ways is Wolfe obviously continuing to express a Romantic sensibility in the early 20th century?

How does Wolfe's prose style imitate Whitman's poetic style?

Wolfe writes at same time as Fitzgerald--Why has Fitzgerald survived while Wolfe has faded?

Wolfe 1900-1938 (Four major novels: Look Homeward, Angel [1929); Of Time and the River [1935]; The Web and the Rock [1939]; You Can't Go Home Again [1940])

Fitzgerald 1896-1940 (Four major novels: This Side of Paradise [1920]; The Beautiful and the Damned [1922]; The Great Gatsby [1925]; Tender is the Night [1934])

Both also wrote numerous short stories . . . 

Possible to work in Hemingway to comparison? Especially Nick Adams stories?

Recall that Faulkner, other great fiction writer of period, appeared in class meeting on Poe.

(Short answer: Fitzgerald's a better writer, but what standards are being used to make that judgment?)

Instructor's notes:

In what ways is Wolfe obviously continuing to express a Romantic sensibility in the early 20th century?

Childhood

Loss + idealization of absence (>desire)

cycle of desire and loss (cf. Poe in "Ligeia")

industrialization as antagonist of Romantic nature or world

disappearance of lost vision into natural world / childhood

Does Romanticism blur all objects of desire together? Nature, childhood, beautiful youth (Uncas, brother, Ligeia), the past . . . .

How does Wolfe's prose style imitate Whitman's poetic style?

Use of "long line"

Attempt to capture copious and elusive reality—1689

Inclusion of common materials of everyday life

Use of long line enables (somewhat) the other two

Astronomical events of American Renaissance

Meteor Storm of 1833

Great Comet of 1843

Walt Whitman, Specimen Days.  Prose Works 1892, v. 1, ed. Floyd Stovall (New York UP, 1963)

94 "The Weather.--Does it Sympathize with these Times?"

            Whether the rains, the heat and cold, and what underlies them all, are affected with what affects man in masses, and follows his play of passionate action, strain'd stronger than usual, and on a larger scale than usual--whether this, or no, it is certain that there is now, and has been for twenty months or more, on this American continent north, many a remarkable, many an unprecedented expression of the subtile air above us and around us.  There, since this war, and the wide and deep national agitation, strange analogies, different combinations, a different sunlight, or absence of it; different products even out of the ground.  After every great battle, a great storm.  Even civic events the same.  On Saturday last . . . .  As the President came out on the capitol portico, a curious little white cloud, the only one in that part of the sky, appear'd like a hovering bird, right over him.

            Indeed, the heavens, the elements, all the meteorological influences, have run riot for weeks past.  Such caprices, abruptest alternation of frowns and beauty, I never knew. . . .  Nor earth nor sky ever knew spectacles of superber beauty than some of the nights lately here.  The western star, Venus, in the earlier hours of the evening, has never been so large, so clear; it seems as if it told something, as if it held rapport indulgent with humanity, with us Americans.  Five or six nights since, it hung close by the moon, then a little past its first / 95 quarter.  The star was wonderful, the moon like a young mother.  The sky, dark blue, the transparent night, the planets, the moderate west wind, the elastic temperature, the miracle of that great star, and the young and swelling moon swimming in the east, suffused the soul. . . . .