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LITR 4232 American
Renaissance 2010 Student Midterm Samples 2. Short essay (4-6 paragraphs) on 1 of 2 options (or combinations as inspired) :
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II: Whitman on Sublimity
Text:
When I heard the learn'd astronomer;
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me;
When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them;
When I, sitting, heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in
the lecture room,
How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick;
Till rising and gliding out, I wander'd off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look'd up in perfect silence at the stars.
If there is one lesson that the Romantics taught, this lesson is
importance of nature, as home, as teacher, as man’s reflection and what man
should reflect. The importance of
rural life over urban existence is what should be taken away from Romantic
works. Such is the case with
Romanticism in English literature, and such is the case in the American
Renaissance. Walt Whitman, father
of free verse and American Romantic poetry, expresses this sentiment so
eloquently and with such simplicity in his poem “When I heard the learn’d
astronomer” that no other text is necessary for understanding Romanticism for
cultural purposes. A close reading
of the simple, eight line poem will reveal just how well Whitman captures the
Romantic spirit.
Whitman opens the poem by setting up a scene in which he listens to a
lecturer expound on astronomy. The
first important note to make is the distinction that Whitman makes between
himself and the “learn’d astronomer.”
Grammatically, all Whitman does is set up a scene with two distinct
characters. But he is also setting
himself up in opposition to the authority figure.
That the astronomer is ‘learn’d’ indicates a probable university driven
education; additionally, his profession as an astronomer denotes that he is a
scientist, one who studies ‘the heavens.’
This is important because of what sublimity exists in nature, but
especially in the heavens, for the Romantics.
The distinction between a love for nature and a study of nature is what
sets the two figures apart.
The next two lines of the poem detail what studies the astronomer has
done. “The proofs, the figures,
were ranged in columns before [him],” the heavens have essentially been
dissected, labeled, and put in a case on display.
By approaching nature in a scientific method, the heavens go from being
sublime to being luminal. This is
important to Whitman because nature, even that which is so sublime and vast as
the stars, reflects himself and man as a whole.
The sentiment of matched sublimity in the soul and the stars is what
matters. That the stars are
measured and put in a case hints to the Romantic that, given the proper ruler
and unit of measurement, the soul could be as easily divided and diagrammed.
In the third line of the poem, the astronomer receives “much applause”
for his knowledge, but Whitman, without explanation, becomes “tired and sick”
and wanders out of the lecture hall.
That the lecturer received “much applause is important because it sets up
another figure in opposition to Whitman: the masses.
Whitman “wander’d off by [him]self,” showing the importance of
individuality to the Romantic.
Romanticism is about the individual’s experience, and Whitman is turned out
unaccountably by his disdain for a nature which is no reflection of him, but a
thing set apart. And in wandering
off, he finds himself “in the mystical moist night-air,” looking up “in perfect
silence at the stars.” Nature has a
much more religious aspect for Romantics than a scientific.
The sublimity of nature is divine in character, and the divine cannot be,
nor should it be, understood. That
Whitman captures so many key feature of Romanticism in so few lines is
representative itself of the point Whitman makes.
There is no reason to expound on why a scientific approach is not
favored. Such an endeavor would
just be dissecting an approach which seeks more to experience than to
understand.
