Alvaro Rodriguez
Literature 5535
American Romanticism
Final Exam
July 3, 2002 

Essay #1 (Question #2)

            It is possible to trace the Romantic to the modern by focusing on the “quest” aspect of Romanticism and what that journey means for writers like Walt Whitman, Langston Hughes, Allen Ginsberg and Robert Hayden. The quest by the individual (separate from the masses, formed by idealism and rebellion and fueled by a desire to self-invent or transform while transgressing social boundaries) recurs as the theme that unifies these four author’s works.

            Whitman’s “There Was A Child Went Forth” is an example of the “kosmic” quest: Whitman as dual narrator, both boy and man, interacting with and being acted upon by a vast catalog of peoples, animals, vegetables, stars and experiences. Whitman’s yearning for a true democracy goes beyond humanity and stretches to all levels of the Natural world. In turn, this holistic view turns inward, as all of these elements become unified under the aegis of “Walt Whitman, a kosmos.” What Whitman does, in this poem, is Eastern in its roots, as it demonstrates a desire for connection with the Unknown by connecting to what is known, i.e., the grass, the fruit, the cow’s calf, the mother, the father, etc. The transformation here is one of transgressing boundaries in that it expresses a vision that excludes boundaries; the walls that separate man from vegetable from cosmic from other man are rent asunder. The poem is as much a declaration of interdependence as one of independence: “I am a child,” it seems to say, “and I am also a man. I am also you.”

            Hughes’ “I, Too,” neatly connects to this quest, albeit from an alternate perspective, that of the African-American male in the early-to-mid 20^th century. Hughes invokes Whitman in the poem’s opening lines: “I, too, sing America./I am the darker brother.” Here, the narrator of the poem seeks to transgress the very real, physical boundaries of the kitchen/dining room as well as the social separation of master and servant, or white and black. The narrator also sees himself as an individual, separate from the (white) masses, but full of the desire to subvert those masses: “Nobody’ll dare/Say to me/ ‘Eat in the kitchen,’/Then.” This subversion comes with the need to self-invent, an event that will gain the attention of the masses: “They’ll see how beautiful I am.”

            Ginsberg’s epochal “Howl” connects the Whitmanesque “line of breath” and notion of communion with the Universal to Hughes’ sense of the outsider seeking to subvert and rebel against the system. “Howl” catalogs an American laundry list of images—some scatological, others poetic, some both; and, curiously, adapts Whitman’s “I” to an identifying “we.” The narrator is not completely alone in his outsider-hood; in fact, he identifies with “the best minds of my generation,” albeit those “destroyed by madness.” The quest is evident in the text of the poem as a real, physical journey, not just a mental one: “returning through Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York,” “in Paradise Alley,” “toward poles of Canada and Paterson,” “the endless ride from Battery to holy Bronx,” “nowhere Zen New Jersey,” “boxcars boxcars boxcars racketing through snow toward lonesome farms in grandfather night,” etc.

            The narrator of the poem also identifies these “best minds” as sexual outsiders, finding a relationship to the barrier-shattering eroticism of Whitman’s poetry, both in terms of frankness and in that such distinctions are arbitrary and illusory. “Howl” connects the Romantic notion of the doomed hero to the “madness” that has overtaken these “best minds,” referencing Bellevue, his mother’s psychosis (“with mother finally * * * * * *”) and his friend Carl Solomon’s committal at Rockland (“I’m with you in Rockland!”). The poem explains this “madness” as the result of a loss of Romanticism, eaten by the “sphinx of cement and aluminum” that is Moloch.

            Not surprisingly, “Howl” ends on the Romantic note of the dream; the belle reve of the narrator culminates in communion between the outsiders in a safe, Natural space: “in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-journey on the highway across America in tears to the door of my cottage in the Western night.”

            It can be said that Ginsberg realized this ideal—to live and work on his own terms as a gay poet—and be transformed and accepted by society. The same, to an extent, can be said about the narrator of Robert Hayden’s “Those Winter Sundays.”

            In contrast to the narrator of Hughes’ “I, Too,” the narrator of “Those Winter Sundays” is not fighting for a transformation that will make him “American.” He is, in fact, already American, and the poem expresses a bittersweet nostalgia for an experience that is wholly American. The narrator, an African-American male, has assimilated into the society that Hughes was railing against, or at least calmly warning about the millennial revolution around the corner. Hayden’s narrator expresses a remorse at not having appreciated “love’s austere and lonely offices” as displayed in the actions of his father. But this feeling is completely disconnected from race, maybe even in terms of Whitman, universal. But at the very least, it is American. Hayden’s poem is a kind of dream realized, even with a touch of sublimity, that the African-American poet can feel nostalgia for the past without placing it in a racial context. The quest is fulfilled in Hayden’s poem, that same quest of Whitman, Hughes and Ginsberg to be “I, Too, America,” but the Romantic notion of desire and loss remains. Even though the narrator has had an experience equal to the others, he still shares a sense of loss at what might have been. The poem could have just as easily been written by Thomas Wolfe—“You can’t go home again.”

Essay #2 (Question #5)

            This course has provided a good example of how the Old Canon of writers has been enriched by the addition of other, often neglected authors in providing a clearer and perhaps more truthful picture of the range of American Romanticism. This essay seeks to discuss some of those writers and their works as an example of and a call for the inclusion of still others, namely Latinos, in the framework of this course.

            As I approached this course, I had a few preconceptions, but the main one was that I’d be reading Hawthorne, Melville and Poe. Having had little to no exposure to the writers of the Harlem Renaissance, those were the first writers on my imaginary chopping block; I readily dismissed their inclusion as “the curse of multiculturalism.” But the fact is I’d read Melville already, a lot of Melville, even the Melville that nobody reads anymore. I hadn’t read Countee Cullen. I hadn’t read Rebecca Harding Davis. I hadn’t read Harriet Jacobs. I hadn’t read Jean Toomer. But my definition of American Romanticism has been broadened and strengthened by my exposure to those authors in this class.

            Gender and race have traditionally been the crisscrossing lines of yellow police tape that have kept writers like Davis and Cullen out of the canon. In the case of gender and its relationship to this course, it’s not hard to see why Davis, for example, is forgotten. Her debut is published anonymously in a magazine, not an entirely alien way to break into the business but certainly one rife with the possibility that one will remain, throughout history, nameless. Similarly, if her work is discussed at all prior to its recontextualization as a seminal piece of protofeminist writing, it is as historical material. This course offers the opportunity to discover the elements of the Romantic that exist in its tenuous bridge between the Arcadia of its forebears and the gritty realism of its setting.

            Margaret Fuller provides another example of this footnoting of the female American author of this period. In essence, Fuller is perceived as a “character” more than a writer; as a public figure with her circle of intimates and pre-Suffragettes or as the behind-the-scenes Transcendentalist editor. But the examination of her writings in the terms of this course offers explorations of transcendence as part of the Romantic journey towards self-invention.

Jacobs’ slave narrative is an example of material that has been viewed as historical documentation rather than literature; the fact that Jacobs is an African-American woman only compounds the difficulty in approaching her work as part of the canon. Yet her narrative is filled with romance; her quest for freedom and independence surpasses racial, social and physical boundaries, and we begin to see the inversion of light-and-dark/good-and-bad imagery in her work, preceding what will come in the writing of the Harlem Renaissance. What emerges from her narrative is altogether complex; memoir-as-history-as-narrative-as-romance-as-plea, in effect, for the end of slavery.

Hurston provides a further example of someone whose work has been appreciated only postmortem. Although as is the case with many African-American writers that their works were enshrined and guarded in the higher institutions of black scholastica, Hurston’s writing fails to reach the masses until this willingness to explore alternatives to the canon comes to exist. In other words, it took the Civil Rights Movement, Women’s Liberation, Multiculturalism, Feminism, etc., to bring writers like Hurston to the forefront of scholarly discussion. And when that point is reached, it begs the question: “Why not?” The material is rife with rich subtext, poetic passages, Romantic elements. Books like these can be read on multiple levels, as part of different schools: Modernist, Romantic, African-American, etc.

This, in turn, begs another question: Why stop with Black authors? Why not Asian-Americans, Indian-Americans, Latinos? Latino literature by its very nature is swimming with Romantic attributes: that of nostalgia for a lost country; the conflicted hero who belongs to neither a pure European nor a pure Indian experience, but “crosses borders” in his “quest” to “self-invent.”

Just as this course became multimedia-oriented from the very beginning, with samples of Mozart and Beethoven and the film Out of the Past, the Latino tradition, which is steeped in song, could be examined in the course of study of American Romanticism. Mexican-American balladry, for example, and the dawn of the conjunto tradition could be explored through the music of artists like Lydia Mendoza, whose songs are full of the sublimity of desire and loss of doomed, tragic romance. A recent text explores the meanings and cultural significance behind songs known as “narcocorridos,” literally ballads about drug smugglers and dealers, where the outsider is romanticized as a tragic hero.

Genre-specific courses like “Mexican-American Literature” or “Chicana Feminism” exist in their solitary forms, but to include works from those “ghettoized” courses into the canonical course “American Romanticism” identifies their validity as part of a greater scheme, the literature of our land. Just as Jacobs lay undiscovered in her literary grave until Jean Fagan Yellin came along and revived her, or Tillie Olsen did for Rebecca Harding Davis, or Alice Walker for Zora Neale Hurston, the same sort of renaissance can be made available to the Latino writers whose work embraces the American Romantic. The experience can only be enriched by their addition.