Lesson Plans from EDSITEment

Walt Whitman sought to create a new and distinctly American form of poetry. As he declared in Democratic Vistas, available on the EDSITEment resource American Studies at the University of Virginia: "America has yet morally and artistically originated nothing. She seems singularly unaware that the models of persons, books, manners, etc., appropriate for former conditions and for European lands, are but exiles and exotics here…." In the same document, he attacks the poets of his day as "genteel little creatures" who do not speak for the great democratic mass of Americans--the drivers, boatmen, and field-workers whom Whitman, in the first quotation above, calls "sublime." It is from this great democratic mass, he suggests, that new forms of art and poetry--a new conception of the sublime--will arise.

Did Whitman in his own poetry succeed in creating a revolutionary, original, and truly American form of verse? However we answer the question, it is certain that the example of the "Good Grey Poet" has had a profound influence on subsequent generations of American poets. In this lesson, students will explore the idea of "democratic poetry" by reading Whitman's words in a variety of media, examining daguerreotypes taken circa 1850, and comparing the poetic concepts and techniques behind Whitman's I Hear America Singing and Langston Hughes' Let America Be America Again. Finally, using similar poetic concepts and techniques, students will have an opportunity create a poem from material in their own experience.

Note: This lesson may be taught either as a stand-alone lesson or as a companion to the complementary EDSITEment lesson Walt Whitman's Notebooks and Poetry: the Sweep of the Universe. To make this lesson plan more compelling and fascinating for students, teachers should screen the brilliant Whitman episode from the NEH-funded series Visions and Voices (scroll down to "12. Walt Whitman") at the EDSITEment-reviewed site Learner.org. There is a log-in process required to access the actual movie, but the registration is free and provides entree to a wealth of educator resources.

Guiding Question:

How does Whitman's poetry and the poems of others influenced by him reflect Whitman's notion of a democratic poem?

Learning Objectives

Preparing to Teach this Lesson

As an anticipatory exercise, discuss with your students the different values that we give to paintings versus photographs. Ask students how many of them have a painted portrait of themselves at home. Ask students how many of them have a photograph of themselves at home. Why do so many more people have photographs? How many people have photographs of themselves doing something (playing a sport for example)? Why is it so rare to see a portrait of someone doing something such as playing a sport? How many people have photographs of themselves at different ages? Why is it so rare to see a series of portraits of someone at different ages?

He would often comment about how photography was part of an emerging democratic art, how its commonness, cheapness, and ease was displacing the refined image of art implicit in portrait painting: "I think the painter has much to do to go ahead of the best photographs." … Painted portraits were for the privileged classes, and even the wealthy did not have their portraits painted regularly; the one or two they had done over a lifetime had to distill their character in an approximation that transcended time. But photographs were the property of all classes.

…The camera, like Whitman's poetry, democratized imagery, suggesting that anything was worth a photograph.

—Ed Folsom, Introduction to the Whitman Image Gallery from the Walt Whitman Archive, a link from the EDSITEment resource American Studies at the University of Virginia

Working in small groups, students should use the Photo Analysis Worksheet available on the EDSITEment-reviewed website Digital Classroom to study one of the following images from the EDSITEment resource American Memory (NOTE: The links provided will take you to a bibliography page with a thumbnail photo. Click on the photo for access to larger images.):

In all of these photos, the subject faces the camera directly; we do not, for example, see the seamstress working at her sewing. Some of the subjects seem as if they are about to speak.

Have each group imagine what the subjects might be saying, in the form of a monologue or a dialogue with the photographer. If desired, create a multimedia presentation for live performance or a computer slide show, using the images accompanied by readings of the students' work.

Whitman was fascinated by the new medium of photography, sat for many photographs throughout his life, even—according to Ed Folsom in his Introduction to the Whitman Image Gallery on the Walt Whitman Archive, a link from the EDSITEment resource American Studies at the University of Virginia—"after wandering through a daguerreotype gallery in 1846, struck by the 'great legion of human faces—human eyes gazing silently but fixedly upon you,' (he) mused: 'We love to dwell long upon them—to infer many things, from the text they preach—to pursue the current of thoughts running riot about them.'"

A photographic portrait made one wonder about the person portrayed. Photography suggested "that anything was worth a photograph." Whitman believed that virtually anything could serve as a subject in poetry. He regarded the working class, for example, an especially worthy subject (see the quote from Whitman's notebook below); images of real individuals, like those in the daguerreotype gallery, are central to many of Whitman's poems.

Share with students as much information as you deem appropriate to help them see the connection between Whitman's poetics and photography.

Before you read aloud Whitman's I Hear America Singing, available on the EDSITEment-reviewed website of The Academy of American Poets, ask students to imagine the poem were written to accompany some photographs. What would those photographs have been? After the reading, ask students to recall images from the poem that could have been photographs such as the daguerreotypes students viewed in Part 1, above.

Discuss with the class basic information about Whitman's notebooks as noted in the fourth bulleted section in Preparing to Teach This Lesson, above. Then share the following quote from Page 65 of Notebook LOC #80, available on the EDSITEment resource American Memory. (If desired, share the actual page image with the students either on the computer or through a handout of the downloaded image.)

I will not discuss any professors and capitalists—I will turn up the ends of my trousers around my boots, and my cuffs back from my wrists and go with drivers and boatmen and men that catch fish or work in fields. I know they are sublime.

Re-read, or have student volunteers read aloud, I Hear America Singing. How does Whitman fulfill his goal to "go with drivers and boatmen and men that catch fish"? In what way does the "democracy" of such a poem compare to the "democracy" of photography discussed in Part 1, above?

Were "drivers and boatmen and men that catch fish" something new as poetic subjects? Perhaps not--some of Whitman contemporaries were including working-class subjects, and earlier in the nineteenth century the English poet Wordsworth and his followers had explored the lives of ordinary English people. While not without precedent, then, Whitman's radicalism in form and subject went beyond the Romantic models. By way of example, share the poem Poetry by L.H. Sigourney (1791-1865), available on the EDSITEment resource The American Verse Project. The subject is poetry. Abstractions such as "Death" and "Morn" perform some of the action in the poem. The two human characters (a young girl and a pilgrim) are given no individual characteristics, serving instead as metaphors (for romantics, for seekers). It's also worthwhile to note that the poem is written in a strict form with eight-line stanzas and a repeated rhyme scheme. Whitman rarely used forms after he developed his poetic philosophy. Other common subjects in 19th-century poetry were characters from the Bible, literature, and mythology; heroes; and nobles. (Some examples you could share with the students, if desired, include Judith by Thomas Bailey Aldrich (1836-1907) and Death of the Prince Imperial by Abram Joseph Ryan (1836-1886), both available on the EDSITEment resource The American Verse Project.)

How does Hughes' approach reflect Whitman's notion of what should be the proper subject for poetry? How is it different?

In what ways are Hughes' and Whitman's poems similar? In what ways are they different? Have students address these questions by filling in the chart "Comparing Two American Poems: 'I Hear America Singing' and 'Let America Be America Again'" on page 1 of the PDF file (see Preparing to Teach This Lesson, above, for download instructions).

(NOTE: If you want to extend the comparison with Whitman to some contemporary poems, consult the first bulleted item in Extending the Lesson, below. If you want your students to write poems modeled after Whitman, consult the second bulleted item.)

Walt Whitman to Langston Hughes: Poems for a Democracy

Introduction

Guiding Question:

Learning Objectives

Preparing to Teach this Lesson

Suggested Activities

Extending the Lesson

Selected EDSITEment Websites