Whitman and Neruda as Grassroots Poets
“The familial bond between the two poets [Walt Whitman and Pablo Neruda] points not only to a much-needed reckoning of the affinity between the two hemispheres, but to a deeper need to establish a basis for an American identity: ‘roots,’ as Neruda referred to his fundamental link with Whitman” (Nolan 33).
Both Walt Whitman and Pablo Neruda have been referred to as poets of the people, although it is argued that Neruda with his city and country house, his extensive travels, and his political connections, was never really “one” of the mass. Nonetheless, his work and energies went into supporting the common working man, and not the elite. By the late 1940’s Neruda had openly defined himself as a communist, looking for the equal treatment of all citizens of Peru. Whitman, though not overtly political like Neruda, did emphasize the equality between all in his writing. The appellation, “poet of the people,” is used to indicate their sympathies towards a commonality in humans, if not the “common man”. As the term “commoner” carries various connotations and needs much explaining, I prefer to discuss the two authors as grassroots poets. “Poets of the people” and “grassroots poets” have many similarities, but by using the term grassroots I draw on grassroots theater studies which illuminate certain artistic purposes and themes. Thinking of Whitman and Neruda as grassroots poets can deepen our understanding of their personas and their work, and especially indicate a similarity of purpose between the two poets who employed different structural styles of writing.
First and foremost, the term “grassroots” hinges on a sense of community. It implies a political motivation from the bo...
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...nity theatre is to create a dialectic between the present state and future possibilities of particular communities, moderated by a knowledge of, and an identification with, those communities” (Kershaw, 61).
With this basic understanding of “grassroots” with in the context of community theater, let us proceed to a comparative study of grassroots sentiments in excerpts from Neruda’s The Heights of Macchu Picchu, and Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself. Go to analysis
Works Cited:
Kershaw, Baz. The Politics of Performance. Radical Theatre as Cultural Intervention. New York: Routledge, 1992.
Nolan, James. Poet-Chief. The Native American Poetics of Walt Whitman and Pablo Neruda. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1994.
Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass (1855). in Walt Whitman Poetry and Prose. New York: The Library of America, 1996.
In Thomas F. Madden’s The New Concise History of the Crusades, he is able to effectively give an accurate depiction of the Crusades in a story-like manner. The expansive and convoluted history of the Crusades has been marred by myths and misconceptions about the true nature of these “holy wars”. In his history, Madden seeks to correct these maladies that plague the Crusades by using concrete evidence to support his claims. Although Madden does an excellent job in condensing the history of the Crusades into 225 pages, there are some improvements that he could have made in his history in order to make it less opinionated and more critical. This paper will criticize the effectiveness of Madden’s arguments and presentation of themes. The doctrine of “holy war”, the place of military leadership and rivalry, and the response of Muslim states and military leaders are all important themes addressed in The New Concise History of the Crusades that will be analyzed to extract Madden’s true intentions, concerns, and assumptions.
American Bards: Walt Whitman and Other Unlikely Candidates for National Poet. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2010. Print.
...e Enlightenment regarded science as a great benefit to the world as being on a trajectory of continuous development and improvement by further building on the discoveries of the scientific revolution (8). The Enlightenment was a period in which these scientific discoveries that were previously band by the Catholic Church, e.g the revelations and all works ascribed to the motion of the earth on the index of the forbidden books. Although there was a similar belief that these scientific discoveries may be morally corruptive through the enlightenment by thinkers such as Rousseau, Advancements in the thinking of the general population were made through the enlightenment as knowledge was made more accessible to people in the forms of dictionaries and encyclopaedia’s, and through the separation of the biblical text as a scientific and historical account of the universe.
Moritz, Michael. Walt Whitman and Allen Ginsberg: Singing and Howling their American Selves. Diss. University College Dublin, 2002.
Walt Whitman is one of America’s most popular and most influential poets. The first edition of Whitman’s well-known Leaves of Grass first appeared in July of the poet’s thirty-sixth year. A subsequent edition of Leaves of Grass (of which there were many) incorporated a collection of Whitman’s poems that had been offered readers in 1865. The sequence added for the 1867 edition was Drum-Taps, which poetically recounts the author’s experiences of the American Civil War.
GMOs are created by inserting DNA from bacteria, viruses or other plants and animals into a "target species" to create desirable traits. Most food today is modified to be resilient against pesticides and/or herbicides like Roundup. The first and only genetically modified food approved by the FDA for human consumption was the Flavr Savr tomato, which was slipped on grocery store shelves in 1994. Scientists at Calgene Inc. altered...
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Humanity has a major flaw. It allows humans to be good, and live lives that seem perfect, and then all of a sudden it snatches the rug out from under their feet, causing a series of tumbles that throws humans into a pit. This pit is the pit of evil. It has all of humanity’s worst traits in it, and when people fall into it, they try to hoist themselves out by latching onto other people, even if they pull them down with them. Humans are good, until the bad creeps back in and poisons them. When that happens, humans cause all sorts of mayhem, but through it all, they somehow survive. The human race will always be bad, and that is the truth. It will stay like this indefinitely. It’s humanity’s greatest flaw.
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