Holistic Walt Whitman Response

I have definitely been formerly acquainted with Whitman, though I haven't really ever read his poetry in-depth before.  The only one we read for class that I was already familiar with was "The Dalliance of Eagles", which I had read several times in high school and remembered liking very much.  In the reading for this class, though, I discovered that it wasn't my favorite Whitman poem, as several of the others jumped out at me as well.  Whitman is certainly a...poetic fellow, for lack of a better way of putting it, and it certainly makes an impression in his writing.  I'll now touch on a few of my favorite parts from these selected works..."One's Self I Sing" is definitely the poem that perplexed me the most. Whitman's opening phrase "one's-self" really puzzled me, as the two terms seemed kind of contradicting, and that same effect was soon employed again in the phrase "simple separate person."  What is it to be "separate," and thus different/unique, and yet still be "simple?"  (I also had a similar headache a little further down the road with "Facing West" and Whitman's calling himself "a child, very old).  The end of One's Self also really struck me...first things first, I always love it when writers refer to their muse, so Whitman definitely got a chuckle out of me there, and then I also thought it comically interesting that he writes so politically correctly with the line "The Female equally with the Male I sing."  So there's no discrimination going on in Walt's mind...good to know, Whitman.  In the end, I think Whitman has me straightened out, because I definitely think I share the image with him of his "Modern Man" living "Cheerful, for freest action form'd under the laws divine."  Definitely evidence of solid morals and ideals, and always a good goal to aspire towards, however impractical it may be.  Moving on to "Shut Not Your Doors"...I immediately thought it was hilarious that Whitman's disposition shift from one of utmost humility in "One's Self" to a hugely inflated ego, as he commands libraries to open their doors and shelves to his writing, "for that which was lacking on ll your well-fill'd shelves, yet needed most, I bring."  You definitely can't argue with that confidence...and it's also ironic that he would refer to libraries as "proud," yet embody this cocky disposition.  I found my favorite line from Whitman's hand in "When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer," when he writes "Rising and gliding out I wonder'd off by myself, In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time, Look'd up in perfect silence at the stars."  This particular bit of Whitman's genius really resonated with me, because I very strongly identify with the importance of enjoying the little things in life, because despite how complex the world can be, especially when people are introduced, it really is the simplest things that makes all the difference in a life worth living.  "The Dalliance of the Eagles" is a poem I feel like I really don't need to give credit to; clearly it's a common favorite, considering how many times I've been assigned to read it while remaining ignorant of these other poems.  Still, I will say that I enjoyed revisiting it, and I loved the poem's articulate ending of "...their separate diverse flight, She hers, he his, pursuing" as much as ever.  "When Lilacs" was the only one not to make much of an impression on me.  I say that not because it is long...Milton's "Paradise Lost" is my favorite poem I've ever read...but simply because I found it so sombre and depressing.  Of course it had its moments, like any Whitman poem, but I for one am more partial to the open-ended, thoughtful optimism you find in "Astronomer," "One's Self," and "Dalliance."

Cask of Amontillado Response

Though I didn't enjoy it as much as Tell Tale Heart (which, thanks to its involvement in my childhood, I admittedly have a personal affection for), I definitely did find Poe's "Cask of Amontillado" to be an interesting short story.  Jumping straight to the ending to begin with (hooray dyslexia!), I was definitely confused by what ultimately had happened, and had to re-read the last few lines just to make sense of it.  At first, it seemed to me that Fortunato had somehow escaped his imprisonment and disappeared after he didn't respond to Montresor's "Indeed, for the Love of God" quip, and then evidenced nothing but a ring of the bells when Montresor looked in to check on him.  It of course instead turned out that Fortunato was silently protesting his own demise in an effort to not give Montresor the satisfaction of seeing him wail and plead anymore, but the way in which Poe ended this particular story of his just struck me immediately as not nearly as...concise as his other ones?  Deliberate?  Devoid of loose ends? I can't quite put my finger on it, but ultimately what I'm trying to say is that for all its darkness and bizarre makeup, "Cask of Amontillado" didn't quite seem Poean to me.  Having said that, the similarities between the killers in "Cask" and "The Tell Tale Heart" are innumerable as they are undeniable.  Both stories, obviously, are told from the perspective of the killer, and both killers seem (to me, at least) to be clearly insane in that they both have absolutely no reason whatsoever for wanting to kill their victims.  Even with that being the case, however, both narrators work themselves up into an angry frenzy over the smallest imperfection in each of their victims, and in the end they get so mad and self-rigtheous about the whole thing that there's nothing for it but to kill the son of a bitch and wipe him off the face of the earth.  SparkNotes: They're both crazy because they both think way too much and have insane (no pun intended) personal problems.  There is, however, one key aspect in which I see them as differing...Cask of Amontillado's narrator is operating from an almost family-values based mindset, as he cites his families motto that references their refusal to suffer insolence.  He paints it almost as his duty to kill Fortunato...he owes it to his elders, to his family, and to the world, because to him it goes without saying that it is righteous.  So in that regard, this story seems to embody the nature side of the nature vs. nurture debate.  Tell Tale Heart's narrator, however, seems to be slightly more aware of the wrongness of what he is undertaking in that he feels so compelled to justify himself to the reader, always saying "If you think I'm crazy now, you won't when you hear this."  Though he does his best to self-justify, this scenario seems to be a little more lacking of understood righteousness (in the mind of the killer, that is).  Instead, he is operating a little more from a self-indulged and motivated, rampaging perspective, although that certainly works its way into Montresor's motivations as well.  Still, I see this story as subscribing more to the nurture side of things...which of course fascinates me because Poe is the author of both stories.  Thus, I wonder...Nature or Nurture, Poe?

The Tell Tale Heart Response

I think that by far the most interesting thing from Poe's "The Tell Tale Heart" is the narrator/killer's process of self-justification as he rationalizes his deranged thought process that is inspired by his neighbor's ominous' eerie eye.  It shocked me how frequently the narrator would say things like "you think me mad...not so when you hear this or that," and how literally every time "this or that" immediately translated into an almost perfect, Merriam-Webster dictionary caliber definition of insanity.  For example, the narrator prefaces his description of how he mutilates the body after killing the old man in an effort to eliminate traces back to himself by concealing the body in the floorboards of the house with his usual "you'll never think I'm crazy after you hear this" bit.  Taking a step back to look at that...he is literally telling us that he is not crazy because he killed his neighbor and then so carefully and deliberately covered up the crime with meticulous effort and, as he thinks, sheer brilliance.  In the very beginning of the story, the narrator also opens with a disclaimer imploring us that he is not crazy for having killed his neighbor.  He assures us that he has every righteous reason to kill him, though he himself acknowledges that he actually had no reason, no personal problem with the man, other than his somewhat excessively creepy eye.  Thus, his own argument is fundamentally flawed, and I think we can say definitively that he is mentally unstable.  I also think it is clear that the guy thinks about EVERYTHING way too much...having to kill someone because their eye bothers you so much?  Seriously, you're going to have to do a lot of thinking to get to that level of "bothersome."  And similarly, it would require a lot of thinking to develop such outrageous theories of self-righteousness that he outlines for us.  This guy may or may not be too smart for his own good, but he definitely thinks too hard and has too much time on his hands.  Moving on to the end of the story...It does seem pretty clear to me that the heart wasn't actually beating (though this is never explicitly stated; quite the contrary, in fact), but rather all just in the killer's head.  We know that he thinks too much, and this definitely looks like a classic symptom of that.  Combine that with the fact that the officers in the room with the killer show no signs of hearing anything, and, of course, the natural impracticality of the heart of a deceased person continuing to beat, and the reality of the sound our killer thinks he is hearing starts to become pretty doubtful.  However, since it was all in his head, this does clearly evidence that the killer is experiencing at least some guilt, so that suggests that though he may be generally bad by nature there is still at least some good to him.  This, perhaps, represents Poe's view of humanity in general.

Inspired Response to Fredrick Douglass's "Narrative of the Life..."

First of all, I feel obliged to say as a disclaimer that I have heard of and discussed, sometimes pretty in-depth, both Fredrick Douglass and his famous slave-narrative Narrative of the Life of Fredrick Douglass prior to my exposure to it in this class.  However, I've never actually read the text...and now having done so, I definitely learned a lot more about both Fredrick Douglass himself and, of course, his perspective as a slave and what that would be like in a real-life context.  Some of what I had been previously ignorant and just learned on this go-round of the Narrative was pretty simple stuff...for example, I had no idea that Douglass's father was white, but rather always presumed he was a thoroughbred African-American.  And what's more, his mother was apparently one of the darkest black women around at the time...which, to me, makes it even more fascinating that Douglass's father would have broken the tremendous social barrier of the time to sleep with a black woman.  Douglass even goes so far as to acknowledge that literally every single person he had ever encountered would willingly acknowledge that his father was, no doubt, a white man...but anyway, on to actual textual analysis.  I was definitely immediately struck by Douglass's abrupt, straightforward tone...and it baffled me that he could manage to be so incredibly condemning of slavery (easy though as that may be to do) while still appearing to be so emotionless, though of course as a reader one has to assume that certain emotions went hand in hand with certain experiences he recounts.  He does, for example, actually seem to express some frustration about not being able to tell his age, though the whites always could; although he does still convey that frustration with hardly any emotive assertiveness.  Still, even without emotion, there is really no arguing with the blatant injustice communicated in phrases like "...it is the wish of most masters within my knowledge to keep their slaves ignorant."  Ultimately, I guess what I am trying to say is, it is one thing to study slavery in your American history classes, become familiar with what it is, and be bludgeoned repeatedly over the head with the reminder that it is a VERY (yes, the four-letter/swear word) bad thing.  That much becomes obvious pretty quickly.  It is, however, completely another thing to be directly exposed to a text containing the actual lived experiences and injustices of a slave in his life.  In such a context, the realization of how terrible and devoid of righteousness the concept of slavery is becomes much more potent than from, say, a white history professor's mouth, or a textbook written by white authors who also have no lived experience of what they write about.  Perhaps this is but a basic reminder, and much ado about not very much, but in my first reading of Narrative I found it quite striking and ultimately I think it's what I most take away from Douglass.