Liza Twilley
Professor Meehan
Transcendentalism
December 2, 2011
Project Proposal:
1.) Walt Whitman: Leaves of Grass
Edgar Allan Poe: *Still debating which works of his to use as examples
George Hutchinson: Whitman’s Presence: Body, Voice and Writing in Leaves of Grass
Vincent Bertolini: Hinting and Reminding: The Rhetoric of Peromative Embodiment in Leaves of Grass
Keith Wilhite: His Mind Was Full of Absences: Whitman at the Scene of Writing
Peter Simonson: A Rhetoric for Polytheistic Democracy: Walt Whitman’s Poem of Man in One”
2.) I plan to argue that like Walt Whitman, Edgar Allan Poe’s works should be considered as a constant revision. Although each of Poe’s work represent and illustrate a different story, he takes the role of the dominant male character and constantly revises him within each dramatic, melancholy story he writes. I will dive into Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and bring in examples of how he constantly revised poems within each edition in order to deliver an alternative point of view or way of thinking.
3.) “Whitman’s linguistic theory adopts an evolutionary momentum toward the future, but this momentum depends upon the recapitulation and revision of what has gone before it. In language, the past is always becoming present as the present “words” the future.” Interestingly enough, Keith Wilhite, author of His Mind Was Full of Absences: Whitman at the Scene of Writing, brings the attention of revision and how the meaning of words can constantly change. Wilhite brings several interesting points about revision in argument towards how Whitman writes.
4.) I believe that I will use A Rhetoric for Polytheistic Democracy: Walt Whitman’s “Poem of Many in One”, written by Peter Simonson as criticism for this project. He is able to go into an in-depth detail in this article about how Whitman constantly revises his work, Leaves of Grass. I believe that this will be one of my primary sources because I feel as though I can tie it into the concept of Edgar Allan Poe’s way of writing off his male narrators.
5.) I think that as I begin to write for this project, I will discover new idea’s and topics that will provoke new and suggestive arguments. I find it interesting that I have been able to like Whitman and Poe together and I believe as this project progresses, I will be able to find more similarities between their revisions of their works as well as some distinct differences.
