Reading Response Prompts
 

These prompts are meant to get you thinking about what you have read, and to help focus your thoughts for your reading responses. You can respond to any one of them, or, if you have another idea you would rather explore, you are free to write about that instead. Do not, however, attempt to answer multiple prompts for any assignment. If you choose to pursue an idea of your own or are not writing a response that day, you should still spend at least a few minutes thinking about each of the prompts in preparation for class. For more information, review the listserv assignment.
Walt Whitman, Poems from Enfans d’Adam and Calamus, both originally published in the 1860 Leaves of Grass, “Poem of the Body” from the 1856 Leaves of Grass

As you will immediately notice, most of the poems that make up Calamus are considerably shorter than those you have read until now. Indeed, some of them are remarkably short, just a few lines.  How do you react to these shorter lyrics? Is Whitman more effective at length or in small pieces?

Whitman gave the term clusters to groups of poem such as Enfans d’Adam and Calamus. The word, like the title Leaves of Grass itself, suggests vegetation; cluster originallly (as early as the 9th century) referred to grapes. What is the effect of grouping these poems in this way?

Apply any of the questions we considered last class to these poems.  What do they say about Whitman as a democratic poet, Whitman as an erotic poet (more transparently a homoerotic poet in these poems), Whitman as a physical poet?  To these categories you may add Whitman as a religious or mystical poet as well.

You have already read one of the poems Whitman included in Enfans d’Adam, “Poem of the Body,” which would eventually be titled “I Sign the Body Electric.” This version, however, is signficantly longer than the one you read for last class, and the additions are likely the reason that Emerson, whom Whitman had apparently sent either a manuscript or proof copy in advance of publication, urged Whitman to cut the entire section from the book due to its obscenity. Whitman thought about it, but decided to retain the section. Compare this version with the earlier one.

 
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