Abstract

This essay reevaluates Walt Whitman’s poetics of presence via three new books (by Lucy Alford, Mark Doty, and Peter Riley), arguing that the poet’s commitment to an undifferentiated ontology is as much a part of his radicalism as is his inclusive democratic politics. That undifferentiated ontology (“every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you”) permits Whitman to overcome spatiotemporal boundaries and to address our contemporaneity. His work thus resists historicist models of scholarship that locate him securely in the nineteenth century. Whitman’s conviction that his poetry involves an encounter not with a textual object but with an embodied presence, a living voice, has consequences for our understanding of poetry more broadly. The essay contends that academic criticism misrepresents poems by treating them primarily as textual objects for scholarly or classroom analysis. Claiming that the devocalization of poetry in academic literary studies helps to explain its disciplinary neglect, the essay connects Whitman’s theory of voice and the preponderance of vocatives in his poetry with a nonexceptionalist account of poetic vocation. Whitman encourages contemporary scholars to grasp how attending to a poem entails hearing its vocalization, listening to it rather than reading it only.

中文翻译：

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在场，职业和注意力的诗学：惠特曼的例子

摘要

本文通过三本新书​​（由露西·奥尔福德，马克·多蒂和彼得·赖利撰写）重新评估了沃尔特·惠特曼的存在诗学，认为诗人对一成不变的本体论的承诺与包容性民主政治一样，都是他的激进主义的一部分。那种无差别的本体论（“属于我的每个原子都属于你”）使惠特曼能够克服时空界限并解决我们的当代性。因此，他的作品抵制了历史主义的学术模式，这种模式使他在19世纪牢牢地处在了位置。惠特曼的信念是，他的诗歌涉及的不是与文本对象的相遇，而是与具体的存在，活泼的声音的相遇，这对我们更广泛地理解诗歌产生了影响。文章认为，学术批评通过将诗歌主要作为用于学术或课堂分析的文本对象来对待诗歌，从而曲解了诗歌。文章声称学术文学研究中诗歌的专门化有助于解释其学科的忽视，因此本文将惠特曼的声音理论和诗歌中的发声优势与非例外主义的诗意职业联系起来。惠特曼（Whitman）鼓励当代学者掌握一首诗的发声方式，即聆听它的发声，聆听它，而不仅仅是阅读它。