Re-Writing the Eugenic Whitman in Michael Cunningham’s Specimen Days 2005
Abstract
Walt Whitman’s poetry and essays weave complex rhetorical links between American nature, the human body, and democracy.2 At the conclusion of his autobiographical collection of prose, Specimen Days 1882 , Whitman lucidly cemented these links in an essay titled “Nature and Democracy—Morality.” The poet, “before departure,” emphasized his belief that democracy, “as manifested in the grand races of mechanics and work people,” needs to be recharged, “fibred, vitalized, by regular contact with out-door light and air and growths, farm-scenes, animals, fields, trees, birds [….]” 200 .
References
- Aspiz, Harold. Walt Whitman and the Body Beautiful. Urbana: U. of Illinois P.,1980. Print.
- Clarke, Adele. Disciplining Reproduction: Modernity, American Life Sciences, and The Problems of Sex. Berkeley: U of California P, 1998. Print.
- Cowley, Malcolm. “Introduction.” Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. 1855. New York: Penguin Books, 1959. vii-xxxvii. Print.
- Cunningham, Michael. Laws for Creations. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006. Print.
- ------. Specimen Days: A Novel. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux: New York, 2005. Print.
- Degler, Carl. In Search of Human Nature: The Decline and Revival of Darwinism in American Social Thought. New York: Oxford UP, 1991. Print.
- Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “The Poet.” (1844). Bartleby.com Web. 23 March. 2014.
- Erkkila, Betsy. Whitman the Political Poet. New York: Oxford UP, 1989. Print.
- Ginsberg, Allen. “A Super Market in California.” Howl and Other Poems. San Francisco: City Lights, 2002. 29-30. Print.
- Gutman, Huck. “I Sing the Body Electric.” (1855). Walt Whitman: An Encyclopedia. Eds. J. R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings. New York: Garland Publishing, 1998. The Walt Whitman Archive. Web. 17 Dec. 2006.