Whitman, Ginsberg, and the Long Line
Loading...
Files
Full Text E-thesis
Date
2023
Authors
Sabbadin, Elisa
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
University College Cork
Published Version
Abstract
This thesis explores Walt Whitman’s long lines, Allen Ginsberg’s long lines, and the line of the long line in American poetry. As a frame of reference for the long line, the thesis discusses open form. Whitman and Ginsberg did more than herald the first and the second free verse revolutions: they initiated and promulgated the tradition of open form – organicism, in Whitman’s early term. Their long lines were a conscious stylistic choice, shaped so as to encode domains which extended beyond form: politics, society, and, above all, spirituality. Or was it perhaps the other way around: that in exploding the constraints of poetic content, these poets accordingly shaped the long line? This thesis explores the long line in various senses: in its implications, origins, and, crucially, in the exchanges which occur, in Whitman’s and Ginsberg’s poetry, between form, content, and meaning. The long line emerges as a form in which surface boasts meaning, and through which the meaning which moulded it may be glimpsed; as a place of playfulness and contradiction, at least in the hands of Whitman and Ginsberg, perhaps the two most playful and contradictory American poets; and as a phenomenon both carefully crafted and, simultaneously, wild at heart.
Just as Whitman’s and Ginsberg’s personas and personalities were larger than life, the long line is larger than the page: it is a line that hungers, eats, digests, expels, unravels, fertilises, orgasms, dissolves, evades, and merges. As the democratic Romantic and the democratic Beat were ‘everyone’s poets,’ the long line is also appropriately an ‘everything line’: it adds, includes, transforms, eludes, overcomes boundaries, embodies organicity, and multiplies its layers. However, this thesis shows that, in spite of its break with conventional form and its ostensible formlessness, Whitman’s and Ginsberg’s long line is solidly built – take Ginsberg’s description of Howl as “really built like a brick shithouse” (Morgan 133). Far from being a formless representation of formless concepts, the long line is an informed formal choice. The long line is a largely unnoticed form, and one which has received scant scholarly attention. This thesis elevates the long line as the premise of an underground American poetics which employs it as a socially and spiritually charged medium, and complements the formal tradition of the long line with attention to an alternative critical tradition which, in particular in Ginsberg’s case, accompanies its emergence and development. Whereas close reading has been traditionally associated with apolitical ways of reading, and extra-literary contexts have been effaced by formalist traditions, this thesis explores how form informs, shapes, and embodies content, showing that poetic form is inherently political.
Description
Keywords
American poetry , Long line , Walt Whitman , Allen Ginsberg
Citation
Sabbadin, E. 2023. Whitman, Ginsberg, and the Long Line. PhD Thesis, University College Cork.