THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO “—LONG AS AGES STEAL!”: MILLENNIAL WHITENESS, (COUNTER) OCCASIONAL POETICS, AND ANTINOMIAN ALLEGORY, 1861-1876 A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE DIVISION OF THE HUMANITIES IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE BY JAMES BASSETT CHICAGO, ILLINOIS DECEMBER 2018 Copyright © 2018 James Bassett All rights reserved. Table of Contents List of Figures…..………………………………………………………………...iv Acknowledgments…………………………………………………………………v Abstract…………………………………………………………………………..vii Introduction: Whitman and Americanness: A Problem; or, Against 1855…..........1 Chapter 1: “But better are they in a hero grave / Than the serfs of time and breath”: Versified Journalism of the Abolition War………………..……………47 Chapter 2: “Must I Change My Triumphant Songs?”: Whitman, Melville, and the Abolition of War…………………………………………………………………98 Chapter 3: Clarel, Counter-monumentalism, and the Shadow of Allegory……157 Coda: “Ah, tread not, sweet, my father’s way”: Susan Howe, Emily Dickinson, and Antinomian Renunciation……………………………………………….…249 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………287 iii List of Figures Figure 1, “Indian Tent in the Government Building at the Centennial Exhibition” in Centennial Exhibition 1876 Philadelphia Scrapbook, Centennial Exhibition Digital Collection, Free Library of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania………………..173 Figure 2, from Susan Howe, Melville’s Marginalia……………………………267 Figure 3, from Susan Howe, Melville’s Marginalia……………………………273 iv Acknowledgments I would like to begin by expressing my deepest gratitude to my dissertation committee: Jennifer Scappettone (Chair), Eric Slauter, and Christopher Taylor. Jen’s generous mentorship and abiding encouragement has proven invaluable throughout the years since this project first began. The perspicacity of her commentary and her startling attunement to the possibilities residing within the elemental granules and airy wisps of poetic measure is strewn throughout these pages. I am likewise indebted to Eric, in whose classes the first inchoate shadows of this dissertation began to assume shape. His suggestions for primary and secondary readings invariably guided my project in directions I could not have anticipated. I would like to thank Chris for his readiness to come aboard this venture in its final stages. Having Chris as an interlocutor enabled me to more precisely reconstruct and resite where I had been and where I might yet go. I would also like to thank my friends and colleagues at Chicago, especially Josh Adams, Stephanie Anderson, Joel Calahan, Darrel Chia, Michael Hansen, Kelly Rolfe, Hank Scotch, Suzanne v Taylor, and Chalcey Wilding. I am a better person and a better reader for their friendship and insight. I would like to thank my mentors and teachers at the University of Alabama, especially Pat Hermann, Alice Parker, Richard Rand, Fred Whiting, and Robert Young. Thank you for helping me find my way. I also extend my sincerest gratitude to my parents, Joe and Tina Bassett, who have offered love and support on every occasion. I also thank my sister, Mindy. No one knows me better than you. I look forward to your return home. And finally, April. Thank you for living with me living with Clarel. Thank you for teaching me how to live through color. vi Dedication Relate (a real event) to me (a real event) unreal events. Would you address what need does your address relate? Would you invite that address to enter into the matter of record as a real event? Tell me what has happened to—what is happening to— what is to become of this relation. From your address you would have that I relate real events? Must I relate to you that that is how you and I, how we, have been this time and again begun? I would, that is I wish, to you relate real events. But for some time, you have been gone, and I, a distant relation, have become a relation of distance. When will cease this address that I, a real event, relate real events? Would you have me for you to relate real events, to pass them along, to tell them just as you have related them to me? Or would you have me pass along them? Am I to come and go about them, these real events, as I wish? Would that be a dream? When is it that this dream is to be? Is this dream to be related to real events? Or, would you have that my relation remains between real events? What remains of me? Are you to be the remainder of me, or I you? Are we to remain between, between the betweens? That which I am could not but for you having ever taken me in, That which I should will not but for your having ever resided in me. How was it again that you and I are related? vii Abstract This dissertation critically interrogates intersections of millennialist nationalism, whiteness, and American poetry between the Civil War’s commencement in 1861 and Reconstruction’s collapse following the U.S. presidential election in 1876. Invoking Emily Dickinson’s spectral trope of the “Ourself behind ourself”, I present a revisionist account of the reception history of Leaves of Grass wherein I argue the twentieth-century monumentalization of Whitman’s free verse as a radical prosodic break has simultaneously disseminated an account of American democracy in which whiteness has been disavowed and rendered immaterial. Lensing recent scholarly rehabilitations of nineteenth- century American poetry through anti-imperialist, decolonizing accounts of whiteness developed within a theologically inflected lineage of critical race studies, I re-cite and re-site formal, disciplinary, and secularist metrics that hypostatically organize the century along an antebellum/postbellum divide. Alongside ongoing scholarly reconstructions of “our” nineteenth century, I argue historical poetics begins by asking not, with positivist élan, what we now know of the nineteenth century; rather, what might the nineteenth-century know now of us? What ethical, hermeneutic, and historiographic undercurrents surface when “white” poets of the era are labeled as white—that is, as inheritors of a racially reifying, theological aesthetic of expropriated land and commodified enslavement dissimulated by whiteness’ ascriptive function in demotic usage. viii In a era beleaguered by institutional legacies of nineteenth-century white supremacy—the promise and subsequent retrenchment of public education, the structural exploitation of the 13th Amendment’s exception clause in the form of mass incarceration, relentless incursions upon indigenous sovereignty, and public relitigation of birthright citizenship prompted by anti-immigrant demagoguery— the illimitable jurisdictional dispensation of White Election, and typological exegetes of scripture that christened waves upon waves of violence in the nineteenth century with the rhetoric of providence and covenant, poetry seems an improbable (if not anachronistic) site for refiguring, redressing, and reconstructing the mal-distribution of the sensible, which calls for an aesthetics ethically grounded in and beginning from an equitably distributed collectivity rather than the a priori enshrinement of propertied individuation. Yet, no period in U.S. history testifies more emphatically to the centrality of verse, much of it ‘minor’ or ‘occasional,’ for negotiating whiteness in the nineteenth century than the Civil War. The extent to which compositions and readings/performances of verse sanctioned and sacralized the contours and coloration of civic belonging by (re)mediating everyday social exchanges remains unprecedented. This dissertation, then, takes the measure(s) of Whitman, Dickinson, and Melville and emplots them alongside the entrained temporality of millennialist eschatology coursing through the versified journalism of battle hymns, minstrel songs, and abolitionist anthems anthologized in the newspaper poets of Frank Moore’s Rebellion Record and Emily V. Mason’s Lost Cause collection Southern Poems of ix the War. Thus reintroduced to the popular, ambient airs from which their variant trajectories of canonization have sequestered them, new narratives of the continuities and ruptures between “their” era and “ours” unfold. By sublimating material legacies of racial and ethnic eradication, territorial expropriation, acculturation, assimilation, and coercive conversion, the historicity of whiteness’ own ethnic massifications—renewed and redeemed for posterity by Whitman studies as the autochthonous voice of American democracy—has abjured temporal flux for a timeless theodicy implicitly and explicitly predicated upon an expansive exteriority of dominion-in-perpetuity and an immutable interiority of redemptive martyrdom. Out of step with this massifying telos, my reading (with Susan Howe as interlocutor) of Dickinson’s antinomian hymns and Melville’s perennially untimely Clarel, a Counter-Centennial opus of 17,863 lines of rebarbative iambic tetrameter, recuperates previously inaudible voices of radical, ‘un-American’ dissensus from their ostensibly staid, antiquated prosodic forms. Whereas Dickinson’s most concentrated poetic dehiscence has historically been read apart from the war with which it curiously coincided, Melville’s astonishing and restless metrical experiments have yet to reverberate beyond the curiously resilient refrains of lament by his few readers that one hears often enough of Melville while hearing little of poetry. Both poets, I argue, unearth melancholic emplotments of time engendered by allegorical readings of afterness as generative, recursive restagings of inexpiable obligation toward emergent formations