Gu Cheng and Walt Whitman

Whitman East & West the iowa whitman series Ed Folsom, series editor Whitman East & West New Contexts for Reading Walt Whitman edited by ed folsom university of iowa press iowa city University of Iowa Press, Iowa City 52242 Copyright © 2002 by the University of Iowa Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America http://www.uiowa.edu/uiowapress No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher. All reasonable steps have been taken to contact copyright holders of material used in this book. The publisher would be pleased to make suitable arrangements with any whom it has not been possible to reach. The publication of this book was generously supported by the University of Iowa Foundation. Printed on acid-free paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Whitman East and West: new contexts for reading Walt Whitman /edited by Ed Folsom. p. cm.—(The Iowa Whitman series) Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 0-87745-821-9 (cloth) 1. Whitman, Walt, 1819–1892— Criticism and interpretation. 2. Whitman, Walt, 1819–1892— Appreciation—Asia. 3. Whitman, Walt, 1819–1892— Knowledge—Asia. 4. Books and reading—Asia. 5. Asia—In literature. I. Folsom, Ed, 1947–. II. Series. ps3238 .w46 2002 811Ј.3—dc21 2002021133 02 03 04 05 06 c 54321 for robert strassburg, who has put Whitman’s words to work in his music, his teaching, and his life. His performance of his Whitman compositions in Bejing literally set the tone for the “Whitman 2000” conference. Contents Preface ix Introduction: xiii Whitman East and West ed folsom Abbreviations xxv “Poets to Come . Leaving It to You to Prove and Define It”: 1 Lucy Chen, Whitman, T. S. Eliot, and Poets Unknown james e. miller jr. The Voluptuous Earth and the Fall of the Redwood Tree: 14 Whitman’s Personifications of Nature m. jimmie killingsworth “O Divine Average!”: Whitman’s Poetry and the Production of Normality in 26 Nineteenth-Century American Culture walter grünzweig Walt Whitman at the Movies: 36 Cultural Memory and the Politics of Desire kenneth m. price “Where’s Walt?”: 71 Illustrated Editions of Whitman for Younger Readers joel myerson A Dream Still Invincible?: 97 The Matthiessen Tradition robert k. martin Whitman’s En Masse Aesthetics 105 sherry ceniza Public Love: Whitman and Political Theory 115 betsy erkkila Representatives and Revolutionists: The New Urban Politics Revisited 145 m. wynn thomas Whitman on Asian Immigration and Nation-Formation 159 guiyou huang Whitman’s Soul in China: 172 Guo Moruo’s Poetry in the New Culture Movement liu rongqiang Pantheistic Ideas in Guo Moruo’s The Goddesses and 187 Whitman’s Leaves of Grass ou hong Modernity and Whitman’s Reception in Chinese Literature 197 wang ning Gu Cheng and Walt Whitman: 208 In Search of New Poetics liu shusen Grass and Liquid Trees: 221 The Cosmic Vision of Walt Whitman roger asselineau Contributors 229 Index 233 Preface Whitman East and West is the result of a remarkable collaboration between Peking University and the University of Iowa and among scholars from Asia, Europe, and North America — an international collaboration that led first to a major conference on Walt Whitman held in Beijing in Octo- ber of 2000 and then to the publication of this book of essays that grew out of the conference. The working premise of the project was that scholars from different parts of the world working on the same author had a lot to teach each other, and this proved to be even more true than we had ini- tially imagined. While the book grows out of a Whitman conference in China that brought together scholars from the East and the West, not all of the essays focus on Whitman’s Chinese connections. When Whitman and China do get discussed in these essays, the topic is not so much what Whitman thought of China (though that topic does get addressed in a couple of the contributions) but more what China thinks of Whitman and, beyond that, how China has over the years thought with Whitman, engaging him on political, poetic, and philosophical levels and melding his work with Chinese traditions. Encountering a Walt Whitman absorbed into Chinese poetic traditions will be surprising and revealing for most Western readers. The essays in this volume that do not focus on Whitman and China deal with him in equally striking new contexts. The fact that the participants were presenting papers to scholars who usually are half a world away led every- one to imagine Whitman in unfamiliar contexts, and so this collection of essays reconfigures Whitman’s work in multiple new ways. Whitman himself did not have a lot to say about China, but in 1891, a little over a year before he died, in a conversation with the Philadelphia playwright Francis Howard Williams, he did speak of China. In this un- published interview now housed in the Library of Congress, Whitman con- trasted China with the United States in a potentially illuminating fashion. Here are Whitman’s words as transcribed by Williams: The Chinese don’t progress. They can originate but can’t apply. We Americans apply too fast. We’re too damnably smart and if we don’t look out it’ll be the ruin of us. We cultivate intellect unduly. All things in moderation. My motto is: Be Bold! Be bold! But don’t be too damned bold! We are refining the intellect so fast that we are emasculating our raw material. What’s the use of a highly finished work of art if it’s got no guts? Culture is well enough, but we mustn’t forget the guts. If we don’t look out we’ll become the damnedest, sneakingest, hoggishest, selfishest people under the sun. From one perspective, Whitman’s comments sound like cultural stereo- typing in his contrasting of the two cultures, but it is important to notice that his analysis characteristically assigns negative qualities to both the Chinese and American cultures. Unlike some of Whitman’s comments on race and culture where he subscribes to then-popular notions of racial and cultural hierarchies, here Whitman bemoans the loss of a wholeness of identity that might emerge if China and America were to form a new hy- brid, a union of divergent beliefs and discrete talents. It’s vital to be able to originate and conceive, and it’s also vital to be able to apply and de- velop, but to focus only on “finish” is to end up repressing the liberatory originating impulse, and Whitman was afraid that’s what he saw happen- ing in late nineteenth-century America. Originating and applying can oc- cur only if cultures blend, learn from one another, recognize both what they have to offer and what they have to learn from others. Whitman East and West sets out to create a new mix of critical insights from the West and the East, to originate new ideas about Whitman and apply those ideas to a fresh understanding of the poet as we read his work again in a new century, a century of expanding international awareness. There were a number of excellent papers at the “Whitman 2000” conference that we were not able to include in this collection. Hongkyu A. Choe (Chung Ang University in Seoul, Republic of Korea) spoke on Whit- man studies in Korea and examined the Korean view of Whitman’s concept of God; Duan Jingwen (Sichuan International Studies University, China) offered a comparative study of Whitman and the Chinese poet Xin Qiji (1140 –1207); Tom Greer (Ouachita Baptist University, United States) examined the “priestly role” of the poet in “Song of Myself”; Huang Zongying (Peking University, China) discussed the “I” and “you” in “Song of Myself”; Ronald R. Janssen (Hofstra University, United States) looked at the legacy of Whitman in the era of globalization; Lin Fengmin (Peking University) compared Whitman and the Arabic poet Gibran Khalil Gibran x Preface (1883–1931); and Tim McGee and Ellie Gebarowski-Shafer (Worland High School and North West Community College, Wyoming) explored Whitman’s pedagogy and global education in the new millennium. There are many people and organizations to thank for their support in making this international collaboration possible. At Peking University, the Department of Scientific Research and the College of Foreign Languages made major financial contributions, and Hu Jialuan, dean of the College of Foreign Languages, was involved in the planning of the conference and offered invaluable advice. Liu Shusen of the Department of English served as associate director of the conference and handled all the arrangements in Beijing. At the University of Iowa, sponsors of the conference included the Arts & Humanities Initiative, the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, the Department of English, the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, and the Center for Asian and Pacific Studies. Special thanks to David Skorton, Iowa’s vice president for Research; Linda Maxson, dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences; and Jay Semel, director of the Obermann Cen- ter for Advanced Studies, for their support and advice. And thanks, too, to Kevin Wyne, my research assistant, for help in the initial editing and for- matting of the essays. Preface xi Introduction Whitman East and West ed folsom When I was in Beijing for the first time, in October 1997, my taxi went by a kind of graveyard for Mao statues. There, in a vast field, were stacks of dismembered statues of the former chairman, decapitated heads lying in a long row and concrete torsos piled up like logs.

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