Walt Whitman to Langston Hughes: Poems for a Democracy

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.CCRA.R.1. Read closely to determine what the text says explicitly and to make logical inferences from it; cite specific textual evidence when writing or speaking to support conclusions drawn from the text.

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.CCRA.R.2. Determine central ideas or themes of a text and analyze their development; summarize the key supporting details and ideas.

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.CCRA.R.3. Analyze how and why individuals, events, or ideas develop and interact over the course of a text.

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.CCRA.R.4. Interpret words and phrases as they are used in a text, including determining technical, connotative, and figurative meanings, and analyze how specific word choices shape meaning or tone.

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.CCRA.R.5. Analyze the structure of texts, including how specific sentences, paragraphs, and larger portions of the text (e.g., a section, chapter, scene, or stanza) relate to each other and the whole.

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.CCRA.R.6. Assess how point of view or purpose shapes the content and style of a text.

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.CCRA.R.7. Integrate and evaluate content presented in diverse media and formats, including visually and quantitatively, as well as in words.

• Review the lesson plan. Locate and bookmark suggested materials and other useful websites. Download and print out documents you will use and duplicate copies as necessary for student viewing.
• Download the worksheet, Comparing Two American Poems, available here as a PDF. Print out and make an appropriate number of copies of any handouts you plan to use in class.
• For background information on the life and poetry of Walt Whitman, consult the following EDSITEment resources:
  • The Academy of American Poets offers Walt Whitman, a concise biography with links to selected poems.
  • Bartelby.com, features an extended treatment of Whitman by Emory Holloway from The Cambridge History of English and American Literature. Click in the lower right-hand corner of each page to access the next chapter. From its Walt Whitman page, Bartelby also provides links to much of Whitman's writing as well as quotations.
  • A hypertext version of Leaves of Grass (1891) is available via the Walt Whitman Archive.
• The EDSITEment-reviewed website American Memory provides information About Whitman's Notebooks, including the following excerpts:

  "In these typical writer's notebooks, Whitman jotted down thoughts in prose and expressions in poetry. The earliest examples include journalistic entries with ideas for articles he might write. His first trial lines for what would soon become part of the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass appear in an early notebook (LC #80) which bears an internal date of 1847; it was his habit, however, to use these notebooks over a number of years, filling in blank pages at will, and the remarkable trial flights of verse for "Song of Myself" in it are likely to date closer to 1854.
  
  "In the Civil War years, he was more apt to carry tiny notebooks in his shirt pocket in which he took notes about the needs and wants of wounded soldiers whom he visited and comforted in the hospitals in and near Washington, D.C. In these he noted what treats a soldier might like on the next visit--raspberry syrup, rice-pudding, notepaper and pencil--or notes and addresses of family to whom Whitman would then write in place of the gravely wounded or dead young man. Occasionally he would also describe scenes on the battlefield, probably from reports from others in the camps."

  American Memory also provides information about Daguerreotypes, including the following excerpts:

  "[Daguerreotypes] occasionally document American laborers in the mid-nineteenth century. The subjects of occupational daguerreotypes pose with the tools of their trade or goods that they have made. Most occupational daguerreotypes depict tradesmen, such as cobblers, carpenters, and blacksmiths …
  
  "Nineteenth-century paintings, prints, and illustrations of the American working class often presented idealized and heroicized images. In contrast, this daguerreotype of a locksmith with his scrawny arms, grave demeanor, and stained apron provides a different perspective on the nineteenth-century American tradesman."

American Memory provides information about Civil War photography as well in Taking Photographs at the Time of the Civil War.

• Further information on Langston Hughes, including commentary "On Let America Be America Again" is available in Modern American Poetry. More commentary on "Let America Be America Again" and a Biography of Langston Hughes is available from The Academy of American Poets. EDSITEment also offers a related lesson plan, The Poet's Voice: Langston Hughes and You, which you may wish to adapt for your classroom.
• For further reading, consult the Recommended Reading List provided below as a PDF.

Activity 1. Democratic Vistas

"What has filled, and fills today our intellect, our fancy, furnishing the standards therein, is yet foreign. The great poems, Shakespeare included, are poisonous to the idea of the pride and dignity of the common people, the life-blood of democracy. The models of our literature, as we get it from other lands, ultra-marine, have had their birth in courts, and basked and grown in a castle sunshine; all smells of princes' favors."

—Walt Whitman, from Democratic Vistas, available on the EDSITEment resource American Studies at the University of Virginia.

As an anticipatory exercise, discuss with your students the different values that we give to paintings versus photographs. Ask students how many of them have a painted portrait of themselves at home. Ask students how many of them have a photograph of themselves at home. Why do so many more people have photographs? How many people have photographs of themselves doing something (playing a sport for example)? Why is it so rare to see a portrait of someone doing something such as playing a sport? How many people have photographs of themselves at different ages? Why is it so rare to see a series of portraits of someone at different ages?

Share with the class the following commentary about Whitman and the democratizing art of photography from the Walt Whitman Archive. 

"He would often comment about how photography was part of an emerging democratic art, how its commonness, cheapness, and ease was displacing the refined image of art implicit in portrait painting: "I think the painter has much to do to go ahead of the best photographs." … Painted portraits were for the privileged classes, and even the wealthy did not have their portraits painted regularly; the one or two they had done over a lifetime had to distill their character in an approximation that transcended time. But photographs were the property of all classes.

… The camera, like Whitman's poetry, democratized imagery, suggesting that anything was worth a photograph."

—Ed Folsom, Introduction to the Whitman Image Gallery from the Walt Whitman Archive. 

Working in small groups, students should use the Photo Analysis Worksheet available from the National Archives to study one of the following images from the EDSITEment resource American Memory (NOTE: The links provided will take you to a bibliography page with a thumbnail photo. Click on the photo for access to larger images.):

• Blacksmith 1850-1860
• Carpenter 1840-1860
• Clock and Watch Making
• Seamstress 1853
• Shoemakers between 1840-1860
• Unidentified woman, probably a member of the Urias McGill family, three-quarter length portrait, facing front, holding daguerreotype case 1855

In all of these photos, the subject faces the camera directly; we do not, for example, see the seamstress working at her sewing. Some of the subjects seem as if they are about to speak.

Have each group imagine what the subjects might be saying, in the form of a monologue or a dialogue with the photographer. If desired, create a multimedia presentation for live performance or a computer slide show, using the images accompanied by readings of the students' work.

Activity 2. Drivers and Boatmen and Farmers... Oh My!

"Whitman anticipated the significance of photography for the development of American democracy; his poetry moved with the invention, and he learned valuable lessons from the photographers he knew."

—Ed Folsom, Introduction to the Whitman Image Gallery from the Walt Whitman Archive.

Whitman was fascinated by the new medium of photography, sat for many photographs throughout his life, even—according to Ed Folsom in his Introduction to the Whitman Image Gallery on the Walt Whitman Archive—"after wandering through a daguerreotype gallery in 1846, struck by the 'great legion of human faces—human eyes gazing silently but fixedly upon you,' (he) mused: 'We love to dwell long upon them—to infer many things, from the text they preach—to pursue the current of thoughts running riot about them.'"

A photographic portrait made one wonder about the person portrayed. Photography suggested "that anything was worth a photograph." Whitman believed that virtually anything could serve as a subject in poetry. He regarded the working class, for example, an especially worthy subject (see the quote from Whitman's notebook below); images of real individuals, like those in the daguerreotype gallery, are central to many of Whitman's poems.

Share with students as much information as you deem appropriate to help them see the connection between Whitman's poetics and photography.

Before you read aloud Whitman's I Hear America Singing, available on the EDSITEment-reviewed website of The Academy of American Poets, ask students to imagine the poem were written to accompany some photographs. What would those photographs have been? After the reading, ask students to recall images from the poem that could have been photographs such as the daguerreotypes students viewed in Activity 1.

Discuss with the class basic information about Whitman's notebooks as noted in the fourth bulleted section in Preparing to Teach This Lesson. Then share the following quote from Whitman's Notebooks, page 67: 

"I will not discuss any professors and capitalists—I will turn up the ends of my trousers around my boots, and my cuffs back from my wrists and go with drivers and boatmen and men that catch fish or work in fields. I know they are sublime."

Re-read, or have student volunteers read aloud, I Hear America Singing. How does Whitman fulfill his goal to "go with drivers and boatmen and men that catch fish"? In what way does the "democracy" of such a poem compare to the "democracy" of photography discussed in Activity 1?

Were "drivers and boatmen and men that catch fish" something new as poetic subjects? Perhaps not--some of Whitman contemporaries were including working-class subjects, and earlier in the nineteenth century the English poet Wordsworth and his followers had explored the lives of ordinary English people. While not without precedent, then, Whitman's radicalism in form and subject went beyond the Romantic models. By way of example, share the poem Poetry by L.H. Sigourney (1791-1865), available on the EDSITEment resource The American Verse Project. The subject is poetry. Abstractions such as "Death" and "Morn" perform some of the action in the poem. The two human characters (a young girl and a pilgrim) are given no individual characteristics, serving instead as metaphors (for romantics, for seekers). It's also worthwhile to note that the poem is written in a strict form with eight-line stanzas and a repeated rhyme scheme. Whitman rarely used forms after he developed his poetic philosophy. Other common subjects in 19th-century poetry were characters from the Bible, literature, and mythology; heroes; and nobles. (Some examples you could share with the students, if desired, include Judith by Thomas Bailey Aldrich (1836-1907) and Death of the Prince Imperial by Abram Joseph Ryan (1836-1886), both available on the EDSITEment resource The American Verse Project.)

Activity 3. From Whitman to Hughes

Now, share this quote from the Biography of Langston Hughes, available on the EDSITEment resource The Academy of American Poets:

"Hughes refused to differentiate between his personal experience and the common experience of black America. He wanted to tell the stories of his people in ways that reflected their actual culture, including both their suffering and their love of music, laughter, and language itself."

How does Hughes' approach reflect Whitman's notion of what should be the proper subject for poetry? How is it different?

Share with the class Hughes' poem Let America Be America Again from the EDSITEment-reviewed website of The Academy of American Poets. Is the poem closer to a discussion of "professors" or of "boatmen?"

In what ways are Hughes' and Whitman's poems similar? In what ways are they different? Have students address these questions by filling in the chart "Comparing Two American Poems: 'I Hear America Singing' and 'Let America Be America Again'" on page 1 of the PDF.

(NOTE: If you want to extend the comparison with Whitman to some contemporary poems, consult the first bulleted item in Extending the Lesson, below. If you want your students to write poems modeled after Whitman, consult the second bulleted item.)

• Whitman's example has had a profound influence on subsequent generations of American poets. If desired, share with the class the following poems from the EDSITEment-reviewed website of The Academy of American Poets or other contemporary portrait poems of people at work:
  • miss rosie by Lucille Clifton (Concise biographical information on Lucille Clifton and links to poems, including two read by the author, are available on the EDSITEment resource The Academy of American Poets; a more comprehensive treatment of Lucille Clifton and her work is available on the EDSITEment-reviewed website Modern American Poetry.)
  • The Women Who Clean Fish by Erica Funkhouser
  • Shirt by Robert Pinsky, United States Poet Laureate from 1997-2000, the first to serve three consecutive terms in the office.
• Students can write their own "democratic" poems about a particular group of people from their own experience, using their own form or one borrowed from Whitman (for example, "I hear the athletes practicing / the relay anchor with his wind sprints / the soccer midfielder …) or even using the famous opening words ("I have seen the best minds of my generation … who") from Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" ("I have seen the best NASCAR drivers of my generation killed in public accidents / who-Edward Glenn "Fireball" Roberts, the greatest driver never to win a NASCAR Winston Cup title-had accumulated 32 wins before an untimely death from injuries at Charlotte Motor Speedway / who-Dale Earnhardt …), an assignment originally conceived by Kenneth Koch.
• A good culminating activity would be a poetry reading combining student work with published poems, such as I Hear America Singing, that inspired or connect strongly with student poems. The poetry reading can take place immediately after this lesson-and feature poems from it-or later in the year and feature poems from various assignments. You may also consider publishing a class literary magazine.
• Students can search for and identify other images and words of interest from Whitman's notebooks using Leaves of Grass (1891) available via the Walt Whitman Archive.
• Students can view a reading from Whitman's Song of Myself at the Favorite Poems Project while perusing the full list of poems submitted to the project for which video readings presently exist. Consider Whitman's "test of a poem" from Notebook 80, page 110: 

"Test of a poem: How far it can elevate, enlarge, purify, deepen, and make happy the attribute of the body and soul of a man."

• Why do students think any one of these poems was chosen by someone as a personal favorite? In times of stress, people often turn to poetry for comfort. Why? Students can conduct their own favorite poem project.
• For another look at the poet's process, students can view Whitman's own correction of and comments about a published version of "O Captain, My Captain" through the exhibit Letter and corrected reprint of Walt Whitman's "O Captain, My Captain" with comments by author, 9 February 1888 on the EDSITEment resource American Memory. Consideration of Whitman's famous dirge could also lead to discussion of the Civil War, Lincoln, and his place in the hearts of the American people.
• Find out about the recovery and preservation process of Whitman's notebooks on the EDSITEment-reviewed website American Memory:
  • The Story of the Recovery of the Notebooks
  • Preserving the Notebooks
  • Conserving the Notebooks (Includes photos of the notebooks and of the preservation process.)
• Learn more about the process of Taking Photographs at the Time of the Civil War from the Selected Civil War Photographs Collection on the EDSITEment resource American Memory.
• Students can explore the special presentation Does the Camera Ever Lie?, part of the Selected Civil War Photographs Collection on the EDSITEment-reviewed website American Memory. It presents photographs with Alexander Gardner's 1865 narrative. Readers can scrutinize the photos to determine if Gardner was accurate, and read a professional analysis. Things are not always what they seem!

Selected EDSITEment Websites

• The Academy of American Poets
  • Lucille Clifton
  • Erica Funkhouser
  • Allen Ginsberg
  • Langston Hughes
  • Kenneth Koch
  • Robert Pinsky
  • David Wagoner
  • Walt Whitman
  • William Carlos Williams
  • Favorite Poems Project
• American Memory
  • Poet at Work: Recovered Notebooks from the Thomas Biggs Harned Walt Whitman Collection
  • Selected Civil War Photographs Collection
  • Does the Camera Ever Lie?
  • Taking Photographs at the Time of the Civil War The Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities
• The Walt Whitman Archive (Contains an array of material, including contemporary reviews of Whitman's work, photographs, and criticism.)
• The American Verse Project
  • Adolphus Busch: Ave Atque Vale by George Sylvester Viereck
  • Death of the Prince Imperial by Abram Joseph Ryan
  • Judith by Thomas Bailey Aldrich
  • On A Late Loss by John G. C. Brainard
  • Poetry by L.H. Sigourney
• Bartelby.com
• Modern American Poetry
  • Langston Hughes
  • Hughes' Life and Career
  • Let America Be America Again
  • William Carlos Williams
  • Williams' Life and Career