Henry Wilmot (politician)

Transcription

>> Alright, let's get started please. I am going to be filing midterm grades later today. Sorry for the delay. I'll be contacting some of you personally about your grades. In some cases to say congratulations on fine work. In unfortunately more cases to ask what's going wrong. But one thing I do want to you to understand is that most of the work of the course in terms of evaluation is yet to be done. You a short paper coming up. You have a long paper coming up, and you have the final exam. Now, I think by my calculation roughly speaking, the exams in this course count a total of about 35%, right? 15% for the midterm and 20% for the final that's because at NYU final exams don't last that much longer than midterms as opposed to other places where there's a big, where the final is sometimes three times longer. So, in those places the final counts like 50% of your grade. Here it's about 20. But I'll make you this deal. If you improve your grade on the final exam, I will drop how much that midterm grade counted down to about 5%. So it'll count, the final will count a lot more. And if you absolutely blow away your performance, I mean if you do so much better on the final exam than you did on the midterms. So say you get an A on the final having gotten a D on the midterm, I will simply think that you had a bad day at the midterm exam and discount it entirely. Or even more, even better perhaps, I will think that you adopted a kind of Franklinian perspective, [ Laughter ] >> identified your errata and fixed them. So you have a significant incentive now to not to despair. This is not cowardive depravity we're talking about, at least not in the cases of most of you. Not to despair and start to mail it in just because your final, your midterm grade isn't what you and I had hoped it would be. No, this is a time to pull yourself up by the bootstraps and do better. We are looking to reward upward progression. We are looking to espouse perfectionism rather than the idea that we're all doomed and depraved. So I want you to take that seriously, alright? There are in certain cases, I will be asking you to come in to see me because there's certain levels of performance where I think that something, there's a crucial thing that's missing in the way that you're approaching your work. I don't actually care if you've been blowing off, if you tell me look sorry, I just had a play that I was in so I blow off your course. I will actually not worry about you as much, because you're making a choice. You're allowed to make a choice, right? You can choose to not do well in this course. That's fine. I'm more concerned with people who expected to being doing better and who haven't, who don't know why things aren't working out either on the papers or the exams. If you find that I have not contacted you but you still feel like you're in that boat. Like you got a B minus and you really thought you were going to get an A minus, then come and see either me or your TA and we can talk to you about. I think in many cases this is about fixing your strategies of reading and understanding what's going on in the text. Alright, any questions about that? Paper assignment will go out by email tonight. Remember it's not due Friday but a week from Friday. Very soon, and I think actually I'm just going to put the prompt for the final paper on there as well so you can start thinking about it. You should think about the final paper basically as an attempt to build on what you've been doing in the earlier two papers. Think of those as kind of building blocks as the final paper might be two or three put together pieces of analysis like the ones that you've been doing but assembled into a kind of larger argument. In this case, an argument that you will propose to us. So we're going to ask you for topic statements. We'll take a quick look at them and let you know if you're on the right track of the wrong track. And when you do those topic statements, we'll be asking you to not only give us a sort of hypothesis about what you think you'll argue but also give us a kind of catalogue, appropriate in talking about Whitman to be talking about catalogues, a catalogue of evidence that seems to you likely to be important to you. And in general, we would like you to find more evidence than you can possibly use. We'll ask you for a few things, but you should have, be in the position of needing to pick the best evidence to make the case that you want to make and simply feeling that you need to use every single thing that you thought of, okay? So, you can talk about those things in section this week. Alright, Whitman, let's look at some more Whitman. Let's turn to the beginning of Song of Myself actually. This is on 2210 of the anthology. And then we'll move on to talk about Emerson and think about what I suggested before, about the ways in which that we might want to temper our optimism about Transcendentalism now as we approach the unit of the course that's really devoted to slavery. Alright, so Song of Myself, which is given the title late, later in its career, begins this way. I celebrate myself and sing myself. And what I assume you assume for every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. I just want to stop and pause and think about those three lines a little bit more closely and think about the ways in which they may or may not encapsulate Whitman's project, in Song of Myself and in his writing as a whole. I celebrate myself and sing myself and what I assume you shall assume. For every atom belonging to me as good belongs. You can think about there's any number of ways to say this. Let's go around and have people different people from the class say it in different ways, and I want to know what's at stake in saying it in one or more of those particular ways. So, somebody tell me where you would place the stresses on those words if you were the one up here reading it aloud. And close the door while you think for a moment. Anyone want to volunteer because I do have the attendance sheets still up here and I can call on people. Yeah? >> [inaudible] >> Okay, I want, so say it out loud. >> So, I celebrate myself and sing myself >> Okay. >> I think that, I don't know, I guess drawing on >> I celebrate myself and sing myself, and what does that do. >> I feel like if Whitman is trying to draw on past poets and past poets always speaking about God. And he's kind of, he's borrowing this I guess the theme of self-divinity >> Okay. >> And he's trying, yeah. >> So self-divinity, thinking about someone in contrast to somebody like Edward Taylor for example, also formally experimentive, but would not say I celebrate myself and sing myself. He starts thing with, I am this humble crumb of dust. I am this miniscule speck that you should walk on. Right? This is quite different from that. >> And he's not as humble towards I guess, if he was trying to, if he was going to try to mention a higher being, he's not to humble in his opening line. >> Okay. >> He's kind of placing himself on a pedestal. >> Okay so he's not humble. Would we tie that to anybody else that we've read? Where's this coming from? Yeah? >> Thoreau. >> To who? >> Thoreau. >> Thoreau, how so? >> [inaudible] conceited I think that emphasizes self-reliance and having >> You mean Thoreau or Emerson? You could mean both. >> I mean both. >>Okay. Right, because I think Thoreau is right, because he's interested in himself and in his particular observations. It's Emerson that says, all mean egotism vanishes in that moment, right? Although he is trying to talk about a connection between himself, but it's interesting again to renote that phrase in Emerson. It's not that all egotism vanishes and I become like Taylor, this crumb of dust and the speck, this particle amongst the divine current. We keep a certain amount of egotism, a certain amount of egotism is necessary for self-reliance. It's the mean egotism that we want to get at. It's almost that there's a sense of a way of being self-reliant or if you want egotistical that nevertheless has a kind of outward flow to it. Maybe that's part of what Emerson, what Whitman is picking up from Emerson. Yeah? >> I feel like you could put the emphasis on the word myself, like that kind of a emphasize the whole self-reliant part, like it's almost like he's saying that he's doing it alone like. Kind of by myself whereas if he put it on the words celebrating [inaudible] it's more about praising the sacredness of the individual. >> Okay, so we can think about that dynamic as well. There could be, you could say I am so, you could say if you celebrate, if you stress yourself you are, he's celebrating himself, but there is a sense of being by myself, right, while you're celebrating. And it might be that if you don't want that you might choose another. I celebrate myself and sing myself. Not with other people, he doesn't play nicely with the other children. >> Like he's the only person he can count on to celebrate himself. >> I think that's very good, I think there's a tension in the poem between those different visions of what it means to celebrate yourself. There's a sense in which he is doing something that is quite different if we think about it from the kind of, some of the past histories of poetic forms. He's not afraid to put himself front and center, right, I mean if you think about the progression of forms that we've looked at. Puritan poetry is supposed to be about venerating God. Public poetry in the Revolutionary era is supposed to be about venerating your country or celebrating the lives of famous people. It's not supposed to be about the self. We start to move to lyric experience when we get to somebody like Bryant, right, but even then Bryant is describing, he's creating a somewhat idiosyncratic voice but really stressing a kind of communal theme. The voice comes quietly idiosyncratic. It's not upfront about itself, right, it's meant to be idiosyncratic in a way of making its kind of connection. It's meant to be a more personal kind of voice and you might say the impersonal marching rhythm that you might find in so much neo-classical poetry. And it's meant to make a connection to the reader on the subject of death. It's a meditation on death. This is a meditation on life in all of its fullness and messiness, right, and part of what he does is he celebrates himself. But I think there is a tension. Is he alone doing this. Emerson talks about meeting somebody with a tyrannous eye. Well maybe it's a kind of lonely place to be if you're going to have that tyrannous eye. What about the second line. What I assume you shall assume. Yeah? >> I'm having a little difficulty. When I first read it like my brain puts a comma after a [inaudible] even though there isn't one. So it comes off as a very demanding like what I assume you shall assume, but instead when I look at it that there is no comma there, what I assume you shall assume, so he's guessing what someone else is going to interpret? >> I think that's probable. I think it's possible. What I assume you shall assume. What I assume you shall assume. >> Like he's assuming that they will >> Say that three times fast. Okay. It's pos, I would say that's right. The lack of a comma does make it possible to think of, you shall assume as the object of the verb, what I assume you shall assume. >> It's hard to get a grasp because there isn't a rhythm because it is free verse. It's hard to see what [inaudible] >> How else might we think about that, yeah. >> Well I guess this is a kind of different point, but first when I heard the say, that it seems like it doesn't match because celebrating and singing aren't necessarily interpretative or analytical. And then like every [inaudible] is very material and it doesn't really have much to do with assumptions as, I don't know I think there are two ways that you can, maybe I'm wrong and need to look up the definitions that I didn't, but it seems that he could also mean rather than using the verb >> What, okay, let's think about assume. What might assume mean? Yeah? >> Assume as in to making an assumption or like making like an approximation. [inaudible] I think people mean now but could also assume a form. >> Okay that's good. So what we take for granted, what I assume, but what I take up. What I bear. I assume your burden. What I assume, you shall assume. My poetic project shall be yours. Yeah. >> I think you have to read that line directly with the one from the one from Self-reliance where Emerson says, to believe your own thought, to believe what is true for you and your private part is true for all men. That is genius. Or he also brings up the same kind of nature in chapter five, every universal truth [inaudible] to every other truth. >> That's good. I mean, I think one way to think about it is that it's a poetic statement precisely those insights from Emerson. That there's a kind of, there's something universal about our nature, right. Emerson says most people are afraid to speak out. They don't raise their hands in section, and then they find that someone else said exactly what they were going to say and maybe didn't even say it quite so well. Our own thoughts were turned to us, he says, with a certain kind of alienated majesty. There's a way in which Whitman is plugging right into that idea. Anybody get bothered by this, feel like it was a bit pushy? What I assume you shall assume. >> I don't read it that way. I also read it as assuming as him taking on but not necessarily as taking on a form. I feel like the first stanza is his mission overall. Like he talks about, the way the rest of the poem falls out with all of the visual stimulus and then he keeps picking on and appropriating. I think it's his mission of almost removing the shame from subjectivity. That's the universal element that we all have, it's an awareness of self as representation almost like Franklin. Like he's talking about every atom of me belongs to you because we all perceive. That's just what it seems to me. >> Why as good? >> As good? >> What does it mean, for every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. >> I think that's the universal principle that he's arguing. He's using, his poetic mission then is to use all of these images to necessarily represent these qualities as in everyone's experience is just as good. There's no lesser qualities, like, which is why he argues the essential unity of everything. >> Okay that's good. I think that's right. I think there's a way in which he's arguing that sometimes we're consubstantial. It can seem a little pushy or even imperialistic if you will to say what I assume you assume. It's like you don't have a choice reader, I'm making meaning and you're going to take it up. But then it's qualified, why does he say for every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. That's a statement about consubstantiality or maybe even contingency or chance. The atoms in me are quite literally could be in you. They are, we're all made of the same stuff. Did you want to add something? >> Yeah. Another kind of way that I was looking at it was kind of in acknowledgement of the relationship between the writer and the reader. As I go along, you're following me. What I assume, you're going to read it and assume as well. So there's all these kind of [inaudible] that he asks question that he asks throughout the poem. There's other lines that kind of point to this, >> Yeah I've talked to you about the ways in which I think we ought to think about texts as collaborations between writers and readers. And so there's a sense in which we'd suggest that the meaning of a text doesn't exist until somebody takes it up takes it up and reads it or speaks it and engages with the author and constructs that meaning. People that are, that find themselves a little perturbed thinks that there's a certain way in which if that's true Whitman is taking up a lot of the oxygen in the room. That he's taking up, he's not leaving a lot of room for you in there. That, some people would argue that there's a kind of perfunctoriness to the way in which he constructs a you. That really it's just a, one of these people who just talks at you without leaving much space to do your own constructing. I just want you to bear it. I'm not saying that's what I think you should believe or even what I believe, but there are people that read this and find it a little bit disturbing and that would be the basis of arguing that there's something that should disturb us about Whitman's poetry. Yeah. >> When I saw this, I kind of saw it as he's setting himself up almost in the same way as Thoreau and Emerson use nature as an instrument to explain the world. He's kind of just saying that he's kind of going to be the instrument to explain the world. >> Okay that's good. >> Making a representation, like using himself. >> So then there's a funny split, right. I suggested to you that maybe Emerson or Thoreau finely are using nature instrumentally right. It's an object for them. Something that gets them someplace. It's funny then to be Whitman, if you're using the body and yourself in that same way, you're sort of objectifying yourself. Or you're even, you're containing within you that kind of subject object split that Descartes writes about. So that there's a secret kind of way in which he writes that maintains his subjectivity but part of the way in which he constructs himself as a subject, is to construct himself as an object. But remember that actually shouldn't seem very strange. Again, pointed it out to you before. It's a strategy of personal narrative. What's Franklin do in order to write his autobiography? He has to transform himself into two things. One is Franklin author and what does Franklin author write about. Franklin author writes about this thing called Franklin character so that there's a sense in which Franklin has to objectify his own life in order to settle it down and turn it into a story and talk about himself even if he talks of himself in the third, first person there's a sense that he constructed that kind of third person version of himself. So that's one of the things I think that Whitman's poetry brings out. In that sense it really is a kind of personal narrative. Anybody else find themselves disturbed by assume or anything that goes with it? Yeah. >> Well, I think that it seems pushy because it's very much like a disclaimer. It's like this [inaudible] that you have to buy into in order to find the rest of the poem, like, because obviously Whitman is not the reader but he's making this comparison, and he's making this argument that you have to believe in order to like buy into the fact that Song of Myself is not some of what Whitman is. Some of everyone. >> Good I think that's right. I mean he asserts and establishes the premise. It is going to be, he's going to have us buy it's going to be about himself. But it's also going to be about everyone else, and there's certain ways in which he's trying to establish, well I just want to point out to you that there's a certain kind of materiality here that he's talking about. Emerson would maybe use in these first three lines the word that Whitman deserves for the fourth line which is the word soul. I mean, Emerson thinks that what connects all of us together and what connects us to the divine is the idea that we have this divine soul. Whitman wants to make that a little more problematic because he thinks that gives short shrift something that he thinks is very important or integral to his self, namely the body. So the first way, you might say the first way in which he asserts our commonality is not by going the soul route but rather the body route. By literally talking about atoms. We are all made of the same matter and stuff. You can say that's his first premise. He's going to get to the soul and then he's going to make the whole question of the soul problematic by suggesting that the soul is something with which he is in dialogue. We get that in the fourth line. I loaf and invite my soul. I lean and loaf at my ease observing a spear of summer grass. Which would suggest to us that the soul is somehow not part of the I or there's some part of the I that's not including the soul or, it's an odd locution, and you should think of it in relation to Emerson. This is one way in which fundamentally he's deviating from Emerson. Emerson thinks that who you are is your soul, everything else is contingent, right. Everything else, even your own body belongs to that not-me. There's a certain way in which Whitman is turning it around at least for the start and relegating the soul to the not-me. At least in terms of the subjectivity of the soul as it's first laid out here. Did you have a, did you want to say something? >> Yeah. I saw that as kind of acknowledging good to me what good is to you. So as you're saying the commonality, like is he saying that the good also belongs to you as well or is he just saying that, >> Well I think that once you start to pull these lines apart, they start to mean not exactly only what you thought they meant. Every atom belonging as good belongs to you. It just might as well belong to you or it's could be, but then if you start to think about it. Every atom belonging to me as good, belongs to you. That would seem a little artificial but is it excluded. The idea that, well he doesn't say might as well belong to you. He sticks that word good in there which creates certain kinds of syntactical resonances. That's part of what we have to look at. I was just talking in office hours today to somebody, an economics person in one of my other classes, completely baffled by the reading of poetry, so just of just talked to him by the way. I mean if you come to Whitman without thinking about the other stuff that we've been thinking about, it can look baffling. You might not understand why is it that this is poetry and not prose. What if you just ran it all together, wouldn't it look like a piece of prose. And maybe you could do that. Not all of it would work that way, but I think part of what we need to understand is that Whitman is trying to express something. That, as Emerson says, expresses the kind of, that encapsulates the entire country. The experience of the country. He's trying to get it all down on paper you might say. So that forces him to explode previous forms. All the other poets have not done a good job of capturing what is distinctive about the United States. Some of them complain that it's an unpoetical country. Some of them are just flabbergasted by what they see. Emerson says the same thing. We're looking for the poet. Where's the poet. Part of the problem, as he suggested in the American Scholar, is that we're too sycophantic when it comes Europe. We've listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe. But we don't have courts. We don't have King's courts heres. We have law courts. We have other kinds of things. We have other forms and Emerson wants to say that those are poetical. Banks and tarrifs and business and all this other stuff is part of the poetry of this country. Whitman understands that as well. And a part of what he's doing, you might say, is exploding forms, but once you start to understand that and realize that. I really want to stress something that almost was a throwaway last time and I think is really true. When we look at every other poet that we've looked at up until now, we're interested in what they do with metrical feet. We think about how long their lines are. Are they pentameter lines, tetrameter lines. Was it anapestic tetrameter or was it iambic pentameter as in Wheatley or what is it that Taylor is doing to these things and how come it doesn't scan so well. Ask yourself about scanning Whitman. What would it mean to scan a line of Whitman. What would it get you. If I asked you to do a close reading of Whitman, which of the, I mean I sort of said before do a kind of checklist. Look for stanzaic form, look for line scheme, look for meter, are those things going to be of use to you when you're reading Whitman. Maybe not. So what is going to be of use to you. Maybe some of the other things we were looking for. Larger rhetorical form. And also moments when you can just isolate the fact that certain words are placed in kind of ambiguous relationship to one another. So that there's a kind of ebb and flow of a line which almost even in a line it seems to shift its meaning depending on how you read it. I think that's one of the things that you must understand about Whitman. The poetry is designed, his metaphor is the leaf of grass, but the poetry itself is designed to mimic water. It ebbs and flows. It has big bursting places and times when it's quiet. And he does, there is a lot of imagery of water and rivers and other kinds of things going on in the poetry. So it has different styles and they're all encompassed. So part of what I think you need to do when you read his poetry to really get decided is to think about the larger project, think about how he got here from where other people were. I mean why is this not, why would you, if we put this on the exam you'll know it right? You're not going to mistake this one. Oh by the way, I should mention that in terms of knowing it there will be passages on the final, but being able to ID them is no longer the point. Because it's very distinctive, I mean, all of these writers are except for possibly where we could seek to confuse you between Emerson and Thoreau and promise you we won't do that. So, Whitman is very distinctive. In some sense in this part of the course, he's by himself as a poet. And in some sense we want to say he is both summing up a poetic tradition and also contradicting it. And that's a way that a lot of poetic traditions work. Poets often repudiate what's gone right before. Sometimes trying to create something new but sometimes openly looking back to earlier forms. You might want to think is Whitman only repudiating what's gone before or is there any way in which he's looking back to something. Can you think of any other poetic forms that you know about, not necessarily just from within the confines of our syllabus, that Whitman might be invoking in this poetry? Yeah. >> Free verse. >> Well, yes free verse is what he's doing alright. There's a sense in which free verse is part of what Whitman is helping to create. Poetry in the United States doesn't look the same after Whitman and in part because he become, he creates this thing called free verse. So that's of the moment, but within the free verse. I guess what I'm trying to point out to you is that it looks like free verse. And you could just say, well anything goes. In the same way that people who look at modern art think, well my three year old sister could've done that one. Oh what does it take to just draw a bunch of lines. What does that mean, that painting that's just purely white. But it means something different if you look at it just as an object than if you look at it as the last in a series of objects to which it refers and which it contextualizes. It's, I think that both of them are valid responses. I see a white painting on the wall. Looks like a white painting on a wall, but then if I see it has a title and refers back to something else, I get another response. And if I know things about the things to which it refers, I have perhaps a richer meaning than I am able to construct. I don't think the first meaning is wrong. It's just not as complex. Just like if you're reading Moby Dick and you don't know that the book called the Bible exists, your meaning is going to be a little bit rich as somebody who does know that a book like, called the Bible exists. And it's going to be a little less rich who actually knows what's in the Bible and can get all the dirty little jokes that Melville has implanted, because he doesn't believe that people are actually going to look stuff up. So, okay let's talk a little about other forms that are invoked. Yeah. >> Virgil's Aeneid is the first first line. >> Sure why not. >> Why not? >> Why not. Sure, absolutely. [ Laughter ] I sing of arms and a man. Interestingly, he's talking about himself, but why not sure. We could even do that. Yes, I would that isn't necessarily, that's probably not the first thing you thought of though right when you read it. That's the first thing you thought of? It could be. >> Yeah it was. >> Okay. Good, that's fine. I think that if it weren't the first thing that you thought of, it might be something that you might think of later as you start to realize what's going on in the poem. I mean, you could think of it first if you think, okay we know this is a poem. It's meant to encapsulate an entire culture. And gee isn't that exactly what the form of epic does. It's meant to encapsulate something about a culture. Now Virgil is really different right. I mean there's a sense in which Virgil is kind of narrative. It's full of inset stories but it's pushing a particular narrative together. It's about, the Aeneid is about, you find yourself in the middle of a story but the story really begins with the sack of Troy and moving forward to eventually found what's going to turn out to be Rome. So it's a kind of narrative but a national thing. Whitman is doing a national thing too. So I think one of the things we would say is, Whitman is trying, one of the things he's trying to do is, one of the way in which he's looking to older poetic forms is, he's leap frogging all of these forms and if he finds an American example it's not going to one that's going to be to his taste. If he even knew Barlow's Dunciad, it's exactly the kind of poetry that he would not be want to try, but he would want to write an epic, that's in some sense is a new world epic not a sycophantic neo-classical version of an epic. So yes, there's probably an echo of [inaudible] in these lines. But think about the cataloging that goes on inside the poem. All of those different catalogs of things, that he sees people, that he sees, it's a little less remarkable than Virgil, although Virgil does it as an echo of Homer. There's also this epic cataloguing that goes on in the classical epics by Homer and Virgil. I mean, that's part of the technique to show you who's out there in the battlefield. What they're wearing. Just a catalogue of stuff. And that's one of the ways in which epic seeks to get its entire culture into the poem. So I think one of the things we would immediately say is that what Whitman is doing is signaling a kind of democratic project, but it's a project that has certain reference points and epic would certainly be one of them. Both Homeric I would suggest and Virgilian. Anything else? Are there any other constraints that we might find that Whitman is trying to put on himself? Yeah. >> I don't know if it's a constraint, but I guess the conventions of classical music is something. I get the, like you said before, the motions of water and their arising and swells and use of punctuation established, like, pace in multiple ways. >> I think you're absolutely right. Music is one of the things Whitman is trying to do. To rethink his project. I mean, he was a big fan of the opera. And you would say there's something operatic about what Whitman is trying to do in terms of big gestures. There's almost like, it has a structure of an opera where we have moments that are big showy set pieces, the kind of opera that he would've been listening to in the middle of the 19th century. Just, you know, not quite going to be Wagnarian. It's going to be something else, more like operas that have kind of set pieces and then moments of recitative. I mean there's definitely a model that he's using. So you have the kind of different moments in this thing, where you have different cataloguing moments. Those are on the one hand maybe epic on the other may function as a kind of recitative. You have other very kind of lyrical and loud moments that are lyrical soft moments. You have moments of narrative, dynamic things that are going, all these are part of whatever metaphor you want to use. As part of the ebb and flow of it or as different kinds of set pieces within a larger poem that tries to do something beyond what literary normally does. Epic invocation is one of the, music is definitely another one. Thanks to the both of you. Anything else that we want to say about this? Yeah. >> I think it's interesting that I noticed that there was no stanzas or sections at first. It was almost like he put his constraints on himself after he had written the poem. [inaudible] like structure. >> I think that's very, it's hard to know exactly why he breaks it up into these set stanzas. If you were going to go and compare, I mean I showed you one little moment where the word Manhattan is interpolated into this version of it, but yeah. There's a sense that one of the things he does is he possibly reigns in his verse a little bit. He makes it look a little bit more conventional. He takes out some of the phrasing that is a little bit, I don't know marked by youthful exuberance but people think. I mean I already told you about the scholar that writes a gay life of Whitman and in order to find the poems that illustrate, he has to go to kind of not even, not this one, sort of the versions before this. So there's a certain way in which Whitman himself is editing his own canon. That's one of the things that's kind of remarkable about him as a poet. He takes his set of poems, enlarges it over his career, but keeps working on them. Little bit like George Lucas, yes. >> I guess is it kind of like a bloated soliloquy? >> Well yeah, sure. I think that's another good thing. We've talked a little about, remember Melville earlier in the course, we'll come back to it again. But Melville thought of him as having kind of Shakespearean ambitions and I think Whitman doesn't tend to talk about Shakespeare as often, but certainly there's something dramatic. I mean, Whitman was a fan of the theatre, and he used to go and when he was young he would go to the old Bowery theatre down there, the working glass theatre. He writes about it later on as if it, kind of romanticizing all those young muscly men on the stage and everybody kind of, there's this democratic exuberance of the audience. So he knows about theatre and there is something theatrical about this. There is a sense that this is a kind of soliloquy writ large. And it has some of that kind, so a series of soliloquys, so I think that's good. I think Whitman whether you think of it as epic or music, opera, or theatre, there is the performative aspect of it right. Epics that were meant to be performed. The written version of the Odyssey is one version that we've gotten. Virgil's is different because he's evoking the for written context. But likewise, theatre and music both of these I think there's this aspect of performance that's definitely part of what Whitman's project. Even more than what we would say in some of the other poetry. I mean, you do, don't you get the sense that you're reading Bryant's Thanatopsis. It's not really meant to be performed. It's a kind of quiet meditation that you probably read to yourself. And certainly Taylor's poetry are all personal private meditations that weren't meant to even be seen by anybody else. I think those are three very good things to bear in mind. Anything else that we might like to say about Whitman? One of the things, last things that I would suggest to you is that like both Emerson and Thoreau, Whitman is interested in a largeness that includes the possibility of self-contradiction. So I just wanted to point out one passage to you. This is line 1323 towards the end of the poem. Well we can even go back to the beginning of that whole section there. Section 321. The past and present wilt I have filled them, emptied them, and proceed to fill my next fold of the future. And again there's a kind of weird thing that's going on there. I mean, Emerson says we got to tyrannize the past, make use of it, but what does it mean to make the past wilt and to be filling up the fold of the future. Listen all up there, what have you to confide in me. Look in my eyes while I snuff the sidle of evening. Talk honestly. No one else hears you. And I stay only a minute longer. It's clearly he's constructing readers and listeners out there, with which whom he is in dialogue. Do I contradict myself. And this is the line I wanted you to see. Very well then. I contradict myself. I am large. I contain multitudes. Many things in me. But you could also read it as, I contain multitudes. I keep them pinned up, penned in. Again there's that one word, there's the kind of, the kind of productive ambiguity that you find in Whitman. There's something tyrannical about being the tyrannizing poetic eye and yet maybe what we need is the tyrannizing poetic eye. Yeah. >> When there's this coming at the end of this poem, the idea of him creating a naturalidge [assumed spelling] for America. It's sort of like, he's conflicting himself because he's talking about himself when referring to an entire country of people and the words multitudes there could convey the sense that it is America that conveys, that contains the multitudes, but it still is one. >> That's right. >> At the same time, people [inaudible] individually. So I think there's that contradiction. >> I think that's great. I mean there's, one of the things we say about Whitman is that, at least this is the way that I tend to read Whitman, is that unlike Emerson, he takes up the kind of cosmopolitan opportunity that's there in the country. I said that Whitman liked to walk around the Lower East Side. He didn't find himself distressed by all the immigrants and the people who were coming to this country. He works them into his poetry. Now there's a sense in which you could think about what the dynamics of this are. What did I say about the melting pot before, everybody goes in whatever they are, and they come out Presbyterian. Well everybody, all the voices go into here and they come out Whitman, which you might say is true of Emerson too, he's very eclectic in his rhetoric and it all comes out sounding like Emerson. But I think for me, there's a greater attention to difference and to bridging gaps and to the energies you might say of the city that kind of work their way into even the lines of the poetry that aren't about the city, that I think of as in some sense deeply cosmopolitan in nature. And again let me remind you, well let me let you hear this. >> Centre of equal daughters, equal sons. All, all alike endeared, grown, ungrown, young or old. Strong, ample, fair, enduring, capable, rich. Perennial with the Earth, with Freedom, Law and Love. >> That's from a wax cylinder recording and it's believed by most scholars to be the only recording of Whitman that actually exists. So that's Whitman's voice when he's an older man in 1888. But again there's that idea of being equal, equal daughters and equal sons, all, all alike, endeared, grown, ungrown, young or old. Strong, ample, fair, enduring, capable, rich, perennial with the Earth. There's a sense in what Whitman wants to be is a kind of a couple things I think. One is a kind of cosmopolitan presence that's able to engage difference and appreciate people that are different from one another and yet he's also I think a poet of union. And sometimes he wants to bring all these people together. For me, the difference between Emerson and Whitman is that, Emerson wants to, Emerson is not interested in the details of other peoples' lives, in the details in which people experiences are different. He's not even interested in the details of his own bodily experience at least not rhetorically. Whitman is. He's interested in all the things that go into life and he's trying to make them all part of experience that we can, we can appreciate. I mean, late in the poem he talks about all these secret thoughts and unvoiced things people are afraid to say, and he wants them to come out in the open. So for me, Whitman is a lot, adopt a kind of perspective that we might really think of as cosmopolitan. This really comes from David Hollinger, intellectual historian from Berkeley, who talks about cosmopolitanism in opposition to multi-culturalism. Multi-culturalism is this idea of very separate traditions. African-American, Asian American, women's writing, all these things separate. We say that they all count for something. They all have dignity. And we keep them separate. We don't want to make inroads from one discipline from another. We don't certainly want to tell somebody that we don't like their cultural practices. Cosmopolitans want to engage in conversation among other things. They appreciate difference. Difference is not a problem for them. For someone like Emerson who I would call a universalist, difference is a problem. He solves it through the question of the soul. For multi-culturalists, difference is also kind of a problem. We extensively appreciate difference but we want to keep the people who are different, different. We don't like mixing if we're multi-culturalists. We need to keep those African American syllabi pure. We need to keep that Asian American department running. Whitman might say, let culture do what cultures going to do. Which is going to be a lot of creating and groping and miscegenating, and I think Hollinger gets into some of that too. Cosmopolitanism urges each individual and collective unit to absorb as much varied experience as it can while retaining its capacity to advance its aim effectively. I think that's a very good description of what Whitman is trying to do. His aims are democratic and ultimately you might say, his aim is to promote the idea of union. Both literally in terms of the United States and metaphorically. Emerson is aware of the difference, the differences of people. He doesn't write about it so much in his own pieces, but in his journal he does. In his [inaudible] he writes in 1845, asylum of all nations. The energy of Irish, Germans, Swedes, Poles, and the Cossacks, and all the European tribes and the Africans, the Polynesians, we'll construct a new race, a new religion, a new state, a new literature, which will be as vigorous as the new Europe which came out of the old smelting pot of the dark ages, and that which earlier emerged from the Pelasgic and Etruscan barbarism. But this is hard for him. There's a kind of, there's a way in which at other moments, Emerson is bothered by what he thinks of as the kind of barbarism of some of these races which he's not sure they can overcome. You can look for moments in that in Whitman when Whitman seems to fall down on the job and is not as cosmopolitan, but I think overall Whitman is somebody who's pushing the envelope of what it is possible to think in the middle of the 19th century. And so, he really is a poet. I think it's not accidental that much of his experience comes from the streets of New York. A poet who is able to appreciate differences and take different people on their own terms, but I do want to suggest that Emerson is interested in this kind of commonality. He overstresses commonality whereas I think Whitman is, I think this idea of universal mind, whereas I think Whitman is much more interested in a sense of diversity than that. We are a set of minds and he's trying to bring them all together. Emerson's interested in creating something called universal history. And I would ask you to think finally about the end of this poem and think about how this statement about the generalizable nature of all private facts, what does that tell us about how to read Whitman if anything. Is Whitman at the end of Songs of Myself deviating from this project. He's interested in timelessness right, he's interested in trying to capture moments of local particular experience that are going to resonate. If you read Crossing Brooklyn Ferry, he articulates something that's clearly wrong, I mean we don't have the same experience that he has. We don't cross the East River on the ferry very much anymore. We have other ways of going, subways and bridges and other things. But Whitman is certain that there's something timeless about that experience. That he can connect to you because you're having essentially the same kind of experience even though it's going to differ in its local details. So look what he says here, the end of the poem. The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me. He complains of my gab and into my loitering. He can poke fun at himself at the end of this large project. I too am not a bit tamed. I too am untranslatable. I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world. And I think that's a wonderful figure for what this poem is. The cry of a hawk, the barbaric yawp. Think about barbaric there in relation to this quote of Emerson. We want to emerge from barbarism, that's the point for Emerson. Whitman wants to in some sense to delight in barbarism. I want to stress that in a way what Whitman is interested in is in the kind of barbaric nature of city experience and in what Tom Bender from the history department is called the historic cosmopolitanism of New York, part of urban experience. So you see, think about what happens at the end of the poem as Whitman decides that he's finally, in so far as he's embodied the nation or represented the nation, he's finally sort of gone into the very dirt and soil of a nation at the very end. I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love. And the grass for him is this great democratic figure. The leaf of grass, each one is special. Each one seems to be alike but put them all together, you get a, you step back and you see what a field looks like. But that doesn't stop him from appreciating a single leaf of grass either. I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love. If you want me again, look for me under your boot soles. And that's maybe a kind of, I don't know if it is, it's a kind of nod to Edward Taylor. Edward Taylor's talking about how you're a crumb of dust. Well, Whitman by the end recedes into this kind of crumb stuff. Dust is going to be under your boot soles in the Earth itself. You will hardly know who I am or what I mean but I shall be good health to you nonetheless. And filter and fiber your blood. Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged. Missing me one place, search another. I stop somewhere waiting for you. So there's a sense of time but it's not quite the same as this universal time. You should think for yourself about what it is. What's the difference between Emerson's universal history and this notion of history that Whitman is trying to evoke. Now, thinking about union in the moment that he's writing this at first, 1885 is five years after the fugitive slave law. So you cannot think about union without thinking about the problem of slavery in 1850, in New York and anywhere in the country at that moment. So that, you might say that if I suggested to you that one of the subtexts or one of the cultural contexts that we need to keep in mind for a full understanding of Whitman's poetry is a situation in the New York streets, the immigration and the aftermath of the Irish famine, the crowding on the Lowest East side, the question of what it is that immigrants are going to do to this country and I've said to you that Whitman embraces that change rather than resists it. Another crucial cultural context is the fugitive slave law and its aftermath. So the fugitive slave law is part of a larger pattern of acts, well you might say of Congressional debates, that finally brings the slavery question to a head. It had sorted started to become a problem in the national imagination with the onset of the Mexican American war. And the fugitive slave law becomes a part of this larger package of legislation that becomes known as the compromise of 1850 that was meant to basically keep the union together. That was the design. It was to keep the nation together from splitting off, to keep the south from seceding. And as I said, part of the problem that arose with the Mexican war which ended in 1848 by the treaty of Guadalupe, Hidalgo. And had a set of interesting consequences, as a result of, well let's think back before the Mexican war what we have is a proposal in Congress from David Wilmot who's a representative called the Wilmot Proviso which said that any territory that was to be gained from a conflict with Mexico, which was already looming, would be free, period, no slavery in them. And this was, it caused a lot of heated debate in the course of the beginning of the war, during the war, and finally after the war itself. It was never passed, but one of the things you can see is that as a result of the Mexican war, a ton of new territory becomes part of the United States which had previously been Mexico is now part of the United States. So all this stuff over here. This is Mexico here, all this stuff here is ceded to the United States from Mexico. So all of a sudden the people living here are part of the United States and many of them previously had thought of themselves as Mexicans. And of course they are promised equal rights as Americans blah blah blah. That doesn't really happen. Gadsden Purchase brings this. Texas has already been annexed by the United States in 1845. It's a whole bunch of new territory out here. And so the question is, is this stuff going to be slave or free, and it causes all these debates in the United States Congress. The President at the time of all of this is Zachary Taylor who is a hero of the Mexican war. And Taylor basically is someone who wants to have both of California and New Mexico admitted to the Union. That's one of the things he wants, but he wants it to be admitted as free states. So this causes a big problem. The aging Whig party leader Henry Clay offers a series of compromises. So the Whigs, the political landscape is a little bit different. There is a Democratic party, the Conservative party tends to be the Whigs, Republicans are just forming. And in the end, Republicans become the main anti-slavery party with Lincoln. At this moment, it's the Whigs are sort of the conservatives and they are the, Henry Clay is interested in a series of compromise resolutions that can be a kind of alternative to the Wilmot Proviso. So he proposes that California be admitted as a free state, but, he says, there should be no restriction on any of these other territories that are gained from Mexico. And he also proposes that a more stringent fugitive slave law be passed. Now there's been a book, on the books, there's been a fugitive slave law that's been in effect since 1793 but it's a national law that supposed to be enforced by the states. So it doesn't have teeth. The states are supposed to enforce it, but some of the states have regulations prohibiting some of the, especially in the North, prohibiting any of their law enforcement people from enforcing that law. So Clay calls for a new law, one that's going to have federal marshals be the ones that are enforcing it. And this creates a series of debates which are, for students of Congressional history, one of the prime moments for speechifying. John Calhoun, this old guy, he is the aging I don't know what he's kind of like a 19th century version of Strom Thurman. Does anyone remember Strom Thurman? But he's a southerner and he speaks against the compromise, and this is what he's worried about. He's worried about the fact that if these states are allowed, any states are allowed to come in as free, what will happen is that there will be a numerical majority of states that are free in the Senate and because the South's population is bounded by its territory and will not grow, there will also be a majority in the House of Representatives which is based on population. As a result, he believes that the inevitable tide is going to turn against the south. There will be a tyrannical northern majority and eventually, he thinks it's inevitable that, slavery will be abolished and therefore the South's way of life will be completely destroyed. So he says, if these measures pass, the South will in order to preserve itself, its civilization, will have to secede from the union. There can be no compromise without secession. Into this fray steps Daniel Webster who features, who's featured in Emerson's address on the fugitive slave law. Webster is a senator from Massachusetts which is a state that's opposed to slavery, and he gives a famous reply to Calhoun in which he says, there is no such thing as a peaceable secession. You secede, we go to war. Webster doesn't want that. Pretty much nobody wants that. So, Webster had opposed the Mexican war. He wasn't an imperialist. He had supported the Wilmot Proviso, but he feared the possibility of disunion even more than he disliked slavery. He really feared civil war. So he sides with Clay and pleads for the compromise of 1850 and for, what he calls, a charitable spirit towards the south. Because he does agree with certain southern complaints that they have about the way abolitionists have been portraying their society. He also supports Clay's demand for a stringent fugitive slave law, but there's a kind of pragmatic bent to his thinking. He thinks look, the Western territories are radically different in climate from the South. The South's climate is conducive to crops like tobacco and cotton that need kind of workers like slaves to pick them and produce those raw materials. Not going to be true in the West, he says, not going to be true in California either. It's basically a moot point. Those will never become slave cultures in the way that the south has. So why would we break up the union now over what is practically a theoretical point. In the midst of all this, Taylor dies. He doesn't stay in office very long. And he's succeeded by. He's succeeded by. He's succeeded by. >> [inaudible] >> Yeah. >> [inaudible] Fillmore. >> Never never good to be 13th, they always forget you. He's a buddy of Clay's and he sides with Clay and the compromise passes. So that is what Emerson is writing about. And in its final form, the compromise of 1850 contains four provisions that should concern us because they're related to slavery. It's a big ominous bill. We're familiar with those these days. We've always been. First one is, California is admitted as a free state. The rest of the Mexican cession is organized into two territories which are called New Mexico and Utah with no federal restrictions on slavery. They can do what they want later on. The slave trade, but not slavery, is prohibited in the nation's capital. And, there is a stringent fugitive slave law in addition to requiring that the northern states capture and return slaves to their owners in the south. The law even goes further and deprives blacks of jury trial or the right to testify in their own defense. It really sucks. And it gets people in the north absolutely outraged. What they start to realize is they can't sit by any longer. Now, Massachusetts is party to slavery. Of course this is something that's always been true. It's part of what Harriet Beecher Stowe will dramatize for us. That it's a national economy. The south was never exempted from benefiting from the slave trade in so far as it bought raw materials, it was even part of the same national system. But now what's come home to these people is that they are by law required to abet the slave catchers. Everyone in the north now becomes a slave catcher. This and there are other things. I mean yeah the slave trade goes on in District of Columbia and even California has slavery. Indians are enslaved in California. So it's full of problems. It doesn't actually solve anything, and you might argue that the compromise of 1850 makes civil war inevitable rather than preventing it, which just takes a little bit of time. It creates a kind of veneer of peace but one that isn't going to last. The fugitive slave law is tested right away in Massachusetts. A slave named Thomas Simms is there, and he's captured and then there's a restraining order and it goes to trial, and the chief justice of Massachusetts returns Simms to his owners in the south. Does anybody happen to know who the chief justice of Massachusetts was in that moment? This guy, Lemuel Shaw. Anti-slavery guy, but he supports the Constitution. Fugutive slave law is the law of the land. He has to find it, he doesn't find it unconstitutional. Do you know who this guy is? He has a famous son-in-law. >> George Bernard Shaw. >> No. His son-in-law has a different name. It's Herman Melville. >> Oh. >> Wow. >> We'll talk about this again, but in so far as context, everything contexts, slavery is not something that simply an abstract thing for Melville. His father-in-law out rules in what is arguably the biggest slave case to date, and Melville is somebody who is aware of his father-in-law's cases. The term monomania which figures largely in Melville's Ahab or Ishmael's descriptions of Ahab comes from one of Shaw's cases. We'll get to that. I just want to strike that note now. Don't forget it. Emerson is particularly bitter about this, and we go back to thinking about the American scholar. Remember what he says there that men in history are bugs, are spawn, all of them behold the hero or the poet their own greed and crude being and are willing to be less, are content to be less so that may attain its full stature. Later on, he goes on in his writing he goes on to develop a concept of what he calls the representative man. Somebody who embodies self-reliance, a kind of hero. He wishes we were all representative men. One of these representative men is Daniel Webster. Webster you might say is one of Webster's culture heroes which is why it's particular disappointing for Emerson to see Webster support this compromise and this fugitive slave law. And if you have a copy of the essay, you might probably bring it now and I'll put some of it on the screen. And I want you to look at the way it begins. This is the second version of the address, shortly after 1850, I mean I think the first of these addresses is in 1850 when Emerson decides he has to speak out on this question. So, Emerson wanted to be aloof from particular public questions. Political questions. He wants to write a philosophy that's universal in some way. Find that he can't do that in good conscience anymore. Slavery is something different and the fugitive slave law has implicated everyone and he has a moral duty, he believes, to speak out against it. I do not often speak to public questions. They are odious and hurtful, and it seems like meddling or leaving your work. I have my own spirits in prison, pirits in deeper prisons, whom no man visits, if I do not. And then I see what havoc it makes with any good mind. This dissipated philanthropy. But he has to do it. Anyway, let's turn the page a little further on, page 76 when he actually gets into the swing of things and starts talking about Webster. This is about the quote that's on the board here. Here's thinking about an appearance where he saw Webster speaking at Bunker Hill. He says, there was the Monument and here was Webster. He knew well that a little more or less of rhetoric signified nothing. He was only to say plain and equal things, grand things if he had them. And, if he had them not, only to abstain from saying unfit things, and the whole occasion was answered by his presence. It was a place for behavior much more than for speech, and Webster walked through his part with entire success. Webster, culture hero. And he goes, he's a good speaker right. His wonderful organization, Emerson writes, the perfection of his eloction and all that thereto belongs, voice, accent, intonation, attitude, manner, we shall not soon find again. Then he was so thoroughly simple and wise in his rhetoric. He saw through his matter, hugged his fact so close, went to the principle or essential, and never indulged in a weak flourish, though he knew perfectly well how to make such exordiums, episodes, and perorations as might give perspective to his harangues without in the least embarrassing his march or confounding his transitions. In his statement things lay in daylight. We saw them in order as they were. And think about the things that Emerson has said in the American Scholar about man thinking, right, Webster is man thinking. We're watching, thinking, in action in contrast to the cynic dopey command. The partial man in the divided or social state. Or think about Thoreau's talking about little statesmen and divines who can't get back and see the larger picture. Webster was not that. Webster was a big statesman. He was able to see things. If you think about Emerson's belief that a true theory will be its own evidence, it'll explain all things, there's something of a resonance of that here. We saw things in order as they were, he says, though he knew very well on occasion how to present his own personal claims yet in his argument he was intellectual. It's no mean egotism that's going to be here. Stated as that pure of all personality so that his splendid wrath when his eyes became lamps with the wrath of the fact and the cause he stood for. His power of that like all great masters was not in excellent parts. Again think about what Emerson says in the American Scholar. But total. He's a total guy. All the parts are coming together. He had a great and everywhere equal propriety. He worked with that closeness, that hesion to the matter in hand which a joiner or chemist uses. And the same quiet and sure feeling of right to his place that an oak or a mountain have to theirs. Webster is almost a kind of force of nature. Think about that. The goal of nature, defining a true theory that's its own evidence. Emerson says that Emerson seems to have that kind of rhetorical power. He can make his argument seem self-evident. And Emerson, I don't know how Emerson is at this, but we criticized Emerson frequently for being nevertheless, despite what he says, a kind of fragmentary thinker. Somebody who's assembled things but maybe they don't all go together. There's all that kind of leaping thought and those contradictory moments. That's not what we find here in Webster. Webster creates a sum total which has a certain kind of propriety. So far so good, but it turns out, and this is what Emerson is going to argue here, is that Webster has a fatal flaw despite all of this. A flaw that we might think of as his moral sensibility, and as the essay goes on a little bit, you might say Webster seems like somebody who, well Webster seems like somebody who emerges as a kind of anti-Emerson. Or he lacks certain things that Emerson has. He seemed, so he goes, he seemed born for the bar, born for the senate, and took very naturally a leading part in large private and in public affairs. For his head distributed things in their right places, and what he saw so well he compelled other people to see also. Great is the privilege of eloquence. There's something of that tyrannous eye as well. But the flaw comes in, and Emerson goes on to say that the history of this country has given a disastrous important to the defects of this great man's mind, and we're going to talk about those. Whether evil influences and the corruption of politics, or whether original infirmity, it was this misfortune of this country that with this large understanding he had not what is better than intellect, and the essential source of its health. It is the office of the moral nature to give sanity in right direction of the mind, to give centrality and uni, and I want you to go back and think again. To map this back onto the end of nature. The ideal philosophy, however smart it might make us, is not enough. It leaves us in the labyrinth of our own perceptions. We need something else. There it's kind of a spirituality. Spirit is the thing we are after not just idealism. There's a sense in which what Webster is lacking is a certain kind of spirituality. That's one thing. Another thing is what Emerson goes on to call, a kind of sterility of thought. So he says like, though the whole thing is nice and has an equal right, it's almost like Emerson says when I think about it, he didn't say anything that was actually that great. No aphorisms. The sterility of thought, the want of generalization in his speech and the curious fact that with a general ability that impresses all the world, there is not a single general mark. Not an observation on life and manners that can, not a single valuable aphorism that can pass into literature from his writings. And who of course is the master of the aphorism of maxim, if not Emerson, just go back to that Reebok's commercial, just lay them all out there. Who's so a man must a non-conformist. Speak related thought and prove blah blah, just that's what Emerson is really good at. Webster isn't. And I think the essay is making a kind of connection. There's a way that we kind of understand the flaw in the moral nature by understanding this inability to synthesize or generalize and distill things down to their essence. And you might say that's what Emerson's philosophy is all about in the end. Distilling things down to their essence and finding in that essence self-reliance. So that will be the way that Emerson will think about what I call his universalism. Webster is unable to do that and therefore, in the crucial moment when his moral sensibility is needed most, it fails him. If any man, Emerson says, had in that hour possessed the weight with the country which he had acquired, he could've brought the whole country to its senses, but he doesn't. So one of the things we might say about the fugitive slave law address is that it really is in a certain way a lot like, and this is Webster later on, looked like a colleague of mine in the English department. Sorry I didn't say that. He has a certain kind of, you might say that Webster has a certain kind of flaw which if we follow the logic of Emerson had thought of him as a kind of representative man. Somebody who's sums up the country becomes a kind of national flaw. We have a morally defective nature as our country. So you might say, what I want to suggest to you therefore, is that there are two different moments in Emerson's writing that we've looked at where he's testing his philosophy of self-reliance. I've already talked to you about one of them which is experience. Can we maintain our belief in the need for self-reliance in the aftermath of the most terrible grief. And I've suggested that what Emerson discovers to his chagrin, maybe even to his horror is, yes we can. We lose our son to a certain extent it's a tragedy but we are left fundamentally unchanged. And he pulls himself up by his bootstraps, said that even among the most bleak of these walks, there's God there and it gives him hope for the future. This you might say is a testing on the largest cultural grounds, and what we might say is that Emerson finds at the end of this episode, that the country really should listen to him. That the country is lacking in self-reliance, at least in so far as it is embodied in somebody like Webster. Does Webster go for what he knows to be right. Is he self-reliant. No. Webster goes for compromise and for Emerson that is a cultural disaster. Okay. Next time we will start to explore what the dimensions of that cultural disaster are. That thing that's left unsolved from the Declaration of Independence, that thing called slavery. Alright, thanks a lot.