[HOME] [Guideline] [Author] [College of Foreign Languages] [Fu Jen University]
ABSTRACT
Critics have noted Walt Whitman's interest in what
Tony Bennet has termed the "exhibitionary complex"; a range of nineteenth-century
museum techniques, culminating in the great world's fairs, that equated
modernity with vast displays of culture. This essay argues that the poem
"After All Not to Create Only," composed for an industrial exposition of
the American Institute in 1872, demonstrates a more complicated relationship
between expositions and Whitman's poetry than has been previously explored.
Later titled "Song of the Exposition," "After All" captures Whitman at
a turning point in his "exposition poetics"; whereas his earlier poetic
catalogues are loosely modeled on expositions, this poem, written for an
actual exposition, makes the exposition building the center of poetic inspiration.
As such, Whitman's poem is steeped in the peculiar material history and
special representational status of exposition buildings--two levels of
meaning that Walter Benjamin's study of the Paris Arcades, his Passagen-Werk,
helps elucidate. Restored to its material context, "After All" reveals
Whitman's dual vision of expositions, of poetry, and of modernity in general:
on the one hand, universally comprehensive, on the other hand, concealed
in representation and in an ongoing process of exposure.
[HOME] [Guideline] [Author] [College of Foreign Languages] [Fu Jen University]