Nationalisms, Modernisms and Masculinities: Strategies of Displacement in Vaughan Williams’s Reading of Walt Whitman
01 Apr 2017-Nineteenth-century music review (Cambridge University Press (CUP))-Vol. 14, Iss: 1, pp 65-91
TL;DR: A different account of Vaughan Williams's reading of the poem is given in this paper, and the implications of this reading for our broader understanding of the relationship between several notions of nationalism, masculinity and modernism.
Abstract: At the time of his death in 1892, the paradigmatic American poet Walt Whitman was more widely celebrated in Britain than in his own country, having received the vocal support of the likes of Tennyson, William Michael Rossetti, John Addington Symonds, Swinburne (for a time) and Edward Carpenter. For these writers, Whitman’s political egalitarianism – expressed through notions of ‘manly love’ and comradeship – presented a powerful alternative to prevailing Victorian forms of political and social relations. Whitman also provided significant inspiration for British composers at the turn of the twentieth century, with settings by Holst, Delius, Grainger, Scott, Gurney, Bridge, Stanford, Wood, Vaughan Williams and others. Yet while Whitman’s transatlantic literary reception has come to be seen as a moment of crystallization in the formation of contemporary notions of homosexuality, his reception among British composers is viewed as having been highly circumscribed, focusing more on the democratic and mystical implications of Whitman’s poetry. This article suggests a different account of Vaughan Williams’s reading of Whitman, and explores the implications of this reading for our broader understanding of the relationship between several notions of nationalism, masculinity and modernism. This examination aims to complicate, inter alia, the narrative of rupture associated with the transition to modernism, by demonstrating how the continuity of intellectual concerns across aesthetic, national, and sexual spheres has been obscured by strategies of displacement.
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01 Mar 1965
TL;DR: In addition to his great prowess as a composer, Vaughan Williams was a man of strong character and unflagging energy, who lived a long, full life as mentioned in this paper and was at the centre of musical events in England for sixty years, a period which for sustained musical achievement is probably unequalled in the history of this country.
Abstract: In addition to his great prowess as a composer, Vaughan Williams was a man of strong character and unflagging energy, who lived a long, full life. He was at the centre of musical events in England for sixty years, a period which for sustained musical achievement is probably unequalled in the history of this country. Ursula Vaughan Williams's intimate and detailed biography of her husband used much material not hitherto available to scholars to produce a balanced and judicious portrait. It is now made newly available as a Clarendon Paperback.
34 citations
Journal Article•
TL;DR: The authors examine the influence of one literary text upon another by the open-source programming methodology of information science and demonstrate the complement of theory testing as they examine the laudatory and cautionary nature of the Calamus poems.
Abstract: I examine the influence of one literary text upon another by the open-source programming methodology of information science. In particular, I look at how the “Calamus” sequence as rendered in the 1867 Leaves of Grass may be understood to be topically present, although most of the sequence was removed and regrouped by William Michael Rossetti toward publishing the first British Whitman edition in the 1868 Poems by Walt Whitman. I further demonstrate the complement of theory testing as I examine the laudatory and cautionary nature of the “Calamus” poems. Those celebrations and reservations about loving out of bounds may at once apply either to the radical inclusivity of a new republic or in same-sex love. While the utility of that laud-caution categorization remains tenuous, looking at both the limitations and strengths of the approach demonstrate the utility of employing a non-linear, even hypertextual sensibility readily available to readers who wish to encounter the social cognitive terrain of a literary work. On that terrain, I argue, readers can better understand a mind produced in time and responding to its time. In editing Poems by Walt Whitman (1868) for a British readership, William Michael Rossetti strode the line between censorship and advocacy, as well as that between an enabling and co-opted subversion. That Hotten edition removed about one-half of Leaves of Grass (1867) — including what would become “Song of Myself” — toward making possible Whitman’s broader circulation in the United Kingdom. Poems was praised by the Saturday Review for bringing forth the comely after removal of the indescribably filthy [Whitley 2020]. That Poems was published at all, and continued to be published into the 20th century, remains remarkable in a British publishing culture that allowed officials to seize an entire press run before either the author or publisher appeared in court to argue its merit. Declaring Poems to be a bowdlerized, censored or expurgated text betrays an editorial/critical orientation contrary to the values of a digital humanities community underscored by openness to process and collaboration with others. It permits authorial identity and preferences to trump the slate the values that permitted publication, however second-guessed that edition was. To understand Poems to be bowdlerized puts it in the company of The Family Shakespeare: in which nothing is added to the original text, but those words and expression are omitted which cannot with propriety be read in a family [Bowdler 2009]. That family-friendly Shakespeare continues to remove the vulgarity and bawdy joys that Thomas’s sister Henrietta sensed more than two centuries ago; the entire six volume set published by Cambridge University Press can be acquired for about $350. Encamping Poems with The Bowdler Shakespeare, while distantly viable, is to dismiss its achievement as the end result of another morally squeamish, superficially selective editor whose first purpose is to serve the family rather than the author. It is also to place Poems in a timeless void, removed from the very social dynamics upon which production and dissemination take place in the digital humanities. More viable is to describe Poems as an expurgated Whitman. Rossetti can be accurately but narrowly understood as expurgating Leaves in his selection criterion “to omit entirely every poem which could with any tolerable fairness be deemed offensive to the feelings of morals or propriety in this peculiarly nervous age” [Whitman 1868, 20]. However, Henrietta’s editing of Shakespeare made no allowance for the limitations of an age; her Shakespeare was in fact elevated as that fit for all time. By contrast, Rossetti’s edition was qualified and even necessitated by his particularly Victorian nervous age. Just as importantly, one purpose of Rossetti’s edition was to serve a living author rather than the sanctity of the family. He upheld American endorsers Burroughs (1867/1971) and O’Connor (1866/2021), who each declared Whitman to be “the poet of the epoch” [Whitman 1868, 4]. In judging Whitman as particularly suited for the present age of his edition, Rossetti declared that Victorian readers would benefit by judging for themselves the merits of Whitman, who “beyond all his competitors” is “incapable of all compromise and an initiator in the scheme and form of his works” [Whitman 1868, 4]. Less viable, by far, is to judge Poems as a censored text. First, Rossetti served no official office in presenting his selected Whitman. He merely offered his edition to the court of literary deliberation. Second, I doubt any censor has so thoroughly considered and documented a case for censorship. Rossetti offered his edition at invitation of a commercial publisher. Further, he did so after first encountering Whitman’s work as a reader and a leading commentator of Victorian publishing 12 years before his Chronicle article. That secretary to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood may have even identified in Whitman the American complement of the movement. Yet further, his goal was to advance reception of an author rather than thwart it. Rather than argue Rossetti was either an advocate for or an expurgator of Whitman, I offer a conciliatory, more utilitarian position. Rossetti brought forward a selected Whitman that he thought possible to publish within the constraints of his time. Moreover, he did so for the benefit of a living author and a readership whose understanding of the man was all too frequently shaped by the hearsay-report of the periodicals of the day. While his depiction of a democratic spokesman championing the humanity of all is only one aspect of Whitman, he also presented a Whitman who yearned to receive the love that he offered to others and yet could only indirectly state. Accordingly, I argue that Rossetti presented a Whitman who was both an all-too-humanly needy American citizen and an egalitarian spokesman for the inherent worth of all — regardless of nationality, vocation or any caste formation. This Whitman should be the herald for the digital humanities on his dual insistence on hearing others — all others — well, and being heard.
1 citations
TL;DR: The Marching Song of Democracy by Australian-American composer Percy Grainger is an unusual piece, not only in a musical and aesthetic sense but also in its performance and reception history as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: The Marching Song of Democracy by Australian-American composer Percy Grainger is an unusual piece, not only in a musical and aesthetic sense but also in its performance and reception history. Accom...
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TL;DR: Erkkila et al. as discussed by the authors studied the relationship between the private and the public, the personal and the political, the poet and history of Walt Whitman's work, and found that the Civil War and its aftermath affected Whitman's artistic ordering and reordering of his work.
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81 citations