The Photograph and the Parenthesis: Walt Whitman, Walter Benjamin, and the Management of Time in "Song of Myself "

TLDR: In this paper, the reader's encounter with the 1855 edition of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass is analyzed using Benjamin's meditations on technology and history, and the critic and the poet share similar commitments to the intentional conflation of certain philosophical dichotomies (contemplation versus experience, individuality versus collectivity, and freedom versus necessity).

Abstract: I the essay that follows, i want to juxtapose what might be regarded as two distinct “moments” in the reader’s encounter with the 1855 edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. The first is so familiar as to be iconic: the daguerreotype portrait of Whitman that occurs at the beginning of the volume. The second is more obscure, and to my knowledge never extensively discussed: a brief parenthetical comment that occupies line 304 of the book’s first poem, eventually titled “Song of Myself.” To facilitate this analysis I’ll make use of Walter Benjamin’s meditations on technology and history. Not only does Benjamin illuminate Whitman’s use of photography, but the critic and the poet share similar commitments to the intentional conflation of certain philosophical dichotomies—contemplation versus experience, individuality versus collectivity, and freedom versus necessity. I want to examine how in Whitman’s poetry these familiar pairings are implicated in the sometimes overlooked ambiguity that almost always governs our encounter with a work of literary art: reading with the eye versus listening with the ear.