Without Being Walt Whitman
Vicente Huidobro, Whitman, and the Poetics of Sight
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 3852054 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Kelly Scott Franklin (Hillsdale College, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2014 |
| Volume | 12 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 282-300 |
| Publication date | 2014-12-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Comparative American Studies An International Journal (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1477-5700 • E-ISSN: 1741-2676 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1179/1477570014z.00000000089 |
| OpenAlex | W2046196769 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 15 |
The Chilean vanguardista poet Vicente Huidobro singlehandedly inaugurated the Spanish-language avant-gardes with his 1918 poem Ecuatorial [Equatorial], and remained a dynamic and controversial global figure until his death in 1948. This essay demonstrates how Huidobro appropriated Walt Whitman’s ‘Salut au Monde’ into this inaugural poem, taking from the US poet an elevated, comprehensive poetics of sight. But Whitman’s all-seeing aesthetic seriously threatened Huidobro’s own ethics and avant-garde poetic philosophy — Creationism — leading the Chilean to reject Whitman and this poetic vision in his 1931 Altazor. If Whitman’s poetic speaker could ‘contain multitudes’, seeing the whole world in instant juxtaposition, Huidobro’s ideal Creationist poet must instead empty himself, to create anew. Finally, this textual and historical confrontation reveals not only how Whitman brought his unifying vision to bear on his nation’s Civil War, but also how the aging Huidobro, facing World War II and the imperialist shadow of the US, wrote back to Whitman to qualify and clarify what this vision might mean for ‘America’
Art · Art history · Astronomy · Literature · Physics · Poetics · Poetry · Sight · Cultural and Mythological Studies · Historical and Literary Analyses · Historical and Literary Studies
Staring How We Look
Natural histories of discourse
The Other Country
Proceed with Caution, When Engaged by Minority Writing in the Americas
Ambassadors of Culture
Transamerican Literary Relations and the Nineteenth-Century Public Sphere
Walt Whitman en Hispanoamerica
Imagined communities
The new American studies
Latin American Vanguards
Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism
| Highly cited | No |
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