Blaine Greteman on 'Poetry in the Age of Trump'

Just two months until Trump's presidency is a reality and already it's shaping conversation in courses about poetry, which—as Blaine Greteman writes, quoting W.H. Auden—"makes nothing happen." Although Greteman planned to conduct the first class after the election with a conversation about Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself," the lesson plan was interrupted by a university-wide alert about hate speech. We'll catch up with Greteman here:

Five minutes before I stepped to the lectern to read those lines, my computer chimed with an email notification from the office of the university president, warning that one of the dorms had been vandalized with racist “hate speech.” The same message vibrated across the phones of all 150 students gathered in the lecture hall. It did not feel like we were living in Whitman’s America, and as I started reading his lines, the word love caught in my throat.

Whitman first published his poem in 1855, shortly before the American Civil War, drawing inspiration from the abolitionist movement. In one stanza the speaker recalls how he had given shelter to a runaway slave “and brought water and filled a tub for his sweated body and bruised feet.” In this American epic, unlike the classic epics of Homer and Virgil, the heroic model is not the triumphant soldier but the radical Jewish teacher who would be crucified shortly after washing his disciple’s feet.

Regaining my composure, I managed to tell my students that Whitman was perhaps too eager to believe that the real America was the one that gave succor to the slave rather than the one that enslaved him, the one that “put plasters on the galls of his neck and ankles,” rather than the one that fought to keep him in chains. For context, I read a passage from Whitman’s contemporary Elizur Wright, a fierce crusader against slavery who saw slavery as America’s original sin. Each generation that continued to profit on the original act of oppression, he wrote, “may well be said to inherit their father’s sin—they commence the business of sinning not like their father, upon their own resources, but with an accumulated and fearfully productive capital.” Wright looked to America’s future and sees not hope but wrath. “As generation after generation passes away,” he continued, “the curse of God grows heavier, and the thunders of his coming wrath swell to a louder tone.” If President Obama had given us hope that we were living in Whitman’s America, President Trump had reminded me that we were also living in Wright’s benighted land, and I ended my lecture in record time with the classic refuge of a teacher with nothing more to say: “Any thoughts or questions?”

Read more at Slate.