Creating Hope
January 2006
Banner photo: Katsuhiro Fujino
Leaves of Grass
Commemorating the 150th anniversary of Walt Whitman's masterpiece, Leaves of Grass, the Boston Research Center for the 21st Century (BRC) sponsored "'Talking Back' to Whitman: Poetry Matters," the second annual Ikeda Forum for Intercultural Dialogue, at its center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on September 30 and October 1, 2005.
Joel Myerson, distinguished professor emeritus at the University of South Carolina, provided a historical and literary context, saying that when Leaves of Grass was published in 1855, critics assailed it as immodest and "quite out of place amid the decorum of modern society." Subsequent readers and scholars, however, have come to view Whitman's work as a watershed in the development of a genuinely democratic poetic idiom.
Prof. Ed Folsom talks back to Whitman
In his keynote address, Ed Folsom, professor of English at the University of Iowa, described how poets from around the world have been "talking back" to Whitman. He focused on the African-American response, particularly that of the poet Langston Hughes. In his poem of parting, Whitman uses the colloquial greeting "So Long!" then just coming into usage among the denizens of New York City. Hughes transmutes this phrase into a yearning expression of the long-deferred dreams and aspirations of people of African descent living in the United States. The afternoon session consisted of an international panel of scholars and poets chaired by Kenneth Price, professor of American Literature at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
