Critical Essay | Critical Essay by L. Edwin Folsom

Critical Essay by L. Edwin Folsom

[Merwin's poetry] is not Whitmanesque, but, like Whitman, Merwin has been obsessed with the meaning of America. His poetry, especially The Lice and the American sequence in The Carrier of Ladders, often implicitly and sometimes explicitly responds to Whitman; his twentieth century sparsity and soberness—his doubts about the value of America—answer, temper, Whitman's nineteenth century expansiveness and exuberance—his enthusiasm over the American creation. In The Lice Merwin is interested in "what America is," and in The Carrier of Ladders he engages in a poetic search—a descent in time—to discover also what America was, to face and assume the guilt of the destructive American expansion across the continent, to invoke the vanished native and face the implications of his absence. (p. 57)

The Whitmanian self [is] a model of expanding America…. (p. 58)

With no regrets, Whitman/America goes about "Clearing the ground for broad humanity, the true America," and "These virgin...
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