9/26/2023 0 Comments Pictures of unity in artInLiquid artist Linda Dubin Garfield makes these poetic ideas, so piercingly true and relevant to our twenty first century world, wordlessly visible in her mixed media art. Our country could definitely be reminded of that now. How simple yet astute: unity in diversity, applied across art and politics. It’s in the discrete parts that the whole is able to come to creative fruition. Art and poetry, by their very nature, reflect that same spirit of the ideals of democracy. As noted in The Atlantic, Whitman expressed his view that “the power of poetry and democracy came from an ability to make a unified whole out of disparate parts.” What an inspiring, uplifting, and insightful comparison. A discussion of Whitman and Patriotism illuminates the easily missed, thoughtful wording: “Only 79 years into the American experiment in 1855, Whitman’s grammar reflects the evolving balance between, on the one hand, the plura of e pluribus and, on the other, the emerging unum under construction” His grammar here seems to allude to the individual states since the notion of true national unity (‘unum’/oneness) must have been quite tenuous in the years before the Civil War. Similarly, in the preface to the Leaves of Grass, Whitman writes: “The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem.” The unusual grammar here, describing the United States in plurality, has meaning too. In this poem, he illuminates the distinct role each citizen plays in fashioning a well-orchestrated whole from smaller musical parts. ![]() And yet, Whitman’s poem “I Hear America Singing” (1860) is essentially a love letter to our democratic process. It would be easy to imagine that literature and poetry of the 1860s would be rife with rhetorical questions, negativity, and uncertainty about the strength of democracy. Several of his poems, written during a tumultuous, intensely divisive period of American history when our country was at the brink of Civil War, draw strikingly powerful parallels between the structure of poetry and the major tenets of democracy. And there is no one who expounds on the artistic process with more insight than Walt Whitman, who championed the natural world and also delved into thoughts about creativity and even democracy. They both have the potential to illuminate the world with wondrous ideas, ideas that mirror the world or expand into the unchartered territory of thought. They both culminate in an original product that arises from the muck of experimentation, unbridled thought and emotion, and hours of revision. ![]() They both utilize unrelated elements, whether these elements are incongruous colors, clashing materials, or words that aren’t normally used together, to create a unified whole.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |