Whitman, Springsteen, and the American Working Class
2000; Pittsburg State University; Volume: 41; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
0026-3451
Autores Tópico(s)Poetry Analysis and Criticism
ResumoIs a dream a lie if it don't come true, or is it something worse ... --Bruce Springsteen, The River AS THE SHIFT in criticism from traditional/ canonical to the broader arena of cultural/popular studies becomes ever more pronounced (thankfully eradicating, in the process, many of the arbitrary and elitist prejudices separating high from low art), scholars are discovering not only that literary and texts often share the same social and psychological concerns, but also that in dealing with such concerns many of these texts are equally compelling, sensitive, and exciting. Walt Whitman, with his well-known poetic emphasis on and desire to be considered the bard of the American working people, would seem to lend himself nicely as the starting point for a study of this sort, particularly one connecting Whitman's fairly idealized and antiquated vision of the American working people with contemporary reflections on the reality of working-class life in a popular culture medium which the American working class itself engendered: rock and roll. Although in terms of subject matter rock music has obviously expanded far beyond its working-class origins since the early 1950s, it could be argued that the most vital and authentic American performers in the genre draw heavily on--and in most cases are indeed descendant from--these social roots. Of the numerous rock artists who can stake such a claim, Bruce Springsteen is without question the foremost purveyor of American working-class rock and roll. While he is often mistakenly stereotyped as a sentimental and patriotic blue-collar hero (such as he was not only by Ronald Reagan in a particularly disturbing 1984 campaign speech, but also by conservative journalist George Will in a New York Daily News column with the unforgivably jingoistic title of A Yankee-Doodle Springsteen), Springsteen is actually the working-class rock poet supreme, laying out in uncompromising terms and detail the shattered lives and broken countenances that make up the dark side of American existence as it is experienced by working people for whom the American Dream is a taunting, cruel, and ungraspable abstraction. Clearly, the people who populate Springsteen's songs are not the jolly and rugged tradesmen so often found in Whitman's poetry. Nonetheless, Springsteen is not just a cynical contemporary crank bitterly refuting the vision of working class America proffered by an idealistic poet over a hundred years ago. Whitman envisioned the American working class of the future having a better existence than those of his own day, and Springsteen is strongly concerned with improving the lives of contemporary American workers, as both his songwriting and consistent acts of charity demonstrate. Certainly Bruce Springsteen would have no qualms with Whitman's aspirations for the American working class, but he would likely point out that the romanticizing of their lot is perhaps not the best way to go about achieving such aspirations. To speculate whether or not Whitman would have liked an aspect of popular culture such as rock and roll might appear somewhat farcical, but to assume that he would have respected its ability to reach the vast audiences that he himself desired but failed to reach during his own lifetime does not seem presumptuous. It also does not seem presumptuous to assume that Whitman would have respected its origins as a decidedly working-class form of expression, although it is true that he probably would not have cared for the unpleasant social realities often reflected in this music of the American working class; it should be remembered that Whitman was wont to envision the future generally and to pin his hopes for their proper education upon literature (Clark, 138). Despite the fact that in A Backward Glance O'er Travel'd Roads (1889) Whitman proudly claimed that [w]ithout yielding an inch the working-man and working-woman were to be in my pages from first to last, and for all of the heartfelt romanticizing of the American working class throughout his work, Whitman felt that what he referred to as the democratic average had not been achieved among the working masses in his time and would have to be a goal for the future, helped along by a guide in the form of the divine literatus. …
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