‘현전(現前)의 시’:휘트먼과 그림, 민주주의

There have been a few exceptional readings on the relationships between American visual culture and Walt Whitman’s poetry. Many critics, however, do not go deeper into reflecting the complex matrix of Whitman’s poetic language and the effects of visual arts made by his comtemporary artists. This essay proposes that Whitman’s encounters with the paintings of Millet and Courbet had awakened in him a sense of realization of poetic democracy. Whitman’s poetic experiments and exploration featured by the notions such as enumeration, repetition, and catalogue can be re-evaluated as ‘poetry of presence’ in which the conjunction between Whitman’s language and painter’s lines and colors creates a very interesting reciprocity. As the cross-disciplinary appeal of Walt Whitman’s language experiments and visual modes of representation, this essay tries to give the prescient observation of Whitman’s transfusion of American democracy beyond the thematic and subjective affinities of Whitman and visual artists.