Have you seen the Levi’s ad from a few years ago that uses a Walt Whitman text to convince you to buy their jeans?
A Chain of Writers Back to Whitman
This week we read Willa Cather’s novel My Antonia, which explores the challenges of pioneer life on the American prairie frontier in the 1880s. This was not Cather’s first novel about these pioneers, though. Her novel O Pioneers! was published in 1913, five years before My Antonia. A C-Span discussion of Cather’s novel O Pioneers! notes that “The title is taken from Walt Whitman’s “Pioneers! O Pioneers!” which, like the novel, celebrates the frontier virtues of inner strength and spirit.”
You’ll notice a theme throughout our course–writers giving a nod to the influence of writers who came before them. Cather and Pound to Whitman. Hemingway to Twain. Others?
Will Whitman Sell Jeans?
The poem intones: “Oh you youths, Western youths, so impatient, full of action, full of manly pride and friendship….fresh and strong the world we seize…”
And we see young people–the target audience of this advertising campaign–frolicking with each other and on their own out in the wild. Fire. Waterfalls. Fields of Yellow Flowers. They run through fields…dance bare-chested before bonfires …wrestle…make out (are those 2 boys kissing?). The language of the poem is urgent, repetitious, like a drumbeat. It instructs the “pioneers” to fight and seize the West. The ad ends with the written injunction “Go Forth.”
Does it make you want to buy Levi’s?
Other Instances of Whitman Inspiring Youth
Have any of you seen the movie “Dead Poets Society” with Robin Williams? In it, an unconventional English teacher at at stuffy, conventional private boys’ school inspires students to embrace poetry, not pick it apart until it’s dead. Whitman becomes the poet who breaks them all open, who the teacher uses to encourage students to “seize the day”, who inspires the students to call to their teacher at the end of the film, “O Captain, My Captain!” (a poem Whitman wrote upon the death of Abraham Lincoln).
Here’s a scene that invokes “the barbaric yawp” of Whitman’s “Song of Myself”:
(post originally published 2-15-10)