20). Whitman saw something in the American Indians that he tried to absorb even as it vanished under the hand of his expanding nation. There are many technological developments that can be examined in relation to their impact on poetry and poetics in America, but perhaps none is more illuminating than the advent and development of photography, the merging of sight and chemistry, of eye and machine, of organism and mechanism, that became the peculiarly appropriate American instrument of seeing (Folsom 100). No culture was more in love with science and technology than America was. The camera became the perfect emblem of the joining of the human senses to chemistry and physics through a machine. Whitman expressed complete acceptance of this science in section 23 of his poem, Song of Myself (J.E. Miller 92).Whitman believed that most ordinary painters were put to shame by a good photograph, and that the majority of painted portraits would be set aside by photographs of the same subjects, since photos seemed to render more quickly and accurately the same images of reality that painters trained so long to achieve. This was the key to Whitmans devotion to photography; it mechanically reproduced what the sun illuminated. For him it was a more honest representation of reality than the paintings of artists. He felt that artists let their discriminations and blindness alter the world that was before their eyes (Allen 146-148).According to Whitman, the camera teaches us to see beauty where we had not before sought it out, and to see significance in the overlooked detail. In his 1855 preface, Whitman described the emerging American poet as an embodied imagination on the lookout for whatever had been seen before as trivial or insignificant; like the absorptive camera (Folsom 102).Walt Whitman died from a complex of illnesses in 1892, at the age of seventy-two. He could take satisfaction in a full and complete life (Loewen 38). The United ...
