As I Ebb'd: Place and Alterity

摘要

This essay attempts a re-conceptualisation of the notion of place through poetry. A reading of the first two verses of Walt Whitman's "As I Ebb'd with the Ocean of Life" (which Harold Bloom has described as a "masterpiece [of the] American Shore-Ode", and one of the "half dozen essentials of American poetry"2), the essay draws out metaphors and tropes evoked by the Poet's description of the spatialities of the margin in order to suggest that architectural place-making might be grounded not simply in "gathering", but more deeply in a response to alterity.