Buinicki, Martin T. Walt Whitman's Reconstruction: Poetry and Publishing between Memory and History [review

Abstract

Martin T. Buinicki. Walt Whitman's Reconstruction: Poetry and Publishing between Memory and History. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2011. xiv + 174 pp.In his poem a Historian, published in 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass but titled so pointedly only in 1867, Whitman chided his subject for treating man as a creature of . . . aggregates. It is no mystery why historical writing proved so troubling for poet who marked eternity through his self-celebrating book: historians, working in aggregates and seeing by epistemological necessity men and women as dreams and dots, transformed people into creatures of externalities and contexts-subject to world, rather than heroic agents who, by being themselves a kosmos, made it. historian, a chronicler of creatures, threatened Whitman's own melding of nation and individual, Many in One. When John William Draper published his History of American Civil War in 1867 and promised to handle our species in masses, war lay behind him, there to analyze. Whitman's war, conversely, resided within him, there for communion. His 1867 title a Historian sounded opening salvo against rival recorders of past.This struggle with history and dilemmas posed by memory are subjects of Martin Buinicki's welcome new book. As Buinicki notes, many scholars have argued that American Civil War and Whitman's experience both during and after conflict ruptured life of Leaves of Grass. Luke Mancuso, in The Strange Sad War Revolving: Walt Whitman Reconstruction, and Emergence of Black Citizenship, 1865-1876, explores Whitman's evolving writings on black emancipation, while M. Wynn Thomas, in Lunar Light of Whitman's Poetry, offers a subtle reading of ways in which Whitman became the prophet of past. For Buinicki, however, these critics sometimes overlook poet's struggle with transience of living memory, especially when, for Whitman, viscerally charged recollections proved to be real stuffof war. To preserve and record this living history became goal of poet's backward glances and defining feature of his revisions of Leaves of Grass after 1865.Taking a cue from critics like Amanda Gailey, Buinicki notes that growth in periodical subscriptions after war gave Whitman a forum to transform his prose persona from journalist, whose voice, though personified as an eye-witness to events, nevertheless spoke from anonymity of newspaper article, to essayist, who appeared authoritatively under a byline. In this regard, Whitman's well-known work as a nurse in Washington D.C.'s hospitals, popularized by William Douglas O'Connor's The Good Gray in 1866, made him something of a known character of war years and offered him opportunity to revise his poetic and prose personae in periodicals like Harper's Monthly Magazine, Atlantic, and David G. Croly's New York Daily Graphic where, as an author of works on noncontroversial themes, like his Song of Redwood-Tree and Prayer of Columbus, Whitman appealed to growing population of middlebrow consumers of print. During this same period, Graphic published Whitman's A Biographical Sketch-An American Poet Graduating from a Printer's Case and some portions of what became Memoranda During War. Other postwar writings also reflected this self-domestication. Buinicki reminds us of disappearance of enraged slave of Lucifer poem in 1881 edition of Leaves, a change first explored, as Buinicki notes, by Ed Folsom and Kenneth M. Price, as well as deletion of a passage against protective tarifffrom Democratic Vistas when reproduced in Specimen Days and Collect. But postwar additions to Leaves proved more profound than deletions. In tandem with his growing acceptance as a popular American poet whose recollections of war proved compelling to a readership contending with war's memory, Whitman sought to incorporate conflict into his revisions of Leaves of Grass in ways that preserved immediacy of conflict and integrity of book. …