The Ever-Changing Nature of the Sea: Whitman's Absorption of Maximilian Schele de Vere

Abstract

In recent yearS, Betty Barrett and Ted Genoways have discovered that Whitman lifted entire images and phrases from newspaper articles and rearranged them into some of his Civil War poems.1 This aspect of Whitman's poetry is not, however, confined to the Whitman of the Civil War era. Instead it began earlier and stemmed from a long-lasting fascination with a fellow writer whose influence on Leaves of Grass remains largely overlooked: Maximilian Schele De Vere, author of Stray Leaves from the Book of Nature,2 which appeared 1855, sharing with Whitman's first edition of Leaves not only a publication date but a green cover blind-stamped with flower y orna- ments and sporting a golden title. Stray Leaves has so far found its way into Whitman scholarship as nothing more than a curious footnote,3 though Schele De Vere himself has been increasingly gaining critical notice.But even though it is unlikely that this book influenced the 1855 Leaves of Grass (Stray Leaves would have been published at most only a few months before the first edition of Leaves of Grass) and the striking physical similarities between the books do appear to be coincidental, such is not the case with the 1856 and (especially) the 1860 editions of Leaves, which are significantly influenced by Schele De Vere's thinking, and which include an almost word-by-word copy of a whole paragraph from Stray Leaves-the first known instance of W hitman copying and rearranging somebody else's words into his own poetry.Born in a grim old mountain castle4 Sweden and raised Prussia, baron Maximilian Schele De Vere (1820-1898) emigrated to the United States his early twenties after receiving a degree philosophy from Berlin's Friedrich Wilhelm Universitat. In 1844, he became the youngest faculty member the histor y of the University of Virginia, where he taught a variety of subjects and even volunteered as a drill sergeant during the Civil War. He published several books on natural science, comparative literature, American histor y, and linguistics, and he translated French and German works of fiction into English. While Schele De Vere's upbringing, education, and social status could not have been more different from Whitman's, their philosophical interests overlapped on a striking number of topics. Both shared a keen interest the American idiom (Schele de Vere was the first academic to teach classes on it), were fascinated by Eastern mythology,5 admired Darwin, Humboldt, and the heroes of the American Revolution, and tried to fuse a strict belief natural law with spirituality.6 (See Figure 1.)Whitman presumably discovered the scholar first through Outlines of Comparative Philology, a book Schele De Vere published through G. P. Putnam & Co. 1853. According to C. Carroll Hollis, Whitman borrowed the book from his acquaintance William Swinton sometime between 1856 and 18597 and took notes on it.8 In the only academic treatment of Schele De Vere and Whitman to date, James Perrin Warren identifies striking similarities both authors' optimistic understanding of language9 and strongly suggests that Whitman studied Schele De Vere's book. Whether Whitman came upon Schele De Vere's later writ- ings, such as Stray Leaves, by actively searching for them or through a chance encounter remains uncertain. Considering that Whitman most likely read the periodicals Schele De Vere published on a regular ba- sis, it seems almost inevitable that the well-read Whitman would have rediscovered the well-published Swede at some point.One very likely place for Whitman to have re-encountered Schele De Vere is Putnam's Monthly Magazine of American Literature, Science and Art, a periodical issued by G. P. Putnam, the publisher of both Swin- ton's and Schele De Vere's books. The poet would have read Swinton's Rambles over the Realms of Verbs and Substantives10 published two parts the periodical late 1854, as well as a review of Leaves 1855- one of the few that, besides his self-reviews, had anything positive to say about his book. …