The Whitman of "Specimen Days"

Abstract

SPECIMEN DAYS consists of fifteen pages of off-hand letter of autobiographical information, another seventy-five pages of Diary jottings, war-memoranda of 1862?'65, and another one hundred and fifty or so pages of Nature-notes of 1877?'81 and reports of journeys to West, Canada, New York, and Boston, mixed in with short essays on literature and on contemporaries like Carlyle, Longfellow, and Emerson. It was published with Collect, which includes Democratic Vistas, towards its beginning, as well as an essay on Origins of Attempted Secession, two prefaces, from 1872 and 1876, and a lecture on Death of Abraham Lincoln, to which Notes Left Over and Pieces in Early Youth were also appended. All this is quite a conglomeration of odds and ends to respond to in any aesthetic way, and Walt Whitman disarms us further by telling us at outset that materials of Specimen Days and Collect, incongruous and full of skips and jumps, were all bundled up and tied by a big string.1 He avows it must be the most wayward, spontaneous, fragmentary book ever printed, for what he did was tumble thing together, letting hurry and crudeness tell story better than fine work (690). But tell what story? It is true that book is basically autobiograph ical. If we place it together with November Boughs and Good-Bye my Fancy, we may have before us material for Walt Whitman autobiography. It would be tempting to rearrange pieces with a bit of creativity. His reminiscence of New Orleans in 1848 would find its place with Through Eight Years in late pages ofthat autobiographical letter. The remark able sketch of Lincoln arriving in New York, at Astor House in 1861, to sulky, unbroken silence (1038), might be moved up from Collect to where it belongs, just before Whitman's war memoranda. And that