Walt Whitman's Multitudes: Labor Reform and Persona in Whitman's Journalism and the First Leaves of Grass, 1840-1855. By Jason Stacy. (New York: Peter Lang, 2008. viii, 168 pp. Cloth, $64.96, ISBN 978-1-4331-0153-3. Paper, $44.95, ISBN 978-1-4331-0383-4.)

Abstract

On July 21, 1855, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote to Walt Whitman, who had sent the eminent man of letters a copy of Leaves of Grass (1855): “I greet you at the beginning of a great career, which yet must have had a long foreground somewhere, for such a start” (Michael Moon, ed., Leaves of Grass and Other Writings, 2002, p. 637). Literary scholars have filled in many of the blanks in Whitman's early years, especially in the 1840s, when the poet was in his twenties. Jason Stacy's new study of Whitman's early journalism is a welcome addition to the scholarly record. Stacy focuses on the period from 1840 to 1855, with a brief concluding chapter that extends beyond the original publication of Leaves of Grass to discuss later editions in 1856 and 1860. Whitman's career in journalism began in the summer of 1831, when, at the age of twelve, he became a printer's devil and newspaper apprentice at the Long-Island Patriot. By 1838, Whitman had started his own newspaper, the weekly Long Islander. He had also taught school in several towns on Long Island between 1836 and 1838. Stacy uses these biographical facts to argue that Whitman constructed three literary personas in his early journalism and in the first edition of Leaves of Grass: the schoolmaster, the editor, and the bard. The schoolmaster can be seen in eleven “Sun-Down Papers—From the Desk of a Schoolmaster,” published in three different Long Island newspapers between February 1840 and July 1841. In Stacy's rhetorical analysis, the schoolmaster presents an ideology of social improvement through individual reform.