Whitman's Sketches of New Orleans: A City, and an Artist, by Glimpses

Abstract

Whitman's Sketches of New Orleans:A City, and an Artist, by Glimpses Bonnie Carr O'Neill The poet of "Song of Myself" identifies himself as "Walt Whitman, a kosmos, of Manhattan the son." The assertion of an identity at once particular and general is audacious, but it also reflects a philosophy of belonging derived from unique circumstances. As a journalist in the 1840s, Whitman's daily labors required him to represent the generality to the particular, to address a local audience on matters pertaining not only to that population, but also to a greater, imagined national community. Whitman's poetry benefits from that journalistic practice as it represents vast and varied American landscapes, as he shows in "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd": Lo, body and soul—this land,My own Manhattan with spires, and the sparkling and hurrying tides, and the ships,The varied and ample land, the South and the North in the light, Ohio's shores and flashing Missouri,And ever the far-spreading prairies cover'd with grass and corn. (ll. 89–92) North and South, rivers and prairies: all are united as part of the same land. These varied and oppositional references were not abstract to Whitman. In crafting them, he drew from personal knowledge. In 1848, he traveled with his teenaged brother Jeff from New York to New Orleans. Whitman worked as an exchange editor of the New Orleans Daily Crescent, and Jeff worked odd jobs for the newspaper, before the brothers returned north after four months. The journeys to New Orleans from New York and back again carried Whitman as far from New York as he would ever go, and on those trips he saw more of the US than most of his fellow New Yorkers would ever see firsthand. His travels made present the discussions over territorial expansion, slavery, the [End Page 111] Mexican War, and so many other subjects that Whitman would have encountered in the newspapers he read and worked for. The details of his journeys, as well as his New Orleans journalism, are collected in the engaging new volume Walt Whitman's New Orleans, edited by Stefan Schöberlein. Schöberlein's brief introduction provides biographical context to the New Orleans writings, explaining the relevant details of Whitman's travels with Jeff, their living situations in New Orleans, Whitman's working life in the city, and his experiences of New Orleans life and culture. Although Whitman's time in New Orleans was brief, the interlude influenced him profoundly, as Schöberlein explains. For one thing, New Orleans was for Whitman a site of sexual liberation. The Calamus sequence of poems, eventually published in the 1860 Leaves of Grass, offers the most intimate expressions of same-sex desire in Whitman's canon; scholars believe the poems to have been inspired by someone Whitman knew in New Orleans. By including a transcription of Whitman's manuscript drafts in the appendix, the volume invites readers to consider the New Orleans journalism in relation to Whitman's creative development. Likewise, Schöberlein argues that the New Orleans journalism provides a link to the poetry Whitman eventually produced. In particular, Schöberlein points out the correspondences between Whitman's journalistic portraits of people he observes in New Orleans and the men and women he includes in his many social catalogs throughout the poetry. Finally, Schöberlein also suggests that the political and cultural diversity of New Orleans contributed to Whitman's evolving idea that "republicanism … is an egalitarian practice, not a set of institutions" (xxiii). In the Crescent journalism, that practice entails openness to the range of people and experience New Orleans affords. Scholars have long known of Whitman's New Orleans interlude, so this collection does not break new biographical ground. It does, however, bring together and make readily available a body of work that is typically accessible only in the scholarly edition of Whitman's journalism or in the archives. It joins Walt Whitman's Selected Journalism, edited by Douglas A. Noverr and Jason Stacey, as one of the very few anthologies of Whitman's journalism suitable for individual or classroom use. Noverr and...