Whitman: The Self and the Singer

Abstract

Gay Wilson Allen's first Walt Whitman Handbook was published in 1946. The new handbook is a thorough revision of the old, as Allen tells us in his preface, with at least minor emendations on every page and major reworkings of all but one of the original chapters.1 The New Walt Whitman Handbook obviously supersedes the old and will now become indispensable to Whitman scholars. Pro fessor Allen has completely restructured his original chapter on biography to take account of major new works published in the 1950s and 1960s, while impor tant post-1946 editions of Whitman texts including, of course, the New York University Press Collected Writings, of which Allen is a general editor have been taken into account in the chapter on The Growth of Leaves of Grass and the Prose Works. The discussion of The Realm of Whitman's Ideas (Chapter III) includes recent interpretations that seem important to Professor Allen and lays particular stress on the ways in which Whitman may be said to have antici pated Teilhard de Chardin's cosmic theology. V. K. Chari's Whitman in the Light of Ved antic Mysticism (1965) is given sympathetic notice in Chapter II, The Growth of Leaves of Grass,'1 and in Chapter V, Walt Whitman and World Literature. This last chapter, even more than the one on biography, shows the growth of Whitman studies since 1946 and even since 1955, when Allen's Walt Whitman Abroad was published. As Allen says, there have been important critical works in several languages and translations in almost every country in the world (except the new nations) in the last thirty years. The one chapter that Professor Allen has not felt it necessary to revise is the chapter on Literary Technique in Leaves of Grass. This seems to me to be the least satisfactory section of the new handbook since it remains almost exclu sively concerned with prosody. Howard J. Waskow's Whitman: Explorations in Form (1966), which is surely one of the most valuable recent works on Whit man, is listed in the bibliography to this chapter but is not mentioned in the text. Also, the discussion of the musical qualities of Whitman's verse makes no refer ence to important articles by Leo Spitzer (Journal of English Literary History, 1949) and Sydney J. Krause (PMLA, 1957). Allen's chapter on The Growth of Walt Whitman Biography is all that one could expect from one of Whitman's most distinguished biographers. It