F. W. Dobbs-Allsopp. Divine Style: Walt Whitman and the King James Bible. Cambridge, U.K.: Open BookPublishers, 2024. xxiii + 386 pp. Available to read and download online atopenbookpublishers.com.

Review of Brian Selznick's Live Oak, With Moss.

Review of Delphine Rumeau. Comrade Whitman: From Russian to Internationalist Icon. Brookline, MA:Academic Studies Press, 2024. 376 pp.

A review of Dara Barnat's recent monograph. 

Unknown to scholars of Whitman, a fourth self-review of Whitman's first edition of Leaves of Grass has been hiding in newsprint since 1855. This short piece, published in August 1855, not only provides another early glimpse of Whitman’s views of his own poetry and its need for public curation, but also, I will suggest, hints at previously unknown journalistic writing or editorial work Whitman may have produced during this period. This self-review, titled “A Poet Showing the New York Muscle,” made its original appearance in the New York Sunday Dispatch, a literary weekly, for August 26, 1855, page 4. It is reprinted here for the first time since 1855, and finally under the poet’s own name.

Walt Whitman: A Current Bibliography, Winter/Spring 2024

This essay traces Whitman’s transcendental legacy as a mystic interlocutor between the divine and the eternal Universal Being and its reception in contemporary ecopoetic water poetry. Through a close study of “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” and “As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life,” I chart Whitman’s move away from viewing nature as a resource for human domination and exploitation towards a sense of our interconnectedness within nature as part of this Universal Being. Comparing Whitman’s transcendentalist American poetry with Graham’s contemporary ecopoetry, I examine how the different historical contexts of frontier expansion (Whitman) and erasure caused by the late-stage climate disaster (Graham) exert their different influences on the mystic, transcendental speakers of these poems. Consulting Graham’s “The Wake Off the Ferry” and “Ebbtide” in answer to Whitman’s poems, I explore how the climate crisis negates the possibility of eternity or any assurance of our value or place within the divine or eternal, and instead offers only the certainty of the moment, before that too begins to crumble. 

Walt Whitman. Leaves of Grass / Grashalme: Zweisprachige Fassung der Erstausgabe von 1855. Translated by Walter Grünzweig and a team of translators at TU Dortmund University. Aachen: Rimbaud, 2022. 226 pp. 

Walt Whitman: A Current Bibliography, Summer/Fall 2023

In letters and conversations with friends and acquaintances, Whitman's ideas about his "burial house" gradually took shape over the four years prior to his death in March 1892. The completion of Whitman's tomb represented the culmination of a complicated series of decisions. While the location of Whitman's tomb, its design, and its cost are topics that have received various critical and biographical interpretations, this essay includes recently uncovered materials that provide a clearer understanding of the process that unfolded in the years prior to Whitman's death regarding his tomb.