American Muse Research Articles

With Walt Whitman in Camden, Durham, Leningrad, and Elsewhere

Camden, New Jersey, was a hell of a place for Walt Whitman to end up. Not too long ago, the city-broke for decades, with no tax base to speak of-fired its entire police force. Even in its heyday, perhaps when the Good Gray, crippled from his hospital work in Washington, first went there, Camden was a working-class city, located in the shadow of Philadelphia, across the Delaware River. As Roger Asselineau describes it in his splendid biography of the poet, Street [where the poet bought a home in 1884] was undoubtedly democratic, but extremely ugly. There was the noise of trains which passed on the nearby track and frequently the air brought the odor of a neighboring fertilizer fac- tory. . . .1 Camden had once been a thriving industrial base, but today nearly one in five of its residents is out of work. According to the New York Times article of September 2012 that reported the dismissal of the police force, Broadway, once the main shopping strip, is now a canyon of abandoned buildings.2 There is no mention of Whitman in this article - only a reference to the W hitman Park which is closer to Harleigh Cemetery, where the poet is buried, than it is to Mickle Street, where he lived.Imagine, the city where Walt Whitman spent the last decade of his life, now in shambles! You'd think the mere spirit of the Poet of Democ- racy, still lingering overhead, would somehow uplift this urban inferno of crime and illicit drugs. The poet's name is still all over the city. Besides the Whitman Park neighborhood, there is Whitman Avenue, his elabo- rate tomb in Harleigh, and a little area near his house, never altogether finished, called Poet's Park. Asselineau wrote in his biography that the idea for the book came to him during the gloomiest years of the German Occupation of France. Roger, who had worked for the French Underground and been captured by the Germans and sentenced to death, wrote: Nothing could have been more natural at that time, when every Frenchman was a prisoner in his own country, than to try to escape from that world of concentration camps into the vast spaces of Whit- man's universe where all is liberty and promise of happiness.3 Today, the occupation of grief and hopelessness has descended on Camden.I first visited Camden in the summer of 1975. Even then it was almost in complete decline. I had recently completed my Ph.D. at Duke University and was teaching at Texas A&M University. That year my edition of The Civil War Letters of George Washington Whitman appeared. It was the same summer that I visited Gertrude Traubel in her home at 6362 McCallum Street in Germantown, an extension of Philadelphia, where, incidentally, I was born. I'm not sure just when the Traubels moved from Camden to Germantown. It may have been shortly after Horace died in 1919. Evidently, Gertrude was born in Camden, in 1892, the year of Whitman's death. Her mother Anne Montgomerie Traubel, a beautiful woman, died in the Germantown house in 1954. On July 22, 1975, Gertrude inscribed my copy of volume 5 of her father's With Walt Whitman in Camden, which she had edited in 1964. I remember that I was driving our nearly brand new Volkswagen bus, and because the Germantown neighborhood struck me as somewhat run-down I worried about it while I sat with Miss Traubel in her front parlor.That summer I was continuing my Whitman studies, which would lead to Walt Whitman's Champion: William Douglas O'Connor (1978) and Emerson, Whitman, and the American Muse (1982). I had already met and befriended the Whitman collector Charles Feinberg, and it was he who got me an invitation to visit Gertrude Traubel (she had checked with him after I initially called for an appointment). By the time of my visit, only five volumes of the nine-volume With Walt Whitman in Camden had been published. She would edit the next one in 1982 with the help of William White, then the editor of the Walt Whitman Review. Gertrude died the following year. …

Orpheus in Manhattan: William Schuman and the Shaping of America's Musical Life (review)

Orpheus in Manhattan: William Schuman and the Shaping of America's Musical Life. By Steve Swayne. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. [xvii, 692 p. ISBN 9780195388527. $39.95.] Illustrations, notes, bibliography, composition index, index. Marking a composer's centenary year routinely invites an influx of conferences, symposia, articles, concert series, and books that illustrate the broad if not complete spectrum of an artist's work. Joseph Polisi's American Muse: Life and Times of William Schuman (New York: Amadeus Press, 2008) provides a substantial portrait of Schuman the businessman, with representative compositions accompanied by detailed analyses. In Music of William Schuman, Vincent Persichetti, and Peter Mennin: Voices of Stone and Steel (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2011), Walter Simmons profiles Schuman together with two other composers fundamentally linked to the New York music scene during the 1940s through the 1960s, and to the Juilliard School in particular: Mennin was on the composition faculty and later became Schuman's successor as president of Juilliard, while Persichetti served four decades on the composition faculty. Simmons offers substantial analyses as well as his perceptions of flaws in compositional technique, but offers only a sketch of biographical information. Steve Swayne's Orpheus in Man - hattan: William Schuman and the Shaping of America's Musical Life an objective, detailed account illustrating Schuman's roles as composer, administrator, husband, father, and friend. He has left no stone unturned when comes to the meticulousness of his research. His acknowledgments alone span seven pages, with many names readers will instantly recognize as members of our own Music Library Association, and he approached over 200 individuals, librarians, archivists, and corporate officers to obtain permissions for the book (e-mail message to me, 18 July 2011). Swayne's goal is to understand Schuman against the backdrop of the world in which he lived and moved (p. 6). The Early Years chronicles not only those events that were formative influences on Schuman's musical development, including his foray into popular song composition, also traces the immigration of Schuman's ancestors from Germany to America. As with many immigrants, pride in their adopted country held a place of high importance. account of Schuman's time at Cobbossee underscores the importance his father put on full assimilation into American life, gradually dissociating (or maybe integrating) their Jewish-German roots. Camp Cobbossee was, in short, a place for Jews that was free of Judaism. It was also a place where German-American Jewish boys could go that kept them separate from their poorer eastern European co-religionists (p. 32). Schuman's position as a major figure in arts administration may have eclipsed his work as a composer in the minds of many, but it was as a composer that Schuman wanted first and foremost to be remembered (p. 551). Music had always played a central role in his life, but the catalyst that brought Schuman from New York Uni - versity's School of Commerce (he withdrew due to poor academic performance), to music studies at Juilliard, at the Salzburg Mozarteum, and at Columbia University, and subsequently to a teaching position at Sarah Lawrence College, all within the span of approximately seven years, appears to have been his first New York Philharmonic concert (pp. 43-44). About his teaching responsibilities, Swayne points out that [i]n his first four years at Sarah Lawrence, Schuman helped to revolutionize the college's music offerings, especially in extracurricular areas. With his colleagues he started a Music Forum at which faculty and students discussed various aspects of music making, and was at a series of these forums that Schuman demonstrated his ability to play every instrument in the orchestra (p. 84). dedication Schuman exhibited when he reshaped the music department at Sarah Lawrence foreshadows the work he would do at the Juilliard School, namely, a curriculum overhaul taking the form of the Literature and Materials of Music. …

American Muse: The Life and Times of William Schuman (review)

American Muse: The Life and Times of William Schuman (review)

Magazines, Presentation Networks, and the Cultivation of Authorship in Post-Revolutionary America

Magazines, Presentation Networks, and the Cultivation of Authorship in Post-Revolutionary America Robb K. Haberman (bio) In the New York Magazine for August 1792, Richard Bingham Davis's "Elegiac Ode" appeared in the "American Muse," the periodical's poetry section.1 Although the occasion marked the work's debut in print, it was not the first time that Davis, a twenty-one year old New York City woodcarver and gilder, had submitted the piece for examination.2 A few weeks prior to publication, Davis introduced a draft, "Verses to Imagination," at a meeting of the Calliopean Society, his local literary circle. Following Davis's oratorical exercise, the assembled company both praised the merit of his performance and offered suggestions for improvement. In addition, a review committee provided written commentary before approving the work for periodical publication (Figure 1).3 Successful entry into the New York Magazine, however, did not mark the culmination of changes to either the poem's title or print status. Fifteen years after its periodical appearance, the "Elegiac Ode" reemerged as "To Imagination" in an 1807 collection of Davis' poetry. Sadly, the transition from magazine to book resulted from an earlier misfortune. During the autumn of 1799, Davis was struck down by the yellow fever epidemic then ravaging the city. His untimely demise prompted his colleagues in the Calliopean Society to collect and publish his verse as a commemorative act.4 As a work republished after a substantial interval and in a different venue, the "Elegiac Ode" exemplifies a phenomenon common to the era's periodical literature. Along with hundreds or possibly thousands of other contemporaneous compositions, Davis's poem appeared in numerous formats. This essay focuses on the multiple renderings of works to explore how magazine contributions cultivated authorial reputation in late eighteenth-century America. Citing conditions of low subscriptions, distribution difficulties, and faulty payments, most scholars thus far have viewed magazines from a [End Page 141] perspective of cultural isolation. I do the opposite, however, by conceptualizing magazines as part of what I call a presentation network to show that magazine pieces, far from being ephemeral, appeared and circulated in numerous venues, including literary societies, civic groups, anthologies, newspapers, and theaters. Magazines were thus fundamental to the development of literary culture in the post Revolutionary era.5 Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Detail from the Calliopean Society Minutes, July 10, 1792, Proceedings of Calliopean Society of New York, vol. 2. Reproduced by permission from the New-York Historical Society. To map out how presentation networks influenced authorial development, I present two case studies of aspiring literati from the early national era. In addition to examining Richard B. Davis at greater length, I look at Benjamin Bridge, a struggling lawyer from Worcester, Massachusetts. While Davis and Bridge hardly exhaust the range of possibilities for establishing presentation networks, their activities lay bare the relationship between literary presentations and authorial personae and the ways in which writing informed and reflected the character and condition of daily life. Moreover, as young unmarried men residing in the Northeast and belonging to the "middling sorts," Davis and Bridge provide an entry point for investigating the social group that formed a core community of magazine contributors. [End Page 142] Although an important outlet for establishing authorship, magazines functioned differently for Davis and Bridge. For Davis, magazines buttressed and extended an authorial reputation already grounded in his connections with New York's literary institutions. In contrast, Bridge had no such prior institutional connections, and so magazines themselves constituted the hopeful foundation for whatever literary reputation Bridge might achieve. Exploring how writers like Davis and Bridge developed a literary presence through multiple presentations opens new possibilities for interpreting the social and cultural functions of print, orality, and manuscript in the late eighteenth century. Thus far, the scholarship on this topic has paid insufficient attention to the ways that presentation networks influenced how individuals and groups accessed different communications modes. It has also neglected to account fully for the myriad interactions and intersections that occurred among media formats. Consequently, the scholarship on communications tends to assign a given set of collective values, assumptions, and practices to a literary work based on...

Serendipity in the Theater: Maude Adams as James M. Barrie's American Muse

ABSTRACTA special niche in theatre history is addressed to begin to fill a void in the contemporary creativity literature. The present essay focuses on Maude Adams and James M. Barrie in an attempt to demonstrate that, serendipitously, Adams initially impacted Barrie's creative process, and thereafter became his platonic source of inspiration for the plays he created for her, meriting the belated title of muse. Set change theory is underscored as a plausible cognitive explanation for Barrie's illumination. The psychoanalytic theory of transference is proposed as an underlying mechanism for facilitating the change of mental set during the incubation stage. A brief discussion on a selective theoretical integration from the fields of cognitive psychology, psychoanalysis, and neuroscience is followed by conclusions.

American Muse: Anthropological Excursions into Art and Aesthetics:American Muse: Anthropological Excursions into Art and Aesthetics.

American Muse: Anthropological Excursions into Art and Aesthetics. Richard L. Anderson. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2000. 235 pp.

American Muse: Anthropological Excursions into Art and Aesthetics. Richard L. Anderson

<i>American Muse: Anthropological Excursions into Art and Aesthetics</i>. Richard L. Anderson

Book Review: American Muse: Anthropological Excursions into Art and Aesthetics

Book Review: American Muse: Anthropological Excursions into Art and Aesthetics

American Muse: Anthropological Excursions into Art and Aesthetics

1. Introduction. 2. The Role of Art in Americans' Lives: Three Vignettes. 3. Weddings: Art in an American Rite of Passage. 4. Art's Cultural Significance. 5. Who Put the Bomp in the Bomp, Bomp?: What American Music Says about American Arts. 6. The Artist's World. 7. The Artist. 8. Art and the Inner World. 9. Art and Society. 10. Vernacular Aesthetics. 11. Calliope in America. References.

Thoreau's Psychology

John Hildebilde. Thoreau: A Naturalist's Liberty. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983. 174 + viii pp. Samuel Arthur Jones. Thoreau Amongst Friends and Philistines and Other Thoreauviana. Edited by George Hendrick. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1982. 241 + xxvi pp. Richard Lebeaux. Thoreau's Seasons. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1984.410 + xviii pp. Jerome Loving. Emerson, Whitman, and the American Muse. Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 1982. 220 + xii pp. Henry D. Thoreau. The Illustrated A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. With Photographs from the Gleason Collection. Edited by Carle F. Hovde, William L. Howarth, and Elizabeth Hall Witherell. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983.415 + xxxvi pp. In his chapter in Walden called "Reading," Thoreau comments: "To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will tax the reader more than any exercise which the customs of the day esteem."1 Whether he would have been gratified by the plethora of critical studies of his own work, however, is another question. Since Thoreau is now a cultural as well as a literary figure, critics of recent years have not been reluctant to offer new interpretations of his life and thought in the light of changing critical fashions. A look at the evolution of fairly recent criticism on Thoreau will bring us to the books that are the subject of this review. Ten years ago much of this criticism either viewed Thoreau as a Transcendentalist or simply related his philosophy to the landscape he described so well. In Thoreau and Whitman: A Study of their Esthetics (1968), Charles R. Metzger explored links with both Whitman and Emerson, a technique used by many of the older Thoreau critics and recently found in Jerome Loving's Emerson, Whitman, and the American Muse, a book I cannot recommend because of its confusing organization and lack of attention to any single figure. The romantic Thoreau, the writer who found unity between thought and landscape, is well presented in James Mcintosh's Thoreau as Romantic Naturalist: His Shifting Stance Toward Nature (1974). Recent criticism of Thoreau tends to be psychologically oriented, though the more conventional biographers still prefer to view the Journals as representations of a fairly stable inner life.

Reviews

Journal Article Reviews Get access Emerson, Whitman, and the American Muse . By JEROME LOVING . Pp. xii + 220 . Chapel Hill and London : University of North Carolina Press , 1982 . DAVID SEED DAVID SEED Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Notes and Queries, Volume 31, Issue 2, June 1984, Pages 284–285, https://doi.org/10.1093/nq/31-2-284 Published: 01 June 1984

Loving, Jerome. Emerson, Whitman, and the American Muse [review

Loving, Jerome. Emerson, Whitman, and the American Muse [review

Emerson, Whitman, and the American Muse

Loving finds in the lives and works of the two writers a symbiosis of spirit that transcends the question of literary influence. Tracing the parallel careers of Emerson and Whitman, the author shows how each served his literary apprenticeship, moved beyond his vocation, prospered, and, finally, declined in his literary achievements. In both cases, Loving follows his subject from vision to wisdom and, along the way, examines the aspects of the relationship that have aroused controversy. Originally published in 1982. A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

Emerson, Whitman, and the American Muse.

Emerson, Whitman, and the American Muse.

Emerson, Whitman, and the American Muse

Emerson, Whitman, and the American Muse

The New American Muse: Notes on the Amusement/Theme Park

The New American Muse: Notes on the Amusement/Theme Park

Symphony No. 10: American Muse

Symphony No. 10: American Muse

The Modern American Muse: A Complete Bibliography of American Verse, 1900-1925.

The Modern American Muse: A Complete Bibliography of American Verse, 1900-1925.