Horace Traubel Research Articles

Fellowship Dinners and The Armory Show

This essay contextualizes and analyzes two previously unrecorded letters from the artist Robert Henri to Horace Traubel. Dating to 1909 and 1913, they broaden what is known about Henri’s relationship with both Whitman and Traubel’s Whitman Fellowship, as well as Traubel’s response to modern art. Building on the work of Ruth Bohan, this essay forwards new insights into Henri’s relationship with Traubel and expands our understanding of Whitman’s influence on Henri’s teaching. Henri was devoted to Whitman. Knowing this, Horace Traubel hoped to bring Henri further into the fellowship Dinners, but this essay finds Henri repeatedly declined to attend and speak and used his classroom instead as the outlet for his Whitman lectures.@font-face{font-family:"Cambria Math";panose-1:2 4 5 3 5 4 6 3 2 4;mso-font-charset:0;mso-generic-font-family:roman;mso-font-pitch:variable;mso-font-signature:-536870145 1107305727 0 0 415 0;}@font-face{font-family:Calibri;panose-1:2 15 5 2 2 2 4 3 2 4;mso-font-charset:0;mso-generic-font-family:swiss;mso-font-pitch:variable;mso-font-signature:-536859905 -1073732485 9 0 511 0;}p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal{mso-style-unhide:no;mso-style-qformat:yes;mso-style-parent:"";margin:0in;mso-pagination:widow-orphan;font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif;mso-fareast-font-family:Calibri;mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-latin;mso-font-kerning:1.0pt;mso-ligatures:standardcontextual;}.MsoChpDefault{mso-style-type:export-only;mso-default-props:yes;mso-fareast-font-family:Calibri;mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-latin;}div.WordSection1{page:WordSection1;}

An Independent Scholar during the Pandemic

An Independent Scholar during the Pandemic

«Американский поэт всегда ищет Бога, но не всегда находит его»: лекция Джорджа Сильвестра Вирека «Америка – земля поэтов» (1911)

The beginning of the American Poetic Renaissance is considered to be 1912: the Imagists, Poetry magazine, the new generation of poets — Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Edna St. Vincent Millay, etc. This phenomenon keeps attracting a lot of attention of literary critics, meanwhile the previous two decades of American poetry fell out of sight of both readers and scholars. However it would be wrong to assume that there were no noteworthy poets and poems in America after Whitman’s death and before the debuts of Pound and Eliot. How did the American poets themselves evaluate “the current moment”? George Viereck’s lecture “America as a Land of Poets” delivered in 1911 at the University of Berlin can give an idea. George Sylvester Viereck (1884–1962), an outstanding poet, critic and editor, speaking of the “undiscovered, esoteric America, where religion and poetry dwell,” divided American poets into four groups. In the first one there are Whitman's heirs, nativists and democrats, singers of labor and comradeship, like Horace Traubel and Edwin Markham. Next, there are heirs of Poe, aristocrats and esthetes, masters of style, like George Santayana and William Vaughn Moody. The third group unites heirs of Longfellow, traditional and conservative authors, like Henry Van Dyke and Richard Watson Gilder. Finally, there are “lyrical rebels,” combining the legacy of Poe and Whitman and that of Swinburne and Baudelaire. Vireck included himself and the majority of young poets from the anthology The Younger Choir (1910) to the fourth group. This paper includes the full Russian translation of the lecture in Viereck’s English presentation.

Walt Whitman and the Washingtonian Temperance Movement

Walt Whitman and the Washingtonian Temperance Movement Maire Mullins (bio) "But stop—thought I to myself, my eyes being caught by the sight of my own soiled and tattered garments—am I a fit person for the company of well-dressed and cleanly people? What excuse should I make?" -Franklin Evans "I know about such men." -Louisa Van Velsor Whitman In November 1842, Whitman published Franklin Evans, or The Inebriate: A Tale of the Times as a newspaper supplement of the New World.1 Whitman was twenty-three years old when the novel appeared. Forty-five years later, he told his literary biographer, Horace Traubel, "'in three days of constant work I finished the book. Finished the book? Finished myself. It was damned rot—rot of the worst sort—not insincere, perhaps, but rot, nevertheless; it was not the business for me to be up to. I stopped right there: I never cut a chip off that kind of timber again.'"2 Critics have interpreted this remark in various ways, but mostly they agree with Whitman that Franklin Evans is not his best work: "While Franklin Evans is hardly as formulaic or predictably moralistic as most critics have asserted, it is without doubt a 'wobbly' text," Christopher Castiglia and Glenn Hendler note. Betsy Erkkila and Michael Moon see the temperance movement's strong influence on Whitman's conception of his reading public; Michael Warner notes that Whitman's temperance-informed newspaper readers shaped his writing.3 While Erkkila, Moon, Warner, and others have offered insightful readings of Franklin Evans, the importance [End Page 477] of the Washingtonian Temperance Movement as a formative influence on Franklin Evans merits expanded scrutiny. Most notably, Franklin Evans includes several episodes that feature the Washingtonian Temperance Movement's approach to alcoholism, especially its emphasis on confession, compassion, and moral suasion rather than evangelical conversion. The Washingtonian meetings assembled a receptive audience familiar with the plight of alcoholism and ready to hear sufferers' autobiographical speeches. The gatherings' atmosphere of support and nonjudgmental listening provided a platform for communal and individual healing. While Whitman incorporated this emphasis on confession in his novel, he also reshaped it. In several fractured, vexed scenes, the confessional moment's initial promise is followed by its failure. Evans recounts the loss of his job and his first marriage, but in both cases, he cannot articulate fully how his behavior implicates him in these catastrophes. His thoughts about the listeners' responses corrode his ability to confess fully, distracting him from discerning his culpability. Later (in chapter ten), Evans remembers a friend who develops the habit of drinking every day. The ensuing harsh reaction of family members, Evans reveals, is partly responsible for his friend's despairing death. This scene serves as a contrast to the receptiveness that a Washingtonian audience would have offered. While temperance was the motivating factor for Whitman's novel, it was the attitude of the Washingtonians toward the alcoholic that influenced many scenes in the narrative. Whitman's interest in temperance was part of American society's overarching concern with healthy daily habits. In the 1820s and 1830s, temperance societies allowed moderate drinking, but the Washingtonians rejected this approach. Whitman examines these differing views toward alcohol as he portrays the fates of two farmers: one in Franklin Evans who starts out as a moderate drinker, [End Page 478] and the other in the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass who abstains completely. Whitman shows how habit can lead to a life of dissipation or a life of fulfillment. Franklin Evans serves as a prototypical young urban male uprooted from his rural community, whose loneliness drives him to seek companionship in beer halls. Over time, Evans succumbs to drinking culture's negative influence, as Whitman underscores the Washingtonian emphasis on abstinence. Overall, the novel stresses the importance of cultivating beneficial habits, a theme Whitman explores a decade later in two longer prose pieces, "Life and Adventures of Jack Engle: An Auto-Biography" (1852) and "Manly Health and Training, With Off-hand Hints Toward Their Conditions" (1858).4 One of the distinguishing characteristics of the Washingtonian temperance movement was its focus on the working-class alcoholic. This emphasis especially appealed to...

Inventing Late Whitman

Inventing Late Whitman Anton Vander Zee (bio) In the December 1887 issue of the Century Illustrated Monthly, Walt Whitman published “Twilight,” a poem whose three lines dissipate into hazy, familiar sentiments: The soft, voluptuous opiate-shades, The sun just gone, the eager light dispelled— (I too will soon be gone, dispelled), A haze—nirvana—rest and night—oblivion.1 These lines might seem the mere old-age jottings of a poet who, to borrow Roger Asselineau’s memorable formulation, “could only repeat weakly what he had formerly proclaimed in a stentorian voice.”2 Whitman had elsewhere figured death—that “low and delicious word,” the “fierce old mother,” those “coffins all”—more memorably.3 But Whitman’s “Twilight” holds a strangeness, even a subtle force, that comes into focus the longer one lingers in its shadows. We enter the poem peering through the opiate-shades of that opening line, its ten soft syllables eliding into a gliding iambic tetrameter. As we arrive at the final dashed line, simultaneously halting and fluid, Whitman delivers an expansive alexandrine, each foot save for that final falling beat receiving a stress that gently unfolds the aurally [End Page 641] contracted first line. This metrical progression represents a formal scattering—or, to deploy the poem’s governing trope, dispelling—that echoes the poem’s investments in both literal and figurative twilights. That middle line, however, exhibits decidedly less attention to form. Here, a plodding pentameter line gives way to a parenthetical aside, casually clinging to iambs, that disrupts the poem’s otherwise finely modulated metrics and betrays the elderly Whitman’s reluctance to let even a cliché speak for itself. And yet something in this line holds us—seems not only strange, but estranging. We sense this estrangement in how the second line’s parenthetical deftly recalls and melds two Whitmanian master-tropes: the ritual gesture of leave-taking on the one hand and the claim of transpersonal identification on the other. Whitman’s recurring valedictory gesture most often involves a promise to return even as the poet confidently faces what is beyond. “I stop somewhere, waiting for you,” Whitman tells his readers at the end of “Song of Myself.” “Remember my words, I may again return,” he instructs in “So Long!” Whitman is, so often, like the “Unseen Buds” in the eponymous late poem, “waiting ever more.”4 This promise lends his effort to forge powerful, often intimate, connections with his readers its transtemporal reach, a trope so beautifully rendered in his insistence that “distance avails not” in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.”5 Rather than merely recycle these moves in “Twilight,” however, Whitman, modeling an intricate poetics of reprise that recurs across the late work, recalls their accrued poetic freight even as he renounces them: the illuminating hope itself appears as an illusion that, like the poem’s fading sun, must be dispelled. And what a strange way to use dispel. According to Webster’s original definition, to dispel is to scatter, to disperse, to dissipate; one dispels darkness and gloom, fears and doubts.6 But here, Whitman dispels that “eager light,” and, with it, the poetic faith it represents. The distance avails. What, then, was Whitman up to? [End Page 642] Whitman’s disciples—those steadfast devotees who congregated around the poet in his old age and did so much to defend and champion their bard—did not earnestly ask this question. When they learned that the poet decided to end “Twilight” on that note, they objected, suggesting that “oblivion” too blatantly contradicted Whitman’s enduring faith. As Horace Traubel records in With Walt Whitman in Camden—published 1906–96, much of it posthumously, his voluminous account of near-daily interactions with the poet in his final years—Whitman’s response was unyielding: “I do not feel it to be necessary to fight for my words—I use them and let them go and that’s an end on’t.”7 His curt response was also incisive, revealing the supple formal intelligence that he developed in his late work while the dynamic drift and debris of themes and images collected across a career filtered through increasingly clipped lines and contracted lyric spaces: “But oblivion as...

Walt Whitman's Selected Journalism. Ed. Douglas A. Noverr and Jason Stacy [review

Whitman's Selected Journalism. Ed. Douglas A. Noverr and Jason Stacy. Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press, 2014. xxxvi + 281 pp.Looking back on the numerous editions of Leaves of Grass, exclaimed to his friend Horace Traubel in 1889, Editions! Editions! Like the last extra of a newspaper: an extra after an extra: one issue after another. poet's analogy effectively captures not only the iterative nature of the book's publication-his on-going attempt to fit his body of work to his particular historical moment-but it also points to the considerable influence Whitman's early experience writing for the antebellum press had on his life and writing. As Douglass A. Noverr and Jason Stacy's welcome new volume Whitman's Selected Journalism reminds us, was a prolific writer well before the publication of Leaves of Grass in 1855. This outstanding collection, covering writing from 1839 to 1865, demonstrates that far from representing a radical departure from his early journalism, Whitman's poetry in many ways expands on ideas and issues that had interested him for many years, offering him another way of expressing his sentiments and forging connections with his readers. editors have organized the material thematically into four sections: Democracy and Politics, Moral Suasion, The Arts, and Come Closer to Me. Each features selections ordered chronologically, and, as the headings indicate, treat both the subject matter or, in the case of the final section, the style of the poet's journalism. In their introduction to the volume, Noverr and Stacy not only trace the ups and downs of Whitman's early career as a writer and editor, but they also provide an overview of the twentieth-century publication history of and scholarship on Whitman's journalism, providing helpful context for this latest collection.The selections in the first section present a picture of the roughand-tumble political world the young inhabited, the local and national controversies that fueled his journalism and that in some cases, as with the Wilmot Proviso, presaged the Civil War to come. Noverr and Stacy provide important context and thoughtful analysis for these pieces, particularly those responding to people and disputes that may now be long forgotten. In doing so, the editors also effectively address the disturbing nativist rhetoric of some of the poet's earliest journalism, without dismissing it. In their discussion of Whitman's editorials criticizing a push to fund Catholic schools in the early 1840s, for example, the editors note, though claimed to be a universalist against religious bigotry, he was also a proponent of cultural assimilation, and that in some of his early editorials, used terms that make us cringe today. portrait of that emerges from these early works is complex and at times troubling; however, later selections demonstrate the emergence of the poet's more inclusive democratic vision as the years passed.Indeed, one of the primary strengths of this collection is the opportunity it provides for exploring the relationship between the more familiar Walt Whitman of Leaves of Grass and the Walter Whitman of such papers as the Brooklyn Daily Eagle or the New York Aurora. Whitman's enthusiasm regarding the laying of the first trans-Atlantic telegraph cable, for example, expressed in a series of editorials in August 1858 and collected in the Moral Suasion section, reflects the poet's fascination with technology and its ability to connect people, and the series foreshadows his celebration of these topics in numerous poems. In The Cable Laid! …

Incalculable, Unaccountable, Indivisible? Walt Whitman's Lessons in Arithmetic

I heartily advise you to peg away at the arithmetic-do something at it every day-arithmetic is the foundation of all such things-(just as a good stone wall is the foundation for a house)- become a good arithmetician first of all--Whitman to Pete Doyle1As surprising as it might seem to some, Walt Whitman was once a math teacher. The proto-hippie with his flowing beard and saggy pants, so proudly singing of infinites and things beyond measure, at one point stood in front of a crowded roomful of students in a stuffy Long Island schoolhouse and discussed multiplication tables, long division and subtraction rules. And he was passionate about it, too2-a passion he carried forward into Leaves of Grass and inscribed into virtually every page of his poetic corpus.Over the course of Whitman's poetic life, arithmetic in Leaves did not remain a static symbol but changed alongside the poet's project. Embraced for its radical language of equality, the science of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division quickly became a metaphoric staple in Whitman's poetic assembling and disassembling of nature into temporary aggregates and complex particulars. Still, with the dawning of the Civil War, Whitman observed the mathematical principles he employed as a lyrical elevation of life, turn into a practical devaluation of it-a turning into numbers of bodies, that could then easily be calculated away as long as the overall equation was favorable. What Whitman the educator embraced and Whitman the celebrated, the Good Grey Poet schooled by fratricidal conflict had to reign back in. The following pages will follow this development from early traces of mathematical thought in Whitman to its inception as a poetic-political program in the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass and its subsequent reevaluation in the context of the Civil War.While grounded in a historical reading of Whitman's text, this essay then also echoes and corresponds to an emerging critical discourse on the intersections of art and mathematics3-especially in German media theory following the publication of Friedrich Kittler's post-structuralist magnum opus Musik und Mathematik, which media-archeologically tries to rethink the epistemological walls that today separate letter, sound, and number. While Kittler himself dives deep into a Homeric past to stake his claims, the nineteenth century-and especially Whitman's democratic epic-seem like a prime entry point to considering these seemingly divergent scribal and logical systems together. Growing out of a soil saturated with New England's transcendental idealism, the mid-1800s saw number and letter suddenly rediscovering their kinship. Calculations are works of taste in the same manner as the productions in music and for instance a 1840s article in a musical journal states, though it may be also true that they are more often applied than music or poetry to what are commonly called purposes.4 Whitman, all about useful poetry, would take up the challenge suggested by such a claim and (re)construct a rigorous arithmetic in and out of language that even by today's standard has lost little of its radicalism. And it all began with Whitman's own, hands-on experience with mathematics: in school.Arithmetic of YouthWhile Walter Whitman's time as a small-town schoolteacher (18361841) was by any stretch of the imagination just a temporary solution to help the ambitious young man through a financial rough patch, he did apparently show an honest interest in the well-being of his pupils as well as employ some rather unorthodox teaching methods-one of them being the daily practice of mental arithmetic. In those days, as Bernstein Freedman observes, this practice was evidently a procedure strange enough to warrant special comment when Whitman's former students were interviewed by Whitman' disciples (in this case Horace Traubel) many years later (Freedman 29).In this regard, Whitman seems at least partially indebted to the set of educational practices he had experienced as a student himself. …

Harris, Kirsten. Walt Whitman and British Socialism: "The Love of Comrades" [review

Kirsten Harris. Walt and British Socialism: The Love of Comrades. New York: Routledge, 2016. ix + 219 pp.In the late 1880s, when he began visiting Walt daily and writing up their conversations, Horace Traubel also commenced a campaign to make the poet confess that he was a socialist at heart. Patiently, the young radical would watch for an opportunity to make a political thrust; inevitably, the canny old man would parry. Do you have any sympathy for . . . socialism? Traubel asked bluntly at one point. Lots of it-lots-lots, replied. Too much is made of property, here, now, in our noisy, bragging civilization-too little of men. Traubel persisted: But about their political program- how about that? Of that I'm not so sure, told him. rather rebel. I am with them in the result-that's about all I can say. Expressions of general sympathy for people over property were the most Traubel was able to extract from Whitman; the young man acknowledged that as far as was concerned, individualism deservedly carries the day.Despite his profound and frequently expressed skepticism about socialist political activity, for roughly two decades, beginning in the 1880s, Walt was revered among British socialists. One of the most interesting questions in the history of Whitman's international reception is how a Free Soil Democrat became a patron saint of British socialism. Kirsten Harris's Walt and British Socialism is the first book-length response to that question. Employing deep scholarship and flexible, sensitive interpretations of literary and political discourse, Harris makes an important contribution to transnational studies.Harris's lengthy introduction serves as a valuable primer on late-nineteenth-century British socialism. Henry Pierson's tripartite division of the of this period into Marxist, Fabian, and ethical strands, laid out in two influential books published in the 1970s, has dominated understanding of the period. Drawing on recent revisionist accounts, Harris rejects that neat division. She turns to Edward Carpenter's concept of the larger socialism as a useful way of understanding the diverse socialist movements of the era. Socialism overlapped not only with trade unions but with the women's rights movement and local cycling clubs; it drew in workers, artists, vegetarians, and spiritual seekers. Within the heady atmosphere of what socialist editor Robert Blatchford called the new religion of socialism, Whitman's politically vague but emotionally stirring appeals to fellowship made him particularly useful during this multi-faceted early phase. As Harris notes, Able to accommodate overlapping and competing ideas, could speak powerfully to a movement . . . fiercely debating what it was and how it should develop (8-9).The book's first two chapters are on Edward Carpenter and the group of Whitmanites in Bolton, England, known as the Eagle Street College. Harris has dug deeply into the archives, and she offers novel perspectives on these now-familiar figures. Critical conceptions of the relationship of Carpenter's Towards Democracy to Leaves of Grass solidified almost from the moment of the first edition's publication in 1883, when Edward Aveling in an influential review proclaimed Carpenter to be the English Walt Whitman. Aveling intended the label as a compliment, but a similar, widely publicized remark by Havelock Ellis was more critical: when a friend showed Towards Democracy to Ellis at a socialist political gathering in London, he handed it back with the dismissive comment, Whitman and water. Ellis later recanted his hasty judgment, and many British socialists regarded Towards Democracy as a worthy companion-volume to Leaves of Grass.By the time of Carpenter's death in 1929, his poetry had been largely forgotten. It was revived in the 1970s by critics interested in the history of homosexuality, scholars among them. …

Introduction to Walt Whitman's "Manly Health and Training"

NOTWITHSTANDING NEARLY EVERYTHING he ever said in poetry, Walt Whitman could be surprisingly anxious about his own day I'll die, he reminded his friend and literary executor Horace Traubel, maybe surprise you all by a disappearance: then where'll my book be? That's the one thing that excites me: most authors have the same dread-the dread that something or other essential that they have written may somehow become side-tracked, lost-lost forever.1 As it turned out, much of his writing was indeed lost, despite his talent for self-bibliography and the efforts of generations of scholars sort through Whitman's mountains of personal papers. He simply wrote too much. Some of his texts bound sink from sight-with Whitman occasionally trying scuttle them himself, anxieties be damned. His early short stories, for example, embarrassed him dreadfully: My serious wish, he confessed in Specimen Days and Collect (1882), were have all those crude and boyish pieces quietly dropp'd in oblivion. In the end, Whitman collected a few of them merely to avoid the annoyance of their surreptitious issue.2 Other early writings less persistently annoying, and thus less fortunate. Whitman's mid-life journalism and freelance writings particularly unfortunate in this regard. Published shortly after the inception of Leaves of Grass (from 1855 1860 or so), usually anonymously or under pen names, much of this work fell into almost total obscurity immediately after the poet's sudden disappearance. It has so far required more than a century and a half of work, with Whitman's own encouragement-Missing me one place search another-to recover his mid-life prose publications.3 The earliest such find of which I am aware is Whitman's anonymous York series (1856). It was forgotten for eighty years in the pages of Fowler and Wells' Life Illustrated magazine until Emory Holloway and Ralph Adimari uncovered it in 1936.4 Another notable discovery was Whitman's Paumanok correspondence, a wide-ranging trio of letters the editor of the Washington, D.C., National Era (1850), finally republished by Rollo G. Silver in 1948.5 Then there is the complete series of Whitman's Letters from a Travelling Bachelor, which appeared in the New York Sunday Dispatch in 1849-1850 before disappearing from memory, until Joseph J. Rubin rediscovered and published them in 1973.6 The list goes on and on.7 All told, scholars have easily rediscovered more than one hundred thousand words of Whitmanian journalism, which vague figure I am happy add a further forty-seven thousand in the form of Manly and Training (1858), Whitman's forgotten, book-length guide living healthily in America.During his lifetime, the poet seems have wasted no time reminding anyone of this series, nor any of the others listed above-and, given Whitman's horror of disappearance, we might ask why. It is possible that Whitman simply forgot about his articles, though I doubt it. Perhaps it is because these recovered works tend toward the editorial, interesting as often as not for how un-Whitmanian, even unpoetic, they can be.8 Or perhaps they did not, in Whitman's estimate, dovetail properly with the political scope or poetic philosophy of Leaves of Grass. Both York and Letters from a Travelling Bachelor, for instance, are geographically narrower, addressed one specific region rather than a teeming nation of nations.9 And tonally, the Paumanok letters are too overtly aggressive and political, favoring, as the Dissected series does, the topical over the eternal. Manly and Training is a similarly square peg. Though every bit as concrete and optimistic as Leaves, the Manly Health series' function is fundamentally utilitarian, a physiological and political document rooted in the (pseudo)sciences of the era. These fields, phrenology and eugenics especially, inspired a surprising amount of Whitman's poetic and political thought, as scholars such as Harold Aspiz and M. …

“It might be us speaking instead of him!”: Individuality, Collaboration, and the Networked Forces Contributing to “Whitman”

HABITUALLY ENLISTING FRIENDS as he navigated the complex media landscape of his time, was anything but the author as solitary genius. In the years since Gay Wilson Allen's biography The Solitary Singer and the steadfastly author-centered edition of The Collected Writings of Allen helped compile, postmodern theory and digital technology have both contributed to a gravitational shift away from the sole author to a greater appreciation of networked forces. If scholars once strove to discover the true we now are more inclined to recognize how we both find and create Whitman, adhering to the records of the past even as we inflect them with our own personal and cultural preoccupations. In our era, is emerging less as the sole creator of his various publications than as an extraordinary writer engaged in innumerable collaborative acts. Throughout his career shaped the initial reception of his key writings, most famously in 1855 when he acted in concert with his journalistic friends to seed the world with three anonymous reviews of the first Leaves of Grass.1 turned again to his associates in the newspaper business to influence his reception in 1859, with the appearance of Child's Reminiscence (ultimately titled Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking) and the exchange of reviews he apparently orchestrated between the New York Saturday Press and the Cincinnati Commercial;2 in 1875, he took a slightly different tack, again with the Cincinnati Commercial by placing selections of the soon-to-be-published Memoranda During the War in the newspaper (an arrangement marked Private in Whitman's letter to the editor).3This essay establishes that he also jump-started the critical conversation about the 1881 Leaves of Grass by contributing to the first known review of that edition: 'Leaves of Grass'. The Complete Poems of Whitman. As Published by a Famous Boston House. A Friendly Characterization of the Poet's Work, Boston Sunday Herald (October 30, 1881: 3). In what follows, we discuss Whitman's collaborations with his friend Sylvester of the Herald and also two key contexts: first, Edmund Clarence Stedman's essay Walt Whitman (Scribner's Monthly, November 1880) and, second, the correspondence between and Thomas W. H. Rolleston, an Irishman living at this time in Germany.Baxter was a long-time employee of the Herald, a versifier who published two books of poetry, an urban planner in the Boston area, and, later in life, author of a book on Spanish colonial architecture in Mexico. He had first come to know when the poet visited Boston to give one of his lectures on Abraham Lincoln on April 15, 1881. published an unsigned piece for the Herald on April 18, Walt Whitman. His Second Visit to the New England Metropolis, praising and taking issue with Stedman's important essay.4 When the poet decided to return to Boston that autumn to oversee printing of the 1881 edition, he asked to help him find a plain boardinghouse or good furnished room.5 In a short period of time, then, and had become friends and regarded him then and later as a key ally as he made clear to Horace Traubel: certainly, Horace, Sylvester is our man-I am sure of it- ain't you?-he belongs to us, we to him.6 On another occasion he described the rapidity of their developing friendship: Baxter jumped right in: was enthusiastic from the start-was what they have called a Whitmaniac.7One day after the appearance of the Sunday Herald review, sent a letter to Baxter, responding with thanks & love for his fervid and stirring criticism.8 He did not mention his own help with the review. However, a manuscript in the Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Library of Congress, suggests that had provided with draft language (see Figure 1) and perhaps further instructions.9Whitman followed a similar pattern a year later: his October 8, 1882 letter provided with a paragraph for a review of Specimen Days. …

Schmidgall, Gary. Containing Multitudes: Walt Whitman and the British Literary Tradition [review

Schmidgall, Gary. Containing Multitudes: Walt Whitman and the British Literary Tradition. New York: Oxford University Press. 386 pp.Gary Schmidgall's ambitious study provides the most thoroughgoing treatment yet of Walt Whitman's relationship to British literary predecessors, primarily poets. Other Anglophone writers, including Whitman's compatriots William Cullen Bryant, Edgar Allan Poe, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Fanny Fern were closer at hand, but Schmidgall implies (by making them outside the pale) that they were less engaging and less pressing. Highlighting the potent force of British writing in the nineteenth-century U.S., Schmidgall devotes chapter each to connections between Whitman and William Shakespeare, John Milton, Robert Burns, William Blake, and William Wordsworth and then treats more briefly group Whitman called other big fellows: Walter Scott, Thomas Carlyle, Oscar Wilde, Algernon Swinburne, and Alfred Tennyson. Like Harold Bloom, Schmidgall is ultimately interested in Whitman's gymnast's struggle with strong predecessors. He also makes the shrewd observation that Whitman no other poet's works as intensely as he read, reread, and revised his (xx).Schmidgall observes that an effort to tie Whitman umbilically to the British literary tradition is bound to seem contradictory and counterintuitive project-a fool's errand (xiii). But that's only if one takes Whitman at face value, as many have. The inspiration for Leaves of Grass, Whitman often claimed, came not from other writers but from first-hand experience. In an unpublished manuscript, probably drafted prior to 1855, Whitman insisted there is something better than any and all books, and that is the real stuff whereof they are the artificial transcript and portraiture (NUPM 1: 188). He even audaciously declared that his own book functioned differently than others, that Leaves of Grass provided unfiltered experience itself: You shall possess the good of the earth and sun rather than spectres in books. Yet at other times-especially late in life-Whitman was more candid about the importance of reading to his writings. In conversation with Horace Traubel recounted in With Walt Whitman in Camden, he discussed the minor poet John Sterling, friend of Thomas Carlyle:It is interesting-even odd-how many things come into, stay in, man's mind which he cannot account for! Then they would pop up after awhile, a man thinking he owned them himself. ... What strange make-up of beginnings and ending and appropriations we are! (WWWC 3:119)For Whitman, poet who often minimized his learning and sometimes posed as being rude, uncouth, and vulgar, one goal was to benefit from reading without appearing pedantic or derivative. He read voraciously and unpredictably, and as poet he rarely seems imitative because of his extraordinary mixture of registers. Whitman owed lot to British literary giants, though, as Containing Multitudes demonstrates so thoroughly. Especially enlightening is Schmidgall's ability to establish affinities between Whitman and Milton, highly learned and allusive poet. Throughout the book Schmidgall is perceptive (and at times delightfully witty) in his comments on Whitman in connection with Wordsworth, Tennyson, and, of course, Shakespeare-the focus of one of his most extended discussions.Containing Multitudes is provocative in the best way, prompting questions that go beyond its scope. …

Marsh, John. In Walt We Trust: How a Queer Socialist Poet Can Save America From Itself [review

JOHN MARSH, In Walt We Trust: How Queer Socialist Poet Can Save America From Itself. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2015. 248 pp.In the late pages of In Walt We Trust-a lively and incisive appeal to revisit our national (queer and socialist!) poet in light of the crises facing American today-John Marsh poses the vital ques- tion: kind of person would you be if you read poetry? (203). answer for Marsh is that any careful reader of his poetry could become ideal democratic citizen (203). After all, it was who, while engaging the gravest threats to nineteenth century (slavery, war, and monopoly), staked the future of the republic and Leaves of Grass on the cultivation of strong and inventive readers. Now, in 2015, confronted the largest gap between wealthy and poor citizens since era, those future Americans have justifiably lost faith in polity paralyzed by corporate influence, financial trusts, and the dogged culture wars. Weaving personal anecdotes biography, literary analysis, and political philosophy, Marsh turns Leaves of Grass into self-help guide for our New Gilded Age, complete lessons on to die, to have better sex, what to do money, and how to survive our fetid democracy by becoming better people and readers (16).These themes, spanning thoughts on mortality, economy, love, and governance, structure the book's four chapters. Marsh provides instructive context in each through first-person accounts of his pilgrimages, Leaves of Grass in hand, to variety of Whitman-related sites. He hops the ferry from Brooklyn, seeking contact the hereafter; he roams Occupy Wall Street, reflecting on work and money. In Pennsylvania strip club, he questions America's lingering shame sexual desire. While in Washington, D.C., he visits former Civil War hospitals and recreates the scenes of communion forged soldiers amid national fratricide. And Marsh's conversion to Whitmanism is as personal as it is political. Once young fire-breathing socialist, Marsh confesses to have fallen on the tenure track (22). A disaffected professor, self-medicating alcohol and harboring doubts about the meaning of life and the purpose of our country, he weds personal crisis to national calamity, testament to how the disciple has absorbed his master (11).Indeed, Marsh is an insightful guide to poetry. At the outset, he masterfully parses the opening lines of Song of Myself, exhibiting the passage as the crux of poetics: from his sense of human divinity and scientific inspiration to his faith in death-lessness and direct address to readers. situates the abstract ideas of life and death in the atomic matter redistributed eternally across time, space, and bodies. If every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you, Marsh claims, then our identities are likewise equal and interchangeable (79), and Whitman, affirming egalitarianism through natural law, proves that we inhabit a socialist universe, not capitalist one (60). At this moment, I was reminded of Horace Traubel in Camden relentlessly prodding the elderly on the question of socialism. Traubel, who galvanized generation of American radicals under the banner of the Walt Fellowship, also published dozens of articles in his Conservator that are in the vein of Marsh's work-essays like Whitman and Socialism, Whitman's Significance to the Revolutionist, and The Propaganda is Whitman. All could duly serve as subtitles to In Walt We Trust, which is steeped in Traubel's inheritance. Marsh, like Traubel, finally consents to nimble evasions, deciding he was with the socialists in the result (107).The book's most rewarding section, to my mind, begins Marsh trailing presence around Zuccotti Park, the site of the 2011 Occupy Wall Street protests. …

"Anything honest to sell books": Walt Whitman and the Autograph Monster

Walt Whitman claimEd to have rigid rule for dealing with requests, but towards end of his life he had become well known among contemporaries for his cautious approach to swarming signature seekers.1 During mid-nineteenth centur y, persistence of what Whitman called autograph monster-a growing number of men and women who begged and often lied their way to signatures from nation's leading poets and novelists-signaled America's rapidly increasing appetite for collecting and consuming celebrity personalities (WWWC, 3:496). For Whitman, this monster was simply a fact of life. Not a day but hunter is on my trail-chases me, dogs me! . . . Their subterfuges, deceptions, hypocrisies, are curious, nasty, yes damnable, W hitman complained to Horace Traubel. No request was to be met naively; even a letter from a young girl could bear the grin of deceiver, old subterfuge poet often met with a laugh (WWWC, 2:82-83; 3:410-411).2 Monsters were everywhere.Whitman's life would become punctuated by encounters with these persistent collectors. have no mail today except Whitman tells Traubel in 1888: an mail, yes, and that I get every day. They all write me-hundreds write-strangers-they all beg autographs-tell funny tales about it, give funny reasons (some of them are pitiful-some of them are almost piteous)-I practically never answer them anymore. It takes about all strength I have nowadays to keep flies off (WWWC, 1:366). Though would never become as revered by contemporary collectors as those of signers of Declaration of Independence-signatures that inspired their own cult following-the poet's canny management of his signature would earn him a unique place among literary professionals. relationship with monster was markedly ambivalent, and, as I will argue, that ambivalence had a tremendous impact on design and marketing of his final books. Like so many brands before and after him, Whitman would place a signature-his signature, written by hand or reproduced mechanically-at center of his commercial identity. Spanning from 1868 British edition of Poems by Walt Whitman, first Whitman-book to include a facsimile of poet's autograph, to 1892 deathbed edition of Leaves of Grass, signature-produced in and on his books and requested every day through mail-became increasingly prominent marker of his personality and literary work.This essay traces W hitman's relationship to culture of collecting during nineteenth century. I begin by examining emergence of hunter in America, focusing especially on cultural significance of celebrity signature after Civil War and relationships collectors developed with well-known writers like Longfellow, Whittier, Lowell, Howells, and Holmes. Whitman was far more protective of his than his poetic peers; that guarded stance came to influence way Whitman circulated his signature within covers of Leaves of Grass, where he included it several times as part of a preconceived promotional scheme. signature would become a central emblem of his literary brand-it appears in and/or on nearly every volume poet published from 1881 until his death in 1892-the perfect symbol of what David Haven Blake identifies as Whitman's remarkable merger of poetry and publicity.3 efforts to join his with his poetry tapped into emergence of what Tamara Plakins Thornton calls romantics-autograph collectors and handwriting analysts-subcultures with a taste for tokens of celebrity that some believed could reveal character of their inscriber.4 For Whitman, was not only a new and foolproof way to drum up business; it was yet another strategy to emphasize author's place within Leaves of Grass through signature's transcendental form of presentness. …

Another English Connection: John Cowper Powys, Walt Whitman, and Percy Ives

In fall of 1880, Percy L. Ives, newly enrolled art student at Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, paid historic visit to Walt Whit- man in home in Stevens Street, Camden, New Jersey, that Whit- man shared with his brother George. Ives appears not to have read any of Whitman's poems at time, although he had read Emerson and Carlyle, as noted in his Commonplace Book after visit (November 17, 1880);1 it was his grandmother, Mrs. Elisa Leggett, who suggested that I had better go across river to Camden to see him.2 With proper sense of his calling, youthful Percy-not yet seventeen-was bold enough to ask whether he could of poet and was permitted to do so. After two-hour session, this first effort significantly drew no critical comment from Whitman, just an open invitation: Sometime when you come again .. . you may be able to make another (Ives 6). The initial sketch does not appear to have survived,3 but Charles E. Feinberg reproduced two later ones, then in his collection, each dated Dec. 6. '81: one is head-and-shoulders portrait, labeled Walter Whitman and other is study of left holding an open book, labeled Walt's hand (Ives 5).4 Though Joann P. Krieg describes these as preliminary sketches for oil portrait of that Ives completed in 1882,5 differences between drawings and oil painting make this claim rather unlikely-especially since Ruth L. Bohan explicitly links oil painting with sketch made on February 12, 1881.6 The por- trait, described at time as a very strongly painted and correctly drawn portrait of Walt Whitman7 was gifted to his grandmother who had encouraged him to visit poet.8 For time painting was displayed in storefront window of Roehm and Wright, an upscale Jewelers and Silversmiths in Detroit, perhaps also through agency of his grandmother (Detroit 8).Recently long-lost third graphite (pencil) drawing from same period, with obvious affinities to sketch of December 6, 1881, and an impeccable provenance, has reappeared (see back cover).9 It is on machine-made woven paper that measures 6.25 by 8.5 inches and is mounted on gray board. Cushing Memorial Library and Archives (Texas AM unlike others, it is also signed by himself, albeit in rather shaky hand. No doubt this is version that both artist and sitter deemed most satisfactory and that therefore merited Whitman's imprimatur in form of his signature. Such explicit evidence of Whitman's approval may explain why Percy Ives kept drawing for himself so long. In any case, we can discern in three portrait drawings (February 12, 1881; December 6, 1881; December 21, 1881) marked progression away from conventional portraiture, as Ives gained confidence and learned to see Whitman-perhaps with some discreet guidance from his subject-as monumental figure, as poet-seer.Ed Folsom has demonstrated significance of Whitman's many illustrations of self in Leaves of Grass11 and makes very persuasive case for Whitman's preference for photographic over other represen- tations of self.12 He cites, for example, comment by recorded in Horace Traubel's With Walt in Camden that pho- tography lets nature have its way whereas the botheration with painters is that they don't want to let nature have its way: they want to make nature let them have their way.13 But he also documents Whit- man's doubts, even anxiety, about disconcerting revelatory powers of photography and thus his need to manipulate (a key word for Folsom) images of himself wherever possible. In particular, he points to implicit contradiction between a poet who celebrated fullness and wholeness of an endlessly diverse self and the images that he chose to have reproduced . …

Walt Whitman's Early Fiction in Periodicals: Over 250 Newly Discovered Reprints

In an introductory note to Collect, Walt Whitman composed special word-a disclaimer-about the short fiction he reprinted in Pieces in Early Youth, stories that he had written approximately fifty years earlier, when, according to the poet, tried my 'prentice hand at recording- (I was then quite an 'abolitionist' and advocate of the 'temperance' and 'anti-capital-punishment' causes).1 W hitman went on to sum up his feelings about those early short stories, writing: My serious wish were to have all those crude and boyish pieces quietly in oblivion-but to avoid the annoyance of their surreptitious issue . . . I have, with some qualms, tack'd them on here.2 Whitman suggests, therefore, that he is reluctantly, even if purposefully, reprinting the tales. In another, more amusing anecdote, Whitman similarly distanced himself from Franklin Evans, or Inebriate: A Tale of the Times, his only novel, written at the age of twenty-three. In 1888, just four years before his death, W hitman explained to his friend and biographer Horace Traubel how he came to write Franklin Evans. Reflecting on the temperance tale he had composed in 1842, Whitman stated, set to work at once ardently on it (with the help of a bottle of port).3 This was not the only time Whitman insisted that intemperance inspired the volume's sobering principles. According to a friend of the poet's, J. G. Schumaker, W hitman once claimed to have written the book under the influence of gin cocktails. In yet another version of the story, Whitman said he relied on whiskey cocktails to finish the novel.4 W hitman also call Franklin Evans damned rot-rot of the worst sort-not insincere, perhaps, but rot, nevertheless.5 But rot or not, despite the poet's dismissal of the novel, it sold approximately 20,000 copies, which was more than any of the other works Whitman published in his lifetime.6The sizable readership of Franklin Evans, its sensational plot events, and a recent scholarly edition have led to new critical perspectives on the novel. Whitman's short fiction, however, has long been neglected even though, as I hope to show, the publication history of those pieces may help explain the popularity of the poet's temperance novel. There has been less attention given to Whitman's short fiction not only because of the poet's own desire to allow it to be dropp'd in oblivion, but also because, in the words of Whitman's biographer Henr y Seidel Canby, 'melodramatic' is too weak a word to describe its incidents and characters, 'sentimental' too mild to define its morality, and 'tripe' too gentle a name for its eloquence.7 All of Whitman's short stories were, as Canby succinctly put it: terrible, and Thomas L. Brasher, editor of Early Poetry and the Fiction, a volume of Collected Writings of Walt Whitman, even went so far as to state, The plain fact is that Whitman had no talent for fiction.8Until now, there has been little evidence to support a more favorable statement that a proud young Walter Whitman made about those very short stories in a June 14, 1842, letter to Nathan Hale, Jr., editor of the Boston Miscellany: My stories, I believe, have been pretty popular, and extracted liberally.9 Here, it is imperative to acknowledge that scholars, most notably Thomas L. Brasher, have collected citations for previously discovered reprints of Whitman's early fiction and his temperance novel-in both periodicals and books. Brasher's Early Poetry and the Fiction provides citation information for about twenty-four reprints of the stories in periodicals.10 But as David S. Reynolds, author of Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography points out, Death in the School-Room, Whitman's earliest short story, first published in the Democratic Review in August 1841, would go on to become one of his most popular works. It was reprinted six different times in his lifetime.11 Taking Death in the School-Room as an example, this modest number of reprints is certainly evidence of interest by editors and readers in the poet's fiction, but this publication history does not suggest widespread popularity or liberal extraction and reprinting in periodicals. …

Walt Whitman in Canada: The Sexual Trinity of Horace Traubel and Frank and Mildred Bain

Introduction: City and Country ShrinesTwenT y-fiv e Mil es easT of kingston, ontario, small sits on the Canadian side of the St. lawrence river within view of Wellesley State Park on the american side (figure 1). Called Stanley since at least 1901, it is part of the thousand islands, region that has been popular with Canadian and american tourists since the 1870s. dur- ing the summer of 1880 Walt Whitman visited the thousand islands with his friend, dr. r ichard maurice bucke, the Superintendent of the london (ontario) insane asylum. Whitman and bucke would have come close to Stanley since, according to Whitman's diar y and bucke's letters, they stayed twenty-five miles east of kingston at the hub house hotel on a little mote of an island on the american side within view of Wellesley State Park.1In 1938 Whitman's connection to the thousand islands-however fleeting-encouraged ardent Canadian Whitmanites, francis (frank) Wayland bain (1875-1959), banker, and his wife mildred louise Jackson bain (1876-1962) to purchase Stanley island. the bains had read Whitman's Canadian diar y soon after it was published in 1904.2 few years later they had made pilgrimages to Whitman's family home at West hills, long island, and to the house in Camden, new Jersey, where Whitman resided from 1884 to 1892. in keeping with Whitman's scorn for elaborate dwellings, the bains provided Stanley with small cedar cottage and sleeping cabin, neither of which they equipped with plumbing or electricity.3 Within the cottage they set up library of Whitman's writings and those of many of the social and political activists who believed Whitman supported their causes. these causes included democracy, socialism, communism, anarchism, pacifism, mysticism, human rights, the labor movement, universal brotherhood, free love, birth control, women's suffrage, liberal attitudes toward ho- mosexuality, gentle forms of child-rearing, and non-traditional forms of spirituality, although, as so many scholars have pointed out, Whitman openly supported only some of them. above the bookshelves the bains placed photographs of Whitman and his most passionate disciple horace traubel. rounding out this installation, which is still intact, the bains mounted photographs of themselves with traubel (figure 2), with whom they were intimate friends from approximately 1908, photographs of other Whitmanites, and an image of the famous funerary sculpture of Queen nefertiti. the latter acted as reference to Whitman's interest in egyptian constructions of immortality and to his belief in unity of time and space.4Just outside the door of the Stanley cottage, the lilac bushes had direct connection to Whitman. in honor of Whitman and one of his most beloved poems, When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom'd, his followers wore lilacs on their lapels at memorial meetings held on may 31st, the anniversary of Whitman's birth.5 it was after the 1911 meeting in new york that the bains visited W hitman's long home along with two of their Canadian Whitmanite friends, henry and Georgina Saunders.6 the Saunders took some lilac shoots from the site and planted them at their toronto home. W hen the bains purchased house in toronto in 1934, the Saunders gave them some of the Whit- man lilacs for their new dooryard. in 1939 the bains replanted some of them in the dooryard at Stanley island.7At the end of each summer on Stanley island, mildred and frank would return to their toronto home (now demolished). designed and furnished in rustic style, images of it evoke Whitman's adulation of common laborers and traubel's support for the arts and Crafts move- ment.8 this house once contained the same type of reading material as the cottage as well as many works of art that traubel gave the bains, including photograph of traubel by Clarence hudson White commissioned by William f. Gable; oil and pastel landscapes, cityscapes, and portraits of traubel by arthur Goodwin; pastel of traubel by an unknown artist; and dozens of Japanese prints. …

Whitman's Columbia: The Commemoration of the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 in "A Thought of Columbus"

From moment intent to host World's Columbian exposition of 1893 was announced in 1890, whole country was eagerly talking about it.1 The event was intended to reflect America's new-found promi- nence on world stage by celebrating four centuries of progress since Christopher discovered Americas, and hardly any publication lacked some mention of event. While exposition was being planned many readers of poems like passage to india, song of exposition, and prayer of Columbus thought that Walt Whitman should have been involved in some direct way. For instance, Illustrated American thought he would make an ideal representative for fair, publishing in 1891 an anonymous editorial criticizing exposition planners' request of a commemorative poem from Alfred Lord Tennyson. The editorial questions choice of Tennyson and argues instead for an American, ideally Whitman:But best of all would be an American poet. The children of new World, which Colum- bus revealed to Old, are best fitted to celebrate glories of new dispensation.Walt Whitman would be ideal choice. He is an American, a democrat in largest and best sense of word, a son of soil. He could give us a splendid chant, full of virility and breadth and wisdom. But have not yet reached ideal stage where can appreciate him at his true worth.2Later same year, George Horton of Chicago Herald requested in a letter that Whitman write an exclusive poem for his paper to com- memorate exposition. Horton indicates that he had approached several other prominent poets, but flatteringly adds that any list of con- temporary poets would be incomplete without Whitman. Appealing to Whitman's penchant for self-promotion, Horton promises that the West is anxious to hear from you on subject, and The Herald reaches West very widely (WWWC, 8:446). similarly, a souvenir collection of thoughts on and america published in 1892 to commemo- rate Exposition quotes Reverend Myron Reed, who insists, we shall remember Walt Whitman, if only for line, ? America! We build for you because you build for world.'3 Closer to home, Horace Traubel had tried numerous times to impel Whitman to write something for fair. Traubel reports on november 11, 1891, that a san francisco paper was warmly advocating W. as poet for Columbian Exposi- tion (WWWC, 9:138). Yet Whitman complained time and again that he was unable to write any more poems. it did not matter to him how many requests he received (WWWC, 9:126). Traubel records that on september 11, 1891,Whitman said to him, have had fully half a dozen applications for poems lately-poems for public occasions-to none of which have i even replied (WWWC, 8:499). putting matter firmly to rest, Whitman died seven months prior Exposition's dedication ceremonies, and he was never formally recognized by Exposition's planners and promoters. As a result, links between Whitman and Columbian Exposition have gone unexamined. However, reading last poem Whitman wrote, AThought of Columbus, within context of vast promotions that wed Columbian discovery to American progress since 1492 suggests that Whitman's final poetic statement was dedicated to spirit of fair. Read in this light, A Thought of Co- lumbus takes on a greater resonance.Whitman's abiding interest in American progress was well under- stood as America took stock of itself in twilight of nineteenth century, and it is clearly on such grounds that Whitman's contemporaries drew a connection between him and objectives of Columbian Exposition. indeed, Exposition would have been perfect vehicle for situating Whitman in central place in American letters to which he had aspired throughout his career. America had assumed a greater prominence on world stage by 1893, thus validating Whitman's faith in abundance of land, strength of democracy, and growth of what he termed Western character in A backward glance o'er Travel'd Roads. …

Elbert Hubbard, Transcendentalism and the Arts and Crafts Movement in America

This article examines the impact of Transcendentalism on the Arts and Crafts movement in America by exploring the manner in which Elbert Hubbard used this philosophy to help define his Roycroft community. Although scholars have focused on the movement's obvious indebtedness to William Morris, John Ruskin and other British sources, the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and Walt Whitman formed an equally important lens through which Americans viewed the Arts and Crafts movement. Not only did Americans look to these authors to help navigate the anxieties that accompanied the experience of modernity but many of the movement's figures like Hubbard, Gustav Stickley and Edward Pearson Pressey explicitly used Transcendentalism to shape their communities. In addition, many important authors and critics that came to define the movement—like Oscar Lovell Triggs, Horace Traubel and Sadakichi Hartmann—shared a personal connection with Transcendentalist thought.

"Average-Representing Grant": Whitman's General

Examines Whitman’s changing attitudes toward Ulysses S. Grant from the Civil War through the poet’s late conversations with Horace Traubel, analyzes Whitman’s poetry and prose about Grant, and shows how Whitman eventually “saw in the general and his critics a symbol of his own poetic battles against the canons of tradition.”

Whitman and Dickinson

There was a continued surge in Whitman-related publications in the year after the 150th anniversary of the first edition of Leaves of Grass, in the form of three scholarly monographs, a large collection of topical essays, an edited collection of writings from Horace Traubel’s Conservator, an encyclopedic companion to Whitman, a special issue of the Revue Francaise ďEtudes Americaines, and more than a dozen articles and book chapters, in addition to the many articles and notes published regularly in the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review. The Walt Whitman Archive completed the digitization of five volumes of Horace Traubel’s With Walt Whitman in Camden, among many other improvements and expansions to the site. Scholarship on Whitman continues to emphasize historical and cultural approaches, including substantial publications on Whitman and the visual arts, his class position and sexuality, the publi cation history of his works, and his reception and influence, particularly in transnational contexts. It was also a productive year in Dickinson scholarship, distinguished by two important new books, Paraic Finnerty’s Emily Dickinson’s Shakespeare and Thomas Gardner’s A Door Ajar: Contemporary Writers and Emily Dickinson; an issue of ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance devoted entirely to Dickinson; and a special issue of the Emily Dickinson Journal containing comments from seventeen important poets. Manuscript study continues to be of interest, and research into Dick inson’s treatment of nature and her contributions to ecocriticism is expanding.