Whitman's Poetry Research Articles

The Whitman Revolution: Sex, Poetry, and Politics

Around 1913, in a speech given to a gathering of the Whitman Fellowship at the Brevoort Hotel in New York, the poet and critic Max Eastman distanced himself from Whitman's “unchurchly religiousness.” Although he, too, had once tasted of the “drunkenness of Whitman's poetry,” it longer appealed to him: he had just discovered Marxism. Betsy Erkkila's new book seems as if written to convince apostates like Eastman that there's political value still in Whitman's vision of universal comradeship, both in practice (she delightedly recalls asking the members of the Transatlantic Whitman Association to hold hands) and in theory. In nine interlinked essays, written over the course of several decades, brilliantly blending scholarship and advocacy, Erkkila traces what she deems Whitman's dream of an idiosyncratic “homosexual republic,” with Thomas Paine and, yes, Karl Marx as its tutelary spirits. Having previously exposed the chinks in Whitman's poetic armor, notably his questionable views on race, women, and empire (see her Whitman the Political Poet, 1989), Erkkila now wants us to embrace the “more positive” Whitman. The topics of her essays range from Whitman's re-invention of America as a sexually charged “federal mother” and muse to his celebrations of male intimacy to the ways in which his revolutionary aims connect with those of Marx, Melville, and Dickinson. A final chapter, on Whitman's “public love,” asserts the central importance of same-sex love to Whitman's concept of democracy.According to Erkkila, the many examples of men loving men in Leaves of Grass may tell us how to practice “interchange . . . with strangers“ (“Song of the Open Road“) and thus a viable path forward for a divided nation. Erkkila's Walt is a determined social and sexual revolutionary, chanting his joyful gospel of same-sex intimacy from the beginning to the end of his poetic career. Arguing against biographical consensus, Erkkila claims that Whitman never sought to chasten and channel his longings into the tamer roles of the selfless “wound-dresser” or “the good gray poet.” In fact, his late-in-life “family” portraits with a variety of younger men, from Harry Stanford to “Warry” Fritzinger, flaunt Whitman's continuing interest in challenging gender norms.Thanks to her decades-long preoccupation with Whitman, Erkkila is better poised than most to highlight overlooked continuities in Whitman's work. Yet she is also a master explainer of details, as when she addresses Whitman's puzzling habit of sprinkling French phrases (“O Democracy . . . ma femme,”) into his otherwise brashly American poem as a nod to France's revolutionary tradition. (Perhaps they may also be seen as Whitman ecstatic acknowledgment that new forms of togetherness require new modes of poetic expression.)Erkkila is a spirited, fluent writer, with a gift for pithy phrases, asking us to visualize, in one particularly memorable passage, to visualize the former printer Whitman's “inky fingers” meddling in every stage of the production of his poems. Her chapters present a remarkably coherent argument, despite the occasional overlap and repetition. There are some inevitable methodological drawbacks: Erkkila's quest for the revolutionary Walt compels her to treat his writings less as literary performances than as versified calls to action, leaving the reader longing for more attention to the poetry itself. And notwithstanding her well-documented commitment to the transatlantic study of Whitman, Erkkila's book sports only sundry references to scholarship not made in U.S.A. For example, Erkkila's search for scholarship linking Whitman and Marx could have led her to the Soviet scholar Maurice Mendelson who, for all his vast blind spots, still has some good things to say about precisely that topic. Finally, one might quibble with Erkkila's definition of “revolutionary.” Erkkila's Whitman is exclusively concerned with human society; there's is no trace, in this book, of Whitman the wild lover of animals roaming the landscape “stucco'd with quadrupeds and birds all over” (“Song of Myself”). Arguably, Melville, whose poetry Erkkila considers more “conventionally literary” than Whitman's, is often bolder at imagining a world in which humans aren't all that matters—a salutary antidote to our ongoing infatuation with progress (which was shared by Whitman, too). But The Whitman Revolution is not intended to elicit full-throated approval from its readers. Like only the very best scholarship, Erkkila's book encourages reflection as well as disagreement. The last thing Whitman would have wanted in his intimate republic is uniformity of opinion.

Democratic Portraiture: The Political Aesthetics of the Individual and the Collective in Whitman's "Song of Myself"

Examines "democratic portraiture" in "Song of Myself" in order to illuminate the ways that "aesthetics and politics" in the poem are not "two categories to be weighed against each other" but rather "one formational question about how to imagine and represent a democratic ideal" by "challeng[ing] readers with new understandings of representation (literary and political) and representativeness (who is the representative hero of the American epic?), which aim precisely to merge aesthetic-political projects"; demonstrates how such a reading of portraiture in the poem "brings all of these themes to life: Whitman's effort to represent and achieve equality, the relationship between literary and political representation, and the role played by photography and other visual arts in Whitman's poetry"; traces how, "by oscillating between the mass-portrait and the portrait-series, Whitman tried to imagine democracy in action while simultaneously enacting it in his poem" as he tried "to balance the mass-portrait and portrait-series in an overarching democratic portrait, with himself as its emblem."

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

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...

Song of Ourselves: Walt Whitman and the Fight for Democracy AND Whitman in Washington: Becoming the National Poet in the Federal City

Two books with two different audiences, Mark Edmundson's Songs of Ourselves: Walt Whitman and the Fight for Democracy and Kenneth M. Price's Whitman in Washington: Becoming the National Poet in the Federal City look at Whitman's poetry in relationship to democracy in the nineteenth century.

Questions of Epic and Lyric: The Challenge of Walt Whitman

The genres of Whitman's most famous poems and the consequences to be drawn from their classification have been debated at least since the middle of the past century. Depending on the prevailing critical spirit of a given decade, critics have sought to enlist Whitman in their respective versions of literary history. F.O. Matthiessen suggested in American Renaissance that Whitman's poetry could be understood through the analogies of oratory, opera, and ocean (Matthiessen F.O., 1941 : 549-577). ...

Walt Whitman: A Current Bibliography

Allott, Daniel. Built Free Verse and Freedom into His Poetry. Investor's Business Daily (March 21, 2016). [Offers general overview of Whitman's career.]Bellis, Peter J. Reconciliation as Sequel and Supplement: Drum-Taps and Battle-Pieces. Mickle Street Review no. 21 (Spring 2016), micklestreet.rutgers. edu. [Begins with question, Why does Drum-Taps require sequel, and Battle-Pieces supplement?, and goes on note how and Herman Melville could simply have ended their books with close of Civil hostilities, but both felt something was needed to give war shape and meaning: an additional movement toward reunification and though both supplements brought formal disruption as is deferred or displaced into separate section of text and marked by an all too visible scar or seam; goes on demonstrate how the break in Whitman's text marks point between wartime conflict and postwar reconciliation, necessary pivot in what he comes see as single temporal and psychological process, while for Melville, is blocked by politicized struggle of Reconstruction, discursive shift that leaves volume not so much temporally incomplete as structurally flawed (Whitman sees reconciliation as task that poetry can still accomplish, given time; Melville fears that it may lie beyond reach of discourse altogether); concludes by observing that, nearly 150 years later, it is all too clear that Melville, not Whitman, was more prescient, for tasks of reconciliation and reunification still remain.]Bennett, Joe. Finding Walt's Wisdom amid Jakes. Dominion Post [Wellington, New Zealand] (February 10, 2016). [Recounts experience of reading Whitman's poetry while on toilet, finding an insect crawling on page, quelling instinct kill it, and realizing that letting creature be was consistent with Whitman's message.]Black, Christopher Allan. Revolutionary Rhetoric in Doris Kearns Team of Rivals and Historiographic Elegies of Walt Whitman. Philological Review 39 (2013), 53-83. [Examines how Doris Kearns Team of Rivals and Whitman's Memories of President both paint heroic picture of sixteenth president as political savior of antebellum American society, analyze Lincoln's rise power in antebellum era and his ability maintain integrity of union, view as martyr who was sacrificed heal wounds of divided country, and portray Lincoln as possessing an almost mystical command of rhetoric that caused individuals of different political backgrounds reconcile their differences; concludes that, unlike historian, Whitman's role as national elegist was reflect sentiment of American public towards President during his time, while Goodwin's narrative deconstructs accepted image of by offering public picture of as principled moral leader deeply conflicted over pressing political issues of his day.]Boorse, Michael J., ed. Conversations (Winter 2015-16). [Newsletter of Walt Association, Camden, NJ, with news of association events, timeline of Whitman at War (this issue's timeline goes from December 5, 1864, December 6, 1865), and one article, listed separately in this bibliography.]Bradford, Adam C. Embodying Book: Mourning for Masses in Walt Whitman's Drum-Taps. Mickle Street Review no. 21 (Spring 2016), micklestreet. rutgers.edu. [Examines Civil era mourning practices and notes how many family members of dead soldiers were never able retrieve body of their loved one, thus robbing them of opportunity go through traditional mourning rituals; proposes that Drum-Taps is Whitman's attempt mediate grief and foster successful mourning through book that . . . not only represented deceased, but allowed readers imagine themselves reconnected them through its pages, process made possible by Whitman's curious lack of detail, and augmented by material construction in which binding, typography, and visual ornamentation were crafted represent any and every lost soldier of Civil War, thus facilitating a collaborative process of mourning which would create what was, in essence, community of 'readerly' mourners united in spite of geographical, political, or ideological distances, as these readers invested Whitman's anonymous soldier images . …

Henry Ware Cattell and Walt Whitman's Brain.

Henry Ware Cattell was a prominent pathologist and medical editor in late 19th and early 20th century America. Strangely, his name is unknown to most medical historians but is more widely known by aficionados of Walt Whitman's poetry. In 1892, Cattell was involved in an incident that abruptly changed his life and decreased his commitment to pathology as a career. Cattell had been serving as the pathologist/prosector for the American Anthropometric Society at the time the poet Walt Whitman died. Cattell, the pathologist for the University of Pennsylvania's Wistar Institute, performed Whitman's autopsy on March 27, 1892; Whitman's brain was removed and was to join those of other prominent American intellectuals who had donated their brains to the Society's "Brain Club," but something went horribly wrong (allegedly, an assistant had dropped the brain and destroyed it) and Cattell kept this a secret. Full of self-doubt, Cattell was anguished about his inadequacies as a pathologist and was extremely worried about how all of this would affect his career when discovered. While still continuing to practice hospital-based pathology, he began to transition into an author and editor. This essay will provide a detailed biographical sketch of Henry Ware Cattell, address his sibling rivalry with his more famous brother James McKeen Cattell, briefly discuss the fad of 19th century intellectuals embracing the pseudo-science of phrenology and their participation in anatomical "brain clubs," and, finally, address the mystery of what happened to Walt Whitman's brain. Clin. Anat. 31:988-996, 2018. © 2018 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

NATIONAL ROMANTICISM IN WALT WHITMAN POEMS

Romanticism is often misunderstood as something genuine love and merely about romance. In fact, romanticism is an understanding of great ideas that also be delivered great ideas. The development of Romanticism delivered a new orientation that called National Romanticism by maintaining the freedom of individual, sovereignty, and independent of human rights. This study took data from three Walt Whitman poems; Patriotic, War Democracy, and Poem of America. Researcher was using the concept of interpretation to explore the meaning of poetry and the influence of romanticism in Whitman poetry. Researchers use Isaiah's theory in his book “the root of romanticism” to explore the influence of the romanticism idea on Whitman's poems. From the three samples of poetry, it is found that romanticism is very influential in Whitman poetry, especially the idea of romantic nationalism. Patriotic themes, nationalities and egalitarian concepts are reflected in Whitman's collection of "Leaves of grass" poems. Patriotic themes and nationalities are seen from the struggle for the right of individual freedom in opposing slavery and aristocratic government. The egalitarian concept is seen from the struggle to promote equality, as well as the democracy system that promotes people's sovereignty. The role of the idea of romanticism has evolved in American territory because it shares the same pattern and state of affairs as revolutions against noble, social, and political norms and rationalization of nature. Thus, the representation of romantic ideas originating from Western Europe of the 18th century has penetrated into the 19th century America which is reflected in the works that carried Whitman.

Late Whitman: Critical Pasts, Critical Futures

ABSTRACT Whitman worked on his Leaves of Grass into his final decade, excluding his last, hybrid collections of poetry and prose from the pages of Leaves proper. These works, representing his final decade of poetic productivity, were bound with the rest, but only as “annexes,” a move that captures the supplementary logic that defines Whitman's late work and governs its critical reception. When critics do not ignore Whitman's late poetry, they tend to regard it as echo or afterthought, as an increasingly conventional combination of attenuated affirmation and old-age complaint. Are these critical judgments justified? And what new stories might we be able to tell about Whitman in age? After reviewing the remarkably consistent neglect of Whitman's late work in the essay's first section, the second section documents a quiet effort at recovery that began in the mid-1970s. This recovery effort charts a course for a more nuanced and layered account of the poet's multifaceted and fittingly contradictory late work.

A Translation of Whitman Discovered in the 1912 Spanish Periodical Prometeo

UNTIL NOW, the first substantial Spanish translation of Whitman was believed to be the 1912 Walt Whitman: Poemas, published in Valencia by the Uruguayan writer Armando Vasseur. But I have now discovered the publication of an earlier, fifteen-page Spanish translation of Whitman's poetry, including a full translation of his long poem Salut au Monde. In addition to pushing back the date of print entry for Whitman's poems into Spanish, this discovery represents a very early point of print contact between Whitman and the inception of the Spanish- language vanguardias, or avant-gardes. Furthermore, both the text and the context of the translation help explain why the avant-gardes in Spain and Mexico tend to imagine Whitman in Futurist terms. Finally, the Prometeo translations reveal that even Whitman's ostensibly transamerican appropriations may occur through a transatlantic- and in fact a heavily global-network of circulation.These newly-discovered poems appear in a mostly-prose translation at the beginning of 1912 in the Spanish literary and cultural journal Prometeo.1 Since it was the first of eleven issues published in 1912 (Prometeo was basically a monthly periodical), we can assume this translation predates or is at most simultaneous with Walt Whitman: Poemas, since Vasseur dates his preface as February, 1912, suggesting an even later publication date for his book-length translation.2 Either way, we can see this earlier translation as independent from Vasseur's textual influence. But more importantly, the Prometeo publication marks or colors Whitman's reception in a particular way, by locating the American poet within an increasingly avant-garde context.First published in 1908 with a modernista3 bent, the journal Prometeo was not always linked with the avant-garde;4 but in 1909, the journal made a radical endorsement of the new aesthetics of Italian one of the originators of the global avant-gardes. When the Italian movement's founder, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, published his bombastic The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism, Prometeo's editor, Ramon Gomez de la Serna, published his own translation of the avant-garde text, alongside a piece celebrating Marinetti-making Prometeo the first Spanish periodical to bring Italian Futurism to Spain. Marinetti's performative text, a hybrid of prose narrative and manifesto, proclaimed the inauguration of a new era, as it celebrated rebellion, violence, the power and aesthetics of machines, and the vitality of industry.5 Then, in 1910, at Gomez de la Serna's personal request, Marinetti even wrote a Futurist address directly to Spain, Proclama Futurista a los Espanoles, again translated by Gomez de la Serna, and for exclusive publication in Prometeo. In it, Marinetti railed against what he perceived as the lassitude of Spanish culture, and called for a revitalization of Spain through radical social change and the development of industry. We see Futurism taking hold in Spain: Gomez de la Serna channels Marinetti's language in his own enthusiastic preface to the Proclama:. . . intersection, spark, exhalation, text like a wireless telegraph or of something more subtle flying over the oceans and over the mountains! Wing towards the North, wing towards the South, wing towards the East, and wing towards the West! Sturdy desire for height, expansion, and speed! Healthy spectacle of aerodrome and oversized runway!6It is the early language of the avant-garde in Spain-global, techno- industrial, and fixated upon the aesthetics of speed and power.The spread of Futurism in Spain would have far-reaching effects, influencing Rafael Cansinos Assens (who would himself later publish poetry in Prometeo's pages) to found Spain's first avant-garde movement, Ultraismo. Cansinos Assens would go on to promote the work of the important Chilean avant-gardist Vicente Huidobro, and the ranks of his own movement would include none other than the young Argentine Jorge Luis Borges. …

Counting from One to a Million: Whitman's Engagement with Large Numbers

This minute that comes to me over past decillions,There is no better than it and now.-Whitman, Song of Myself, Section 221I do not think seventy years is time of a man or woman,Nor that seventy of years is time of a man or woman,Nor that years will ever stop existence of me, or any one else.-Whitman, Who Learns Lesson Complete (LG1881 305)There will be no one like us when we are gone, but then there is no one like anyone else, ever. When people die, they cannot be replaced. They leave holes that cannot be filled, for it is fate - genetic and neural fate - of every human being to be a unique individual, to find his own path, to live his own life, to die his own death.-Oliver Sacks, My Own Life2One of many unique aspects of Whitman's poetry that would have unsettled nineteenth-century readers of Leaves of Grass is poetic presence of large numbers.3 Whitman expanded realm of poetic diction in many ways, of course, but one of most striking remains his absorption of terms for large numbers that long had been familiar in realm of mathematics4 and more recently had been utilized in a widening array of sciences, particularly astronomy. The names for large numbers, then, were in language but in early years of nineteenth century were still not commonly used; as 1840 Penny Cyclopaedia of Society for Diffusion of Useful Knowledge put it: the terms billion, trillion, &c., though defined by arithmetical writers, have never found their way into common use, want of such numbers having never been experienced.5 These large numbers had long been a theoretical tool in mathematics, but, with advances in astronomy and geology, and early glimmerings of atomic physics, vast numbers gradually entered into realm of actual. The explosion in perception of time and distance brought on by scientific advances necessitated thinking of earth's age and earth's place in cosmos in terms beyond familiar and comfortable numbers that had previously served most humans well for dealing with material world.As a former teacher of arithmetic himself, and as a journalist keenly interested in emerging genre of American schoolbooks, Whitman was well aware of how these large numbers had quickly become a staple of every child's education. The arithmetic book he recommended in 1846 for use in Brooklyn schools, James B. Thomson's Practical Arithmetic,6 provides students with a numeration table taking them up to quadrillions, and among student exercises is a directive to read large numbers (like 504069470300400) and to write out in figures numbers like One hundred and thirteen billions, six hundred and fifty thousand.7 And very first section (Numeration) of Benjamin Greenleaf's influential 1847 Introduction to National Arithmetic (Designed for Common Schools) requires students to memorize and write out numbers from units to thousands to millions to billions to trillions to quatrillions to quintillions to sextillions and on up to tridecillions. Student assignments included writing out in words names of numbers up to forty-five digits long.8Arguably, then, audience for Whitman's poetry was better attuned than twenty-first-century audiences to particular definitions of numerical terms that Whitman so frequently employed in his poetry, even if they would have been surprised to find such arithmetical diction in a poetic context. Not only did these giant numbers appear in arithmetic textbooks, they were also frequently tossed about in early debates over whether scientific discoveries about vastness of time and space made existence of God more or less likely. Baptist minister Eli Noyes, for example, in his 1853 Lectures on Truth of argues that the scientific man, who looks into intricacies of can only ultimately corroborate teachings of Bible, for the one who studies nature, becomes more devout. …

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! …

Whitman, Walt. Drum Taps: The Complete Civil War Poems; Drum-Taps: The Complete 1865 Edition [review

Walt Whitman. Drum Taps: The Complete Civil War Poems. Introduction by James McPherson. Kennebunkport, ME: Cider Mill Press, 2015. 213 pp.Walt Whitman. Drum-Taps: The Complete 1865 Edition, ed. Lawrence Kramer. New York: New York Review of Books, 2015. xxiv + 170 pp.Two stand-alone editions of Walt Whitman's 1865 Drum-Taps hit bookshelves in 2015 beside score of commemorating the sesquicentennial of General Robert E. Lee's surrender and the end of the Civil War-an anniversary coinciding with the birthday of Whitman's war poetry collection. Both editions of Drum-Taps stand apart from the majority of those other books, celebrating one of the few collections of Civil War poetry written by an eye-witness. Cider Mill Press's Drum Taps: The Complete Civil War Poems offers visceral experience, integrating the poems with full-color and black-and-white historical images of battlefields, hospitals, and veterans. The result is collage attempting to present Whitman's poetry as documentation-eye-witness testimony to the bravery of soldiers and the savagery of war, with special emphasis on the eye. Drum-Taps: The Complete 1865 Edition, published by the press of the New York Review of Books, is text-only paperback, about one-third smaller in dimensions than Cider Mill's version, with back cover declaring this edition to be a revelation, allowing one of Whitman's greatest achievements to appear again in all its troubling glory. The differ dramatically not only in appearance but, more importantly, in the editorial approaches to the source material.Pulitzer-prize winning and New York Times bestselling author James McPherson, the renowned historian whose include Battle Cry of Freedom, introduces Cider Mill's Drum Taps (the missing hyphen in the title is the Press's own mistake) as [making] the war more real to readers of the poems and viewers of the photographs, [offering] stark portrait of the grim realities of war that confronted Whitman as he made his rounds of hospitals and battlefields (4). The editors have chosen fair balance of iconic and lesser known images of the period, including Currier and Ives lithographs, Mathew Brady and Alexander Gardner photographs, and daguerreotypes of enlisted soldiers. A majority of the images are black-and-white or sepia, and are remarkably clear for book of this size. The color images, mostly artistic representations of the war, are equally stunning in their detail, testifying to the quality of Cider Mill's printing.Any book relying so heavily on illustrations runs the risk of encountering problems in formatting, especially when pulling those images from historical archives and collections. While most of the illustrations are full-page, smaller images require internal framing to fit the 6 x 9.2 book format. Some of these frames-mock-Victorian borders against stock-design backgrounds-contain images no bigger than 2 x 3.5, mostly horizontal images presumably reduced in size to fit the vertical dimensions of the book. Among otherwise full-page spreads, these frames are clunky and often interrupt the continuity of the reading experience. Photo information and credits are located at the back of the book, so, with nearly 200 images to contend with, the reader is forced to constantly flip back and forth between the pages. The presence of the frames might suggest the book's role as curatorial item, museum on the page, but the absence of localized, focused captions and the inconsistency of formatting detract from the maneuverability of the work as whole.Cider Mill internally divides their collection of Whitman's Civil War poetry into two books, the first of which is textually and structurally identical with the Drum-Taps cluster found in the final (1881) arrangement of Leaves of Grass, thus relying on Whitman's later ordering and edits. The two books are separated by an interlude-two prose pieces detailing the inauguration and death of President Lincoln taken directly from Whitman's Specimen Days, an attribution that does not appear anywhere within the book itself. …

The Integrated Catalog of Walt Whitman’s Literary Manuscripts

NEARLY TEN YEARS ago the Whitman Archive created the Guide to Walt Whitman's Poetry Manuscripts, a resource that provided access to nearly all of these items, pulling together manuscripts spread across more than thirty repositories and offering item-level descriptions and scanned images of each. Using EAD (Encoded Archival Description), the nonproprietary de facto standard for the encoding of finding aids, the Archive project created individual catalogs for all of these repositories, describing the Whitman poetry manuscripts held in each. The individual manuscript descriptions were also combined to form the Integrated Guide, a resource that for the first time provided access to all of Whitman's poetry manuscripts in one virtual collection. This guide was organized around the concept of Whitman's allowing users to see all of the known manuscripts that contributed to a given poem.1 For this project, the Walt Whitman Archive was awarded the Society of American Archivists' C.F.W. Coker Award, for setting national standards in archival description, in 2006.Now, the Whitman Archive is proud to unveil a greatly expanded version of this resource: the Catalog of Walt Whitman's Literary Manuscripts. This new iteration, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, has added descriptions and images of more than 500 prose manuscripts, providing unprecedented access to early versions of Whitman's writings and shedding light on the creative process behind Whitman's prose. These additions bring the total number of manuscripts described in the Integrated Catalog to nearly 1,500. Each item-level entry provides a title, composition date, genre, repository location information, physical characteristics, and a description of the textual content of the item. Access to images of the original manuscript is provided whenever possible.As an initial stage of the prose project, Whitman Archive staff members compiled a list of all of Whitman's known prose manuscripts.A given manuscript can be associated with any number of works, and thus may appear multiple times in the Integrated Catalog, listed separately under each work to which it contributed. We compiled the list by consulting Edward F. Grier's six-volume Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts and William White's Daybooks and Notebooks (both published by New York University Press as part of The Collected Writings of Walt Whitman). To this we added those prose manuscripts, several hundred of which were unaccounted for in these print volumes, for which the Whitman Archive had acquired images and records during the past two decades. Finally, using ArchiveGrid, an online database that aggregates the records of more than 1,000 archival institutions, we sought out any remaining Whitman prose manuscripts. Totaling close to 2,000 items, this list represents the first attempt to document the scale of Whitman's extant prose output in manuscript form.The project's initial goal was to then write item-level EAD descriptions for all of Whitman's prose manuscripts, as we had done for the poetry. However, it soon became clear that such a goal was unrealistic given the sheer volume of prose manuscripts, their overall complexity, and the amount of time required first to determine a given manuscript's relationship to Whitman's larger body of published work and then to write the EAD description itself. We thus decided to confine our item-level descriptions only to those items that could, with reasonable confidence, be identified as having contributed to a piece of published prose. Of course, we hope to someday have the resources to include item-level descriptions for all 2,000 prose manuscripts. The addition of the prose material also necessitated the creation of individual manuscript catalogs for approximately twenty new repositories, meaning that the Archive's Integrated Catalog now brings together manuscripts that are spread across more than fifty repositories around the world. …

Ivo Andrić’s Response to Walt Whitman

AS WE APPROACH the 2019 bicentennial of Walt Whitman's birth, it is fitting to recall what Yugoslav writer Ivo Andric (1892-1975), the 1961 Nobel laureate in literature, wrote about Whitman almost century ago, in 1919.1 He was at the time one of four editors of the literary magazine Literary South [Knjizevnijug], which was published twice month in Zagreb, Yugoslavia (present-day Croatia).2 The magazine ran for two years and featured texts in both Latin and Cyrillic script. In the very first issue (January 1, 1918), Andric published his translations of three of Whitman's poems (To The States, When I Peruse the Conquer'd Fame, and Chanting the Square Deific).3 Then, in the November 1918 issue, his translation of On the Beach at Night appeared. His interest in the American poet did not cease there, and the 27-year-old Andric published subsequent article commemorating the centenary of the poet's birth in the August 1919 issue of the magazine.4In this brief, seven-page essay, Andric provides not only then-mandatory biographical sketch of the poet but also weaves in astute literary criticism.5 Andric narrates the story of Whitman's life as if it were piece of art, connecting events in the poet's life to his work, making them inseparable. The fluency and ease of Andric's lines allow readers to absorb Whitman and his philosophy, and didactic voice pervades the text. This is why publishers of numerous editions of Leaves of Grass in Serbian have used Andric's article as preface.6Andric asserts this close connection between the poet's person and his words at the very beginning of the text: It is not the kind of poetry from which single word or line could be extracted, dissected, nor measured; it is work of lifetime and an expression of personality; what is important is the entirety. Andric goes on to compare Whitman's work to strong drink, thus establishing connection not only to Baudelaire, but to Nietzschean Cult of Dionysus as well.7Near the end of the article, Andric stresses the idea that Whitman is beyond all definitions, that he contains multitudes, and that he is a poet of the body and of the soul, poet of freedom, joy, struggle, energy, virgin land, and of hale, good, daring people, poet of democracy, love, and religion, poet of comradeship and of sacrifice, but also poet of vice and misfortune which he duly recognized. Andric argues that Whitman eludes aesthetic molds and goes far beyond such contemporaries as Emerson and Tennyson.Andric leaves the reader with the vision of Whitman as a rare, perfect, clairvoyant man, who left his followers words that would lead to the simple yet all-encompassing love that he had harbored in himself all his life. Throughout the text, the author lauds Whitman's poetry, arguing that its lines encompass greater cultural milieu, than simply that of the U.S. in the second half of the nineteenth century. As Andric wraps up the poet's biography, one particular sentence connects Whitman's lines to the hoped-for rejuvenation of Slavic nations: medicine and joy for us is this poetry, much like miraculous Japanese spring, it wishes to restore to humanity the delight of youth, and it is the refreshing scent of foreignness; there we rest long way from our somber Slavic sorrow.Whitman's words indeed have the power to cross national and linguistic borders, as Andric rightfully observes some three decades after the poet's death. While Andric stopped writing about and translating Whitman after his piece was published, the poet clearly had profound effect on his development into one of the most prominent Yugoslav literary figures of the twentieth century.What follows is my translation of Andric's 1919 essay, the first translation from the original Serbo-Croatian into English. I have kept Andric's casual shifting of verb tenses, his free-flowing syntax, and his occasional obfuscations.WaltWhitman (1819-1919): A Brief Recollection in Honor of the CentennialSo as to provide an image of Whitman's character and his poetry and to get sense of its value and significance, it is neither enough to apply common place literary standards nor to apply European aesthetic molds. …

Wilson, Ivy G., ed., Whitman Noir: Black America and the Good Gray Poet

Ivy G. Wilson, ed. Noir: Black America and Good Gray Poet. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2014. xx + 210 pp.Halfway through Ivy G. Wilson's Noir: Black America and Good Gray Poet, Christopher Freeburg writes: Whitman was a racist, and he did subscribe to white supremacist ideas and (90). Freeburg's assessment here intuits, I think, contradiction sometimes complicates this necessary and often thrilling collection of essays. For many, remains democratic poet of America, and so confusion easily abounds when Whitman's racist politics are unearthed. This is a pertinent issue cropped up last year at Northwestern University-where Wilson works-when M.A. music student Timothy McNair protested vaunting of as a democrat by refusing to perform a musical setting of his poetry, which led to a failing course grade. Instead of definitively sorting out Whitman's attitudes toward Afro Americans, Noir productively engages his conflicted inheritance, paying homage to an underappreciated and longstanding tradition of black authors embracing rather than rejecting Whitman's poetry. Natasha Trethewey exemplifies this collection's wide-ranging engagement with on race when she writes, From where I stand, it's easy to feel kinds of contradictions evident in Whitman's work, those things he revealed both intentionally and inadvertently (171). Indeed, Whitman's specters of blackness, and our own haunting by his white supremacy, offer another valence to noir of this collection's title, all more striking for its understatement.Whitman Noir is divided into two parts, first comprised of scholarly essays on relation of to blackness and of subsequent black writers to by-aside from Wilson and Freeburg-Ed Folsom, Amina Gautier, Matt Sandler, and Jacob Wilkenfeld. The second part of book reprints previously published personal and political reflections on by Trethewey and June Jordan, as well as publishes for first time short pieces by Rowan Ricardo Phillips (on Garcia Lorca and Whitman) and George Hutchinson (on visiting Whitman's home and grave in Camden). C. L. R. James, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Langston Hughes, Ralph Ellison, Martin Delany, James Weldon Johnson, and Yusef Komunyakaa, along with many of book's own contributors, provide testament to diverse ways black writers have invoked Whitman. This is a reckoning is consistently laudatory and skeptical, if not downright aghast, of Whitman. One can appreciate, for instance, Jordan's deep alienation from her New Critical schooling while being confounded by her lament over the peculiar North American vendetta against Walt Whitman-which, thankfully, seems dated today (157). It is hard not to love, though, her earnest and playful pronouncement: Listen to this white father; he is so weird (158).The first three essays of this collection-by Folsom, Gautier, and Sandler-are most striking. Folsom shows how Whitman's temporary persona as mash'd in Song of Myself is based upon-both historically and in poet's drafts-a black fireman (unmentioned in published poem) for whom white faces become visible: White and beautiful are faces around me, heads are bared of their fire-caps (5). Whitman, we learn, erases blackness in legible ways, inscribing through development of his corpus formative presence as well as increasing absence of slaves and freedmen. In following essay, Gautier mines Whitman's 1842 temperance novel Franklin Evans, or The Inebriate with dogged singularity, emerging with sterling conclusion Evans' storied self-possession is only won through his ownership of Louis-the brother of creole slave Margaret to whom Evans is briefly married. Whitman shows, writes Gautier, that Evans' own self-mastership is ultimately dependent upon his ownership of Louis (47). thereby unravels intemperance is slavery metaphor animated Washingtonian temperance reformers of time, showing how temperance here literally means mastery over another. …

Federico García Lorca and Pablo Neruda's Odes to Walt Whitman:

Abstract This article investigates the relation between two poems titled “Oda a Walt Whitman,” one by Federico García Lorca (Poeta en Nueva York), the other by Pablo Neruda (Nuevas odas elementales). Both odes pay a tribute to Whitman, but also deviate from eulogy and provide a frame for a very critical depiction of contemporary America, thus mixing praise and disparagement. García Lorca and Neruda both appropriate Whitman's poetry, though they differ in the use they make of it. Furthermore, these odes should really be read as an ensemble by two poets who were once very close. The first time they met in 1933, they improvised a two-voiced speech, a “discurso al alimón,” in honor of Rubén Darío—who incidentally happens to have written a sonnet on Whitman. Neruda's “Oda a Walt Whitman” is not only an address to Whitman but also a response to García Lorca, a “poem al alimón,” so to speak. The odes really are a contrapuntal composition, since the voice of Darío echoes in the distance. Whitman is thus not only the addressee of the odes, but also a great mediator enabling García Lorca and Neruda's dialogue.

“A Trail of Drift and Debris”: Traces of Whitman in the Correspondence Art of Ray Johnson

In 1987, the artist Ray Johnson, “leader” of the so-called New York Correspondence School, filled his mouth with Reese's Peanut Butter Cups and read some of Walt Whitman's musings on the nature of correspondence in a performance that Johnson dubbedSmile. An example of what Johnson termed his “nothings,”Smiletook place in an empty ATM vestibule on Long Island, the nostalgic “Paumanok” of Whitman's poetry. Johnson's performance both elevated and mocked Whitman's equally personal approach to the art and practice of correspondence. By invoking Whitman and his thoughts on correspondence, Johnson was keen to respond to descriptions of him as “Dada Daddy” to a younger generation of correspondence artists. Johnson's performance looked not so much to elevate his own ephemeral correspondence art, but to foster a reappraisal of Whitman that considered the ephemerality of his poetic method and opened up a queer line of communication and anti-teleological influence that would disrupt Johnson's own artistic reception. This article examinesSmileas an (auto)biographical performance that simultaneously clarifies and clouds the creative methodologies of Johnson and Whitman, declaring Whitman's influence on the irreverent Johnson while rejecting the restrictions of a chronological chain of influence, much as Johnson's earlier mail art had done.

POE AND THE REMAPPING OF ANTEBELLUM PRINT CULTURE

POE AND THE REMAPPING OF ANTEBELLUM PRINT CULTURE. Ed. J. Gerald Kennedy and Jerome McGann. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2012. vii + 271 pp. $45.Since the impact of F. O. Matthiessen's American Renaissance (1941) on the academic study of American literature in the 1950s and 1960s, scholars in the last three decades have debated Matthiessen's criteria for inclusion, his nearly exclusive focus on five major authors (three from New England and two from New York), and the writers excluded from his overall discussion. Notable by his absence in American Renaissance was Edgar Allan Poe (1809-49), who represented to Matthiessen the tragic consequences of isolation, a contrast to those writers who consciously or unconsciously confronted a larger social world. If Walt Whitman's poetry represented engagement with the ordinary experiences of the common man, Poe's works, according to Matthiessen, suggested an escape from such concerns, a retreat into a realm out of space and out of time. body of Poe's writings represented the trappings of an abnormal Romantic temperament, a horror and anxiety generated by a tortured sensibility.Several of the contributors of the ten essays in Poe and the Remapping of Antebellum Print Culture invoke Matthiessen or use his work as a point of departure. Maurice Lee, in particular, does so with a hint of weariness. He duly cites the number of Matthiessen-influenced works-from American Renaissance Reconsidered (1985), edited by Donald Pease and Walter Benn Michaels, and David Reynolds's Beneath the American Renaissance (1988) to more recent studies. He notes, however, that Matthiessen, when currently cited, represents a once-dominant tradition of scholarly inquiry that examined a more manageable canon at a time of an apparent scholarly consensus. Pointing to Poe's critical neglect, according to Lee, seems less compelling today, and his own essay, via a numerical accounting, shows that academic interest in Poe remains strong and shows few signs of abating.The metaphor in the volume's title, addressed by editor J. Gerald Kennedy in his introduction, is mapping, a marker suggesting a decentralized and volatile network of writers, editors, and publishers of varied, competing, and often antagonistic agendas and interests. It was this literary, economic, and social marketplace that Poe, the magazine editor aspiring for independence, aimed to negotiate and control. As the contributors demonstrate, however, he was often the victim of his own assertiveness and was subject to forces in the publishing milieu, most notably a vast culture of reprinting, that he failed to master.Kennedy seizes on the metaphor of mapping in his opening essay, which focuses on Poe's mixture of literary criticism and gossip, The Literati of New York City (1846). Despite acknowledgment that the series was a random selection of his New York contemporaries, the compilation constituted a fairly systematic appraisal of antebellum authors, including portraits of every person of literary note in (24). Clergymen, politicians, and scholars appeared alongside poets and fiction writers, and Poe took pains to include over two dozen editors of periodicals, fellow arbiters of literary taste. Kennedy charts the course from Poe's early Autography installments in the Southern Literary Messenger (1836), to the Autography series in Graham's Magazine in 1841-42, to the Literati. All these efforts led Poe toward a plan in the last years of his life for a more ambitious project on American authors and their literary productions. If Kennedy's essay elaborates on Burton R. Pollin's pioneering work in presenting the notes and outline for Living Writers of America (Studies in the American Renaissance, 1991), a project Poe never completed, persuasive claims are made for Poe's achievements in broadening the scope of American letters by including profiles of women writers, practitioners in a diversity of genres, and figures from different regions. …

POE AND THE REMAPPING OF ANTEBELLUM PRINT CULTURE

POE AND THE REMAPPING OF ANTEBELLUM PRINT CULTURE. Ed. J. Gerald Kennedy and Jerome McGann. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2012. vii + 271 pp. $45.Since the impact of F. O. Matthiessen's American Renaissance (1941) on the academic study of American literature in the 1950s and 1960s, scholars in the last three decades have debated Matthiessen's criteria for inclusion, his nearly exclusive focus on five major authors (three from New England and two from New York), and the writers excluded from his overall discussion. Notable by his absence in American Renaissance was Edgar Allan Poe (1809-49), who represented to Matthiessen the tragic consequences of isolation, a contrast to those writers who consciously or unconsciously confronted a larger social world. If Walt Whitman's poetry represented engagement with the ordinary experiences of the common man, Poe's works, according to Matthiessen, suggested an escape from such concerns, a retreat into a realm out of space and out of time. The body of Poe's writings represented the trappings of an abnormal Romantic temperament, a horror and anxiety generated by a tortured sensibility.Several of the contributors of the ten essays in Poe and the Remapping of Antebellum Print Culture invoke Matthiessen or use his work as a point of departure. Maurice Lee, in particular, does so with a hint of weariness. He duly cites the number of Matthiessen-influenced works-from The American Renaissance Reconsidered (1985), edited by Donald Pease and Walter Benn Michaels, and David Reynolds's Beneath the American Renaissance (1988) to more recent studies. He notes, however, that Matthiessen, when currently cited, represents a once-dominant tradition of scholarly inquiry that examined a more manageable canon at a time of an apparent scholarly consensus. Pointing to Poe's critical neglect, according to Lee, seems less compelling today, and his own essay, via a numerical accounting, shows that academic interest in Poe remains strong and shows few signs of abating.The metaphor in the volume's title, addressed by editor J. Gerald Kennedy in his introduction, is mapping, a marker suggesting a decentralized and volatile network of writers, editors, and publishers of varied, competing, and often antagonistic agendas and interests. It was this literary, economic, and social marketplace that Poe, the magazine editor aspiring for independence, aimed to negotiate and control. As the contributors demonstrate, however, he was often the victim of his own assertiveness and was subject to forces in the publishing milieu, most notably a vast culture of reprinting, that he failed to master.Kennedy seizes on the metaphor of mapping in his opening essay, which focuses on Poe's mixture of literary criticism and gossip, "The Literati of New York City" (1846). Despite acknowledgment that the series was a random selection of his New York contemporaries, the compilation constituted a fairly systematic appraisal of antebellum authors, including portraits of "every person of literary note in America" (24). Clergymen, politicians, and scholars appeared alongside poets and fiction writers, and Poe took pains to include over two dozen editors of periodicals, fellow arbiters of literary taste. Kennedy charts the course from Poe's early "Autography" installments in the Southern Literary Messenger (1836), to the "Autography" series in Graham's Magazine in 1841-42, to the "Literati." All these efforts led Poe toward a plan in the last years of his life for a more ambitious project on American authors and their literary productions. If Kennedy's essay elaborates on Burton R. Pollin's pioneering work in presenting the notes and outline for The Living Writers of America (Studies in the American Renaissance, 1991), a project Poe never completed, persuasive claims are made for Poe's achievements in broadening the scope of American letters by including profiles of women writers, practitioners in a diversity of genres, and figures from different regions. …