Authors
Walt Whitman (1819-1892)
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The study of Whitman has been revolutionized by the Walt Whitman Hypertext Archive <www.whitman.archive.org>, directed by Kenneth M. Price and Ed Folsom. Before going to the printed sources listed below, students should work in and out of the sections of this gigantic and superbly ordered archive, which includes a lengthy and reliable biographical essay by Folsom and Price, all the known contemporary reviews, all the known photographs, and a current bibliography of scholarship and criticism. The Collected Writings of Walt Whitman was under the general editorship of Gay Wilson Allen; part of this edition is Walt Whitman: The Correspondence (1961–69), a six-volume set with two supplements (1990–91), edited by Edwin H. Miller. The growth of Leaves of Grass may be studied in the Comprehensive Reader’s Edition (1965, 1968), edited by Harold W. Blodgett and Sculley Bradley. Essential, in three volumes, is “Leaves of Grass”: A Textual Variorum of the Printed Poems (1980), edited by Bradley, Blodgett, Golden, and William White. Michael Moon’s Norton Critical Edition of Leaves of Grass (2002) includes discussion of textual variants and compositional development. Garland has printed three volumes containing facsimiles of Whitman manuscripts (1993). Important documents are in Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts (1984), edited by Edward P. Grier in six volumes. The first volume of Whitman’s Journalism, edited by Herbert Bergman, Douglas A. Noverr, and Edward J. Recchia, appeared in 1998. Long the standard biography is Gay Wilson Allen’s The Solitary Singer (1967). It should be supplemented by Roger Asselineau’s The Evolution of Walt Whitman (1960, 1962; reissued 1999), the first biography to deal openly with Whitman’s sexuality; Justin Kaplan’s Walt Whitman: A Life (1980); David S. Reynolds’s Walt Whitman’s America: A Cultural Biography (1995); Gary Schmidgall’s Walt Whitman: A Gay Life (1998); Jerome Loving’s Walt Whitman: The Song of Himself (1999); and Ed Folsom and Kenneth M. Price’s Re-scripting Walt Whitman: An Introduction to His Life and Work (2005). Joann P. Krieg’s 1998 A Whitman Chronology is useful. Contemporary context is emphasized in Betsy Erkkila’s Whitman the Political Poet (1989), Ed Folsom’s Walt Whitman’s Native Representations (1994), and Roy Morris Jr.’s The Better Angel: Walt Whitman in the Civil War (2000).Valuable editions of documentary evidence include Thomas L. Brasher’s Whitman as Editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1970), Joel Myerson’s Whitman in His Own Time: A Biographical Chronicle of His Life, Drawn from Recollections, Memoirs, and Interviews, Friends and Associates (1991, rev. 2000), and Myerson’s Walt Whitman: A Documentary Volume (2000).The last of nine volumes of Horace Traubel’s With Walt Whitman in Camden, edited by Jeanne Chapman and RobertMacisaac, appeared in 1996; an excellent starting place is Gary Schmidgall’s Intimate with Walt: Selections from Whitman’s Conversations with Horace Traubel, 1888–1892 (2001). Valuable collections of critical essays include Robert K. Martin’s The Continuing Presence of Walt Whitman: The Life after the Life (1992), Geoffrey M. Sill’s Walt Whitman of Mickle Street: A Centennial Collection (1994), Gay Wilson Allen and Ed Folsom’s Walt Whitman and the World (1995), Ezra Greenspan’s The Cambridge Companion to Walt Whitman (1995), Betsy Erkkila and Jay Grossman’s Breaking Bounds: Whitman and American Cultural Studies (1996), David S. Reynolds’s A Historical Guide to Walt Whitman (2000), and Donald D. Kummings’s A Companion to Walt Whitman (2006). Two provocative recent critical works are Vivian R. Pollack’s The Erotic Whitman (2000) and Jay Grossman’s Reconstituting the American Renaissance: Emerson, Whitman, and the Poetics of Representation (2003). On Whitman’s reception, see Graham Clarke’s fourvolume Walt Whitman: Critical Assessments (1996) and Kenneth M. Price’s Walt Whitman: The Contemporary Reviews (1996). Joel Myerson prepared Walt Whitman: A Descriptive Bibliography (1993). Very useful is the 1998 Walt Whitman: An Encyclopedia, edited by J. R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings. Walt Whitman: The Measure of His Song, edited by Jim Perlman, Ed Folsom, and Dan Campion (2nd rev. ed., 1998), quotes other poets on Whitman. Kenneth M. Price’s To Walt Whitman, America (2004) traces Whitman’s continuing impact on U.S. literary culture.
Born on Long Island and raised in Brooklyn, Walt Whitman left school at eleven and found work as an office boy, a journeyman printer, and a teacher. He started his own newspaper when he was nineteen and subsequently went on to edit and contribute to several prominent New York periodicals. In 1855 Whitman published his first book, Leaves of Grass, a collection of twelve poems that both placed humankind within a transcendent spirituality and celebrated physical pleasure. As a hospital attendant during the Civil War, Whitman cared for wounded soldiers and in the months following the end of the war worked for the Interior Department, from which he was fired for the sexual content of Leaves of Grass, then in a revised edition. All told, Whitman published six editions of this book, which eventually contained some 389 poems, including Song of Myself, the Calamus poems, Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking, and When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd.
Questions for Discussion and Writing
From the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, Song of Myself has emerged as Whitman's best-known and most-discussed long poem. Commentary about it often focuses on Whitman's commitment to Emerson's poetics and Transcendental values: the poet as bard for a new nation, speaking of the whole of human experience in a voice drawn from that nation's own vernacular and affirming the wisdom and divinity of nature and the "deathless" unity of all living things. In reading with Transcendentalism in mind, however, we need to recognize the range and experimentation which distinguish this poem as a poem, rather than as a predictable implementation of Emerson's tenets.
1. Read lines 101 through 139 as a single unit; then read lines 140 through 192 in the same way. Is there a tonal difference between these sections? By what logic, or by what sequence of perceptions, does the latter section follow the former? What has been resolved, or at least granted approval, which allows Whitman to tour American experience in lines 140 through 192?
2. Lines 257 through 325 affirm that a vast variety of Americans, of all races and creeds, are understood and empathized with by the "I, Walt Whitman" who speaks in this poem. Describe this "I," and comment on the risks that are taken in making such affirmations.
3. In lines 381 through 435, Whitman favors shorter lines; in lines 714 through 796, he moves back to very long ones. What connections do you sense between line length, subject, and mood in Song of Myself?
4. At various points in the poem, Whitman chides himself for saying too much, tarrying too long, or digressing from some greater subject. When he enacts departure at the end of Song of Myself, where is he going? How does this urge to move, to speak, and to stop speaking create tension, or even suspense, within the poem?
