Walt Whitman Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking

Selected, Annotated Bibliography

Web Sites:

The Walt Whitman Hypertext Archive

Eventually, this may be the most complete site dealing with Walt Whitman's work. A very valuable resource now, it seems to be always growing.

The Library of Congress, American Memory Collection

A fascinating look at some of Whitman's Civil War notebooks.

The Bartleby Project, Columbia University

This site offers an interesting hypertext arrangement of LG.

Walt Whitman and the Development of Leaves of Grass

The University of South Carolina's Collection of Whitman documents.

Walt Whitman in Camden

A rare book dealer offering biographical volumes on Whitman.

The Poetry of Walt Whitman

This too is a commercial site which may have interest for the human browser.

Books:

Allen, Gay Wilson. Walt Whitman. New York: Grove, 1961.

One of the 'modern' biographies by an eminent Whitman scholar.

- - - . The Solitary Singer: A Critical Biography of Walt Whitman.

New York: MacMillan, 1955.

Bradley, Sculley, et al., ed. Leaves of Grass: A Textual Variorum

of the Printed Poems. 3 vols. New York: NYU Press, 1980.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. "The Poet." 1844. Selected Essays.

New York: Penguin USA, 1982.
Along with "Nature," "Self-Reliance," "The American Scholar," etc., the Emerson essays are indispensable reading for any study of 19th-Century American literature and of American Transcendentalism. Available in many other editions.

Fredman, Stephen. The Grounding of American Poetry: Charles Olson

and the Emersonian Tradition. Cambridge UK: Cambridge UP, 1993.
An interesting and informative study which claims an inherent and enduring 'modernism' for American poetry, and which pairs and compares American poets of the 19th and 20th centuries. The concluding segment deals specifically with Whitman and OCER.

Gilbert, Sandra M. "The American Sexual Politics of Walt Whitman

and Emily Dickinson." Reconstructing American Literary History.
Ed. Susan Bercovitch. Cambridge MA: Harvard UP, 1986.
Gilbert expertly explores the sexual and social ambiguities which informs the 'not-poetry' of Whitman and Dickinson, and how these themes and influences were translated by them into formal innovations.

Golden, Arthur. Walt Whitman's Blue Book. 2 vols. New York:

The New York Public Library, 1968.
Volume One is the fascinating facsimile publication of Whitman's own copy of Leaves of Grass, 1860. The pages show, by his own pencil on the margins, changes to the texts he was contemplating. Volume Two is Arthur Golden's study itself.

Lawrence, D. H. Studies in Classic American Literature.

New York: Boni, 1930.
Lawrence's idiosyncratic and bombastic style is amusing reading in its own right. In his chapter on Whitman, he states that "death as a theme" transformed WW into a great poet, and cites OCER as one of his examples.

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

Chapel Hill NC: U of NC Press, 1982.
A fine study which specifically explores the effect of Emerson's essays and lectures on WW.

Moon, Michael. Disseminating Whitman: Revision and Corporeality

in Leaves of Grass. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1991.
Moon deeply explores homoerotic discourse in Whitman's poetry, as well as elements of 19th-Century sexual conventions which acted upon WW. This study is carried forward in great detail.

Perry, Bliss. Walt Whitman: His Life and Work. 1902.

Boston: Houghton, 1906.
A classic 'early biography' (though obviously not one of the several contemporaneous ones) makes use of Perry's ability to consult many of Whitman's comtemporaries.

Rubin, Joseph Jay. The Historic Whitman. University Park, PA:

Penn State UP,1973.
A valuable and informative study of Whitman's pre-LG days as journalist and editor.

Whicher, Stephen E. "Whitman's Awakening to Death: Toward a Biographical

Reading of 'Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking.'" The Presence of Walt
Whitman. Ed. R.W.B. Lewis. New York: Columbia UP, 1962.
This book was produced as a result of two scholarly conferences on Whitman held at the English Institute in 1960 and 1961. The first four essays deal specifically with OCER. The book also contains a text comparison which suggested a similar one for this site.

Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass. Ed. Harold W. Blodgett

and Sculley Bradley. The Comprehensive Reader's Edition.
New York: Norton, 1968.
The primary text used for this site and perhaps,the authoritative edition of LG.

Periodical Essays/Articles:

Jensen, Millie D. "Whitman and Hegel: The Curious Triplicate Process."

The Walt Whitman Review. 10.2. (1964): 27-34.
This essay investigates Whitman's reading of German literature and its effect on his work. Though not specifically about OCER, it does suggest, at least to this editor, that the three-sided 'dialogue' in OCER may be Hegelian in origin. Jensen also explores WW's interest in oratory. This entire periodical series is a good resource for WW studies.

Trowbridge, John Townsend. "Reminiscences of Walt Whitman."

Atlantic Monthly 89 (1902): 163-175.
Trowbridge recounts his first meeting with Whitman in Boston, 1860, and his subsequent acquaintance with him during the war years in Washington, D.C.

Whicher, S. E. "Whitman's 'Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking.'"

The Explicator. 5.4. (1947): Item 28.
Whicher provides a brief, yet effective, response to a previously posed question (in an earlier Explicator) about the seeming conflict in Whitman's treatment of Life and Death in OCER.

Acknowledgements: