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Early 1880s? Phillips and Taylor, Philadelphia. Saunders #48. Whitman
in 1880 wrote a "letter to W. Curtis Taylor photo. 914
Chestnut St." Nothing is known about the Phillips and
Taylor
establishment, and the dating of this photo has ranged
from
1873 to 1883. It was printed at various times facing
right and
facing left (the one facing left is the original). Whitman
described the photo as a "2/3d length with hat outdoor
rustic."
This infamous portrait led to a great deal of skepticism about
Whitman's
honesty, since the "butterfly" is clearly a
photographic prop
(and was indeed once part of the Library of Congress
Whitman collection), though Whitman sometimes (jokingly?) claimed it was
real ("Yes--that was an actual moth: the picture is
substantially literal: we were good friends: I had
quite the
in-and-out of taming, or fraternizing with, some of the
insects, animals . . ."). Whitman's friends seemed more
troubled
than amused by Whitman's story, worrying that it was
unlikely a
butterfly just happened to be in the photographer's
studio when
Whitman was there. What is not often noted is that the
photo simply
enacts one of the recurrent visual emblems in the 1860
and 1881
editions of Leaves : a hand with a butterfly perched
on a
finger. Dr. R. M. Bucke read the image symbolically:
"The
butterfly . . . represents, of course, Psyche, his
soul, his
fixed contemplation of which accords with his
declaration: 'I
need no assurances; I am a man who is preoccupied of
his own
soul.'" Thomas Donaldson and Elizabeth Keller recall
this being
Whitman's favorite photo. Gay Wilson Allen says it was
taken while
Whitman was on a vacation trip in Ocean Grove, New Jersey,
in 1883.
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