Jerome Loving

Born in Boston on 25 May, Ralph Waldo Emerson was the third of eight children born into a family of Unitarian and Congregational ministers going back to the Puritans. After the age of eight, Emerson grew up without a father. He entered Harvard College in 1817 as the youngest member of his class. It was during his undergraduate days that "Waldo" (as he was called after his junior year) began keeping a journal, or "savings bank," whose life-long entries often served as the first hint of Emerson's sermons, lectures, and essays.

After graduation Emerson assisted his older brother William in the operation of a girls' school in Boston, but Emerson was never comfortable with schoolteaching and soon enrolled in the Harvard Divinity School. This education, which was quite informal at that time, was interrupted several times when Emerson was forced to take to his bed or go to sea or the South to combat recurring bouts of tuberculosis, a frequent malady in the nineteenth century which took early in manhood the lives of Emerson's most promising brothers, Edward and Charles. Following his graduation, Emerson was assigned to the Second Unitarian Church of Boston, where he wrote well over 100 sermons and otherwise conducted the duties of a clergyman. In arguing for Emerson's lack of warmth to any but the closest relatives, it has been said that Emerson was not comfortable with the hand-holding aspect of a clergyman's duties, but this was generally the least popular aspect of a minister's tasks, which were mainly intellectual. While an active minister, Emerson married Ellen Tucker in 1829, but her health was never strong, and she died of tuberculosis in 1831. Soon afterward, Emerson starting thinking about leaving the ministry; his sermons show him becoming more interested in nature than Scripture as a spiritual guide, and he began to think of Christ as someone who had discovered a divinity that was present in all humankind.

Resigning his position in 1832, he traveled abroad, once again for purposes of health, visiting Italy, Germany, France, and England, and returned with at least part of his first book, Nature (1836), drafted either in deed or thought. He joined the Lyceum Movement, which allowed working-class young men the opportunity of educating themselves by giving and hearing lectures on various topics. Emerson gave four in 1835 on the general subject of natural history, but underlying each was the transcendentalist idea that nature was the emblem of the spirit, or God. Successful in his Lyceum lectures, he soon ventured out on his own, announcing a series of lectures each winter, and paying attention to such details as the printing and sale of tickets. For the next fifteen years, this (in addition to what he received from his first wife's estate; he married Lydia ["Lidian"] Jackson in 1835) was Emerson's sole source of income, as he realized no profit from his books until after 1850.

It was during his lecture on "The Times" in New York City in March of 1842 that Emerson first came in contact with Whitman, who heard him deliver "Nature and the Powers of the Poet." As editor of the New York Aurora, Whitman wrote that Emerson's lecture was one of the richest and most beautiful compositions he had ever heard anywhere, at any time. By this time Emerson had published his major lectures of the 1830s as well as Essays (1841), which Whitman no doubt read, especially the essay entitled "Spiritual Laws," mentioned in one of the poet's editorials in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle in 1847. "The Poet" would open Essays: Second Series (1844), as the final version of the lecture Whitman had heard in 1842. There Emerson writes that he has looked "in vain" (465) for the poet he had described, one who would in "a meter-making argument" (450) sing of "our log-rolling, our stumps and their politics, our fisheries, our Negroes and Indians, our boasts and our repudiations" (465). He would soon find that poet (though he had thought he had discovered that talent before and was subsequently disappointed) as the author of Leaves of Grass in 1855.

Emerson greeted Whitman at the beginning of a "great career" in his letter of 21 July 1855. He promised to visit his "benefactor" and did just that on 11 December, when he sought out the poet in his Brooklyn neighborhood and took him to dinner at the Astor House in Manhattan. Whitman had published without permission Emerson's encomium in the press that fall, but Emerson overlooked the indiscretion to meet the person who had transformed transcendentalist ideas of divinity into democracy. He also apparently overlooked Whitman's second publication of some words from the letter on the spine of the 1856 edition of Leaves of Grass (in gold letters) and the full text of the letter in an appendix. When Whitman came to Boston in 1860 in connection with the publication of his third edition, Emerson, who had apparently been given a chance to read the manuscript's new poems, urged him to excise "Enfans d'Adam" ("Children of Adam") because of its perceived obscenity. Whitman listened carefully to Emerson's argument, as the two walked on Boston Common, but he thought that such an excision would be like cutting out a person's virility and kept to his course with the book. The result, in the Boston press at least, was the consensus that Emerson, who had championed an earlier edition of Leaves of Grass, and Whitman, who had authored it, had one thing in common: temporary insanity.

This was essentially their last meeting (though Whitman visited Emerson in his senility shortly before his death). Emerson wrote in behalf of Whitman's efforts to secure government employment during the Civil War and in praise of his hospital work, but he began to lose interest in the later editions of Leaves of Grass because of their long catalogues and the poet's "religious" tendency to be too consciously transcendental. Yet Whitman may have been inspired by Emerson in part for his crisis poems as he was for those, such as "Song of Myself," that celebrated absolute freedom in nature. Emerson's "Fate" in The Conduct of Life (known earlier as a lecture) seems a spiritual blueprint for Whitman's realization in "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking" and "As I Ebb'd with the Ocean of Life" that Transcendentalist Reason (poetical or mystical intuition) could not always calm the Understanding (the senses for empirical reasoning) out of its fear of death. The relationship between these two writers is one of the most important in American literary history, and both kept up their respect for the other until the end. After Emerson's death, Whitman ("At Emerson's Grave") tried to understate his debt to Emerson by aligning him with the traditional literature Leaves of Grass had challenged, but he was otherwise always loyal to the man he called "Master" in his open letter in the 1856 edition.

Jerome Loving

Bibliography

Allen, Gay Wilson. Waldo Emerson. New York: Viking, 1981.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. "The Poet." Essays and Lectures. Ed. Joel Porte. New York: Library of America, 1983. 445-468.

Loving, Jerome. Emerson, Whitman, and the American Muse. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1982.

Mott, Wesley T. "The Strains of Eloquence": Emerson and His Sermons. University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 1989.

Richardson, Robert D., Jr. Emerson: The Mind on Fire. Berkeley: U of California P, 1995.

Rusk, Ralph D. Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson. New York: Scribner's, 1949.

von Frank, Albert J. An Emerson Chronology. New York: Hall, 1994.

Bernard Hirschhorn

Convinced that "an ignorant people cannot form a wise government" (Whitman Looks 101), Walt Whitman commended tax-supported schools for their protection of republican institutions and for their assurance of the success of the common school movement, a Jacksonian reform. He also supported free public high schools and believed that newspapers should keep citizens informed about public school education issues. To achieve his educational objectives—good citizenship, moral character, and intellect—he wrote a stream of editorials on classroom conditions, educational principles and practices, and school reforms for the Brooklyn Star (1845-1846), the Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1846-1848), and the Brooklyn Daily Times (1857-1859). Further, as a reporter, he visited several schools in Brooklyn and Manhattan, observing classroom instruction and recommending improvements. 

His focus was on developing the potential of the average child, seeking good standards to promote effective teaching and learning. As country schools were particularly prone to making poor teacher selections, Whitman advocated the careful screening of applicants to find teachers able to establish a healthy emotional climate in the classroom. He cautioned against rigidity in discipline and inflexibility in classroom management and argued as well for the provision of a pleasant physical environment (including playground space). He believed in the worth of each child as an individual—urging teachers and parents to be alert to the unappealing and unpopular children who seemed more difficult to teach. He also emphasized the importance of teaching children to rely on and think for themselves (ideas which were encouraged by phrenology, the precursor of modern psychology). Whitman was frequently critical of dull teaching methods that relied on mechanical drill and repetition which were commonplace in the teaching of grammar, arithmetic, and geography, for example; instead, he advised teachers and parents to gain an understanding of how children best learn—e.g., through motivation. He also wanted parents to visit schools, confer with teachers frequently, and build up their children's confidence. 

Whitman understood the need for the expansion of the free public school system, calling for the acquisition of sites for school building construction. He sought other reforms, including provision for teacher training and supervision (he wanted primary schools to have the most qualified teachers); he also argued for employment of women teachers, improved salaries to raise the quality of teaching, expansion of the curriculum to include American history, vocal music, art, physical recreation, and free, ample, and up-to-date textbooks preferably by the best authors. While corporal punishment was a common practice in his time, Whitman pleaded most energetically for its complete abolition (cf. his short story entitled "Death in the School-Room (a Fact)" [1841]). 

Always personally interested in the schools of New York, he regarded such concern to be a civic obligation of all citizens. Though Whitman's ideas on education were unpopular in his time, they were influenced by his own formal schooling (and probably his Sunday schooling) and his schoolteaching experience. He attended School District No. 1 in Brooklyn (then the only Brooklyn public school) from about 1824 to 1831 when, at age 11, he needed to go to work. Like most large schools of that period, his school used the Lancastrian method of instruction, i.e., a single, authoritarian-minded teacher, assisted by student monitors, for a large class that learned by rote and repetition (typically, girls and boys were on separate floors). In addition, corporal chastisement was used, as Whitman no doubt observed. 

At age seventeen Whitman, impelled by severely hard times, became a pedagogue. He taught in some common schools—usually for one three-month term—in Queens County (which then included what is now all of Nassau County) and Suffolk County on Long Island from 1836 to 1841. A teaching profession did not exist then; youths like Whitman, with time to spare and in need of money, were appointed—"chance teachers," as he called them (Whitman Looks 26). Still, the inexperienced Whitman did not teach the textbook as teachers then did but instead used the Socratic method of instruction, asking stimulating questions to involve himself and his pupils in discussion and learning. As he realized later, "boarding around" with the parents of his pupils was also a great learning experience for him. His thoughts about school matters may also have been influenced by the lectures on education he had attended in Brooklyn in the 1830s. 

Anti-intellectualism in American life still prevails at least to some extent today and during the nineteenth century accounted for the state of public education. Whitman described it thusly: low teacher status, poor pay and lack of job security, and poor and persistent working conditions such as dilapidated school buildings, insufficient ventilation, and overcrowded classrooms. Nevertheless, as his teaching progressed, his respect for his pupils deepened. And it in turn solidified his conviction that the teacher played a pivotal role in their education. Though the job was difficult, he believed the teacher's position was "properly one of the noblest on earth" (Whitman Looks 74). (He also thought that proper parenting was crucial to children's success in school.) In Leaves of Grass he continued to teach "what I have learnt from America" ("By Blue Ontario's Shore," section 17). 

In several educational controversies during the Age of Jackson, Whitman took bold positions. On the issue of secular versus sectarian schooling, he challenged the Catholic officials of New York in 1842 who clamored for government support of their schools. Whitman, who rejected religious creeds, upheld the principle of separation of church and state (many at the time thought that religious and moral training were inseparable). In the debate between nature vs. nurture, he agreed with theorists in education and psychology who during the 1830s stressed the environment as a prime determinant of human action, a belief that was rooted in the educational philosophy of Rousseau and Locke—the latter positing the idea of tabula rasa. (Interested in debating societies, Whitman helped organize one in Smithtown, Long Island, where he taught from 1837 to 1838. In one of the debates on the issue of heredity vs. environment in shaping character, he supported the view that nurture exerted the greater influence.) Whitman also accepted the scientific belief in the inheritability of acquired characteristics (parentage), which overtook the "environmental" school by the late 1840s. He felt, however, that parents could modify their own behavior, which would in turn produce the desired effect on their children. On concrete school issues Whitman greatly respected the views of Horace Mann, a leading contemporary educational reformer who also espoused the theory of democratic education and agitated for change to improve public schools. 

Whitman's advanced theories of education and newly tried classroom practices put him in the forefront of the "new education" based on progressive ideas that took hold in the early decades of the twentieth century. Teachers' colleges and schools of education would do well to include Whitman in their curriculum today. Particularly useful in view of perennial social problems is Whitman's notion that investment in public education would, in his words, "preclude ignorance, crime, and pauperism" (Whitman Looks 67). Whitman also favored education for young people no longer in school, proposing free evening schools for them. He thought also that education for adult men and women was essential, equating the penny press of his day with the common school. His idea that there was much to learn outside of books was further indication of his extended view of education. 

Bibliography

Hitchcock, Bert. "Walt Whitman: The Pedagogue as Poet." Walt Whitman Review 20 (1974): 140-146. 

Hofstadter, Richard. Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. New York: Vintage, 1963. 

Reynolds, David S. "Walt Whitman and the New York Stage." Thesis 9.1 (1995): 4-11. 

Whitman, Walt. The Gathering of Forces. Ed. Cleveland Rodgers and John Black. Vol. 1. New York: Putnam's, 1920. 

____. Walt Whitman Looks at the Schools. Ed. Florence Bernstein Freedman. New York: King's Crown, 1950.

Martin G. Murray

The romantic friendship that Walt Whitman shared with Peter Doyle embodied the "love of comrades" celebrated in Whitman's "Calamus" poems. Their thirty-year friendship (1865–1892) left a legacy of loving letters from the older man to his younger companion which are invaluable reference points for the student seeking to understand Whitman's emotional and sexual nature.

Doyle and Whitman met one winter's evening in Washington, D.C. The twenty-one-year-old Doyle was the conductor on a Pennsylvania Avenue horsecar, and the forty-five-year-old Whitman was the car's sole passenger. Doyle recalled, "We were familiar at once—I put my hand on his knee—we understood . . . From that time on, we were the biggest sort of friends" (qtd. in Bucke 23).

In some respects Doyle seems an unlikely companion for "America's poet." Born in Limerick, Ireland, on 3 June 1843, and reared in America's South, Doyle came into manhood armed as a Confederate soldier against the Union that Whitman held so dear. A marginally literate working man, Doyle was no intellectual or social match for Whitman, the well-known poet and federal employee whose Washington friends included Lincoln's former secretary, John Hay, Ohio Congressman James Garfield, and Attorney General J. Hubley Ashton.

Yet, in ways that mattered more, Doyle was precisely the kind of man Whitman loved best. The poet always followed his own admonition, laid down in the Preface to the 1855 Leaves of Grass, to "go freely with powerful uneducated persons" (Whitman 715). In his youthful grace and good health, Doyle was a welcome tonic for the war-weary Whitman, who had spent the previous two years in Washington's army hospitals nursing the wounded. They spent long afternoons riding the streetcars, or eating fresh fruits at Center Market. Evenings were reserved for moonlit walks along the Potomac River that had Whitman reciting Shakespeare's sonnets to Doyle, and Doyle relating his favorite limericks to Whitman. Whitman also relished the opportunity to be part of the young man's large family circle. It included Doyle's widowed mother, Catherine, and his younger brother Edward and sister Margaret, for whom Pete made a home. Also nearby were the families of married brothers James and Francis, and aunt Ann and uncle Michael Nash, whom Whitman counted among his dear friends.

Doyle is usually associated with Whitman's "Calamus" poems, although he did not serve as the muse for these tender verses first published in 1860. The satisfaction that Whitman derived from his relationship with Doyle, however, may have influenced him to drop several of the more anxiety-ridden "Calamus" poems in editions of Leaves of Grass brought out after 1865. Whitman's expressed affection for the former Confederate artilleryman reinforced the theme of reconciliation in the poet's war writings. The eyewitness narrative of Lincoln's assassination found in Memoranda During the War (1875–1876) may have been inspired by Doyle, who was at Ford's Theater on that fateful Good Friday.

A stroke that Whitman suffered on 23 January 1873 caused him to settle later that year in Camden, New Jersey, with his brother George and sister-in-law Louisa. The intensity of Whitman's friendship with Doyle waned with time and distance. In New Jersey, Harry Stafford provided Whitman with a measure of the companionship that Doyle was not there to give.

In the mid-1880s Whitman and Doyle renewed their intimacy when Doyle—now employed by the Pennsylvania Railroad as a baggage master—settled in Philadelphia and made weekly visits to Whitman in Camden. The round-the-clock presence of caretakers during the poet's last years eventually alienated Doyle, whose calls became infrequent. Before Whitman's death on 26 March 1892, Doyle explained to Whitman the reason why he visited so rarely, and the old man understood. Doyle attended Whitman's funeral at Harleigh Cemetery.

Peter Doyle made a lasting contribution to Whitman biography in 1897 when he allowed Richard Maurice Bucke to edit and publish Whitman's letters to Doyle, which Doyle had entrusted to Bucke in 1880. Included with the letters was Bucke's interview of Doyle, which Henry James in his 1898 review of the book called "the most charming passage in the volume" (260).

Doyle was a member of the Walt Whitman Fellowship and enjoyed the friendship of Horace and Ann Traubel, Gustave Percival Wiksell, and publisher Laurens Maynard. Doyle continued to work for the Pennsylvania Railroad until his death on 19 April 1907 at age 63. Peter Doyle is buried in Congressional Cemetery in Washington, D.C.

Martin G. Murray

Bibliography

Bucke, Richard Maurice, ed. Calamus: A Series of Letters Written During the Years 1868–1880 by Walt Whitman to a Young Friend (Peter Doyle). Boston: Small, Maynard, 1897.

James, Henry. "Henry James on Walt Whitman, 1898." Walt Whitman: The Critical Heritage. Ed. Milton Hindus. London: Routledge, 1971. 259–260.

Murray, Martin G. "Pete the Great: A Biography of Peter Doyle." Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 12 (1994): 1–51.

Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass: Comprehensive Reader's Edition. Ed. Harold W. Blodgett and Sculley Bradley. New York: New York UP, 1965.

Arthur Wrobel

This lengthy prose work, published in an eighty-four-page pamphlet in 1871, is comprised of a trilogy of essays Walt Whitman originally intended for publication in the Galaxy magazine. Two appeared in the Galaxy : "Democracy" in December 1867 and "Personalism" in May 1868; he submitted the third, "Orbic Literature," to the Galaxy, but it did not appear.

The text of Democratic Vistas, which Whitman variously described as "memoranda" and "speculations," some of which date to the middle 1850s, shows evidence of Whitman's familiar propensity to tinker. Textual variations are evident in its several versions—from the "Rough Draft," Galaxy, pamphlet, and Two Rivulets (1876) versions to the Specimen Days & Collect version. The various additions and deletions, however, are minor and do not alter Whitman's purpose.

The immediate impulse for the writing of Democratic Vistas was the publication, in Horace Greeley's Tribune on 16 August 1867, of the complete text of Thomas Carlyle's Shooting Niagara: And After?, a blistering critique of democratizing trends, specifically enfranchisement legislation, in England and America. Carlyle's and Whitman's essays belong to a larger body of writings that appeared during the third quarter of the nineteenth century and attempted to address the spectacle of a putative moral and spiritual collapse. Unable to discern the providential arm operating through engineering marvels, a frenzied economic development, vulgar consumerism, and widespread social fragmentation, writers in this country and England attempted to recenter the concept of culture, conceiving of it as a beneficent instrument of political reconstruction. For them, the force of culture had the potential to integrate national life through its conceptualization of a common heritage and to elevate the intellectual, aesthetic, and moral faculties of citizens. Unlike his English counterparts, however, Whitman insistently defended the principles associated with the democratic, egalitarian ideal. As he points out in an anonymous review of Democratic Vistas, the essay attempts to demonstrate how freedom and individualism could not only "revolutionize & reconstruct politics, but Religion, Sociology, Manners, Literature & Art" as well (qtd. in Warren 79). The culture, he envisioned, would hold up a forgotten ideal that might yet recall people to perfection.

In taking up the challenge of reconstructing his country, Whitman assumes several roles: that of a Jeremiah—harsh and uncompromising in his detailing of America's many spiritual and moral failures; a cultural diagnostician who looks below the surface of America's body politic to "the inmost tissues, blood, vitality, morality, heart & brain" (qtd. in Warren 79) in order to determine a course of treatment; and a visionary seer who anticipates the unfolding of the Great Republic of the future comprised of superbly developed individuals whose freedom lies in their obedience to eternal spiritual laws.

Whitman's prose style in Democratic Vistas has been justly described as diffuse, tortured, and murky—one that seemingly dramatizes Whitman in his role as poet-prophet speaking out of a visionary trance. His procedure is no less obscure despite his statement near the beginning that describes it as dialectical: "I feel the parts harmoniously blended in my own realization and convictions, and present them to be read only in such oneness, each page and each claim and assertion modified and temper'd by the others" (363). There is some reason to argue that Whitman counters visionary projections with actualities and explores various sets of antitheses—individual and mass, material and spiritual, present and future—but whether he ever achieves a synthesis, or simply resorts to placing his trust in the familiar nineteenth-century theory of history as an irreversible record of democracy's advance, remains moot.

Democratic Vistas appears to be structured, roughly, according to the three Galaxy essays. From this perspective, Whitman initially surveys the "canker'd" present of post-Reconstruction America (369); he then describes his program for developing individualism, which he calls "Personalism," as it is nurtured by the emergence of a "New World literature" (405), the subject of the final part of his essay.

In the first part, Whitman inveighs, with apocalyptic fervor, against the awful discrepancy between "democracy's convictions, aspirations and the people's crudeness, vice, caprices" (363). Fixing his "moral microscope" on post-Reconstruction American society, he surveys a "dry and flat Sahara" (372). His indictment is uncompromising and comprehensive: he accuses American society of hypocrisy, business of a greed that borders on "depravity," and political life, both local and national, of being "saturated in corruption, bribery, falsehood, mal-administration"; he describes churches as "dismal phantasms" and conversation as a mere "mass of badinage"; literature, he asserts, exhibits little more than "scornful superciliousness" (370). He is also distressed by the unmistakable signs of society's fragmentation, its fabric seemingly in imminent danger of being torn apart by a divisiveness he attributes to vestiges of feudalism—competing factions and classes, racial and gender tensions, distinctions between mass and polite culture, party politics, and incipient conflicts between labor and capital—as traditional standards retreat before the advance of accelerating change. He acknowledges that "the fear of conflicting and irreconcilable interiors, and the lack of a common skeleton, knitting all close, continually haunts me" (368). Commenting that "We sail a dangerous sea of seething currents, cross and under-currents, vortices—all so dark, untried," he asks with good reason, "and whither shall we turn?" (422).

The answer for Whitman lies in the transformation of the American nation and the mind of its people by a new class "of native authors, literatuses, . . . sacerdotal, modern, fit to cope with our occasions, lands, permeating the whole mass of American mentality, taste, belief, breathing into it a new breath of life . . . with results inside and underneath the elections of Presidents or Congresses" (365). Such a literature would speak to the "common people, the life-blood of democracy" (388), and "with an eye to practical life" (396) provide them with "a basic model or portrait of personality for general use" (397). The "mental-educational part" of Whitman's model would attend to everything from a program of stirpiculture aimed at producing an ideal birthstock for the new democracy of the future, to the commonplace of "food, drink, air, exercise, assimilation, digestion," and even manners and dress (397). Such a literature would "raise up and supply through the States a copious race of superb American men and women, cheerful, religious, ahead of any yet known" (395).

On a more sublime note, but no less pragmatic, Whitman values this literature for its moral and political efficacy. Such a literature would be the instrument by which American government would achieve its highest potential, namely "to develop, to open up to cultivation, to encourage the possibilities of all beneficent and manly outcroppage, and of that aspiration for independence, and the pride and self-respect latent in all characters" (379). Acting in concert with a beneficent government, this literature would foster a radical individualism which he names "Personalism." While recognizing that "the virtue of modern Individualism" potentially conflicts with "the ancient virtue of Patriotism, the fervid and absorbing love of general country" (373), Whitman nevertheless hopes that such a reformulation might restore a much-needed balance between the desire for personal liberty and communal solidarity. The "Personalism" he proposes projects an "image of completeness in separatism, of individual personal dignity, of a single person, either male or female, characterized in the main, not from extrinsic acquirements or position, but in the pride of himself or herself alone" (374). This construct retains Whitman's two great faiths: "the democratic republican principle," namely "the theory of development and perfection by voluntary standards, and self-reliance" (362) and the common citizenry whose capacity for heroism and patriotism were confirmed for him during the Civil War. Conceding, however, that individualism potentially "isolates," he postulated the existence of a universal force called adhesiveness that could counter the excrescences of individualism while reconnecting the individual to the larger political body. This force fuses and binds "all men, of however various and distant lands, into a brotherhood, a family . . . making the races comrades, and fraternizing all" (381).

The ideal manifestation of "Personalism" was to be found in a spiritualized future democratic state. Whitman's anticipation of this state's unfolding draws on a theory that measured historical change in terms of progress through various stages. For Whitman, civilization advanced from a "feudal, ecclesiastical, dynastic world" (366) to the American present of economic development and material abundance; the next stage entailed the emergence of a "sublime and serious Religious Democracy" (410). The "Vistas" in the title of Whitman's essay are those of the prophet-seer's glimpses into the features of this higher, religious-spiritual democracy. What he envisions is a homogeneous society, animated by a "fervid and tremendous Idea, melting everything else with resistless heat, and solving all lesser and definite distinctions in vast, indefinite, spiritual, emotional power" (368). Such a society is characterized by "the copious production of perfect characters among the people" (392–393) who are trained "in sanest, highest freedom" so as to "become a law, a series of laws, unto [themselves]" (375). Here the presence "of a sane and pervading religiousness" (393) undergirds a "rich, luxuriant, varied personalism" (392). In this construct, we are given Whitman's most explicit statement about democracy's agency for spiritualization.

Undoubtedly, Democratic Vistas is long on visionary lyricism and a bit short in practical suggestions. Richard Chase faults Whitman for being too sanguine in entertaining a view of history as a force that necessarily nurtures democracy; Arthur Golden for willfully blinding himself to the "canker'd" body politic of Reconstruction America and hoping it would simply disappear; David Marr for contradicting the spirit of democratic plurality in his yearning for a unitary national literature; and Betsy Erkkila for his failure to achieve any convincing reconciliation between vision and reality. However, as Harold Aspiz points out, Democratic Vistas needs its visionary content to give it substance, while Alan Trachtenberg notes that the split Whitman observed between literary and mass culture prophetically anticipates the condition we find ourselves in today.

Arthur Wrobel

Bibliography

Aspiz, Harold. "The Body Politic in Democratic Vistas." Walt Whitman: The Centennial Essays. Ed. Ed Folsom. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 1994. 105–119.

Chase, Richard. Walt Whitman Reconsidered. New York: William Sloane Associates, 1955.

Erkkila, Betsy. Whitman the Political Poet. New York: Oxford UP, 1989.

Golden, Arthur. "The Obfuscations of Rhetoric: Whitman and the Visionary Experience." Walt Whitman: The Centennial Essays. Ed. Ed Folsom. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 1994. 88–102.

Grier, Edward F. "Walt Whitman, the Galaxy, and Democratic Vistas." American Literature 23 (1951): 332–350.

Mancuso, Luke. "'Reconstructing is still in Abeyance': Walt Whitman' s Democratic Vistas and the Federalizing of National Identity." ATQ 8 (1994): 229–250. 

Marr, David. American Worlds Since Emerson. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1988.

Scholnick, Robert J. "The American Context of Democratic Vistas." Walt Whitman: Here and Now. Ed. Joann P. Krieg. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1985. 147–156.

Trachtenberg, Alan, ed. Democratic Vistas: 1860–1880. New York: George Braziller, 1970.

Warren, James Perrin. "Reconstructing Language in Democratic Vistas." Walt Whitman: The Centennial Essays. Ed. Ed Folsom. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 1994. 79–87.

Whitman, Walt. Democratic Vistas. Prose Works 1892. Ed. Floyd Stovall. Vol. 2. New York: New York UP, 1963–1964. 361–426.

Maverick Marvin Harris

The Democratic party is the older of the present two major political parties in the United States and is, in fact, the oldest political party in the world. Commonly called the "party of the people," from its beginnings it has drawn members and a power base essentially from such citizens as small farmers, producers, small mercantile traders, and blue collar workers, though both major parties tend to be heterogeneous groups organized to win elections for the purpose of controlling policymaking more than homogeneous groups agreed upon clearly defined programs. Walt Whitman was associated with the Democratic party from the early 1830s until his defection to the newly-formed Republican party twenty years later.

Whitman's workingman heritage, which came from his father, a member of the Workingman's party, led him to the Democratic party early in life. At the age of twelve Whitman worked for the Long Island Patriot, a weekly paper that served as the organ of the Democratic party in Kings County. He had a good record in the party at first and felt quite at home in Tammany Hall. Actively involving himself in the affairs of the party, he campaigned vigorously for Martin Van Buren in 1840 and later for James K. Polk, served as the secretary of the General Committee of the Kings County Democratic party in 1846, and wrote and stumped in support of the candidates and doctrines of the Democratic party in New York State—one time addressing a Democratic rally in City Hall Park attended by 15,000 people.

Whitman felt that the Democratic party championed that which was noblest and most progressive in a republican form of government. Thus, he held expansionist views based upon the doctrine of Manifest Destiny and felt the Democratic party should promote the ideal of democracy southward even into Central America. In his writings, especially those while editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, he espoused the Jeffersonian-Jacksonian ideas fundamental to the Democratic party's philosophy: diminished government, free trade, opposition to a national bank, resistance to morality laws, hostility to trade unions, and belief in America as a noble experiment in liberty.

Though not an abolitionist, Whitman firmly believed that slavery should be disallowed in any state entering the Union. Within the Democratic party, liberals who avidly held to the free-soil position ("Barnburners" and "Locofocos") were opposed by conservatives whose sympathies lay with the Southern Democrats favoring slavery ("Hunkers"). The Wilmot Proviso of 1846 (ultimately defeated), which prohibited slavery in any territory acquired from Mexico, split the Democratic party in New York. The failure of the party in New York to take a stand on the issue, Whitman believed, cost it the local election in November 1847 and the presidential election in 1848. The national Democratic party, fearing the alienation of Southern Democrats if it took a stand to support the free-soil position, chose to compromise and support the policy of letting prospective states choose whether to allow slavery or not—which later the Kansas-Nebraska Bill of 1854 provided.

During the bitter controversy, Whitman, as editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, unabashedly stated his support for the Wilmot Proviso and other liberal views. The compromise in the Democratic party clearly angered him, for he felt that by compromising, the party had unjustly resorted to chicanery and subterfuge. He blamed the social conditions of the period on control of the Democratic party by slave-owning Southern Democrats. Eventually, his editorials favoring "free soil" and his attacks on the policy of the Democratic party were more than Isaac Van Anden, owner of the Eagle and a Hunker, could abide. Whitman was fired.

Shortly thereafter, Whitman accepted the editor's position of the New Orleans Crescent. But this position was short-lived, for after only three months (25 February–25 May 1948) he returned to edit a Free Soil Democratic paper, the Brooklyn Freeman. Whitman was becoming more and more disenchanted with the Democratic party, however, for after being fired from the Eagle for his "radical" position on free soil and then being deserted financially by Free Soil Democrats, he felt the politicians in the Democratic party had betrayed not only him but also the fight for liberty and justice. Indignant, he aligned himself with the newly-formed Republican party in the 1856 election, though he never became politically active after this time.

His indignation can be seen in "Blood-Money" (1850), "Dough-Face Song" (originally published as "Song for Certain Congressmen") (1850), and "The House of Friends" (1850).

Maverick Marvin Harris

Bibliography

Allen, Gay Wilson. The New Walt Whitman Handbook. 1975. New York: New York UP, 1986.

___. The Solitary Singer: A Critical Biography of Walt Whitman. 1955. Rev. ed. 1967. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985.

Kaplan, Justin. Walt Whitman: A Life. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1980.

Whitman, Walt. The Early Poems and the Fiction. Ed. Thomas L. Brasher. New York: New York UP, 1963.

____. The Gathering of the Forces. Ed. Cleveland Rodgers and John Black. 2 vols. New York: Putnam's, 1920.

Winwar, Frances. American Giant: Walt Whitman and His Times. New York: Tudor, 1941.

Zweig, Paul. Walt Whitman: The Making of the Poet.New York: Basic Books, 1984.

Christine Stansell

Born to a well-to-do family in Charleston, the woman who would become known as Ada Clare left home at nineteen to earn her living as a writer in New York. A prolific essayist, poet, and short story writer, she won a following in the magazines and newspapers and became a celebrity in the New York demi-monde. In the mid-1850s she gave birth to an illegitimate son, probably the child of the pianist Louis Gottschalk, and defiantly presented herself as an unmarried mother, "Miss Ada Clare." A confessional novel, Only a Woman's Heart (1866), bears upon these events. Along with her friend Adah Menken, Clare frequented the bohemian Pfaff's saloon, where she befriended Whitman and made a place for herself in the circle of newspapermen who gathered there. She was one of Henry Clapp's featured writers in his Saturday Press. Whitman was sufficiently impressed by Clare to make her into one of the "sights" cited in his newspaper articles recounting his New York rambles (later collected in New York Dissected [1936]). From the mid-1860s, Clare supplemented her writing with a hard-working, although mostly unsuccessful, stage career. She spent time in San Francisco and Hawaii as a feted literary celebrity. She died in New York in 1874 of rabies, which she contracted from the dog of a theatrical agent.

Christine Stansell

Bibliography

Parry, Albert. Garrets and Pretenders: A History of Bohemianism in America. New York: Covici, Friede, 1933.

Stoddard, Charles Warren. "Ada Clare, Queen of Bohemia." National Magazine Sept. 1905: 637–645.

Robert Leigh Davis

Military nursing in 1861 was a brutal and haphazard affair. Performed by convalescent veterans, regimental musicians, or those soldiers "least effective under arms," nursing involved little or no formal training and was stigmatized as a sign of inability or cowardice. Capable soldiers shunned the work and hospital observers emphasized the absence of any meaningful system of nursing care. Afflicted soldiers sometimes concealed their wounds to avoid being taken to hospitals they saw as little better than prisons or morgues. 

At the outbreak of the war, reformers from a wide range of social organizations met at the Cooper Institute in New York to establish a training program for military nurses. That meeting, led by Elizabeth Blackwell, resulted in the formation of the Women's Central Association for Relief, the core of the United States Sanitary Commission, later headed by Henry Bellows. In addition, Dorothea Dix was appointed "Superintendent of Female Nurses" and charged with recruiting women for an army nursing corps. "[O]ur Florence Nightingale," as Louisa May Alcott called her, Dix transformed military nursing into an organized profession and her ideas about nursing, medicine, disease, and hospital design were drawn from Nightingale's work in the Crimea. 

Although he held an appointment from the Christian Commission, a branch of the YMCA, Whitman took pride in his status as a volunteer nurse and "consolant" of the wounded. Like Mary Ann Bickerdyke and Clara Barton, Whitman worked outside of any agency or institution and saw himself as an advocate for the private soldier. Working in the crowded, chaotic wards of Washington hospitals like the Armory Square, the Judiciary Square, and the Patent Office, Whitman wrote letters for afflicted soldiers, dressed wounds, distributed gifts of money, clothing, and food, and read aloud from Shakespeare, Scott, Miles O'Reilly, and the Bible. Whitman's hospital visits strengthened his belief in the dignity of common people, the crucial issue of his Civil War. Profoundly moved by the courage and comradeship of wounded soldiers on both sides of the line, Whitman felt that he had glimpsed in the military hospitals the very expression of a democratic America, and he cherished that glimpse as a turning point in his own life, what he later termed "the very centre, circumference, umbilicus, of my whole career" (Whitman 15). 

Bibliography

Adams, George Worthington. Doctors in Blue: The Medical History of the Union Army in the Civil War. New York: Henry Schuman, 1952. 

Fredrickson, George M. The Inner Civil War: Northern Intellectuals and the Crisis of the Union. New York: Harper and Row, 1965. 

Greenbie, Marjorie Barstow. Lincoln's Daughters of Mercy. New York: Putnam's, 1944. 

Murray, Martin G. "Traveling with the Wounded: Walt Whitman and Washington's Civil War Hospitals." Washington History: Magazine of the Historical Society of Washington, D.C. 8.2 (1996-1997): 58-73, 92-93. 

Reverby, Susan M. Ordered to Care: The Dilemma of American Nursing, 1850-1945. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987. 

Whitman, Walt. Walt Whitman's Civil War. Ed. Walter Lowenfels. New York: Knopf, 1960. 

Wood, Ann Douglas. "The War Within a War: Women Nurses in the Union Army." Civil War History 18 (1972): 197-212. 

George Hutchinson

Whitman often spoke of the importance of the Civil War to Leaves of Grass. He told his disciple Horace Traubel that it was "the very centre, circumference, umbillicus, of [his] whole career" (With Walt Whitman 3:95). In the poem "To Thee Old Cause" he wrote, "My book and the war are one," and elsewhere he wrote that his poems turned on the war as a wheel on its axle. What Whitman liked to call the "Four Years War" indeed represented for the poet a pivotal event in universal history, a sacred conflict between democracy and its internal as well as external antagonists. It proved his poetry's validity and anchored his personal history, with all its private anguish, to the public life of the nation.

Whitman heard of the firing on Fort Sumter while walking down Broadway around midnight, 12 April 1861. Three days later he recorded in his journal a resolution to purify and "spiritualize" his body, to drink only water and to avoid late suppers and fatty meats. This ritual self-purification reflected Whitman's view of the war, from the beginning, as a purgative rite for the country. 

Indeed, it is difficult to understand his response to the war without understanding his despair for the country before it broke out—a despair that finds expression in his ecstatic poetry and the crescendo of prose attacks on "cringers, suckers, dough-faces, lice" of humanity (politicians) between 1855 and 1860 (1855 Preface 18). Whitman believed the causes of the war lay not in Southern secessionism alone but rather in lingering "feudal" elements and corruption that infected both the South and the North. Hence, like Lincoln, Whitman viewed it as a war within one identity.

But the war not only preserved and purified the Union; it proved as well that American democracy was breeding a race of heroes in the common people—a new type of human being. This proof Whitman found through personal experience in the hospitals, in the way the boys and men (in Whitman's view at least) faced suffering and death without complaint or fear, in the way they expressed selfless affection for each other and, indeed, for Walt Whitman. Here was America, "brought to Hospital in her fair youth" (Correspondence 1:69), and yet, sadly, the closest approximation to true democratic community Whitman would ever know. 

Until the very end of 1862, Whitman had no direct experience of the war, for all his interest in it, and he never took up arms. Like most Northerners, he expected the "secessionists" to be quickly defeated and was appalled when early engagements, beginning with the first Battle of Bull Run, indicated that this was not to be. Whitman remained in New York during the first year and more, occasionally visiting a hospital for the sick and wounded, and following the conflict in the newspapers. His brother George, on the other hand, enlisted early and would fight in many of the war's major battles yet emerge practically unscathed. 

On 16 December 1862, the Whitmans learned that George had been wounded at Fredericksburg, Maryland, and Walt set off to find him. After canvassing the hospitals in Washington, he found George still with his company across the Rappahannock from Fredericksburg, his cheek pierced by shrapnel but on the mend. Walt stayed with his brother slightly over a week, witnessing the dead on the battlefield, visiting the wounded in hospitals, and touring the camps.

He left on 28 December with responsibility for conducting a contingent of wounded soldiers to the hospital authorities in Washington. Here he settled into a rooming house where an acquaintance, William Douglas O'Connor, was staying with his wife Nellie and took meals with them. His relationship with these two became among the most important of his career, as they formed the nucleus of his first circle of fervent supporters and, in the end, helped make him famous.

After finding a part-time job as a copyist in the army paymaster's office, Whitman was able to support himself and visit the soldiers in the hospitals. Soon he began to find his real calling in the war—providing aid, comfort, and encouragement to the sick, wounded, and dying. At the same time he wrote journalistic pieces for the New York papers describing the conditions of the hospitals and, more movingly, the emotional condition of the hospitalized. Whitman had found a way of actively employing the qualities celebrated in his poetry. He took on a healing function equivalent to that of his shamanistic persona in early poems such as "The Sleepers," and his homoeroticism could be openly and safely expressed, employed in the cause of his beloved country. He also found a new employment for his poetic powers as he strove to become the bard of the war. 

Whitman's routine was to rest after his office work, bathe, dress in fresh clothes, eat a good meal, and put in four to five hours touring the hospitals. He would often pack a knapsack with fruit, tobacco, paper, envelopes, and the like for individual distribution to the soldiers—materials chiefly paid for with money raised from relatives and friends. He entered the hospitals well-rested, sweet-scented, and cheerful in appearance. Though he might often break down hours after a visit, he took care to steel himself to the agonies he witnessed for as long as he was in the presence of the soldiers, to keep his spirits high. He was not so much a "wound-dresser," as his poem of that title suggests, as a healer of the spirit, an affectionate comrade or "uncle," whose curative abilities were nonetheless deeply respected at a time when doctor's interventions often did more harm than good. Whitman never read his poetry to the men—in fact, he apparently never told them he was a poet—but he would recite Shakespeare or passages from the Bible. He would also hold the men's hands, kiss them, write letters for them. Some of Whitman's most admirable prose can be found in letters informing parents, with exquisite tact, of the exact circumstances and manner of the death of a son. 

While absorbed in this work, Whitman was also making contact with the men who would later be crucial in building his reputation. He met John Burroughs in 1863; along with O'Connor, Burroughs became one of Whitman's most important early publicists, although they differed on abolitionism and racial matters. Whitman's experience in the war also firmed his resolve to dedicate his life to poetry. He wrote his friend Charles W. Eldridge on 17 November 1863 that he had determined to devote himself increasingly to "the work of [his] life, . . . making poems . . . I must be continually bringing out poems—now is the hey day" (Correspondence 1:185). He came to see his relation to the war as equivalent to that of Homer to the Trojan War. He wished to be identified with it through all later generations.

Throughout this period, however, Whitman was also afflicted with ongoing family difficulties, his brother Andrew dying of a painful throat disease in late 1863 and his older brother, Jesse, gone mad from syphilis, abusive to all around him. On 5 December 1864 Walt would commit Jesse to a lunatic asylum. By that date, the family knew brother George was missing in action—actually a prisoner of war, as they later found out, at which point Walt would begin pulling strings to secure his release through prisoner exchange. 

Also in 1864 Whitman proposed a book composed of his diary entries and observations on the war. Above all, he worked on his new collection of poetry, "Drum-Taps," which he regarded initially as a project independent of Leaves of Grass, even artistically superior to it. As he sent the new manuscript to the printer, Richmond fell to the Union Army andLee surrendered at Appomattox—events that, Whitman believed, would "shape the destinies of the future of the whole of mankind" (Correspondence 1:258). Yet in the end these events would be vastly overshadowed by tragedy in the assassination of President Lincoln.

The Saturday after Good Friday, Whitman and his family read the news of Lincoln's assassination. Walt and his mother, Louisa, did not eat that day but sat silently as the sky darkened and the rain fell in dreary accompaniment to their sorrow. Later, Whitman would get a first-hand report of the assassination from his friend Peter Doyle, an Irish immigrant and former Confederate soldier whom Whitman had met when Doyle was an out-patient in Washington. Doyle's description would form the basis of Whitman's later speech, "Death of Abraham Lincoln," which in old age he gave religiously on the date of the murder. Essentially, the death of the president encapsulated the entire meaning of the war and proved its sacred quality. That it so well epitomized national tragedy suggested that only God could have written the script: "The whole involved, baffling, multiform whirl of the Secession period," Whitman would argue in his speech, came to a head in that single "fierce deed" ("Death" 11). In a sense, it proved the universal and even religious significance of the war; it was democracy's originary moment, its rite of crucifixion. Whitman ceased thinking of the nation as having been born during the Revolution. He began to see the Civil War and assassination as America's true "parturition and delivery"; the nation had been "born again, consistent with itself" ("Death" 12).

But what if Whitman's reading of the war, and with it Lincoln's death, were wrong? If the poet had deceived himself and democracy had not been truly and permanently saved, then America, he believed, would be a spectacular failure and his life's work wasted—both nation and poet victims of "a destiny . . . equivalent, in its real world, to that of the fabled damned," as he wrote in Democratic Vistas (Prose Works 2:424). Fear of such self-deceit is one of the keys to Whitman's later years. The war, which seemed to have revealed the very ground of meaning through blood-sacrifice, became the sacred center of the poet's view of both himself and history. He avoided any radical questioning of the motion of history, which helps explain the dramatic shift in his poetry away from personal crisis and ecstasy to stoic detachment, reminiscence, and meditation. Simultaneously, a greater focus upon the problem of temporality as such, of being in time, emerges in all his work as the poet moves not only closer to his own death but also further from the "umbillicus" of his career, those sacred experiences that had revealed the ground of meaning in history.

In incorporating "Drum-Taps" into Leaves of Grass and, throughout the last quarter century of his life, expanding as well as reorganizing that work into a cathedral-like form, Whitman gave the Civil War a central position. He devoted the heart of his autobiography, Specimen Days, to his memoranda from the war period. Whitman does not provide a comprehensive view of the war; most glaring is an almost total absence of reflection upon slavery and emancipation, except for the awkward "Ethiopia Saluting the Colors" (which, nonetheless, would be much admired by some black writers of later years). The whole epic story of black American experience of the conflict lies outside Whitman's reach—and, for that matter, the reach of every other poet and novelist of the period, as Daniel Aaron has pointed out. Nonetheless, it is right to remember Whitman as our greatest poet of the first modern war.

Bibliography

Aaron, Daniel. The Unwritten War: American Writers and the Civil War. New York: Knopf, 1973.

Allen, Gay Wilson. The Solitary Singer: A Critical Biography of Walt Whitman. 1955. Rev. ed. 1967. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985.

Erkkila, Betsy. Whitman the Political Poet. New York: Oxford UP, 1989.

Fredrickson, George M. The Inner Civil War: Northern Intellectuals and the Crisis of the Union. New York: Harper and Row, 1965.

Glicksberg, Charles I., ed. Whitman and the Civil War. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1933.

Hutchinson, George B. The Ecstatic Whitman: Literary Shamanism & the Crisis of the Union. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1986.

Reynolds, David S. Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography. New York: Knopf, 1995.

Thomas, M. Wynn. "Fratricide and Brotherly Love: Whitman and the Civil War." The Cambridge Companion to Walt Whitman. Ed. Ezra Greenspan. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995. 27–44.

____. The Lunar Light of Whitman's Poetry. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1987.

Traubel, Horace. With Walt Whitman in Camden. 9 vols. Vol. 1. Boston: Small, Maynard, 1906; Vol. 2. New York: Appleton, 1908; Vol. 3. New York: Mitchell Kennerley, 1914; Vol. 4. Ed. Sculley Bradley. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1953; Vol. 5. Ed. Gertrude Traubel. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1964; Vol. 6. Ed. Gertrude Traubel and William White. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1982; Vol. 7. Ed. Jeanne Chapman and Robert MacIsaac. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1992; Vols. 8–9. Ed. Jeanne Chapman and Robert MacIsaac. Oregon House, Calif.: W.L. Bentley, 1996.

Whitman, Walt. The Correspondence. Ed. Edwin Haviland Miller. 6 vols. New York: New York UP, 1961–1977.

____. "Death of Abraham Lincoln." Memoranda During the War & Death of Abraham Lincoln. Ed. Roy P. Basler. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1962. 1–14.

____. 1855 Preface. Complete Poetry and Collected Prose. Ed. Justin Kaplan. New York: Library of America, 1982. 5–26.

____. Prose Works 1892. Ed. Floyd Stovall. 2 vols. New York: New York UP, 1963–1964.

Huck Gutman

"I Sing the Body Electric" was one of the twelve poems which comprised the first edition of Leaves of Grass (1855). As with the other poems in that edition, it appeared without a title. The poem's first line, later changed, was, "The bodies of men and women engirth me, and I engirth them," at the outset announcing itself as a poem about the human body. After revision and the addition of what is now the final section of the poem, it appeared as "Poem of the Body" in the 1856 Leaves. In the 1867 edition it appeared in its present nine-section version, with its present title, as part of the "Children of Adam" sequence. 

Unlike many of the other poems in the first edition of Leaves, "I Sing the Body Electric" has received relatively little critical attention. Some critics have felt that it is obvious and repetitive; others have found it lacking in the deeper mysteries characteristic of Whitman's major works. Many have criticized the final section, an extensive catalogue of the human body. Tenney Nathanson is typical when he says that the catalogue is "a struggle against alienation. It is a struggle the poet seems to lose. What ought to be a ritual of repossession . . . comes to seem instead like an obsessive enumeration" (288). 

But despite these critical caveats, "I Sing the Body Electric" remains a magnificent poem of Whitman's early period. Whitman was in his mid-thirties when he first turned to poetry, uncertain of himself yet determined to celebrate the glories of existence. He explored the mysteries of identity in "Song of Myself," of childhood in "There Was a Child Went Forth," of the rivers of subconscious desire in "The Sleepers." In "I Sing the Body Electric" Whitman records his delight—and delight is too weak a term—at the wondrous qualities of the human body. "If any thing is sacred the human body is sacred" (section 8), he writes, "And if the body were not the soul, what is the soul?" (section 1). The reader encounters in "Body Electric" Whitman's profound love of bodily flesh. Always a central element in Whitman's ecstatic imagination, the body is here both ostensible and central subject of the poem. 

Almost at the outset Whitman acknowledges that many have doubts about the body—doubts originating in the enduring Christian notion that the body is different from the soul, and is the seat of the soul's corruption. Similar doubts will also surface in "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" (1856) and "Out of the Cradle" (1860). "Body Electric," however, is not a poem of doubt but a response to those who doubt the body. It is a paean of praise to the wonders of the sensual body. 

Section two asks the reader to consider the perfection of the body, devolving into a stream of images in which the poet looks at bodies with the gaze of sensual desire: the "swimmer naked in the swimming-bath," the "embrace of love and resistance" of two young boy wrestlers, the "play of masculine muscle" of marching firemen. The poet is attracted to all of these bodies, especially those of virile men, and sheds the rigid contours of his identity so that he can become close to them: "I loosen myself, pass freely, am at the mother's breast with the little child, / Swim with the swimmers, wrestle with the wrestlers, march in line with the firemen." 

In section three the poet gazes with love and affection at the body of a patriarchal farmer, an idealized figure quite at odds with Whitman's own father as described in "There Was a Child Went Forth." Paul Zweig argues persuasively that the old man "stands for the self Whitman was even then making in his poems and in his person" (196). By section four the poet is convinced that nothing is more satisfying than to admire the bodies of men and women: "I do not ask any more delight, I swim in it as a sea."

Whitman then proceeds, in the following two sections, to describe the bodies of women and the bodies of men. It is usual for Whitman to idealize the erotic attraction of women, something he does when he speaks of their "divine nimbus" and their function as "the bath of birth." But he also presents women as exceedingly sexual, for "mad filaments, ungovernable shoots" of erotic attraction play out of their bodies. The poet, describing himself as "ungovernable," gives way, and reaches the heights of sexual climax in the lines which begin "Ebb stung" and end with "delirious juice." 

Concentration on the body of a woman occasions a parallel concentration on the body of a man. But here a new note emerges, one which is likewise a constituent element of "Song of Myself." Whitman finds a link, an identity, between the erotic body and the body politic. For if "the man's body is sacred and the woman's body is sacred," then all bodies are sacred—even those which belong to the "dull-faced immigrants just landed on the wharf." Every single body has its place in the great democratic procession. Other-directed, Whitman is in sections six through eight less prone to egotism than in any other major early work; he speaks to himself as well as the reader when he chides, "Do you think matter has cohered together from its diffuse float, and the soil is on the surface, and water runs and vegetation sprouts, / For you only, and not for him and her?" 

The poet continues to assert this democratic viewpoint in sections seven and eight, in which his gaze is focused on a male slave and a female slave on the auction platform. His is an antislavery argument, an argument derived perhaps from his Quaker background: "Within there runs blood, / The same old blood! The same red-running blood!" The political content of these sections is discussed by Betsy Erkkila, who notes that in writing about slaves and bodies-as-property Whitman provides an "ominous political prophecy [because] the body electric is also black" (125). Some critics are disconcerted that as Whitman moves from the body itself to the political importance of the body, he switches rhetorical modes, from the narrative rhapsodic to what Edwin Miller correctly assesses as the "forthrightly satirical" (133). A contemporary analogue of such mixed modalities is Moby-Dick, published four years earlier. 

Section 8 concludes with the curious questions about concealment, defilement, degradation with which the poem began. These lines reinforce the possibility that the poet's song arises not solely from a need to celebrate the human body, but also from a need to come to terms with his own ambivalence over his sexual appetites. "Body Electric" prefigures much of Whitman's later work by raising the possibility that the poet's bodily celebration is a complex mechanism of defense and self-argument which makes manageable the unruly emotions which arise in his psyche. Seen from this perspective, the poem is an assertion by the poet, to himself, that the sexual hungers which gnaw at him—hungers that we today recognize as an attraction to men—are legitimate because the body is so electric, so filled with a vital energy that attracts and a galvanic current that flows. 

Whether simple celebration or complex self-assertion, the final section, added in the 1856 edition of Leaves, "makes sense as the climax of the poem," as Howard Waskow says (86). It catalogues the glories of the body, moving from head to toe and from outer surfaces to inner organs and processes. 

Whitman's erotic specificity in the catalogue, and in the entire poem, has often discomfited readers. Yet despite exhortations to modify the poem, he did not. Nowhere is the poet's commitment to the importance of celebrating the body in erotic terms clearer than in the long conversation which took place between Whitman and Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1860. For two hours the two men walked the streets of Boston, Emerson arguing that Leaves of Grass would find the large audience it deserved only if Whitman cut some of the most sexual and bodily passages from "Body Electric" and other poems in the "Children of Adam" section. "[H]e was the talker and I the listener. It was an argument-statement, reconnoitring, review, attack, and pressing home . . . of all that could be said against that part (and a main part) in the construction of my poems . . . each point of E.'s statement was unanswerable, no judge's charge ever more complete or convincing, I could never hear the points better put—and then I felt down in my soul the clear and unmistakable conviction to disobey all, and pursue my own way" (Whitman 281). 

Bibliography

Coskren, Robert. "A Reading of Whitman's 'I Sing the Body Electric.'" Walt Whitman Review 22 (1976): 125-132. 

Erkkila, Betsy. Whitman the Political Poet. New York: Oxford UP, 1989. 

Fone, Byrne R.S. Masculine Landscapes: Walt Whitman and the Homoerotic Text. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1992. 

Miller, Edwin Haviland. Walt Whitman's Poetry: A Psychological Journey. New York: New York UP, 1968. 

Nathanson, Tenney. Whitman's Presence: Body, Voice, and Writing in "Leaves of Grass." New York: New York UP, 1992. 

Waskow, Howard J. Whitman: Explorations in Form. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1966. 

Whitman, Walt. Prose Works 1892. Ed. Floyd Stovall. Vol. 1. New York: New York UP, 1963. 

Zweig, Paul. Walt Whitman: The Making of the Poet. New York: Basic Books, 1984. 

Howard Nelson

"Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" first appeared in the second edition of Leaves of Grass under the title "Sun-Down Poem." It received its present title in 1860, and Whitman revised the poem through the various editions. Thoreau named it and "Song of Myself" as his favorite Whitman poems, and he was only one of the first in a long line of readers who have ranked "Crossing" among Whitman's best. It is one of those mid-length lyrics that offered Whitman what some critics have felt to be his most effective form—not so sprawling as "Song of Myself" but with enough space to allow him some musical and thematic amplitude. "Crossing" is generally regarded, along with "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking" and "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd," as one of his supreme achievements in this mode.

Late in life Whitman commented, "My own favorite loafing places have always been the rivers, the wharves, the boats—I like sailors, stevedores. I have never lived away from a big river" (Traubel 71). In his younger adult years and again in old age, his river experiences were especially connected with ferries—the latter crossing the Delaware between Camden and Philadelphia, the former crossing the East River between Brooklyn and Manhattan. Both of these periods are acknowledged in entries in Specimen Days : "I have always had a passion for ferries; to me they afford inimitable, streaming, never-failing, living poems" (16), and "What communion with the waters, the air, the exquisite chiaroscuro —the sky and stars, that speak no word, nothing to the intellect, yet so eloquent, so communicative to the soul" (183). He had written about ferries in his journalism. He editorialized against rate increases, and used the hustle and bustle of the ferries as an image of the frantic pace and impersonality of modern life—no doubt among the earliest protests against the rat-race of the urban commuter. In "Crossing" he looks at ferries and ferry-riding from a quite different perspective.

"Crossing" says nothing about the poet's reason for crossing the river; the focus is not on a purpose or destination but on the act of crossing itself and the surrounding spectacle: the water, the people, the sun going down, the boats and docks and city in the distance. The poem describes the daily experience of a mid-nineteenth-century New York ferry-rider, mundane enough to most but glorious to Whitman. At the same time it makes the trip the basis for a profound meditation on time and flux and how we exist both within and outside them.

"Crossing" is a very visual poem, conveying a strong sense of particular detail, the play of light, and vista; a number of critics have compared it to painting in its effects, including that of the luminists, Turner, and the popular panorama paintings of the day. It is also richly symbolic, and its symbolic implications arise naturally from the setting and images. The river, the ebb and flow of tides, the boat, the shuttling from one shore to the other—some of the oldest, richest images of the human imagination presented themselves to Whitman in his ferry-riding; in his daily experience he was moving among archetypes.

Whitman grasped not just the larger fundamental images that resonate throughout the poem; he used discrete particulars strikingly as well. For example, leaning on the rail of a ferry is a particularly apt image of standing still and moving simultaneously and of the paradox of existing in both particular moments and a ceaseless flow of time. Similarly, "the fine centrifugal spokes of light round the shape of my head in the sunlit water" (section 3) is perfectly accurate in its observation, entirely native to the scene, and at the same time uncannily suggestive and appropriate in a poem in which ordinary human beings going about their daily business have a kind of transcendence, so that the poet asks "what gods can exceed these that clasp me by the hand . . . ?" (section 8). These examples only begin to suggest the symbolic resonances and possibilities of the poem.

Critics have disagreed about the degree to which the poem is psychological, and psychologically troubled—that is, how much it expresses doubts and struggles in its author, whether feelings of isolation, fear of actual intimacy in life as opposed to intimacy in poems, or gender identity. Psychological critics find a good deal of conflict sublimated into the poem's imagery and tend to emphasize the poem as process, a way of coping or groping toward a resolution Whitman may or may not achieve or fully believe. Of course, many critics are by training and temperament disposed to look for the dark, and some, as if by reflex, view any affirmation, let alone one as far-reaching as Whitman's here, as suspect or regressive. Other critics, while not denying psychological content, see the poem as more philosophical—an Emersonian poem in that it conveys a transcendent apprehension of reality, an achieved vision, and does so with a certain degree of didacticism and composure. Even Edwin Haviland Miller, one of the best-known of Whitman's psychological critics, finds the poem placid, circling rather than journeying or diving and lacking the psychological exploration or turmoil of such poems as "The Sleepers" or "Out of the Cradle."

Whatever directions critics take in their readings of "Crossing," all include the fundamental theme of time and flux, which Whitman introduces in the first section as he addresses first the physical scene itself, then the people riding the ferry with him, and then those who will come after him, far into the future. He makes large claims from the outset: that he sees in all things a "simple, compact, well-join'd scheme" (section 2) and that time and place "avail not" (section 3)—a transcendental claim of unity and cohesion in the universe and throughout time. The conscious purpose of the poem is to communicate this sense of unity; not just to explain it, but to convey it in the most immediate way.

How does one go beyond individual identity, flux, and time? The poem offers at least three ways: through the physical world itself; through shared human nature and experience; and through works of art (and especially this work of art).

In addition to being a poem of cumulative, orchestral, meditative beauty, "Crossing" is also a poem of memorable lines and phrases. One of those lines, in fact, suggests the effect very well: "I too had been struck from the float forever held in solution" (section 5). Just as an individual person is catalyzed out of a flow—both the bodily fluids of parents and the flow of life itself—the poem turns on certain phrasings that seem "struck," precipitated sharply and suddenly, out of the larger meditative and rhetorical movement. Two such phrases, which critics have focused on and any reader would take note of, express the key point of the importance of the things of this world, of physical reality. Near the beginning of the poem Whitman calls the sights and sounds around him "glories strung like beads on my smallest sights and hearings" (section 2); near the end, he refers to objects and physical surroundings as "dumb, beautiful ministers" (section 9). The pun on religion hearkens back to Whitman's 1855 Preface and his suggestion that priests will soon be supplanted by the physical world itself, poetically perceived. Though Whitman did not foresee the demise of the ferries, he knew that people in the future would, like him, see the gulls turning in late afternoon light, the rise and fall of tides, the river flowing, and the sun, and in that he felt a kind of immortality. (Later, when the Brooklyn Bridge was being built, the threat to ferries became apparent, and Whitmanregistered far less enthusiasm for that particular modern engineering wonder than would be expected of him.)

Another of the poem's memorable lines, "The dark threw its patches down upon me also" (section 6), expresses the second way that Whitman finds unity across time. The dark patches at first refer to "curious abrupt questionings" (section 5) that stir within him. Then he goes well beyond doubts to a litany of human frailties and failings, all of which, he tells the reader, he was as subject to as anyone. This empathy creates another bond between poet and reader, present and future. Some critics have found this confession unconvincing, too general or easy. (One of the acts to which Whitman did seem to attach some real guilt, masturbation, was removed from the catalogue when he cut the phrase "solitary committer" in later editions.) But even some who feel this way find another aspect of the poem's reaching out to the reader remarkable. Whitman raised the direct address to the reader, a common enough device in pre-twentieth-century literature, to an entirely different level, not artificial, but strangely, convincingly intimate. "Crossing" is one of the outstanding examples of this, both in individual lines, such as "Who knows, for all the distance, but I am as good as looking at you now" (section 7), and in its overall effect. To what degree Whitman meant this ghostly, vivid presence to be taken literally is left to the reader's judgment and imagination.

The idea of art as a means of transcending time is one that "Crossing" shares with other works, such as Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn." What perhaps makes "Crossing" distinctive in its treatment of this theme is its dynamic, kinesthetic quality. A number of critics have commented on the way the poem creates a sense of motion, how, through imagery and linguistic devices, everything within it seems to be flowing, swirling, moving. The experience-caught-in-art seems here more like a motion picture than a carving.

"Crossing" has long been admired for its artistic control. Theme, imagery, rhythm, and symbolism work together to a degree that Whitman rarely achieved, and the poem has a formal quality without sacrificing freshness. Whatever the artistry or alchemy he brought to bear, in "Crossing" Whitman wrote a poem that fits startlingly well his description of the experience-poems that ferry-riding gave him personally again and again: "inimitable, streaming, never-failing, living poems" (Whitman 16).

Bibliography

 

Black, Stephen A. Whitman's Journeys into Chaos: A Psychological Study of the Poetic Process. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1975.

Cavitch, David. My Soul and I: The Inner Life of Walt Whitman. Boston: Beacon, 1985.

Coffman, Stanley K., Jr. "'Crossing Brooklyn Ferry': A Note on the Catalogue Technique in Whitman's Poetry." Walt Whitman: A Collection of Criticism. Ed. Arthur Golden. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1974. 61–71.

Dougherty, James. Walt Whitman and the Citizen's Eye. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1993.

Geffen, Arthur. "Silence and Denial: Walt Whitman and the Brooklyn Bridge." Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 1.4 (1984): 1–11.

Miller, Edwin Haviland. Walt Whitman's Poetry: A Psychological Journey. New York: New York UP, 1968.

Miller, James E., Jr. A Critical Guide to "Leaves of Grass." Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1957.

Orlov, Paul A. "On Time and Form in Whitman's 'Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.'" Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 2.1 (1984): 12–21.

Thomas, M. Wynn. The Lunar Light of Whitman's Poetry. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1987.

Traubel, Horace. With Walt Whitman in Camden. Vol. 2. 1908. New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 1961.

Whitman, Walt. Specimen Days. Vol. 1 of Prose Works 1892. Ed. Floyd Stovall. New York: New York UP, 1963.

James E., Jr. Miller

Originally entitled "Enfans d'Adam" in the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass, this cluster of poems celebrating sexuality was called "Children of Adam" in 1867 and thereafter. The poems, openly "singing the phallus" and the "mystic deliria," were too bold for their time and often got Whitman into trouble. His relationship with Emerson cooled after he refused Emerson's advice in 1860 to drop the sex poems; in 1865 he lost his job in the Interior Department in Washington for writing "indecent" poems; and he had to withdraw the 1881 edition of Leaves from publication in Boston when the Society for the Suppression of Vice found it immoral.

On conceiving the idea for the "Children of Adam" cluster, Whitman jotted in a notebook: "Theory of a Cluster of Poems the same to the passion of Woman-Love as the Calamus-Leaves are to adhesiveness, manly love" (Notebooks 1:412). Whitman appropriated two terms from phrenology to distinguish the two kinds of relationships he describes here: "adhesiveness," or comradeship, and "amativeness," or heterosexual love. In pairing his poems on friendship with poems on love, Whitman was following masters of the personal essay, from Montaigne to Emerson, who in their prose compared and contrasted the two most fundamental, and generally complex, relationships in life. Whitman's intention is programmatic: he challenges the traditional ecclesiastic view of sexuality as inherently evil. The symbolism basic to the structure of the "Children of Adam" cluster is announced in the title: human beings are all descendants of Adam and Eve, who, after eating the forbidden fruit from the Tree of Knowledge, "knew that they were naked" and covered their nakedness with "fig leaves" (Genesis 3:7). For their act of disobedience, they were cast out of the Garden of Eden. In effect, Whitman exhorts a return to the Garden by recovering the sexual innocence of Adam and Eve before the Fall.

The voice heard in the "Children of Adam" cluster, as revealed in "Ages and Ages Returning at Intervals," is that of a "chanter of Adamic songs" who, "[l]usty, phallic," wanders through "the new garden the West" and the great cities, "bathing" his songs in sex. This chanter identifies himself specifically as Adam in the opening and closing poems of the cluster, "To the Garden the World" and "As Adam Early in the Morning." In the first he is walking with Eve, content, taking delight in the "quivering fire that ever plays" through his limbs; in the latter he emerges from his "bower refresh'd with sleep" and urges, "Touch me, touch the palm of your hand to my body as I pass, / Be not afraid of my body."

Although the poet does not portray himself as Adam in the other "Children of Adam" poems, he assumes the voice of the "chanter of Adamic songs." "From Pent-up Aching Rivers," second in the cluster, has the tone of a defiant proclamation ("what I am determin'd to make illustrious, even if I stand sole among men"). Images seem to tumble out with an increasing speed and intensity, creating finally the impression of a montage of sexuality in all its many and varied manifestations. The rhythmic urgency of the poem, beginning with the "pent-up aching rivers" seemingly at flood-tide, has something of the urgency of the universal sexual drive. 

Although Whitman considered using "Song of Procreation" as his title for this poem, he decided against it probably because he came to realize that the poem was more clearly a celebration of all sexuality however expressed—"The mystic deliria, the madness amorous, the utter abandonment." The poem embraces autoeroticism ("From native moments, from bashful pains, singing them"), homoeroticism ("From exultation, victory and relief, from the bedfellow's embrace in the night"), hetero-eroticism ("The female form approaching, I pensive, love-flesh tremulous aching"), and what might be called cosmo-eroticism ("Of the mad pushes of waves upon the land, I them chanting"). In brief, Whitman's poem portrays the sex drive as a "pent-up aching river" or a "hungry gnaw" present day and night that demands release or relief, whatever form that release takes.

The third poem in "Children of Adam," "I Sing the Body Electric," originally appeared in the 1855 Leaves. It dominates the "Children of Adam" cluster by its sheer length and, like "From Pent-up Aching Rivers," celebrates sexuality as a mysterious primal energy contained within the human body: "The love of the body of man or woman balks account, the body itself balks account" (section 2). In section 2 the "chanter of Adamic songs" provides a random catalogue of men and women engaging in various activities—the "swimmer naked," "the female soothing a child," the "wrestle of wrestlers," the "march of firemen"—and then concludes: "Such-like I love—I loosen myself, pass freely, am at the mother's breast with the little child, / Swim with the swimmers, wrestle with wrestlers, march in line with the firemen, and pause, listen, count." By such lines the poet reveals the sensual pleasure, rooted unconsciously in sexuality, that all feel in seeing such scenes; great painters and novelists have always been attuned to such primal responses.

Sections 5–9 of "Body Electric" focus alternately on the bodies of women and men and are, in effect, a series of idealized portraits of nudes. To some readers they may seem a bit perfunctory, presenting predictable catalogues of the female and male bodies, interspersed with affirmations that everything named (including "the womb, the teats, nipples," "man-balls, man-root") are not just "of the soul" but "are the soul!" (section 9). The poet's technique, however, is full enough of the unexpected to reward the reader. 

Section 5 begins "This is the female form," then suddenly veers away from cataloguing into a metaphoric sketch of love-making that must be counted among Whitman's greatest lines: "Ebb stung by the flow and flow stung by the ebb, love-flesh swelling and deliciously aching, / Limitless limpid jets of love hot and enormous, quivering jelly of love, white-blow and delirious juice, / Bridegroom night of love working surely and softly into the prostrate dawn, / Undulating into the willing and yielding day, / Lost in the cleave of the clasping and sweet-flesh'd day." The metaphoric "bridegroom" and "prostrate dawn" are evocative of heterosexual love. But the initial focus on the phallus in orgasm is suggestive of homosexual love. There is enough ambiguity or indirection (the bridegroom is "night," the dawn is prelude to "day") to make it impossible to decide definitively. One might ask, what difference does it make? The point is that, contrary to those critics who assume Whitman to be sincere and persuasive only in his poems of adhesiveness, he could write with great power poems of amativeness that would appeal to all readers, whatever their sexuality. In this regard, it is useful to recall the many women among Whitman's readers who pointed to his sexual themes as one of the strongest of his attractions—Anne Gilchrist, who fell in love with the poet upon reading Leaves of Grass; Kate Chopin, who adapted some of Whitman's sexual themes for her own fiction; and Muriel Rukeyser, who found Whitman's handling of his sexual themes a model to admire.

After "Body Electric," two poems appear that were included in the 1856 edition: "A Woman Waits for Me" (originally "Poem of Procreation") and "Spontaneous Me" (originally "Bunch Poem"). In "A Woman Waits for Me" the poet assumes the role of Adam as everyman, contributing his vital part to the continuation of humankind. "Sex contains all" not only in the sense that it is the mystic deliria, key to human happiness, but it literally contains "all" the human beings of the future. As the poet drains his "pent-up rivers" into the "woman who waits" for him, "warm-blooded and sufficient," he wraps in her "a thousand onward years." The "crops" he "so lovingly" plants now will produce still other "loving crops from the birth, life, death, immortality." 

"Spontaneous Me" is a powerful outpouring of "pent-up" sexual images, but it seems to move toward a climax of some sort. A curious line in the middle of the poem—"The body of my love, the body of the woman I love, the body of the man, the body of the earth"—epitomizes the confusion felt in reading the poem. The spontaneous poet is revealing inchoate sexual feelings that originate from within and that are capable of being directed to any one of a number of bodies: the body of his "love" or of the woman, man, or earth he loves. Masturbatory images dominate the latter half of the poem, as in "the pulse pounding through palms and trembling encircling fingers." In the closing lines, the poet refers to a "wholesome relief, repose, content" and adds: "And this bunch pluck'd at random from myself, / It has done its work—I toss it carelessly to fall where it may." "Bunch" has at least two meanings: it is, in some obscure sense, the semen (a bunch of sperm?) ejaculated by his own hand, and the lines of the poem he has just written, also by his own hand, for which these are the closing lines. Semen or poem—each will "fall where it may": the first perhaps in the woods or in the sea, the poem among the manuscripts destined to become the Leaves. 

The remaining poems of "Children of Adam" all celebrate sexuality and sexual feeling consonant with the program announced in "From Pent-up Aching Rivers," but they are sparse on images of man-woman, or heterosexual, love. The poems appear to promise a particular sexual experience or partner—"One Hour to Madness and Joy," "Out of the Rolling Ocean the Crowd," "We Two, How Long We were Fool'd," "I Am He That Aches with Amorous Love," "Once I Pass'd through a Populous City," "I Heard You Solemn-Sweet Pipes of the Organ"—but instead they offer a generalized celebration of sexuality or ambiguity about the sex of the partner. "Once I Pass'd," for example, was originally addressed not to a woman but to a man (Emory Holloway's discovery of this in the 1920s subverted his enthusiasm for Whitman). There remain three additional, as yet unmentioned poems in "Children of Adam." Containing one of the rare references to the female genitalia in Leaves, "O Hymen! O Hymenee!" is a short paean to married love. "Native Moments," on the other hand, celebrates the "midnight orgies of young men," more adhesive than amative in its sentiment. In the penultimate poem of the cluster, "Facing West from California's Shores," the voice of the "chanter of Adamic songs" no longer sounds so confident as at the beginning, instead ending on a plaintive note: "But where is what I started for so long ago? / And why is it yet unfound?"

In "A Backward Glance O'er Travel'd Roads" (1888), Whitman wrote his final reply to those readers and critics who condemned him and his work for his frank avowal of sexuality. He said: " Leaves of Grass is avowedly the song of Sex and Amativeness, and even Animality. . . . the espousing principle of those lines so gives breath of life to my whole scheme that the bulk of the pieces might as well have been left unwritten were those lines omitted" (Comprehensive 572). Readers today are more prone to agree with Whitman than with the squeamish critics of his own time. "Children of Adam" should be read for what it purports to be, not a paean to heterosexual love, but a celebration of sexuality in all its varied forms—auto-, homo-, hetero-, cosmo-eroticism. Whitman was right to deal with all of these as a whole and, in a sense, as one; he realized that they are much more alike than different, that they hold much more in common than not. All these forms of sexuality take their origins from the same source, the "mystic deliria" of the universal sex drive.  

Bibliography

Allen, Gay Wilson. The New Walt Whitman Handbook. 1975. New York: New York UP, 1986.

Black, Stephen A. Whitman's Journeys into Chaos: A Psychoanalytic Study of The Poetic Process. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1975. 

Holloway, Emory. Free and Lonesome Heart: the Secret of Walt Whitman. New York: Vantage, 1960.

Larson, Kerry S. Whitman's Drama of Consensus. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1988.

Lawrence, D.H. Studies in Classic American Literature. 1923. New York: Viking, 1964.

Miller, James E., Jr. A Critical Guide to "Leaves of Grass." Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1957.

Reiss, Edmund. "Whitman's Poetic Grammar: Style and Meaning in 'Children of Adam.'" Whitman in Our Season: A Symposium. Ed. B. Bernard Cohen. Hartford: Transcendental Books, 1971. 32–41.

Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass: Comprehensive Reader's Edition. Ed. Harold W. Blodgett and Sculley Bradley. New York: New York UP, 1965.

____. Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts. Ed. Edward F. Grier. 6 vols. New York: New York, 1984.

Arnie Kantrowitz

Like Walt Whitman, Edward Carpenter was an inspirational writer. Carpenter gave up the advantages of an affluent family and Cambridge education to live openly as a homosexual with his lover George Merrill among the workers of Sheffield in the north of England. He was a socialist who spoke out for the labor movement and for women's rights in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but he was also a student of sexuality, especially of homosexuality. His work in that field and the spiritual side to his writing were both influenced by Walt Whitman.

Carpenter's writings include Civilisation, Its Cause and Cure (1889), an appreciation of the virtues of pre-industrial cultures; Love's Coming of Age (1895), a commentary on feminism and free love; and Towards Democracy (1905), a poetic and spiritual summons to human improvement. He examined his own experience in My Days and Dreams (1890). In The Intermediate Sex (1908) and Intermediate Types Among Primitive Folk (1919), he explored homosexuality as an instinctive behavior which premodern societies incorporated openly into their religious and cultural lives. Since there was no vocabulary for homosexuality at the time, Carpenter used the term "Uranian" to discuss the phenomenon, an allusion to the sky god Uranus. 

Although Whitman was not a socialist, his writing had a profound effect on Carpenter, who made the long trip to America primarily as a pilgrimage to his literary and spiritual inspiration. He visited the poet for several weeks in 1877 and again in 1884. In 1906 he published an account of his visits to America, Days with Walt Whitman, writing a respectful, even somewhat glorified, portrait of his idol. 

It was not until the 1966 publication of a memoir by Gavin Arthur entitled The Circle of Sex that the intimate details of Carpenter's visits were revealed. Arthur slept in bed with Carpenter, who was an old man at the time, and described a gentle body-stroking with the hands, which led not to a spilling of seed, but to "a far more intense orgasm of the whole nervous system, in which oneself, as a unit, reunites with the Whole" (Arthur 135). When Arthur asked Carpenter if that had been his experience with Whitman, Carpenter assented (Arthur 136), leaving us with our only description of Whitman's sexual behavior, an area otherwise shrouded in mystery and controversy.

In his emulation of Whitman, Carpenter became one of the first of many disciples, spreading Whitman's message into another country and another century.

Bibliography

Allen, Gay Wilson. The Solitary Singer: A Critical Biography of Walt Whitman. 1955. Rev. ed. 1967. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985.

Arthur, Gavin. The Circle of Sex. New Hyde Park, N.Y.: University Books, 1966.

Carpenter, Edward. Days with Walt Whitman. New York: Macmillan, 1906.

Grieg, Noel. Introduction. Edward Carpenter: Selected Writings. By Edward Carpenter. Vol. 1. London: GMP, 1984. 10–77.

Geoffrey M. Sill

Camden is described by one Whitman biographer as "unlovely," an appropriate term for the late-twentieth-century city that has survived eighty years of decline since it reached its greatest glory in the 1920s. But during Whitman's residence in Camden from 1873 to 1892, the city was still young and growing, vigorous and raw-boned much as Brooklyn, New York, had been in the 1830s during Whitman's youth. This is one reason why Whitman gradually formed a strong attachment to his adopted city.

Camden began as a refuge for a group of Irish Quakers seeking relief from religious persecution. Between 1681 and 1700, they settled on the eastern shore of the Delaware River across from Philadelphia on a tract of land bordered by Pennsauken Creek to the north and Timber Creek to the south. These waterways, along with Newton Creek and Cooper's Creek, which also joined the Delaware at this point, made the tract a natural center for transportation between Philadelphia and the West Jersey towns of Salem, Woodbury, Haddonfield, and Burlington, all of which had large Quaker populations. Several ferry companies provided transit across the river, William Cooper's giving the town its early name of Cooper's Ferry. His descendant Jacob Cooper laid out the streets of the town and sold building lots in 1764, naming it in honor of Charles Pratt, Earl of Camden and friend of the American colonies. The town was incorporated by the New Jersey legislature in 1828, although it was little more than a collection of separate villages lying at some distance from each other. The town's three public gardens were sufficiently wooded that John James Audubon was able to conduct his ornithological studies there in the late 1820s and early 1830s.

Camden tripled in population between 1828 and 1840, from 1,100 to about 3,300, in part because it continued to provide transportation for the emerging industrial economy of the region. A sixty-mile railroad between Camden and Amboy, New Jersey, completed in 1834, provided a direct link between Philadelphia and New York; another in 1852 connected Camden with Atlantic City. Ferry services improved as a result of the railroads, with modern slips at the ends of five city streets. Gas street lamps were first lit in 1852, tracks were laid down for horse-drawn streetcars, and a waterworks was built in 1854. A cholera epidemic in 1866 forced the construction of a sewer system, which in turn created a demand for iron pipes. Among the employees taken on by local foundries in November 1868 was a pipe inspector from Brooklyn named George Washington Whitman.

George Whitman, Walt's younger brother, worked part-time in Camden for several years while also running a construction business and inspecting pipes in Brooklyn. By 1871, however, he was employed full-time in Camden, which enabled him to marry Louisa Orr Haslam and take a house at 322 Stevens Street. He brought his mother, Louisa Van Velsor Whitman, and his brother Edward to live with them in August of 1872 and soon began construction of a three-story house on a corner lot at 431 Stevens Street. Before he could finish it, his mother became ill and died in May 1873. Still partially paralyzed by a stroke he had suffered four months earlier in Washington, Walt Whitman hastened to Camden to see his mother, arriving on 20 May, three days before her death. He intended to stay only until his strength returned, but his convalescence was very slow. In September he moved with George's family into the new house at 431 Stevens, and in 1874 he was dismissed from his clerkship in Washington, leaving him a permanent resident of Camden.

Whitman never regained the strength of mind or body that he had enjoyed prior to his stroke, but the last eighteen years of his life were by no means barren of literary activity. In February and March of 1874 he published two poems in Harper's Monthly, "Song of the Redwood-Tree" and "Prayer of Columbus," and in June the Daily Graphic published "Song of the Universal," the three poems together comprising a reaffirmation of his belief in the self and the new world of America. In 1876 he published those and other new poems in the Centennial edition of Leaves of Grass, the only edition to cite Camden as its place of publication. That two-volume edition also included Two Rivulets, a collection of prose and poetry that Whitman hoped would "set the key-stone to my democracy's enduring arch" (Whitman 467). The inclusion of prose signified his determination to become known as a prose writer as well as a poet, and a major portion of his labor in the late 1870s and 1880s went into writing the essays finally published in 1891 as the Complete Prose Works, a longer volume than Leaves of Grass. Many of these essays, such as "Scenes on Ferry and River—Last Winter's Nights," eloquently express the depth of Whitman's attachment to Camden and Philadelphia. 

In 1884 George Whitman moved his family to a farm twelve miles from Camden, but Walt refused to go with them. He had a circle of friends and admirers, including the lawyer Thomas B. Harned and his brother-in-law, Horace Traubel, and the Staffords, with whom Whitman summered in Laurel Springs on a branch of Timber Creek. He had a stream of visitors who knew to look for him in Camden, and he enjoyed the ferryboat rides to Philadelphia immensely. So when an opportunity arose to buy a two-story frame house on Mickle Street for $1,750, he took it, paying the price with his royalties and a loan. He acquired a housekeeper, Mrs. Mary Davis, and spent his days by the front window, looking out and talking with neighbors; or riding in the buggy bought for him through a subscription arranged by Thomas Donaldson; or editing his manuscripts and recalling details of his biography to Horace Traubel. His birthday each year was celebrated with a dinner, the grandest being a banquet in Camden on 31 May 1889, with orations by twelve notable locals and greetings from many more, published as Camden's Compliment to Walt Whitman. 

When Whitman died in 1892, his funeral was attended by over three thousand viewers who filed past the casket in the Mickle Street house and thousands more who lined the avenue as Whitman was carried to his tomb in Harleigh Cemetery. The Camden Post editorialized that Camden would someday be "America's Stratford," Whitman's name giving the city "a glamour second only to that of Avon" (Dorwart and Mackey 94). The city acquired Whitman's house on Mickle Street in 1921, located the original furniture which had been dispersed through the neighborhood, and restored the home as a memorial to the poet. An eight-story hotel in downtown Camden, finished in 1925, was named for Whitman, and a new bridge across the Delaware River was named for him in 1957. Although much of Walt's neighborhood has been lost to urban renewal and George's house at 431 Stevens Street burned down in 1994, Walt's house at 328 Mickle Street and two adjoining properties are now a New Jersey State historic site, offering the original dwelling, a library and visitor's center, and a park with a lifesize statue of Walt with a butterfly on his outstretched fingertip. In these ways, Camden has continued to pay its compliments to its most famous and best-loved resident. 

Bibliography

Allen, Gay Wilson. The Solitary Singer: A Critical Biography of Walt Whitman. 1955. Rev. ed. 1967. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985.

Canby, Henry Seidel. Walt Whitman: An American. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1943.

Dorwart, Jeffrey M., and Philip English Mackey. Camden County, New Jersey, 1616–1976: A Narrative History. Camden County, N.J.: Camden County Cultural and Heritage Commission, 1976.

Kaplan, Justin. Walt Whitman: A Life. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1980.

Loving, Jerome M. Introduction. Civil War Letters of George Washington Whitman. Ed. Loving. Durham: Duke UP, 1975. 3–35.

Traubel, Horace. With Walt Whitman in Camden. 9 vols. Vols. 1–3. 1906–1914. New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 1961; Vol. 4. Ed. Sculley Bradley. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1953; Vol. 5. Ed. Gertrude Traubel. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1964; Vol. 6. Ed. Gertrude Traubel and William White. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1982; Vol. 7. Ed. Jeanne Chapman and Robert MacIsaac. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1992; Vols. 8–9. Ed. Jeanne Chapman and Robert MacIsaac. Oregon House, Calif.: W.L. Bentley, 1996.

____, ed. Camden's Compliment to Walt Whitman. Philadelphia: McKay, 1889.

Whitman, Walt. Prose Works 1892. Ed. Floyd Stovall. Vol. 2. New York: New York UP, 1964.

James E., Jr. Miller

The "Calamus" poems had their origin in a sequence entitled "Live Oak with Moss," which survived in manuscript (published, 1955, in Fredson Bowers's Whitman's Manuscripts). This sequence of twelve poems contained a sketchy account of "manly attachment" that ended in separation. Other poems were added to this core to comprise the 45 poems of the "Calamus" cluster in 1860. In subsequent editions of Leaves of Grass, Whitman dropped or shifted a few "Calamus" poems, ending with a total of 39 in 1881.

The poems of the "Calamus" cluster, companion to the "Children of Adam" cluster, celebrate friendship and "manly attachment" (or "adhesiveness," a term that Whitman adopted from phrenology, as he did "amativeness" for heterosexual love). In setting these clusters together in his book, he appears to be following a tradition of the personal essay, from Montaigne to Emerson: writing on love and friendship by drawing on personal experience as a basis for philosophical generalizations. Whitman explained his title "Calamus" in the following way: "[I]t is the very large and aromatic grass, or root, spears three feet high—often called 'sweet flag'—grows all over the Northern and Middle States. . . . The récherché or ethereal sense, as used in my book, arises probably from it, Calamus presenting the biggest and hardiest kind of spears of grass, and from its fresh, aromatic, pungent bouquet" (Poetry and Prose 941). In his nude portrait of himself in section 24 of "Song of Myself," the phallic suggestiveness of Calamus (or sweet-flag) is made explicit: "Root of wash'd sweet flag! timorous pond-snipe! nest of guarded duplicate eggs!"

"In Paths Untrodden" opens the "Calamus" cluster with a straightforward resolution "to sing no songs to-day but those of manly attachment," concluding "I proceed for all who are or have been young men, / To tell the secret of my nights and days, / To celebrate the need of comrades." The next poem, "Scented Herbage of My Breast," initially introduces an extraordinarily copious imagery entwining "[t]omb-leaves," "body-leaves," "tall leaves," "sweet leaves," until, finally, in the middle of the poem the poet exclaims: "Emblematic and capricious blades I leave you, now you serve me not, / I will say what I have to say by itself." The poet spins an opaque web of images and, feeling himself getting entangled in his weaving, tosses it all aside and begins to speak directly: "I will sound myself and comrades only, / I will never again utter a call only their call." The drama of the poem is essentially about writing the poem, or about the giving up on the writing of the poem and turning to direct speech in its place. 

This playfulness with the reader continues in the next poem, "Whoever You are Holding Me Now in Hand." The very title leads the reader to expect a love scene, with the poet's hand held by one of his comrades. But this is not the case. The reader quickly discovers that it is the reader's hand caught in the title. The poet turns the reader into the seducer, saying "before you attempt me further, . . . [t]he whole past theory of your life and all conformity to the lives around you would have to be abandon'd." The poet (becoming his book) gives the reader a chance to escape, but then entices him or her by suggesting a trial in some hidden spot—"in some wood," "back of a rock," or "on the beach." There he will permit the reader to kiss him with the "comrade's long-dwelling kiss or the new husband's kiss" and will allow himself to be thrust beneath the reader's clothing to rest against heart or hip. Readers discover, perhaps to their dismay, that they have been propositioned by a book! The poet himself is ready to escape, requesting his release with a riddle: "For all is useless without that which you may guess at many times and not hit, that which I hinted at; / Therefore release me and depart on your way."

"These I Singing in Spring," the fifth poem in the "Calamus" cluster, portrays the poet going to the pond-side alone but soon surrounded in imagination by a gang of comrades—"the spirits of dear friends dead or alive." The poet, accompanied by this ghostly "great crowd" and wandering in search of "tokens," soon comes upon a place sacred to his memory: "O here I last saw him that tenderly loves me, and returns again never to separate from me, / And this, O this shall henceforth be the token of comrades, this calamus-root shall, / Interchange it youths with each other! let none render it back!" At the end of the poem, the poet begins to discriminate among his "cloud of spirits": not all of them are worthy of receiving the phallic-like Calamus-root. Indeed, it is reserved for a few: "I will give of it, but only to them that love as I myself am capable of loving."

The "Calamus" poems celebrate adhesiveness and manly love but rarely portray such a relationship at any length. At times, the intensities of feeling the poet celebrates seem more real in memory and imagination than in fact. For example, in "Of the Terrible Doubt of Appearances," after describing the big philosophical questions that defy human answer, the poet reveals that for him the questions are "curiously answer'd" by his friends, his "lovers." Such a relationship charges him with "untold and untellable wisdom": "He ahold of my hand has completely satisfied me." A similar portrait is painted in "When I Heard at the Close of the Day"; even though the poet's name has been received "with plaudits in the capitol," even though he has accomplished his plans, still he is not happy. Only when his friend and lover returns is he happy. The poem concludes with a bedroom scene, the poet lying awake content listening to the waters roll in on the shore: "For the one I love most lay sleeping by me under the same cover in the cool night, / In the stillness in the autumn moonbeams his face was inclined toward me, / And his arm lay lightly around my breast—and that night I was happy." Again, the poem appears to be a treasured recollection, the more valued for its rarity in the poet's life; that night must provide comfort for the many others spent alone. The passion of adhesiveness seems to be manifested in the simplest of gestures—the holding of a hand, the encircling of an arm.

Though the poet celebrates adhesiveness and associates the love of comrades with some of the tenderest, most memorable moments of his life, he also sometimes reveals the pain he has felt. "Trickle Drops," the bloodiest of all Whitman's poems, might well be read as an anguished confessional poem—indeed the opposite of celebratory. The blood-drops come from his face, from his forehead and lips, and from his breast—"from within where I was conceal'd." The drops are "confession drops" that "stain every page, stain every song I sing, every word I say." The poet exhorts the drops to saturate his pages "with yourself all ashamed and wet." The shortest of the "Calamus" poems, "Here the Frailest Leaves of Me," is similarly confessional, but less self-lacerating: "Here the frailest leaves of me and yet my strongest lasting, / Here I shade and hide my thoughts, I myself do not expose them, / And yet they expose me more than all my other poems."

"Sometimes with One I Love" portrays the poet as feeling jealous rage for fear that he "effuse[s] unreturn'd love." He discovers, however, there is recompense, even for "unreturn'd love": "I loved a certain person ardently and my love was not return'd, / Yet out of that I have written these songs." Perhaps this poem reveals the secret as to why there is so much celebration of adhesiveness in "Calamus" but so little portrayal of it in any extended sense. "Sometimes with One I Love" may be paired with "Not Heaving from my Ribb'd Breast Only," one of the most visually negative of Whitman's poems: fourteen lines begin with "Not" and two others with "Nor" in this seventeen-line poem! Along with "Trickle Drops," this is one of Whitman's most tortured poems, a long periodic sentence filled from beginning to end with heaving, sighing, panting, and chattering, a portrait of an unhappy, almost despairing man ("in sighs at night in rage dissatisfied with myself"). The source of the rage is finally disclosed in the last two lines: "Not in any or all of them O adhesiveness! O pulse of my life! / Need I that you exist and show yourself any more than in these songs." These two poems reveal that the poet has lived a largely lonely life suppressing his adhesiveness, his only compensation the creation of his poems. 

These poems may reveal the reason Whitman emphasized the social dimension of the "Calamus" poems when he referred to them in later years, as, for example, in his 1876 Preface to Two Rivulets : "Important as they are in my purpose as emotional expressions for humanity, the special meaning of the Calamus cluster of Leaves of Grass, (and more or less running through that book, and cropping out in Drum-Taps,) mainly resides in its Political significance" (Comprehensive 751). That "political" dimension is explicit in "For You, O Democracy" and "The Base of All Metaphysics." In the first of these, the poet announces his aim to make "the continent indissoluble," "the most splendid race," "inseparable cities"—all "By the love of comrades, / By the manly love of comrades." Many readers have found this poem naive or unconvincing.

"The Base of all Metaphysics," however, has not received its due. The poet become professor explains the base for all past metaphysical speculation—Plato, Socrates, Christ, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, etc.—as contained in "The dear love of man for his comrade, the attraction of friend to friend, / Of the well-married husband and wife, of children and parents, / Of city for city and land for land." In Civilization and its Discontents (1930), Sigmund Freud presents in his non-poetic prose a vision of social bonding quite compatible with Whitman's: "Man's discovery that sexual (genital) love . . . provided him with the prototype of all happiness [inspired him to] . . . make genital eroticism the central point of his life. . . . The love which founded the family continues to operate in civilization both in its original [sexual] form . . . and in its modified form as aim-inhibited affection." Freud believed that "aim-inhibited love" was originally "fully sensual love, and it is so still in man's unconscious. Both—fully sensual love and aim-inhibited love—extend outside the family and create new bonds with people who before were strangers" (qtd. in Miller, Leaves 54). Freud would have seen that in such poems as "To a Stranger" the poet provides an example of the kind of bonding derived from such "aim-inhibited love." The poem is addressed to a "[p]assing stranger": "You give me the pleasure of your eyes, face, flesh, as we pass, you take of my beard, breast, hands, in return."

As a poet Whitman probably had more conscious access to his unconscious than do most people. In the last "Calamus" poem he describes himself as "[f]ull of life now, compact, visible," but he speaks to those readers who have come after him, who themselves are "compact, visible," seeking him in his poems—"Fancying how happy you were if I could be with you and become your comrade; / Be it as if I were with you. (Be not too certain but I am now with you.)" ("Full of Life Now"). The poet is confident that his readers, whatever their sexuality, overt or suppressed, will respond imaginatively to such an appeal cast primarily in physical terms.

During the nineteenth century, Whitman's sex poems in "Children of Adam" and elsewhere in Leaves became subjects of controversy and created many problems for the "good gray poet," but the "Calamus" pieces were largely accepted as innocent poems of comradeship and brotherly love. In the twentieth century, the two clusters have exchanged positions in the reputation of Leaves; the sex poems have found acceptance, but the "Calamus" poems are charged with depicting "unnatural" sexuality. Most recently, however, with the advent of the rights movement for gays and lesbians (allied with the rights movement for Blacks and women), the "Calamus" cluster has come to be celebrated as a homosexual manifesto. Too often in the debate about "Calamus," proponents for one or another interpretation forget that it is a cluster of poems which, like all genuine poetry, yields itself most fully only after one attends to the subtlety and complexity of its techniques and themes.   James E. Miller, Jr.

Bibliography

Black, Stephen A. Whitman's Journeys into Chaos.Princeton: Princeton UP, 1975.

Erkkila, Betsy. Whitman the Political Poet. New York: Oxford UP, 1989.

Fone, Byrne R.S. Masculine Landscapes: Walt Whitman and the Homoerotic Text. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1992

Killingsworth, M. Jimmie. Whitman's Poetry of the Body: Sexuality, Politics, and the Text. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1989.

McKinley, John. "Shooting the Moon: Over-Reading Homoeroticism in Whitman's 'Calamus.'" Walt Whitman Centennial International Symposium. Ed. Manuel Villar Raso, Miguel Martinez Lopez, and Rosa Morillas. Granada, Spain: U of Granada P, 1992. 146–150.

Martin, Robert K. The Homosexual Tradition in American Poetry. Austin: U of Texas P, 1979.

Miller, Edwin Haviland. Walt Whitman's Poetry: A Psychological Journey. New York: New York UP, 1969.

Miller, James E., Jr. A Critical Guide to "Leaves of Grass." Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1957.

____. "Leaves of Grass": America's Lyric-Epic of Self and Democracy. New York: Twayne, 1992.

Moon, Michael. Disseminating Whitman: Revision and Corporeality in "Leaves of Grass." Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1991.

Pollak, Vivian R. "Death as Repression, Repression as Death: A Reading of Whitman's 'Calamus' Poems." Walt Whitman of Mickle Street: A Centennial Collection. Ed. Geoffrey M. Sill. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1994. 179–193.

Thomas, M. Wynn. "Whitman's Achievements in the Personal Style in Calamus." Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 1.3 (1983): 36–47.

Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass: Comprehensive Reader's Edition. Ed. Harold W. Blodgett and Sculley Bradley. New York: New York UP, 1965.

____. The Poetry and Prose of Walt Whitman. Ed. Louis Untermeyer. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1949.

____. Whitman's Manuscripts: "Leaves of Grass" (1860). Ed. Fredson Bowers. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1955.

Carmine Sarracino

John Burroughs first met Whitman in 1864, while Burroughs was in Washington, D.C., looking for work. After his marriage to Ursula North in 1857, Burroughs foundered financially. Against the wishes of his conventional wife, who had grown up in affluence as the daughter of a prosperous New York farmer, Burroughs hoped to become a writer, thus his interest in Walt Whitman. In 1862 he had frequently visited Pfaff's beer cellar, a bohemian watering hole and the center of literary life in Manhattan. There Burroughs championed Whitman in literary arguments, anticipating at every moment a meeting with the poet himself.

That meeting did not take place at Pfaff's, but rather by chance on the streets of Washington, D.C., as Whitman made his way to an army hospital to tend wounded soldiers. Always trying to recruit fresh help, Whitman invited Burroughs to come along. In an earlier desperate attempt at employment, Burroughs had briefly worked on a crew that buried Union soldiers whose bodies were transported to Washington. Nursing the horribly wounded was as repugnant to Burroughs as handling mangled corpses, and he soon left his job in the hospitals. But Burroughs and Whitman, who quickly began calling him "Jack," had struck up an enduring friendship.

Whitman encouraged Burroughs to develop a literature of nature that was scientifically precise in its observations and factuality and at the same time poetic in its praise of nature. Under Whitman's guidance, Burroughs developed as a writer and began to sell pieces to magazines while working as a clerk for the Department of Treasury and, later, as a bank examiner. Burroughs in turn influenced Whitman by sharpening Whitman's eye for precise detail in observing nature.

Whitman became a regular guest at the Burroughs's house for Sunday breakfast. He befriended Ursula, nicknaming her "Ursa." The Burroughs's marriage had been strained from the outset by sexual incompatibility; Whitman attempted to reconcile the two.

Even though their courtship had been completely chaste, John's attraction to the slender, attractive Ursula North had been powerfully erotic, perhaps even solely erotic. On their wedding night, however, the devoutly religious Ursula portentously fell to her knees at the side of the bed they would share for the first time and urged John to join her in prayer. After five troubled years of marriage, Ursula consulted ministers in Olive, her hometown in the Catskills, and concluded that her husband's sexual demands were immoral and intolerable. She prescribed a separation of two months, July and August of 1862, so that John could learn the value of chastity. The separation, however, lasted until February of 1864, by which time John had learned not the value of chastity but rather the ease of finding accommodating female company. Even after their reunion, John remained unfaithful.

Whitman sided with Ursula. He told John that his "wantonness" was the one flaw in an otherwise beautiful and admirable character. As for Ursula's sexual unresponsiveness, Whitman blamed it on John's failure sufficiently to inspire Ursula to love him. Whitman frequently visited the lonely Ursula when John's job as bank examiner required him to travel, as it often did. In 1873 Whitman's visits suddenly ceased because of the stroke he suffered; Ursula, in turn, then became a frequent visitor to the ailing poet, bringing him food and taking him out for carriage rides. She even offered him a room in the Burroughs's Washington home at 1332 V Street, which offer Whitman appreciated but declined.

Burroughs's first work on Whitman was Notes on Walt Whitman (1867). The work was so extensively revised and rewritten by Whitman himself that it should properly be considered a collaborative effort. In it we see Whitman shaping his public personality, even at the expense of accurate biography; for example, Whitman is alleged to have traveled to the Western United States, although in fact his first such trip took place decades later.

In Whitman, A Study (1896), his second major work on the poet, Burroughs is, as always, the Whitman disciple, but he turns his naturalist's eye on Whitman as an original specimen: a poet whose work transcends the usual categories of art, who is as much the prophet as the poet. Whitman was commonly attacked for his lack of artistic polish and literary refinement; Burroughs and others defended him against these charges by in turn attacking the limitations of "the literary."

In 1901, nine years after Whitman's death, John Burroughs met the great love of his life, Clara Barrus, who was a physician affiliated with the state psychiatric hospital at Middletown, New York. She wrote Burroughs an admiring letter, and he invited her to visit him at Slabsides, his "hermit's retreat" about a mile from Riverby, the home he had built on the banks of the Hudson. Barrus was 33, Burroughs 64; he referred to her as "Whitmanesque," a "new woman" who was his intellectual equal as well as his lover. She became his live-in companion after Ursula's death in 1917, and then his literary executor and biographer.

Bibliography

Barrus, Clara. Whitman and Burroughs, Comrades. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1931.

Burroughs, John. Birds and Poets. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1877.

____. Notes on Walt Whitman as Poet and Person. New York: American News, 1867.

____. "The Poet of the Cosmos." Accepting the Universe. By Burroughs. New York: Wise, 1924. 316–328.

____. Whitman, A Study. 1896. St. Clair Shores, Mich.: Scholarly, 1970.

Renehan, Edward J., Jr. John Burroughs, An American Naturalist. Post Mills, Vt.: Chelsea Green, 1992.

Wyman, Mary A. "Burroughs and Whitman—Naturalist and Mystic." The Lure for Feeling in the Creative Process. New York: Philosophical Library, 1960. 104–128.  

Thomas Sanfilip

There is a distinct contrast between Whitman's idealized notions of the human body as expressed in his literary work and the actual state of his health as it evolved over the course of his life. The many revisions of Leaves of Grass did not so much parallel his decline in health as much as reinforce his original conception of the natural human being as the divine reflection of the cosmos. Over time this idea as an essential theme of his work began to take precedence over others, serving as both his conception of America's unique characteristic as a people and the archetype of his own self-created myth for the model of healthy masculinity.

Whitman attributed his heartiness to his Dutch and English ancestry, particularly that of his mother's side. Although he attributed the collapse of his health to prolonged exposure to viruses and diseases while nursing dying soldiers during the Civil War, his inherent physical capacity to rebound from strokes was remarked upon with wonder by most of his friends and doctors. This capacity only added to his self-created myth as representative of the innate physical integrity and health of the American type. Late in life he was to admit that his family showed a marked tendency to paralysis, and the history of his bouts with illness and strokes that left him a semi-invalid for the remaining second half of his life tends to bear this out.

The first signs of serious health problems began during the war, when he started suffering extended periods characterized by sore throats, unexpected weight gain, bouts of dizziness, and at one point a loss of hearing. All of these were indications of hypertension and emotional stress brought on by his work in the hospitals. As time went on he complained of periods of increasing faintness, headaches, fatigue, and sore throats. In June 1864 he returned home to Brooklyn to recover his health and remained housebound a full month before eventually regaining his strength.

In the late 1860s Whitman's health began to sink again with a return of the same symptoms, including depression and head pains; in addition, he began to break out in sudden sweats diagnosed by doctors as symptoms of "hospital malaria" and "hospital poison" they believed had been absorbed into his system during the war. He recovered again, but in January 1873 suffered his first major stroke, which left him paralyzed. Some scholars have suggested the primary cause was a troubling emotional incident occurring in 1870 that sapped his energy, although the event has never been uncovered.

Whitman agreed to electric-battery shock therapy to try to bring about some recovery to his limbs, but there was little success. Only after a number of weeks was he able to sit upright. Although emotionally set back by the death of his mother during his convalescence, his health improved again, even though his left leg remained lame. By 1885 he found it increasingly difficult to walk, and three years later suffered a second paralytic stroke, which left him a semi-invalid needing regular care for the rest of his life. In spite of his debilitating maladies Whitman continued to maintain a belief in the healing power of nature and regularly asserted its primary significance as the crux of his philosophy. 

Throughout his life Whitman was keenly aware of many types of unorthodox medical analyses and treatments, which ranged from homeopathy and hydropathy to phrenology, a science that claimed a connection between the shape of the skull and the innate characteristics of the individual. Whitman had visited the offices of the phrenologists Fowler and Wells in New York City many times, and it was they who distributed the first edition of Leaves of Grass as well as published the first review of the book; thus, his interest in all aspects related to the health of the individual clearly permeated his perception of the human experience. 

Not completely sympathetic to the standard medical approaches of his day, Whitman felt that physicians were too quick to circumvent the natural healing processes of the body in favor of applying various emetics. He believed in a more holistic approach to health, advocating fresh air, exercise, and the full emotional and physical development of the self. He was considered by his medical friends to have a better-than-average knowledge of physiology and medicine, gained primarily by extensive reading of popular medical journals of the time, observation of doctors, and hospital experience during the war. In later years he admitted that had he been seeking a profession it would have been in the medical field as a doctor.

As a consequence, the health-imbued persona of mythic proportions he projected in his work fused with new and various aspects of his self-created image as healer in each newly revised edition of the work. Harold Aspiz believes the first three editions of Leaves of Grass illustrate a merger of what he terms the "fact and invention" of Whitman's self-portrayal as the self-endowed symbol of his own magnificent body. His image as "one of the roughs" in the first edition transforms in the second into a magnetic "folk-evangelist," in the third into a "reincarnated Adam" ready to bear healthy children, and in the fourth into the "healer-camerado." With each new edition, the body of the poet is used less and less as a metaphor for the physical vitality that was integral to his philosophy. 

In addition, Aspiz shows that the editions after the Civil War reflect Whitman's marked attempt to gain a greater spiritual insight from his past.  Democratic Vistas —his last major prose work—continued to emphasize the significance of a sound body as the basis for all virtues of the individual and the nation as a whole. His final essays derive little significance from the earlier image of himself as the physical example of the healthy American type, often taking on what Aspiz terms a "wistful" longing for his past health as he declined into old age.

Bibliography

Allen, Gay Wilson. The Solitary Singer: A Critical Biography of Walt Whitman. 1955. Rev. ed. 1967. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985.

Aspiz, Harold. Walt Whitman and the Body Beautiful. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1980.

Knapp, Bettina L. Walt Whitman. New York: Continuum, 1993.

Leon, Philip W. Walt Whitman and Sir William Osler: A Poet and His Physician. Toronto: ECW, 1995.

Traubel, Horace. With Walt Whitman in Camden. Vol. 2. New York: Appleton, 1908.

M. Jimmie Killingsworth

In Whitman's poetry, the human body is a major theme—and much more. It is a prominent conceptual device; Whitman's use of body metaphors anticipates the work of twentieth-century cognitive linguists and language philosophers in the recognition of the body as the ground of human understanding to which all concepts ultimately relate. It is also a source of delight, on a footing with poetry itself, the seat of sexual pleasure and the sympathetic emotions which bind person to person. In this last sense the body is the heart of democratic politics, the common denominator in the experience of all men and women. In proclaiming himself in the 1855 Leaves of Grass to be the poet of the body as well as the poet of the soul, Whitman set out to elevate the status of physical existence as a theme and inspiration of modern poetry, fully exploiting the metaphorical possibilities of material life as well as advocating a complete realization of the body as a source of psychological, social, and political well-being. 

The 1855 body-consciousness seemed to propel the poet beyond anything as simple as "interest" in the physiological processes of the body in health. He had expressed such an interest in his earliest poetry and prose, most notably in book reviews he wrote as a young journalist. But the 1855 versions of "Song of Myself," "The Sleepers," and "I Sing the Body Electric" take their very inspiration from the being and workings of the human body. In all of these poems, bodily health is at once a metaphor for spiritual, social, and political success and a literal topic set on equal footing with the more traditional topics of poetic expression. In "Body Electric" in particular, physical existence appears as a central element in the poet's project. The speaker proclaims, "The bodies of men and women engirth me, and I engirth them, / They will not let me off nor I them till I go with them and respond to them and love them." The bodies of the poet's "lovers" are set against "those who corrupted their own live bodies" and "those who defiled the living" bodies of others (section 1). The latter come under a special attack in twin sections of the poem dealing with what the social reformers of Whitman's day viewed as the two great evils of American society—slavery ("a man's body at auction" [section 7]) and prostitution ("a woman's body at auction" [section 8]). Neglecting one's own body, the poem implicitly argues, leads to the oppression of others' bodies, so that democratic consciousness ultimately depends upon care for and respect of the physical existence of every individual. 

In "The Sleepers," the poet adopts the persona of the loving healer who attends the bodies of sleepers restless with illness and with dreams of unfulfilled sexuality. His sympathetic imagination arises from the common experience of bodily life that the poet shares with the subjects of his poem—and with his readers, who are invited to join in the examination and celebration of the physical. Far from being just a metaphor, the treatment of the body appears as the very foundation of all metaphorical communication. As the language philosophers Lakoff and Johnson suggest, every new concept a person learns has its grounding in—or may be traced to—a reference to the living body. The body is the starting place of all knowledge, a theme taken up directly in the cosmic drama of "Song of Myself," in which the poet treats "otherbeingness" in nature—the life of other people, as well as that of animals, trees, and even rocks in the crust of the earth—as sharing in the overall evolution of physical existence and as being tied to the individual human being through shared developmental processes. Inone famous passage, the speaker of the poem marvels that "I incorporate gneiss and coal and long-threaded moss and fruits and grains and esculent roots, / And am stucco'd with quadrupeds and birds all over" (section 31). Such is the "knit of identity" (section 3), a trope that is simultaneously a metaphor for shared life and a metaphor for metaphor itself. Every metaphor knits an identity between unlike things. Whitman reveals material existence to be the starting place for all such identification and thus celebrates the body for its contribution to what he calls the "merge" ("Body Electric," section 5), the tendency toward the unification of individuals driven by the "procreant urge" of all life ("Song of Myself," section 3) to reproduce itself by interpenetrating with other life forms. 

Whitman's attitude toward the body and his treatment of it did not remain static but changed over the several editions of Leaves of Grass as he added new poems and revised old ones. In the 1856 Leaves, Whitman was, if anything, more inclined to develop his celebration and exploration of physical life. In the poem eventually titled "Spontaneous Me," he again identified the poetic function with a physical one, this time with special emphasis on the male organs of sexual regeneration. In "Poem of Women," later titled "Unfolded Out of the Folds," he balanced the equation, presenting life as an evolving phenomenon unfolding upon the world much as a child emerges from the very folds of the mother's womb and vagina. In "Poem of Procreation," later "A Woman Waits for Me," the poet offers the vision of a future woman whose physical life is every bit as developed, as open, and as athletic as a man's. 

By the 1860 edition, however, Whitman displayed a new trend toward developing his poems of spirituality and psychological drama and increasingly neglecting his poetry of the body. After his representation of the torn body of the nation and his own efforts at "wound-dressing" in the Civil War poems of Drum-Taps, he all but abandoned the celebration of physical existence. By that time, Emerson and other supporters had encouraged him to rethink his emphasis on the body because, they argued, it had cost him readers and interfered with his ambition to become the great poet of democracy. Moreover, he had lost much of his own physical vigor and, as a consequence, may have also lost some interest in being the poet of the body, though he never openly agreed to reduce, eliminate, or apologize for his work on sexuality and physical vitality in general, but instead defended it vigorously in essays like "A Memorandum at a Venture." Whatever the cause, however, the effect is clear: the poems written after 1865 are mainly soulful reflections on life from the vantage of an artistically distanced observer rather than the ardent celebrations of a lover of material life immersed in the very material of his being and song. 

Early commentators on Whitman's poetry of the body, as well as critics and biographers well into the twentieth century, tended to understand the poems as a completely original gesture of a rebellious soul reacting to the strict demands of the Victorian Age. However, the image of the poetic rebel "singing the body" has been greatly modified by more recent scholarship under the influence of new developments in social history and a comparison of Whitman's work to contemporaneous writings outside the accepted literary canon (see Aspiz; Killingsworth, Poetry of the Body; and Reynolds). Whitman drew upon a variety of scientific sources and from social reform literature in developing both the form and content of his treatment of physical life. He learned about evolution, for instance, from reading reviews of pre-Darwinian scientists like Jean Baptiste Lamarck and Robert Chambers. He borrowed the notion of "sexual electricity" from eclectic medical writers of the day, such as Edward H. Dixon and Orson S. Fowler, the founder of the phrenological firm Fowler and Wells, which served as the publisher and distributor of the second edition of Leaves of Grass. Phrenology encouraged Whitman in his notion that character could be "read" in a person's physical attributes and that moral character, as well as physical traits, could be transmitted from one generation to the next. From popular medical writing, Whitman picked up the theme of human perfectibility and wove eugenic themes into poems like "A Woman Waits for Me." Above all, it was the quirky physiology of nineteenth-century science writing that Whitman left behind when he shifted the emphasis of his own writing after the war. His farewell to the soap box and lecture hall of scientific reform is embodied in the 1860 poem "I Sit and Look Out" and in "When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer," which first appeared in Drum-Taps. 

Formalist and deconstructionist critics since the 1950s have looked with skepticism upon Whitman's assertions about the spontaneous connection between his poetry and the unmediated workings of nature and the body. But the poetry of the body continues to affect readers with a sense of immediacy and liveliness that is difficult to account for by reference to poetic conventions and semiotic processes. Much as Lawrence Buell suggests that we must retain a theory of referentiality (a way of linking poetry to its sources in lived experience) if we are to grasp the full significance of Henry David Thoreau's work and his tradition in the literature of the environmental imagination, so perhaps we must retain a sense of how language not only depicts but also grows out of bodily processes—an organic theory of art rooted in life—to fully appreciate Whitman's accomplishment in the poetry of the body. 

Bibliography

Aspiz, Harold. Walt Whitman and the Body Beautiful. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1980. 

Buell, Lawrence. The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1995. 

Johnson, Mark. The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987. 

Killingsworth, M. Jimmie. The Growth of "Leaves of Grass": The Organic Tradition in Whitman Studies. Columbia, S.C.: Camden House, 1993. 

____. Whitman's Poetry of the Body: Sexuality, Politics, and the Text. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1989. 

Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1980. 

Reynolds, David S. Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography. New York: Knopf, 1995. 

Edward W. Huffstetler

On 1 January 1865 Whitman was hired as a clerk at the Bureau of Indian Affairs, a governmental agency within the Department of Interior. Six months later, the newly appointed Secretary of Interior, James Harlan, a former Methodist minister and senator from Iowa, fired Whitman upon discovering he was the author of Leaves of Grass, a book Harlan knew by reputation as immoral and pornographic. The incident caused considerable stir within the administration as prominent supporters of Whitman came to his defense, eventually securing him a position in the Attorney General's Office. 

Upon deciding in 1862 to stay in Washington, Whitman had initially secured a position in the Paymaster's Office as a clerk, but was dissatisfied. To secure a better position, he sought help from several influential friends, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, who wrote a recommendation on his behalf. After receiving the Department of Interior appointment, Whitman, from all accounts and from his letters home, was delighted for a number of reasons. First, he was fascinated by the visiting delegations of American Indians from the plains tribes. It was even reported that he would sometimes visit them in the evenings in their hotel rooms and speak with them via an interpreter. Secondly, he enjoyed the more relaxed atmosphere of the office, which allowed greater flexibility in his schedule so that he could visit the nearby field hospitals to help with the wounded. He wrote in a letter to his brother Jeff that though he was supposed to work from nine to four, he almost never arrived as early as nine and only stayed until four if he wanted. Finally, he was delighted with the per annum pay of $1200, a considerably higher sum than his previous position, which he needed both to support himself in Washington and to send home to his mother and younger siblings. 

The job, which primarily consisted of copying out reports made by BIA officials, was suited to Whitman's needs at the time, and he was well-liked by his immediate superior William P. Dole, who promoted him to a second-class clerkship on 11 May 1865, just a few days prior to his dismissal. 

Bibliography

Allen, Gay Wilson. The Solitary Singer: A Critical Biography of Walt Whitman. 1955. Rev. ed. 1967. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985. 

Asselineau, Roger. The Evolution of Walt Whitman. 2 vols. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1960-1962. 

Kaplan, Justin. Walt Whitman: A Life. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1980. 

Schyberg, Frederik. Walt Whitman. Trans. Evie Allison Allen. New York: Columbia UP, 1951.

M. Jimmie Killingsworth

Biographers have always recognized Whitman's career in journalism as a prominent feature of his life and his development as the "poet of democracy." First through printing and then through news writing and newspaper editing, Whitman discovered the power of the written word in an age of increasing literacy. It was through journalism that Whitman first discovered himself to be a writer, first joined the public "conversation" on matters literary and political, and first established himself as a professional figure in an era when professionalism was on the rise.

Whitman's career in journalism was an outgrowth of his apprenticeship in the printing craft, which he began in 1831 at the age of twelve, working at the hand-press of the Long Island Patriot. The special combination of craftsman's pride, working people's democracy, and impassioned writing inspired by social and political affairs was as much a part of the journalist's environment of this time as it would be of Leaves of Grass later, though his earliest writing tended to be conventionally introspective, impressionistic, and, not surprisingly, caught up with the psychological problems of the adolescent ego. By the time Whitman graduated to journeyman printer in 1835, he was already publishing short pieces in various papers, not only routine features and news but also reviews, essays, and poems. When bad economic times left him out of work as a printer and journalist in 1836, he turned to schoolteaching, but continued to write and seek publication. By 1838, Whitman was back to regular work in journalism, this time as the founding editor and publisher of a weekly, the Long Islander. No files of this paper survive, but a few pieces were reprinted in the Long Island Democrat and thus come down to us as the earliest examples of Whitman's published work. Also dating from this time, but probably written earlier, is a series of ten essays "From the Desk of a Schoolmaster" entitled Sun-Down Papers. The Long Islander did not thrive financially under Whitman's management, and when his backer sold it, he went to work for the Democrat. Then, completing the pattern that dominated his early career, he drifted back to schoolteaching and finally moved to New York to find work as a printer. During the early 1840s, he contributed reviews and essays to papers and literary journals and also began to write fiction. In critical notices and reviews, he vigorously joined the rush to define and defend a democratic ideal of literature that then consumed the pages of periodicals like the United States Review and the New World.

In 1842, Whitman produced a sizable body of work and served as chief editor for a single paper, the New York Aurora. In this role we see him for the first time writing hotly on local political topics such as the Catholic-Protestant disputes in the streets of New York and the associated stirrings of the anti-immigrant Nativist movement. Like most journalists of his day, Whitman was not above name-calling and rabble-rousing and may well have lost his editorial post because of his refusal to tone down the editorials published in the paper. His difficulty in keeping to a schedule may have also contributed. Loafing and inviting his soul may later have served him well as a method of poetic composition, but did not suffice for newspaper work with its tight production schedules. For whatever reason, Whitman left the Aurora after a few months and for the next three years supported himself by writing prose fiction, including the temperance novel Franklin Evans, as well as piece work for a number of New York papers, including the Tattler, Sunday Times, Statesman, Plebeian, Sun, Democrat, and Mirror. 

Whitman returned to Brooklyn in 1845, where for a while he served as a kind of cultural reporter for the Star, writing on such topics as music, theater, education, and books. When the editor of the leading Brooklyn paper, the Daily Eagle, died, Whitman was hired to fill the post. He remained with the Eagle for two years, writing on a variety of topics, which Thomas Brasher in a book-long study of Whitman's work at the Eagle divides into three large categories: the political and economic scene, including editorials and features on such topics as nationalism, the West, the old world versus the new, party politics, and the question of immigration; the social scene, including treatments of crime and punishment, temperance, slavery, and health issues; and literature and the arts, including reviews of plays and operas, as well as discussions of music, ballet, architecture, painting, and sculpture. Whitman's writings for the Eagle are enough to fill the two large volumes of The Gathering of the Forces, and this is only a selection of the editor's total output. The range and volume of Whitman's writing as a newspaper editor provided a more than adequate preparation for the poet who would boast in his most famous poem that he "contains multitudes," and it gave him a medium in which to try on different personae and otherwise experiment with the democratic discourse of self-assertion. He took pleasure and pride in the power of the daily paper to foster special ties between author and audience. "There is a curious kind of sympathy (haven't you ever thought of it before?) that arises in the mind of a newspaper conductor with the public he serves. . . . Daily communion creates a sort of brotherhood and sisterhood between the two parties," Whitman wrote (qtd. in Brasher 6), foreshadowing Leaves of Grass in theme and style (notice the use of parenthetical direct address of the reader). Despite such occasional flashes, however, Brasher concludes, as do most scholars and critics, that the great mass of Whitman's writing for the Eagle is the work of a literary apprentice who had yet to find his own voice. In general, Whitman's literary criticism and cultural pronouncements tended to be conventional and predictable, the labor of a busy journalist with precious little time to refine and reflect upon his style and subject matter. His political editorials, especially at the beginning of his tenure, show him to be a party man writing for a party paper, defending the Democrats against the powerful Whig papers across the river in New York, even supporting excesses such as the Mexican War, which had greatly offended Emerson, Lowell, and other liberal writers. Ultimately, though, Whitman may have lost his job at the Eagle because he was unable to sustain the hard party line his publishers demanded. In Specimen Days, he would recall, "Thetroubles in the Democratic party broke forth . . . and I split off with the radicals, which led to rows with the boss and 'the party,' and I lost my place" (Prose Works 1:288).

In the next post he took as a journalist, traveling south with his younger brother Jeff to work for the New Orleans Crescent, he avoided politics almost entirely, reporting on cultural events, reviewing books, and writing feature essays. He capitalized on his trip south in "Excerpts from a Traveller's Note Book," published in several installments soon after his arrival in New Orleans; he warmed up for the famous catalogs that would appear in Leaves of Grass with impressionistic essays of characters and places around the city; and he used the occasion of controversy over a performance by the "model artists," who used human groupings to portray famous scenes from art and history, to defend the fundamental purity of celebrating the human body in art. Working for a paper that accepted advertising from slave traders and in every way catered to a slave-owning population, Whitman must have felt his status as a political outsider. This may have contributed to the decline of his political muse and even his rather early departure from his only Southern post, which was also hastened by his own homesickness and that of his brother. He lasted only two months with the New Orleans paper.

By the end of 1848, he was back in Brooklyn, publishing the Freeman, a weekly devoted to the free-soil ideal. In his first editorial, he wrote of Thomas Jefferson, "How he hated slavery! He hated it in all its forms—over the mind as well as the body of man" (qtd. in Kaplan 145). In the charged and changeable political atmosphere of the day, he could keep the Freeman going only a year, after which time he again took up the life of a freelance journalist, contributing travel letters and man-on-the-street essays to a number of New York and Brooklyn papers. He would continue to produce this kind of work right through the time of the first two editions of Leaves of Grass in 1855 and 1856. Notable among these pieces were those published in Life Illustrated under the sponsorship of the phrenologists Fowler and Wells, who also published the second edition of Leaves.

Feeling the pinch of tight finances after focusing his efforts on producing the first two editions of his poems, Whitman gave full-time journalism one last try in 1857, accepting an editorial position on the Brooklyn Daily Times. Despite having become the controversial author of Leaves of Grass, Whitman cultivated a persona in the Times that remained a largely conventional one. He replicated his earlier stance, which Jerome Loving has called "the pose of the journalist as moral paragon" (60), taking charge of his readership's public education, moderating local disputes such as the treatment of slavery in the churches, and chiding the "ultraabolitionists" and radical advocates of social programs like women's rights even as he resisted the extension of slavery and pondered the position of women in a society that offered few options for the unmarried. Yet we can see a slightly greater independence in Whitman the editor in this later period. He was no longer a party man, for example, arguing at one point that an overweening commitment to political parties had led to corruption and naiveté in American politics, local and national. He seems a bit more willing to take on controversial stances—favorably reviewing W.W. Sanger's History of Prostitution, for instance, which argued for controlled legalization—and he stretched the limits of sensationalistic news reporting with regular stories of rape, murder, and incest, and even one account of a homosexual rape. In all, he portrayed a "detached yet sympathetic spirit," in the words of Emory Holloway (I Sit 24), a recognizable, if watered-down, version of the speaker in "Song of Myself," both "in and out of the game" (section 4). Why Whitman left the Times in June 1859 is not clear, though it has been suggested by various commentators that he offended the church people of the town, either with his stance on slavery or with his liberal attitude toward sexuality, even the attenuated version he developed for his newspaper audience. Though he never again worked formally for a single paper, Whitman kept his journalistic connections alive throughout his life, publishing poems, essays, and sketches in various papers and journals.

Much work remains to be done on Whitman's journalism. Though selections appear in the various collections listed in the bibliography below, no complete collection of extant work, comparable to Floyd Stovall's edition of the prose works, exists. (Whether some of his freelance works should be characterized as literary journalism or prose nonfiction in fact remains an unsettled question.) Nor has any biographer or critic fully accounted for the continuities and discontinuities between Whitman the poet and Whitman the journalist, though the differences have fascinated scholars since Whitman's own day. The significance of journalism in Whitman's overall development is at least partly clear, however. Newspaper work provided Whitman with a way of earning an income through writing in an age where the dominance of crafts was giving way to professionalism. It also gave him room to experiment—though in a closely controlled environment—with the rhetoric of democratic discourse, in which an ordinary citizen, the journalist, takes on the task of informing, educating, and exhorting a large and active readership composed of fellow citizens.

Bibliography

Brasher, Thomas L. Whitman as Editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1970.

Kaplan, Justin. Walt Whitman: A Life. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1980.

Loving, Jerome. Emerson, Whitman, and the American Muse. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1982.

Reynolds, David S. Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography. New York: Knopf, 1995.

Whitman, Walt. The Gathering of the Forces.2 vols. Cleveland Rodgers and John Black. New York: Putnam's, 1920.

____. I Sit and Look Out: Editorials from the Brooklyn Daily Times. Ed. Emory Holloway and Vernolian Schwarz. New York: Columbia UP, 1932.

____. Prose Works 1892. Ed. Floyd Stovall. 2 vols. New York: New York UP, 1963–1964.

____. The Uncollected Poetry and Prose of Walt Whitman. 2 Vols. Ed. Emory Holloway. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page, 1921.

____. Walt Whitman of the New York Aurora. Ed. Joseph Jay Rubin and Charles H. Brown. State College, Pa.: Bald Eagle, 1950.

Maverick Marvin Harris

In 1825 Marquis de Lafayette, the colonists' friend during the Revolutionary War and participant in the surrender of Cornwallis after the battle of Yorktown, made a return visit to the young nation as its honored guest. Ushered from city to city to review the progress of the young American republic, he was greeted everywhere by enthusiastic crowds. When the honored general came to Brooklyn to lay the cornerstone of the Apprentice's Library, school was let out so that the children might view this auspicious event. One of those children was five-year-old Walt Whitman, who, as he recorded in "My First Reading—Lafayette" in Specimen Days (1882), was embraced and kissed by Lafayette himself as he helped lift children away from a dangerous excavation to safer viewing spots. Whitman never forgot the experience and liked to think that the "old Republican" had dedicated him to the cause of liberty and democracy. 

Bibliography

Burroughs, John. Notes on Walt Whitman. New York: American News, 1867. 

Fausset, Hugh I'Anson. Walt Whitman: Poet of Democracy.New Haven: Yale UP, 1942. 

O'Connor, William Douglas. The Good Gray Poet: A Vindication. New York: Bunce and Huntington, 1866. 

Whitman, Walt. "My First Reading—Lafayette." Specimen Days. Vol. 1 of Prose Works 1892. Ed. Floyd Stovall. New York: New York UP, 1963. 13. 

Winwar, Frances. American Giant: Walt Whitman and His Times. New York: Harper, 1941.

Ivan Marki

The importance of the first edition of Leaves of Grass to American literary history is impossible to exaggerate. The slender volume introduced the poet who, celebrating the nation by celebrating himself, has since remained at the heart of America's cultural memory because in the world of his imagination Americans have learned to recognize and possibly understand their own. As Leaves of Grass grew through its five subsequent editions into a hefty book of 389 poems (with the addition of the two annexes), it gained much in variety and complexity, but Whitman's distinctive voice was never stronger, his vision never clearer, and his design never more improvisational than in the twelve poems of the first edition.

The first Leaves of Grass was put on sale in at least two stores, one in New York and another in Brooklyn, in late June of 1855. Printed in the shop of Andrew Rome of Brooklyn (where Andrew was assisted by his younger brother Tom), the quarto-size volume was designed and published by Whitman himself, who is also believed to have set the type for a few of its 95 pages. As William White has shown, 795 copies were printed in all, 599 of which were bound in cloth with varying degrees of gilt, the rest of them in paper or boards. A recent census of extant copies of the first edition reveals that nearly 200 copies survive today. Copies of the first edition are regularly some of the most expensive American books sold at rare-book auctions, with recent copies going for as much as $200,000. Because it was printed on a handset press, the first edition could never be reprinted (there were no plates); once the pages were printed, the type was redistributed. The handset type on Rome's hand-inked iron-bed press slipped and moved and in some cases fell off while the 795 copies were being printed, and so arguably each copy of the first edition is unique. Whitman stopped the press at least twice during the press run, once to correct a typographical error in the preface, and once to reset an entire line of poetry (he revised "And the night is for you and me and all" to "And the day and night are for you and me and all"). Because Whitman was paying for the printing, he did not want to waste any copies, so he bound copies that contained the corrected and uncorrected typo, as well as copies that contained both versions of his revised line (about one-third of the extant copies contain the original version). For a hundred and fifty years, many critics saw great significance in Whitman's concluding the poem that would come to be called "Song of Myself" with no period (indicating, so it was thought, the endless, ongoing process that the poem celebrates), but the census has revealed that a number of copies do have a period at the end of the poem. When Whitman proofread the first quarto sheets off the press, then, he would have seen the period before it broke off early in the print run.

The text begins with a ten-page statement in prose, untitled here and later known generally as the 1855 Preface. This is followed by twelve poems on 85 pages, the first six entitled "Leaves of Grass" and the remaining six untitled (listed here in order of appearance, they will be referred to in this entry under the final titles Whitman gave them in the 1881 edition of Leaves): "Song of Myself," "A Song for Occupations," "To Think of Time," "The Sleepers," "I Sing the Body Electric," "Faces," "Song of the Answerer," "Europe, The 72d and 73d Years of These States," "A Boston Ballad (1854)," "There Was a Child Went Forth," "Who Learns My Lesson Complete," and "Great Are the Myths." Whitman worked on the Preface while the book was being printed and wrote most of the poems in 1854 and 1855, although some lines that eventually found their way into the volume occur in his "green notebook," which has been dated as early as 1847, though more recent criticism dates the material related to Leaves as much later, probably in the early 1850s. The complete manuscript of the book is lost (although various early manuscript versions of many passages of1855 poems still exist). As Whitman told Traubel decades later, he left the original manuscript with Andrew Rome, and in 1858 it "was used to kindle the fire or feed the rag man" (Traubel 92).

The physical design of the book is unusual. Spread over the dark green covers and sprouting from the words "Leaves of Grass" embossed in gold in the center, patterns of vines, tendrils, and tufts of grass announce the spirit of organicism and give visual confirmation to the words' suggestion that the contents have grown like grass. These words are the only title to appear in the book, in bold big letters on the title page, in somewhat smaller characters at the head of the first six poems (serving as a repeated title for those pieces), and as a modest refrain at the top of each page. On the frontispiece is a portrait of a bearded young man. The collar of his shirt open, a wide-brimmed hat at a jaunty angle on his head, one hand in his pocket and the other one on his hip, he stares down the onlooker. Ted Genoways has discovered that there are two versions of this frontispiece, one in which the figure's crotch is flat, and the other in which a noticeable bulge has been added by the engraver to enhance the image of what Whitman would refer to as a "goodshaped and wellhung man."

The portrait represents Whitman, of course; it is a stipple engraving, perhaps by John C. McRae or Samuel Hollyer, based on a daguerreotype (often referred to as "the carpenter portrait") taken a year earlier by the painter-photographer Gabriel Harrison. The young man, however, is not identified, just as no author's name is given on the title page; there is no reason to associate the portrait or text with the Walter Whitman who, according to the small print at the bottom of the back of the title page, registered the book in the U.S. District Court in the Southern District of New York on 15 May 1855. One effect of the arrangement is that the identity of the person speaking the poems emerges from the poems themselves and is not confused with any actual individual. So successful in this respect was Whitman's layout that even after hearing the speaker of "Song of Myself" identify himself as "Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos," an astute reader like Emerson could not "trust the name as real & available for a post-office" (Correspondence 1:41).

That identity, rather than any argument, is the true significance of the volume; that is what it means. The topics and themes taken up by the poems are components of the speaker's personality, and the order in which they are arranged does not so much advance propositions leading toward a reasoned conclusion as it discloses the dynamism through which that personality is constituted. The key to that personality is the speaker's intuitive certainty that by being himself and himself alone he is everyone else and that, beyond all apparent conflicts, differences, and contradictions, he and America, thus people and land, are one, for each receives identity from the other as they respond to one another—"tally," as Whitman often puts it—in profound harmony. The speaker of the first Leaves does not justify or explain his vision but bears witness to it; as the Preface has it, "he is no arguer . . . he is judgment" (1855 Leaves v).

To articulate this sense of the self or, as Whitman phrased it thirty-three years later in "A Backward Glance," "to put a Person . . . freely, fully and truly on record" (Prose Works 2:731) is the volume's program, as it will, indeed, remain the program of Leaves of Grass throughout all its subsequent versions. In the first edition, it is announced in the Preface, enacted in "Song of Myself," and elaborated in the other eleven poems.

The theory of poetry emerging from the Preface, that the poet is the prophet of his land because "the others are as good as he, only he sees it and they do not" (v), is clearly indebted to Emerson's essay "The Poet"; it is small wonder that Emerson responded to it enthusiastically. The Preface also points to what proves to be a substantial difference between the later editions and the first one. As it describes, exuberantly and at length, the speaker's undertaking and catalogues his raw materials (defiantly testing the limits of conventional prose all the while), this introduction avoids the first person singular with an almost pedantic rigor that is in startling contrast with the carefree unrestraint of the rest. The absence of "I" throughout the piece is a reminder that its words are spoken about, but not by, "the greatest poet," because at the outset of the first Leaves this program is also "the direct trial of him who would be the greatest poet" (xi). He must find the voice, the language—Whitman spoke of Leaves of Grass as "only a language-experiment" (American Primer 4)—that will communicate his vision to those who are blind to its truth even as they embody and live it. If the experiment succeeds, if the speaker passes his trial, he will have become "the greatest poet."

In none of the later editions will Whitman have to face this challenge, for "Song of Myself" follows, and by the time it reaches its end the trial is over: the poetic self named Walt Whitman is born. In all its editions, not just the first one, Leaves of Grass is dominated by this presence emerging from "Song of Myself," Whitman's greatest poem and one of the truly great poems in the language. It is as if the rest of the poems had been written by the poet who is "Song of Myself" (as a matter of fact, in the editions from 1860 up to 1881, the poem was titled simply "Walt Whitman"). As for the world beyond Leaves of Grass, the Whitman it has known is the person it met in the 1855 version of "Song of Myself."

How that "hankering, gross, mystical, nude" (section 20) poet comes to life in the poem's 1336 lines is beyond the scope of this essay. Inventive and illuminating accounts abound, and by their very diversity they prove not that it is indeterminate but that it is inexhaustible. However construed, the poem discloses the private world of its protagonist, the "I" so conspicuously missing from the Preface, as he "invite[s his] soul" and "observ[es] a spear of summer grass" (section 1). The soul is what senses the self in the other and the other in the self; its presence allows the private world to "tally" with the whole world without losing any of its own integrity. It is an irresistibly attractive, various world of delicacy, strength, and joyous acceptance. It is also a world where the vision often darkens and moments of weakness, guilt, pain, and mortal fear must be confronted. (Whitman's romance with death begins only with the third edition, in 1860.) That in this exuberant yet anxious world of contrasts and tensions Americans—indeed, Americans of the globe—can recognize their own (or perhaps see it for the first time) is what gives the poem its rank in the literature of the United States and explains the continuing and sometimes anxious fascination it has held for its readers.

In the 1855 edition, the power of "Song of Myself" is at its least controlled or self-consciously "poetic," and the versatility and wit of its language are at their freshest and most exhilarating. The "-ed" of the weak past tense is not yet replaced by the later editions' "'d"; four points of suspension are the only punctuation within a line; and beyond double spaces grouping lines into stanzas, no subdivisions of the sort that appear in later editions interrupt the onrush of words. Thus the reader's sense is reinforced that for all the variety and multiplicity of the images, moods, and episodes that make it up, the poem is a single, unified experience just as its subject, the Whitman presence, is one, for all its multifariousness. The diction is also freer and the verse more supple in 1855 than later. In the first edition, the speaker "cocks [his] hat as [he] please[s]" instead of wearing it, as in later editions; he is "a rough" in the 1855 edition and "of Manhattan the son" in the 1881 edition (section 24); his slang is more pungent ("Washes and razors for foofoos") than in later versions, and when the occasion arises he will even curse—"O Christ! My fit is mastering me!" The line that by 1881 becomes "And mossy scabs of the worm fence, heap'd stones, elder, mullein and poke-weed" (section 5) breathes much more easily in 1855: "And mossy scabs of wormfence, and heaped stones, and elder and mullen and pokeweed." Although "Song of Myself" has remained throughout all editions substantially what it was in 1855, Whitman kept coming back to its text until 1881, weeding and pruning even when he might have left the leaves of grass as they had grown.

An important difference between "Song of Myself" and the eleven poems that follow it is that the latter are structurally closed and thus formally less innovative than the former with its essentially open, loose structure. These eleven poems have often been referred to as "cuttings" from the long poem, passages that for one reason or another Whitman chose not to include in it yet would not discard altogether. The assumption seems to underrate both Whitman's sense of organization and the structural unity achieved in the volume. To be sure, the topical anger of the two political poems, "Europe, The 72d and 73d Years of These States" and "A Boston Ballad (1854)," would be hard to fit into "Song of Myself," and the omission of the slight "Who Learns My Lesson Complete" would probably not have made much difference to the book, nor is there good reason to regret that Whitman decided to leave out "Great Are the Myths" from later editions altogether. Some of the other poems, however, like "I Sing the Body Electric" or "There Was a Child Went Forth," are Whitman at his best, and the sequence as a whole is indispensable, for it concludes the business that "Song of Myself" has left unfinished.

The tenor of "Song of Myself" is robustly optimistic and self-confident, yet its protagonist is "somehow . . . stunn'd" (section 38) time and again by moments of anxiety, even terror, and haunted by powerful images of frustration, violence, and death. He can extricate himself from each of these episodes but cannot shake them off completely. To discover and thereby confront and overcome the forces that stun him, he must probe the depths of his self: this process is the primary burden of the so-called "cuttings." The climax of the drama occurs in another great poem in the volume: "The Sleepers." In the dream-vision of "The Sleepers" the "I" moves through several increasingly intense nightmare-episodes until he finds in himself the murderous impulse which may precipitate his fits of existential anxiety and sexual guilt: "My tap is death." Once he has discovered and admitted to himself that, with all his affection and goodwill, he also has anger enough to kill, his nightmare is over, and his trance becomes a reinvigorating dream of harmony and "summer softness" (section 7) as he joins the other sleepers, and "they flow hand in hand over the whole earth" (section 8). This drama is possible only in the 1855 text of "The Sleepers"; Whitman's later revisions radically altered the poem's shape and character. In this original version, however, it is at the very heart of Leaves of Grass, forming, with "Song of Myself," what Justin Kaplan calls the matrix of the work.

"The Sleepers" stands in the exact middle of the first of the two clusters of poems—the one cluster with poems all titled "Leaves of Grass" and the other cluster with poems untitled—that make up the "cuttings." In the order in which they appear the other four poems in the first cluster frame and center the climactic moment in "The Sleepers." The processional movement induced by the grand catalogue that is "A Song for Occupations" continues through the funeral march in "To Think of Time," slows down as it gathers strength in "The Sleepers," and speeds up again once the moment of high drama is past. After two other lists, in "I Sing the Body Electric" and "Faces," the procession comes to rest in the latter poem with the discovery of the face of "the justified mother of men" (section 5).

In the untitled cluster, the last six poems in the volume, a similar pattern, though much fainter, less pronounced, can be discerned. These poems frame "There Was a Child Went Forth" as the titled cluster frames "The Sleepers," and if the parallel can be sustained, they make the "mean, angered, unjust" father's "blow" and "quick, loud word" of "There Was a Child" as conspicuous as the speaker's deadly "tap" is made in "The Sleepers." As the first sequence ends reaching the mother, the second one, and with it the entire book, concludes discovering death: "Sure as the stars return again after they merge in the light, death is great as life" ("Great Are the Myths"). In another four years, in the magnificent conclusion of "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking," the two images will be fused.

But it is also possible, as Ed Folsom has proposed, that the arrangement of the poems had less to do with thematics and more to do with the odd circumstances of the printing of the volume. Perhaps the final six poems contain no "Leaves of Grass" title because Whitman was trying to squeeze all of his poems into twelve signatures; thus, starting with the fourth poem, he stopped leaving blank space between poems, and, starting with the seventh poem, he omitted the repeated titles, moving the shorter poems to the end of the volume in case he would have to delete one in order to stay within the allotted number of pages (he was, after all, paying for the paper himself). Indeed, as Folsom has shown, Whitman's printer's cast-off for Andrew Rome indicates that he originally planned a quite different order for the poems (ending with the poem later titled "I Sing the Body Electric") and a quite different size for the book (181 pages instead of the 95 he ended up with). Since Rome was primarily a printer of legal forms (Leaves of Grass was the first book he printed), his presses were set up to handle the large paper on which such forms were printed, and so the oversized format of the first edition was clearly something forced on Whitman by the circumstances of the Rome shop, and he had to adjust the spatial arrangement of his poems as the type was being set.

On the morrow of the publication of the first Leaves Whitman definitely did not wake to find himself famous. Though no reliable records have survived, probably very few copies of the book were sold. A few reviews appeared, some of them discerning and sympathetic, but most of them somewhat bewildered by the new work and also offended by the sexual frankness of some of its passages. A small handful of unsigned reviews also appeared, which praised the volume in extravagant terms and in what must have appeared rather extravagant prose. These were written by the poet himself, who used his connections among the newspaper editors of New York to get them published. Apparently, they did not help sales much.

Thus, nothing in the public response gave Whitman any encouragement to continue his "experiment." The majority of the readers who happened to have come upon the book seem to have been simply indifferent. But Whitman had also had the good sense to send out a few complimentary copies. Although the Quaker poet Whittier reportedly threw one of these into the fire, another copy reached Emerson. A few weeks after the book's publication, Emerson acknowledged the gift in a letter in which he greeted the poet "at the beginning of a great career" and declared that he found "incomparable things said incomparably well" in Leaves of Grass (Correspondence 1:41). The praise from the author of "Self-Reliance" and "The Poet" was enough to outweigh the indifference or hostility of all other readers and to start Whitman on his plans for the 1856 edition.

With the publication of this new edition, the first one all but disappeared. When Malcolm Cowley reprinted it in paperback in 1959, he had to introduce it as "the buried masterpiece of American writing" (Cowley x). Until then, the text was not easily available and, except in Jean Catel's French study in 1930, received little scholarly or critical attention. That the situation has radically changed is due, to a large extent, to Gay Wilson Allen, who, even before Cowley, gave the first edition its due both in his handbook in 1946 and in his exemplary biography of Whitman, The Solitary Singer, in 1955. No serious study of Whitman has appeared since in which the 1855 text is not extensively discussed and its significance in Whitman's achievement not recognized. It has also been examined on its own in a book-length study and in a large number of critical articles, and two of its major poems, "Song of Myself" and "The Sleepers," are probably more often studied now in their first version than in their last. E.H. Miller's mosaic of interpretations of "Song of Myself," for example, dedicated to the "nearly 300" scholars from whose work the mosaic has been assembled, is accompanied by the 1855 text of the poem, and in the Library of America edition of Leaves of Grass both the 1855 and 1892 texts are given in their entirety.

Changes in critical perspectives and preoccupations are reflected, of course, in the responses to the first Leaves as well. The New Critical formalism of the sixties and early seventies has been long replaced by postmodern approaches, and these, too, will undoubtedly evolve and change; meanwhile, the fascination with the 1855 edition continues, and the book is unlikely to become a buried masterpiece again.

Ivan Marki (supplemented by Ed Folsom)

Bibliography

Allen, Gay Wilson. The Solitary Singer: A Critical Biography of Walt Whitman. 1955. Rev. ed. 1967. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985.

Catel, Jean. Rythme et langage dans la 1re édition des "Leaves of Grass" (1855). Montpellier: Causse, Graille et Castelnau, 1930.

Cowley, Malcolm. Introduction. Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass": The First (1855) Edition. Ed. Cowley. New York: Viking, 1959. vii–xxxvii.

Folsom, Ed. "A Census of the 1855 Leaves of Grass: A Preliminary Report." Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 24 (Fall 2006): 71–84.

Folsom, Ed. "What We're Still Learning about the 1855 Leaves of Grass 150 Years Later." In Susan Belasco, Ed Folsom, and Kenneth M. Price, eds., Leaves of Grass: The Sesquicentennial Essays. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2007. 1–32.

Folsom, Ed. Whitman Making Books / Books Making Whitman. Iowa City: Obermann Center for Advanced Studies, 2005.

Genoways, Ted. "'One goodshaped and wellhung man': Accentuated Sexuality and the Uncertain Authorship of the Frontispiece to the 1855 Edition of Leaves of Grass. In Susan Belasco, Ed Folsom, and Kenneth M. Price, eds., Leaves of Grass: The Sesquicentennial Essays. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2007. 87–123.

Hutchinson, George B. The Ecstatic Whitman: Literary Shamanism & the Crisis of the Union. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1986.

Kaplan, Justin. Walt Whitman: A Life. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1980.

Marki, Ivan. The Trial of the Poet: An Interpretation of the First Edition of "Leaves of Grass." New York: Columbia UP, 1976.

Miller, Edwin Haviland. Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself": A Mosaic of Interpretations. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 1989.

Traubel, Horace. With Walt Whitman in Camden. Vol. 1. Boston: Small, Maynard, 1906.

White, William. "The First (1855) Leaves of Grass: How Many Copies?" Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 57 (1963): 352–354.

Whitman, Walt. An American Primer. Ed. Horace Traubel. Boston: Small, Maynard, 1904.

____. The Correspondence. Ed. Edwin Haviland Miller. 6 vols. New York: New York UP, 1961–1977.

____. Prose Works 1892. Ed. Floyd Stovall. 2 vols. New York: New York UP, 1963–1964.

Facsimile Editions of Leaves of Grass (1855):

Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass. 1855. New York: Library of American Poets/Collectors Reprints, 1992.

____. Leaves of Grass: A Facsimile of the First Edition. Ed. Richard Bridgman. San Francisco: Chandler Publishing, 1968.

____. Leaves of Grass: A Facsimile of the First Edition Published by Whitman in Brooklyn in 1855. New York: Eakins, 1966.

____. Leaves of Grass: Facsimile of the 1855 Edition. Ed. Clifton J. Furness. New York: Columbia UP, 1939.

Harold Aspiz

Registered for copyright on 11 September 1856, the second edition of Leaves of Grass resulted from the continued surge of creativity that produced the first edition. The title page does not bear the author's name, but the verso page copyright is assigned to Walt Whitman (cf. Walter Whitman in the first edition). The little volume is bound in olive-green cloth; its front cover is blindstamped with leaves and berries and goldstamped "Leaves of Grass"; its back cover (without goldstamping) is identical. The spine is goldstamped with the title, leaf designs, and "I Greet You at the / Beginning of A / Great Career / R.W. Emerson." Unlike the slim outsized format of the first edition, this thick, squat volume measures approximately 6 2/3 by 3 3/16 inches and looks "like a fat hymn book" (Allen, Introduction xvi). The poems are set in well-leaded ten-point type, so that Whitman's characteristically long lines tend to overflow, sometimes three or four times. The New York Tribune advertised the one-dollar volume as "handy for pocket, table, or shelf" (Stern 121), so that when Whitman (in "Whoever You are Holding Me Now in Hand") challenges the reader to "carry me" "beneath your clothing," in breast or hip pocket, he imagines this volume as the embodiment of himself.

The volume's frontispiece is a photograph of Whitman in the "carpenter" pose. Its 32 numbered poems, including all 12 carried over from the first edition, are for the first time given titles. They are followed by "Leaves-Droppings," consisting of Emerson's encouraging but private 21 July 1855 letter of praise (previously reprinted in the 10 October 1855 New York Tribune and tipped into some late issues of the first edition); Whitman's "dear Friend and Master" reply, in effect, a prose essay; and "Opinions, 1855–56"—nine favorable and unfavorable reviews, including two anonymous self-reviews.

Despite its artistic merit, the volume was Whitman's greatest publishing failure. Its factual but unacknowledged publishers were Fowler and Wells, distributors of books and periodicals on phrenology, health reforms, and occasionally, belles lettres, to whose weekly Life Illustrated Whitman was then a contributor. Although reluctant to print the work, the firm advertised on 16 August in the same periodical that it was the principal distributor for this "neat pocket volume" in a stereotyped edition of 1,000 copies: "The author is still his own publisher, and Messrs. Fowler and Wells will again be his agents for the sale of the work" (qtd. in Stern 119). Despite Whitman's boast to Emerson that "these thirty-two Poems I stereotype to print several thousand copies of" (Comprehensive 730), sales were even poorer than those for the first edition; copies are now quite rare. Readers were embarrassed by such overtly sexual poems as "Spontaneous Me" and "A Woman Waits for Me," by the author's self-promotion, and by his unauthorized appropriation of Emerson's letter. Thus The Christian Examiner attacked the "foul work" ("Impious" 62) for its "pantheism and libidinousness" and its "self-applause" (63). Relations soured between poet and publisher. In 1857, when Whitman had 100 poems ready for the press, he declared that "Fowler & Wells are bad persons for me.—They retard my book very much" (Correspondence 1:44).

This edition is more programmatic than its predecessor. In a notebook jotting, Whitman defines the "Idea to pervade" the book as "Eligibility—I, you, any one . . . any being, no matter who" (Notebook 8). And in a characteristic mixture of semi-mystic populism and personal hauteur, he positions himself as the spokesman-poet of the American masses, telling Emerson that "A profound person can easily know more of the people than they know of themselves" (Comprehensive 733). His letter to Emerson—in effect an essay explaining his poetic intentions to the literary establishment in the critical 1856 election year—asserts that his poems are intended to unify the nation, "for the union of the parts of the body is not more necessary to this life than the union of These States is to their life" (Comprehensive 733). He proposes a new literature for America to inspire a free, democratic youth, aware of their singularity and their sexuality and destined to overcome personal and national corruption.

Like the authors of Fowler and Wells's manuals of reform and personal advice—many of whose ideas are interwoven into Whitman's poems—the persona often appears as a fatherly or brotherly counselor in matters physical, personal, or spiritual. At times his prescriptive tone borders on the prosaic, even the banal, and dilutes the intensity of some of the new poems. But Whitman was attempting to enlarge the poet-reader relationship by projecting himself as "the general human personality" (Bucke 63). And Whitman's contemporaries often found this hortatory tone to be congenial. Of this edition, Thoreau (while troubled by the edition's sensuality and its mixture of poetic wonders with "a thousand of brick") declared: "I do not believe that all the sermons, so-called, that have been preached in this land put together are equal to it for preaching" (Thoreau 68).

With the 1856 edition Whitman began his lifelong practice of adding new poems, reworking previously published poems, and reordering poems into different groupings. Thus the dozen poems of the first edition are here distributed in the following sequence: 1, 4, 32, 26, 7, 27, 19, 16, 22, 25, 29, and 6, beginning with "Song of Myself," here called "Poem of Walt Whitman, an American." He added, deleted, and combined lines. For example, he deleted the two-line curse against those who defile the human body at the end of the 1855 "I Sing the Body Electric" and added a 36-line quasi-anatomical catalogue. He also began the practice of removing over-used conjunctions and abandoned the idiosyncratic but rhetorically effective combination of dots, dashes, and conventional punctuation of the first edition in favor of a more standardized system.

The 1856 edition is more than an update; it is, in effect, a new work. Despite some poetic lapses, it is probably the most effectively designed of the six editions, and it is poetically dazzling. Its most impressive cluster of new poems, numbered 8 through 13, includes the following. The massive "By Blue Ontario's Shore," largely cannibalized from the 1855 prose Preface, is a paean to the present and future greatness of Americans ("It is I who am great, or to be great—it is you, or any one" [section 15]) and to the superb Whitman persona, the "equable," profound interpreter of the world and its symbols. "This Compost" evokes the persona's emotional interplay between his fear of death and his faith in the perpetuation of life. The short poem "To You [whoever you are]" is the persona's comradely outreach to his downtrodden fellows. "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry," with its stunning coloration and its musical and philosophical subtleties—the undisputed masterpiece of the second edition—pictures a deathless, empathic Whitman persona whose presence becomes palpable to generations of readers. "Song of the Open Road" presents the dynamic persona as a reader of the world's symbols proposing to lead the American masses out of their cramped existences into a continuum of transcendental selfhood. The group concludes with the sexually provocative "A Woman Waits for Me.''

Memorable new poems in this edition also include "Salut au Monde!," an inspired visionary catalogue of the persona's fellow beings throughout the world; "Song of the Broad-Axe," whose variations on the axe motif herald the emergence from tyranny of a new breed of individualistic Americans; "Song of Prudence," also largely derived from the 1855 Preface; the uniquely ironic "Respondez!"; "On the Beach at Night Alone," which, in its original version, testifies to Whitman's agonized struggle to comprehend death; and, the penultimate poem in the collection, "A Song of the Rolling Earth," with its image of the Whitman persona interpreting the world of beauty, language, and Emersonian compensation. The edition concludes with the 1855 funereal poem "To Think of Time," which intones a somewhat troubled faith in the immortality of the poet and his work. (All poems have been listed by their customary, rather than 1856, titles.)

Despite its relative obscurity, the second edition has not been without admirers. The poet Edgar Lee Masters praised it; the French critic Léon Bazalgette commended its "tremendous beauty" and its "passion, superabundance, torrential violence" (qtd. in Giantvalley 395, 291); and Gay Wilson Allen emphasized its "solid merits . . . literary, bibliographical, and biographical" (Introduction xii). Whitman had set himself the highest goal for this edition—to create an exemplary persona who combined the merits of his idealized self with the best elements in men and women: "I must combine the tolerance and sympathetic manliness of Jean Paul [Richter] with the strength of Homer and the perfect reason of Shakespeare" (Notebook 6). The volume provides valuable insights into a troubled genius whose public voice (in this most political of editions) and private (confessional) voice achieve a remarkable degree of blending. A study of this singular masterpiece will reward amateur and scholar alike.

Harold Aspiz

Bibliography

Allen, Gay Wilson. Introduction. Leaves of Grass: Facsimile of the 1856 Edition. By Walt Whitman. Norwood, Pa.: Norwood Editions, 1976. xi–xxi.

____. The New Walt Whitman Handbook. 1975. New York: New York UP, 1986.

____. The Solitary Singer: A Critical Biography of Walt Whitman. New York: Macmillan, 1955.

Bucke, Richard Maurice. Walt Whitman. Philadelphia: McKay, 1883.

Erkkila, Betsy. Whitman the Political Poet. New York: Oxford UP, 1989.

Giantvalley, Scott. Walt Whitman, 1838–1939: A Reference Guide. Boston: Hall, 1981.

Goodson, Lester. "The Second Leaves of Grass (1856): A Re-Evaluation." Papers on Walt Whitman. The University of Tulsa Monograph Series 11. Ed. Lester F. Zimmerman and Winston Weathers. Tulsa: U of Tulsa P, 1970. 26–34.

"Impious and Obscene." Walt Whitman: The Critical Heritage. Ed. Milton Hindus. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1971. 62–64.

Myerson, Joel. Walt Whitman: A Descriptive Bibliography. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1993.

Stern, Madeleine B. Heads & Headlines: The Phrenological Fowlers. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1971.

Thoreau, Henry David. "Thoreau on Whitman." Walt Whitman: The Critical Heritage. Ed. Milton Hindus. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1971. 67–68.

Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass. 1856. Facsimile Edition. Ann Arbor: Microfilm International, 1980.

____. Leaves of Grass: Comprehensive Reader's Edition. Ed. Harold W. Blodgett and Sculley Bradley. New York: New York UP, 1965.

____. The Correspondence. Ed. Edwin Haviland Miller. 6 vols. New York: New York UP, 1961–1977.

____. Leaves of Grass: A Textual Variorum of the Printed Poems. Ed. Sculley Bradley, Harold W. Blodgett, Arthur Golden, and William White. Vol. 1. New York: New York UP, 1980.

____. Walt Whitman: An 1855–56 Notebook Toward the Second Edition of "Leaves of Grass." Ed. Harold W. Blodgett. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1959.

Gregory Eiselein

In 1856, not long after the publication of the second edition of Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman began planning a third edition. By June 1857, in an explosion of poetic production, he wrote about 68 new poems and was seeking a publisher to bring out a new edition of Leaves of Grass. During the next two years, Whitman failed to locate a publisher. Yet he did ask the Rome brothers to typeset and print page proofs of the new poems; as he revised, Whitman liked to see printed versions of the poems and think about readers looking at the printed page. In February 1860 Whitman received an unexpected letter from Boston publisher Thayer and Eldridge, enthusiastically offering to publish his poems. A contract was quickly negotiated, and by 5 March Whitman had arrived in Boston to meet personally with his new publishers and to oversee the printing. Thayer and Eldridge announced the publication of the new edition in April, and the book appeared in May 1860. Although no one knows precisely how many copies of Leaves of Grass Thayer and Eldridge printed before the firm went bankrupt in 1861, Whitman biographers and bibliographers estimate 2,000 (two printings of 1,000 copies) to 5,000 (the estimate of Whitman's friend, John Burroughs)—a significant increase over the first two editions. There were also a number of pirated copies. In 1879 Richard Worthington purchased the electrotype plates and began printing and marketing unauthorized copies.

The 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass was 456 pages long and appeared in a variety of differently-colored cloth bindings—orange, green, and brown—many embossed with decorative designs. The book's pages were well-printed in a clear ten-point type on heavy white paper and elaborately decorated with line-drawings around titles and the beginning and end of poems. The title page and the poem titles appear in various fonts and sizes, and some—like the script-like typography of the title page—are fancy. Scattered throughout the volume are small illustrations of a butterfly perched on a human finger, a sunrise, and a globe resting on a cloud and revealing the Western hemisphere. The frontispiece is an engraving by Stephen Alonzo Schoff from an oil painting portrait by Charles Hine; it depicts Whitman not as a working-class rough as in the 1855 frontispiece but as a well-coiffured and genteel romantic poet wearing a large, loose silk cravat. In its advertisements, Thayer and Eldridge highlighted the book's elegant design.

To the 32 poems of the second edition, Whitman added a total of 146 new poems, the single largest augmentation of Leaves of Grass in its 37-year growth from 1855 to 1891–1892. He altered earlier poems and revised their titles. And for the first time he placed some of the poems in the distinctive, thematic, titled groupings that he called "clusters." The 1860 edition includes seven clusters: "Chants Democratic and Native American" (a group of 21 numbered poems prefaced by an introductory poem titled "Apostroph"), "Leaves of Grass" (which contains 24 numbered poems), "Enfans d'Adam" (15 numbered poems), "Calamus" (45 numbered poems), "Messenger Leaves" (15 short titled poems), "Thoughts" (seven short numbered poems), "Says" (eight short numbered poems), and "Debris" (17 short unnumbered and untitled poetic fragments). "Enfans d'Adam" (later called "Children of Adam") and "Calamus" possess the most thematic coherence as groupings. Whitman retained these two clusters in future editions, dropping the other five arrangements. There are also 26 individual, unclustered poems—several of them important, such as "Walt Whitman" (from the 1855 edition, later called "Song of Myself") and "A Word Out of The Sea" (new to Leaves of Grass in 1860, later titled "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking").

The clusters and the carefully-chosen titles in the third edition indicate an increased attentiveness to organization and structure. The 1860 Leaves of Grass begins with "Proto-Leaf" (later called "Starting from Paumanok"), a prefatory poem that announces the poet's intentions and major themes, a poem that deliberately marks the beginning of the book, just as So long! concludes the book. Because of these structural revisions, Whitman considered the third edition complete, although future editions indicate that he later changed his mind.

While planning this edition and writing poems for it, Whitman saw his project as " The Great Construction of the New Bible " (Notebooks 1:353). In some respects the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass looks like a Bible. It groups poems into clusters, numbers (rather than titles) the clustered poems, and individually numbers stanzas in a way that resembles the book, chapter, and numbered verse divisions of the Bible. This Bible-like appearance amplifies the 1860 edition's increased thematic emphasis on religion. In "Proto-Leaf," the program poem that begins the third edition, the poet invites his comrade to share with him "two greatnesses" (love and democracy) and also "a third one, rising inclusive and more resplendent"—"the greatness of Religion."

Love is the theme of the two most important, most coherent, and most famous clusters. Whitman conceived of "Enfans d'Adam" as a cluster about "the amative love of woman" (Notebooks 1:412), phrenological jargon for sexual love between women and men. These poems celebrate procreative sex and the innocence, beauty, and sacredness of the human body. Although Ralph Waldo Emerson urged him to delete these poems, Whitman retained them and their bold, erotic language. Moralistic critics and public officials condemned the "Enfans d'Adam" poems as obscene, while other readers—many of them women—expressed admiration.

The companion cluster, "Calamus," focuses on love between men, what Whitman called comradeship or "adhesiveness," the phrenological term for "manly love" (Notebooks 1:413). The cluster's introductory poem (later titled "In Paths Untrodden") announces the theme of "manly attachment," and the cluster explores that theme in poems that are sometimes joyful and content and sometimes suspicious, anxious, and yearning. The origin of "Calamus" is a series of twelve poems originally titled "Live Oak with Moss," a series that biographers and critics see as Whitman's story about or poetic response to an unhappy romantic relationship in the late-1850s, a narrative about love and lost love. While the "Calamus" pieces are clearly personal, intimate, often erotic love poems, Whitman insisted that they were political. And indeed they are, for in them Whitman imagines homoerotic affection as the basis for the Union and democracy. The politics imagined here are an expression of faith in a spiritualized comradeship. Hence, "Calamus" is an important example of the merger of the third edition's major themes (love, democracy, religion).

More overtly, but perhaps less convincing, political poems are found in this edition's largest cluster, "Chants Democratic and Native American." In it Whitman celebrates democratic America with a nationalistic fervor that can at times sound shrill, especially given the approaching crisis—the bloody, four-year-long Civil War that threatened to dissolve the United States. Whitman's response to this threat in "Chants Democratic"—"O a curse on him that would dissever this Union for any reason whatever!" ("Apostroph") barely masks a deeper anxiety about the impending crisis.

Whitman's scarcely contained dread about national divisions and the sometimes suspicious or despairing poems in "Calamus" mark an important distinguishing characteristic of the third edition—its dark mood. In contrast to the confident, self-reliant persona of the 1855 edition or the 1856 "Song of the Open Road," the disconsolate speaker in the 1860 edition expresses melancholy, woe, and painful uncertainty about personal identity, national destiny, and metaphysical order. In the first poem from the "Leaves of Grass" cluster (originally published in the Atlantic Monthly [April 1860] as "Bardic Symbols" and later titled "As I Ebb'd with the Ocean of Life"), the poet walks along the desolate ocean shore, examining the debris from the sea and identifying with the washed-up fragments. He yearns for nurturing from a maternal father figure, but to no avail. The poem ends with an address to the cosmos, an apparently deaf "You, up there," and an acknowledgment that like the sea debris, "we too lie in drifts at your feet." Self-doubt converges with skepticism about the order, benevolence, and responsiveness of the natural and metaphysical universe.

A melancholic tone also characterizes "A Word Out of the Sea" (first published in Saturday Press [24 December 1859] as "A Child's Reminiscence," later called "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking"), a poem about a childhood encounter with death. Like "Leaves of Grass" number 1 ("As I Ebb'd"), this poem is set on the Long Island shore. The poet remembers observing as a child a pair of mockingbirds and listening to their songs. When the she-bird disappears, the solitary he-bird sings a wild, despairing song. But, unlike the nearly nihilist "Leaves of Grass" number 1, in which the isolated poet sees himself in the washed-up sea debris, "A Word Out of the Sea" has the boy identify with the solitary bird and take inspiration in the bird's sad, desperate song. Moreover, the ocean is no longer representative of the enormous, unresponsive universe, but of death—a cool, inviting, erotic merge with the universe. "A Word Out of the Sea" is certainly a dark poem, full of the desperation, yearning, melancholy, and doubt that characterize the 1860 edition. Yet, the focus on death here is notably religious; it leads to a reconciliation with death and the spiritual, maternal cosmos.

In addition to selling far more copies than previous editions, the well-advertised 1860 Leaves of Grass received more attention and critical acclaim than the first two. There are 32 known contemporary reviews of the third edition, and most of them are positive or mixed. Only eight reviews were mostly negative. Women readers and critics (such as Juliette H. Beach, Mary A. Chilton, and the renowned African-American actress and poet Adah Isaacs Menken) greeted this edition with exceptional enthusiasm, defending it against the hostile sometimes vicious judgments of male critics who disapproved of the candid, erotic passages in "Enfans d'Adam."

The significance of the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass tends to be paradoxical. Although the poems often express grief over romantic and professional failures, the book's new sense of structure, the sizable increase in poems, its wider readership and critical praise made it one of Whitman's most successful books. Although the poems seem more intimate and personal than previous Whitman poems, the third edition is also a deliberate intervention into public life, an attempt to realize American democratic ideals and save the Union. And while it expresses a strong faith in comradeship as the means for realizing democracy, the 1860 edition also reveals a darker Whitman, suspicious, uncertain, and lonely: "Here the frailest leaves of me, and yet my strongest-lasting" ("Calamus" number 44).

Gregory Eiselein

Bibliography

Allen, Gay Wilson. The New Walt Whitman Handbook. 1975. New York: New York UP, 1986.

____. The Solitary Singer: A Critical Biography of Walt Whitman. New York: Macmillan, 1955.

Erkkila, Betsy. Whitman the Political Poet. New York: Oxford UP, 1989.

Graham, Rosemary. "Solving 'All the Problems of Freedom': The Case of the 1860 Leaves of Grass." American Transcendental Quarterly 7 (1993): 5–23.

Moon, Michael. Disseminating Whitman: Revision and Corporeality in "Leaves of Grass." Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1991.

Myerson, Joel. Walt Whitman: A Descriptive Bibliography. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1993.

Warren, James Perrin. Walt Whitman's Language Experiment. University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 1990.

Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass: Facsimile Edition of the 1860 Text. Ed. Roy Harvey Pearce. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell UP, 1961.

____. Leaves of Grass: A Textual Variorum of the Printed Poems. Ed. Sculley Bradley, Harold W. Blodgett, Arthur Golden, and William White. 3 vols. New York: New York UP, 1980.

____. Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts. Ed. Edward F. Grier. 6 vols. New York: New York UP, 1984.

____. Walt Whitman's Blue Book. Ed. Arthur Golden. New York: New York Public Library, 1968.

____. Whitman's Manuscripts: "Leaves of Grass" (1860). Ed. Fredson Bowers. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1955.

Luke Mancuso

The fourth (1867) edition of Leaves of Grass was actually published in November of 1866 as the third installment of Whitman's Reconstruction project. Following closely on Drum-Taps (1865) and the Sequel to Drum-Taps (1865–1866), the first of at least four different formats of the text were available from the presses of a New York printer, William E. Chapin. In various permutations, Whitman circulated this fourth edition as four separately paginated books stitched together between two covers: a vastly re-edited version of the 1860 Leaves, a reissue of Drum-Taps, a reissue of the Sequel to Drum-Taps, and a striking coda called Songs Before Parting. This most chaotic of all six editions of Leaves contains only six new poems ("Inscription" [later "One's-Self I Sing" and "Small the Theme of My Chant"], "The Runner," "Leaves of Grass" number 2 [later "Tears"], "Leaves of Grass" number 3 [later "Aboard at a Ship's Helm"], "When I Read the Book," and "The City Dead-House"), but its significance lies in its intriguing raggedness, which is embedded in the social upheaval in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War.

The 1867 Leaves has been designated the "workshop" edition, and as such, has been relegated to the status of a curiosity in the ongoing evolution of Leaves of Grass. However, as a text that circulated in the midst of an unsettled cultural "workshop" that was reconstituting the ruins of postwar America, this edition provides a fertile site in representing the incipient nationalist ideology that intensified in the years following Appomattox. On publication, the scant critical attention devoted to this edition underscored Whitman's nationalism and his exuberant democratic instinct. The images of a coherent Union proliferate throughout all parts of the 1867 edition, but the physical "dismemberment" of the book mirrors not only the fracturing of the North from the South, but also bears the same stress marks as the contentious rhetoric across America concerned with reinstating rebel states and racial differences between whites and newly-emancipated slaves. For instance, with the legislative tide turning toward the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868, which guaranteed African Americans citizenship on a national scale, Whitman's poetics sought at every turn to reinforce the fragile coalition between sectional and racial factions. Through several strategic revisions of his antebellum poems, along with his new 1867 insertions, Whitman urgently accented democratic nationality, while carefully superintending his earlier images of cultural diversity on the Union landscape.

For the first time, the 1867 Leaves opened with the poem "Inscription," which would thereafter introduce the work to subsequent readers. It has been suggested that "Inscription" contains in its six verses the skeletal purpose of the final edition of Leaves of Grass. The dominant image of "ONE'S-SELF" as the subject of the chant "for the use of the New World," quickly becomes an exchange between the individual self and the collective self: after announcing "Man's physiology complete," the speaker continues to exert a larger scheme, which moves from "One's-Self" to "En-Masse." In a single line, the slippage in the movement from the isolated individual to the collective body politic underwrites Whitman's commitment to sing of his historical position in postwar America. The image of "One's-Self" has been conventionally read as a call for the sovereignty of the individual, the irreducible agent of democracy. But the egotistical sublime fails to account for the movement from "single" to "unitary" (collective) self.

Several revisions of earlier poems in the rearranged 1867 version of Leaves help the reader to map out the increasing emphasis the poet places on collective identity. In the second poem of this edition, "Starting from Paumanok," Whitman modifies the autobiographical references in the 1860 version and gives the poetic persona a continental identity. The federalizing spirit that was emanating from Washington, in its legislative attempts to reconstruct the Union, finds an echo in "Paumanok" through the embrace of diverse geographical sites. Also, there is an echo of Whitman's elegy, "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd," where the "hermit thrush" moves the speaker to inaugurate a "New World" out of the ashes of the war. In addition, the renovated world that Whitman was inaugurating had already begun its reversal of the effects of the war, through the 1865 abolition of slavery, and therefore, the "Paumanok" speaker can reincorporate the ex-Rebel states as potential readers of Leaves. There is an explicit mention of the racial politics of 1866 when Whitman cites the "comity clause" of the Constitution (Article 4, Section 2) in section 6. This clause entitles all citizens of an individual state to the privileges and immunities of every other state. Abolitionists had since the 1840s widened the scope of the comity clause to include free blacks and slaves under these protections. In July 1868, with the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment, Whitman's 1866 "Paumanok" text intersects with this understanding of that constitutional diction as applying to the renovated concept of national citizenship. After 1868, the federal government had the right to preside over the states' conduct in the forum of civil liberties, beyond local and regional custom, especially in relation to ex-slaves as they laid claim to authentic status as descendants of the Constitution. In the 1867 Leaves, Whitman debuted the poem "Tears," which offers the enigmatic spectacle of a weeping "muffled" figure on a "white" shore. Given the color coding ("white"/"shade") and the undeniable remorse expressed in this text, "Tears" may well have resonated with the concurrent debates over the incorporation of African Americans into the national family. Therefore, when read as a cultural text, Whitman's antebellum frankness in depicting blacks (most famously, in "Song of Myself," speaking in the voice of the slave) has receded into indeterminacy. But the sentimental "lump" suddenly takes on a threatening persona and wills a strong storm to engulf the "white" shore. Thus, read allegorically, the text has enacted the race hatred that greeted ex-slaves at every turn in their bid for postwar equality. Whitman's poem points threateningly to the result of such hatred if the cultural inequalities between races persisted indefinitely.

Whitman's texts of social solidarity, the "Calamus" cluster, comprise the longest cluster of poems in the 1867 Leaves, and the poet has moved them closer to the front of the volume. Along with the "Children of Adam" cluster, these two groupings, centered on social relations, are the least destabilized of any clusters from the 1860 edition. The growing coherence of a popular awareness of national identity may have pushed Whitman to foreground these "Calamus" poems, which represent comradeship among strangers from diverse backgrounds, as opposed to local, ethnic, and even racial allegiances. Whitman seems to have learned this lesson in his wartime hospital visits to thousands of wounded veterans from the four corners of the Union (witness his intercalation of Drum-Taps and Sequel to Drum-Taps in the 1867 edition). The poet also deleted three of the most privatized confessions which had appeared in the "Calamus" cluster of the 1860 edition, and thereby enabled the cluster to be read better as a manifesto of public solidarity among citizens. Rather than the pull of local family ties, then, in the 1867 "Calamus," it can be argued that Whitman was announcing a model of national solidarity built on affiliations between strangers enlisted in the quest for a revivified Union.

In this moment of an explosion of discourse on civil rights, Whitman registered his regret over the continued insistence that marginalized citizens could be discarded through social exclusion in the new poem, "The City Dead-House." At the heart of this text, the issue of disposable persons in a flawed democracy is argued with as much rhetorical force as it was by the Radical Republicans in the houses of Congress, on behalf of African Americans; only Whitman's marginal figure is a dead prostitute lying within sight of the United States Capitol. Socially outcast, the body of the prostitute requires the intervention of the poet's speaker in order that she may be represented visibly, in a democracy in which many are invisible. If persons were rotting on the pavement within sight of the Capitol, this compelling poem enacts a recovery of the rightful place of human solidarity among strangers. Another of the new 1867 compositions, "The Runner," could be read as an allegorical snapshot which represents the athletic determination required to bring coherence to a postwar Union weakened by sectionalism and racism. Without such athletic vigilance, the inherent danger to the Union lay in its static attachment to a failed social compact that had come undone in the firing on Fort Sumter. In "Aboard at a Ship's Helm," another of the new compositions of the 1867 Leaves, Whitman's figure of the "ship of state" avoids wreckage on the shore of history only through the alarm-bell aboard which warned of continued social divisions. Only by engaging in an egalitarian revision of social relations, to become more inclusive rather than exclusive, would the Union avoid another cataclysm like the Civil War, only this time along the racial divide rather than the sectional divide.

With the legislative tide turning toward "equal protection" for black and white citizens, Whitman coerced several poems from previous editions of Leaves into a new book, appended to the end of the 1867 edition. Called Songs Before Parting, this coda resonates with the same federalizing motifs that were rife in public debate as the Fourteenth Amendment made its rough passage to its port in the Constitution. Obviously, these songs represent Whitman's desire for the prevention of "parting" the newly-recovered Union, but they were also written "before" the 1861 "parting" of the South from the North. In 1867, these songs can be re-heard in the context of the "parts" becoming united again. To reinforce such a representation of national unity, Whitman opens these songs with "As I sat Alone by Blue Ontario's Shore," which announces that a nation is emerging from its lines. The poem is divided into two voices: alongside the exuberant call for the formation of national identity there is a parenthetical voice which sounds portentous warnings concerning the racial and sectional strife of the Union, still caught in the "throes" of giving birth to democracy. By extending eligibility to "all" persons desirous of equality, the poem reminds the reader that Whitman had not abandoned his dream of a "Radical Democracy." The representative who stands in for the people becomes the "bard" who can still be the agent for democratic change.

Therefore, Whitman offered Songs Before Parting as the incipient representation of a national compact, in which images of federal affiliation were enlisted to perform the cultural work of enlarging national consciousness and racial sympathy and the dismantling of sectional malice, which sought a return to antebellum black subjugation. America would be reconstructed at some deferred future moment, for these "Songs" never tire of their gestures toward the "great Idea" of democratic equality. When the political foundation of America recovered the "inalienable rights" promised in the Declaration of Independence, then the temporary aberrations of social divisions would cease, not before. The end of democracy is always a beginning, in a circular movement between resistance and surrender to empathy to strangers in our midst. Whitman's announcement of a nation, which was the reconstructive purpose of this cluster, is represented by any desire for "libertad," the poet's curious expression for liberty, from whatever point of origin in the field of social relations. The 1867 Leaves announces, in newly-added lines to "On the Beach at Night Alone," that "A VAST SIMILITUDE" conjoins all races (and sections) within the borders of the United States. In 1867, such an "interlocking" required Whitman's intervention with a radically altered Leaves of Grass, always on the verge of dissolution in its disarray, and yet always shoring up the productivity of reconstructive solidarity, active in binding together factions at multiple points in the disquieting months after Appomattox.

Luke Mancuso

Bibliography

Allen, Gay Wilson. The New Walt Whitman Handbook. 1975. New York: New York UP, 1986.

Erkkila, Betsy. Whitman the Political Poet. New York: Oxford UP, 1989.

Mancuso, Luke. "'The Strange Sad War Revolving': Reconstituting Walt Whitman's Reconstruction Texts in the Legislative Workshop, 1865–1876." Diss. U of Iowa, 1994.

Moon, Michael. Disseminating Whitman: Revision and Corporeality in "Leaves of Grass." Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1991.

Whitman, Walt. Walt Whitman's Blue Book. Ed. Arthur Golden. 2 vols. New York: New York Public Library, 1968.

See also : "City Dead-House, The"; Drum-Taps; Leaves of Grass; "One's-Self I Sing"; Reconstruction; Sequel to Drum-Taps; Walt Whitman's Blue Book; "When I Read the Book"; "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd"

Luke Mancuso

As early as the summer of 1869, Walt Whitman had been preoccupied with a revised edition of Leaves of Grass to follow the publication of the fourth (1867) edition. When the poet escaped the summer heat of Washington, D.C., to return to New York in July 1870, having secured a substitute in his clerkship at the attorney general's office, he was determined to publish the fifth edition with J.S. Redfield of New York. By the winter of 1870–1871, the fifth edition of Leaves was on sale in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Washington. Despite this signal moment, Whitman was virtually ignored by the critics, though the handful of reviewers noted his universality and his personal incarnation of American democracy. The complicated publishing history of the fifth edition includes at least three rearrangements of the book, perhaps signaling his displeasure over the absence of an audible response from the public to what, for him, was a major publishing event. In any case, Whitman reissued Leaves with the Passage to India annex, adding 120 pages with 74 poems, 24 of which were new texts, while the others were culled from earlier editions of his work. In 1872, this bifurcated edition was reissued, directly from Washington, D.C., dated 1872 but copyrighted in 1870. Still another issue of the book contained the Passage to India annex, with separate pagination, as well as the additional supplement After All, Not to Create Only (later "Song of the Exposition"), with 24 additional pages, also published as a separate pamphlet with separate pagination. In short, the fifth edition of Leaves contained in its format three separate books of poetry, as well as the related publication of a pamphlet called As a Strong Bird on Pinions Free, and Other Poems in 1872. The latter As a Strong Bird booklet also contained the significant prose Preface, now known as the 1872 Preface.

This convoluted series of editions adds up to a massive displacement of Whitman's work as the reading public had known it up to that time; in effect, Whitman was pointing to a reassessment of how his evolving project would speak to postwar America, at the moment when he was announcing a companion volume to Leaves which he labeled a book of " democratic nationality " (Whitman 1005). The most significant innovation of the 1871–1872 Leaves, aside from the obvious fact that Whitman took nearly a third of his published poems and shifted them into the Passage to India annex, amounts to the poet's dispersal of the Drum-Taps collection throughout the body of Leaves. Thus, while Drum-Taps appeared as a part of Leaves for the first time in this fifth edition, the Civil War texts have been scattered and re-edited into three clusters: "Drum-Taps," "Marches Now the War is Over," and "Bathed in War's Perfume." This textual multiplication underscores Whitman's assertion that he owed the existence of Leaves to the creative energy he found in the war itself.

The cluster "Marches Now the War is Over" enlisted images of nationalism in the pursuit of civil restoration immediately after the war years. One of the poems that points the way for the reconstruction of the social order, "Pioneers! O Pioneers!," reinforces this containment of social disruption in its traditional form, complete with trochaic meter and conventional stanzaic patterns. While the title echoes the westward migration, the word "pioneer" traces its etymological roots back to include "foot soldier," and thus connotes an imagistic parallel to the martial images of the war troops. Thus, while the "Pioneers!" text points backward as an echo chamber of the war memory, the poem also points forward to the reconstructive energies of creating a future that will recast soldiers as pioneers. Clearly, Whitman's pioneers were moving forward, as originators of a new social order, in order to prepare the way for an inclusive, socially diverse citizenry fit for Reconstruction America. Whitman's "foot soldiers," like his conventional poetic "feet," were stepping into the postwar urge for forging a future out of social solidarity. Such solidarity stressed the extension of democratic identity beyond the neighborhoods, towns, and states which had contributed self-understanding to Americans before the Civil War. Such provincial identity had to include national allegiance as well, which was one of the high-profile controversies in the extension of civil liberties to African Americans through the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870 (enfranchising African-American males). An earlier poem, "Respondez!," also makes its debut in this cluster of war marches. In "Respondez!" Whitman appeals for a "new distribution of roles" in the social relations of the United States. Like "Pioneers!" this march enables readers to unmoor themselves from the outmoded past in order to be empowered to rewrite their social roles on a more egalitarian basis than had been the case in antebellum America.

The dominant image of the second Civil War cluster, "Bathed in War's Perfume," constitutes Whitman's metonymic representation of the United States in the flag, the "Stars and Stripes." In fact, the "delicate flag" embodies the referent of the title, which is washed in the aroma of the Civil War. The most significant text that appears in this cluster of poems made its debut in the 1871–1872 Leaves as the first attempt by Whitman to address explicitly the subject of African Americans since the 1855 edition of Leaves spoke, in "Song of Myself" and in "The Sleepers," in the voice of the slave. "Ethiopia Saluting the Colors" centers on the bewildered confrontation between a "dusky" African-American woman and a soldier in Sherman's army during the Civil War. Situated in a poetic cluster of "flag" poems, the affront of the African-American woman's salute to the Stars and Stripes takes on pointed significance in the soldier's inability to recognize her selfhood except as a "hardly human" object. Sherman's underling calls her only "Ethiopia," and thus strips her of any legitimate identity within the boundaries of American civil liberties, despite the newly-minted Civil War amendments to the Constitution which ratified African-American citizenship for the first time. In effect, the black woman reaches out to the flag in a gesture of inclusion, interracial comradeship, and political citizenship; the soldier's inability to recognize her finds its analogue in the historical agitation in 1871–1872 over the inability of the white majority to cede its social authority over African Americans.

Curiously, the 1871–1872 Leaves struggles with this question of liberation from domination in a cluster of poems that appeared only in this edition, called "Songs of Insurrection." The insurrection of African-American struggles for recognition, as well as the revolt of Southern whites against federal interference with their local racist customs, lends this cluster a material value in its historical context. In his textual production, Whitman came closest to overcoming the incessant struggles for power that marked his moment. In the syntax of his Reconstruction poems, he enacted a model of the poet as the legislator of social solidarity across lines of racial and sectional fighting. Hence, in 1871, Whitman accented the federalization of America, represented in this pastiche of mainly earlier "Insurrection" poems, now given a new thematic identity in a turbulent postwar setting. This cluster recognizes that "democratic nationality" might be deferred, but could not be defeated.

Whitman's construction of a book of "democratic nationality" took more coherent form in the first annex to the 1871–1872 Leaves, namely Passage to India, which contained 75 poems, mostly lifted from earlier editions but including 23 new texts. The poet's centralizing imagery takes on an added urgency here, just as the national Capitol sought to federalize civil liberties for African Americans. Whitman deemphasizes the autonomous sovereignty of the individual in favor of a composite image of national identity, which finds an allegorical echo in the two dominant images of this annex: voyaging ships and death. Each of these images has a dual significance, at once both literal and allegorical. Whitman's willingness to abandon the shoreline, evident in the Passage cluster called "Sea-Shore Memories," opened a newer ocean-going preoccupation for a poet who had heretofore stood on the shore. Such a departure pointed to Whitman's willingness to hazard uncertain future destinations, as well as to suggest that the "Ship of State" had to unmoor itself from older models of self-understanding in favor of an accent on centralized notions of democratic nationality. Of course, the most recognizable image of the "Ship of State" had been published in the popular 1865–1866 text, "O Captain! My Captain!," which Whitman reprinted in Passage to India in the cluster called "President Lincoln's Burial Hymn." In addition, the death that Whitman was dispersing in Passage included both the actual deaths of Civil War soldiers on the battlefields, and the death of the antebellum notions of local self-understanding, in favor of the dissolution of outmoded social relations unsuited to the new demands of postwar America. Such a dissolving of the crippled inheritance of the political past, broken by the Civil War, signaled the desire to set out on the open road of reconstructing America.

Again and again, the 23 new texts in the Passage to India annex return to the preoccupation with letting go of the past, in order to stretch out toward the possibilities for unprecedented social solidarity in the future. Significantly, the "Passage to India" text has landed on the shores of America, and not the shores of India. As a prototype of the Western migration to the New World, Columbus inaugurates the historical narrative which would culminate in Whitman's dream of a reconstructed America. Like Columbus, the text is grounded in a transcontinental passage across the United States in order to arrive at the Pacific shoreline. After such a continental passage, the social solidarity of Whitman's Reconstruction project would be accomplished through the departure of the "Ship of State" from the shores of racism and sectionalism. Syntactically, Whitman repeatedly collapses plural images into singular ones (for example, "ourselves" into "all"). In such new clusters as "Whispers of Heavenly Death," the poet continually positions the national Soul as surpassing the possibility of its dissolution. Read allegorically, a new composition called "A Noiseless Patient Spider" casts the agency for social reform into the future. The spider represents a compelling emblem for the Reconstruction poet, though apparently isolated and casting filaments into an unpromising future, who will continue to desire to connect the present social turmoil to the unwritten national future.

The second annex appended to the 1871–1872 Leaves extends Whitman's desire to construct a book of "democratic nationality" in its celebration of the technological ingenuity of American industry. After All, Not to Create Only (later "Song of the Exposition") was recited by Whitman himself at the fortieth annual exhibition of the American Institute in New York on 7 September 1871 and was issued in pamphlet form by the Robert Brothers of Boston. The text provides a kind of coda to the poem "Passage to India," insofar as Columbus's abrupt landing in 1492 on the shores of America had provided the opportunity for the muse of invention to import the cultural artifacts of the Old World, in order to imprint them on native genius. By 1871, Whitman represented industrial products as agents of rehabilitation from the trauma of the cultural vertigo induced by the Civil War. Whitman extols the centralizing image of national identity in the imperial Union, for he celebrates "Our freedom all in Thee!" (section 9). Once again, Whitman is stylistically enacting his centralizing strategy by the movement from the plural ("Our") to the singular ("Thee"). As the newly-appointed arbiter of civil liberties, the federal government represents an absolute Union ideology, and Whitman, as a representative poet, seeks to further the consolidation of national energy with an enthusiasm that has hardly been noticed by either Whitman's readers or his critics. Perhaps, the strange critical silence surrounding the contemporary reception of this fifth edition of Leaves of Grass can be read as an (unconscious) resistance of Whitman's egalitarian solidarity against the white majority, who were resisting the widening of liberties for marginalized minorities. Indeed, Whitman qualifies as an "unacknowledged legislator" of the world of Reconstruction culture. Most Americans were not ready to admit that the dismemberment of discrimination through federal surveillance of civil rights was a justifiable intervention in the evolution of an interracial democracy.

Bibliography

Allen, Gay Wilson. The New Walt Whitman Handbook. 1975. New York: New York UP, 1986.

Erkkila, Betsy. Whitman the Political Poet. New York: Oxford UP, 1989.

Mancuso, Luke. "'The Strange Sad War Revolving': Reconstituting Walt Whitman's Reconstruction Texts in the Legislative Workshop, 1865–1876." Diss. U of Iowa, 1994.

Szczesuil, Anthony. "The Maturing Vision of Walt Whitman's 1871 Version of Drum-Taps." Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 10 (1993): 127–141.

Whitman, Walt. Complete Poetry and Collected Prose. Ed. Justin Kaplan. New York: Library of America, 1982.

Dennis K. Renner

Walt Whitman recognized that the timing of the 1881–1882 edition of Leaves of Grass was fortunate because it was a chance to consolidate and unify his work late in his career. He could achieve "the consecutiveness and ensemble " he had always wanted, he told his friend John Burroughs ( Correspondence 3:231). To accomplish this goal, Whitman regrouped many poems in five new subtitled sections or clusters, a formal device with which he had long been experimenting. Generally recognized as the definitive edition of his poems, this edition was published in Boston by James R. Osgood and Company in October 1881. It was the seventh edition, counting a pirated typesetting distributed in England. Other than adding supplements of later poems, Whitman did not change the design of the volume in the final decade of his life. The last of fifteen printings of the edition occurred in 1892, the year of Whitman’s death.

The Osgood edition is notable both for its legacy of clustering and because for the first time Whitman’s book was being distributed by a mainstream publisher; Osgood’s authors included James, Howells, and Twain. Whitman’s book sold more than 1,500 copies before the publisher withdrew it after a district attorney objected to the sexual content and threatened to prosecute the company for selling obscene literature. The poet soon arranged to resume printing with Philadelphia publishers—first Rees Welsh, then David McKay when McKay acquired Leaves and other non-legal titles from Welsh, who specialized in law books. Spurred by publicity, Philadelphia sales eventually surpassed 6,000 copies, earning Whitman more than $1,000 in royalties by December 1882.

In the summer of 1881, Whitman spent three weeks revising his book in New York City, then oversaw publishing details for two months in Boston. He cut 39 poems in their entirety, added seventeen new ones, and modified hundreds of lines, but many of the changes were minor adjustments of punctuation. For his final edition of Leaves Whitman focused his editorial efforts on regrouping poems to create the sequence and unity of dramatic effects he had in mind.

Whitman’s remarks are sketchy about the formal device of clustering, but the evidence supports James E. Miller’s conclusion that Whitman envisioned the overall organization of his poems in dramatic terms, with a protagonist and a narrative divided into acts. In his preface for the Centennial edition, whose structure was transitional toward the final arrangement of the poems, Whitman explains the function of the "Passage to India" cluster in this way: "As in some ancient legend-play," these poems serve "to close the plot and hero’s career" ( Comprehensive 745). In the same preface, Whitman also makes a distinction between the spiritual poems—his thoughts "on Death, Immortality, and a free entrance into the Spiritual World" (746)—and the political poems that presumably advance the career of his protagonist, which may be understood as the poet’s conflation of a poet figure and the American people, struggling to achieve the ideals of the Revolution.

Whitman published the "two altogether distinct veins" (746) of his poetry—spiritual and political—in separate volumes for his Centennial printing. Spiritual poems—combined with prose works in a second volume, Two Rivulets —were understandably ascendant in Whitman’s final arrangement of his poems. He was mindful of the transience of his own life "at the eleventh hour, under grave illness" (744), he explained, having suffered a paralytic stroke and the loss of his mother, who had died three years earlier. In spiritual poetry, Whitman offered elaborate poetic visions of immortality, post-Christian in imagery, yet largely compatible with Christian hopes.

In the final arrangement of his poems, Whitman reintegrated the spiritual poems from the second volume of his 1876 printing back into a single volume of Leaves of Grass. Critics differ over whether this reintegration succeeds or fails. Those who presume that the primary literary intention of the text was putting the imaginative life of a poet into a sequence of poems tend to discern miscellaneous instead of purposeful regroupings in the 1881–1882 edition. Bradley and Blodgett complain that "Autumn Rivulets" lacks a common theme or progression of ideas, James E. Miller, Jr., finds only a casual thematic unity in "By the Roadside," and Allen concludes that Whitman erred when he did not arrange poems according to the chronology of their composition or his autobiography. Assuming that Whitman used clusters to deal with the tension between the private origin of lyrics and the public setting he established for his poems, however, Warren concludes that clustering in the 1881–1882 edition succeeds. Critics who read the literary intention of Leaves from historical perspectives also are favorable about Whitman’s final design.

Starting with the observation by editors of the Variorum edition that Whitman seemed to have rejected nearly one of ten poems not for aesthetic reasons, but because the poems did not fit his plan for the book and drawing upon historical criticism by Erkkila and Thomas, Mary Virginia Stark offered the first extensive explications of new clusters in the 1881–1882 edition. Stark concludes that in his final design Whitman groups poems to create the dramatic effect of rising action, crisis, and resolution common in the narratives of Western literary culture. He portrays the aspirations of his protagonist-speaker under cluster subtitles from earlier editions—"Children of Adam" and "Calamus"—and in unclustered political poems like "Song of Myself," other "Songs," and "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry." These poems are all placed before the "Drum-Taps" cluster of Civil War poems Whitman called pivotal.

Stark observes a foreboding and intensifying somberness in the three new clusters placed before the crisis Civil War poems in the 1881–1882 edition. The "Birds of Passage" cluster opens with "Song of the Universal," in which images of hope are surrounded by images of peril and defeat: "From imperfection’s murkiest cloud, / Darts always forth one ray of perfect light" (section 3). The "Sea-Drift" cluster expands war imagery and amplifies the somber tone presaging the crisis of civil war. The third new cluster, "By the Roadside," opens with the harshly satirical "A Boston Ballad (1854)" and closes with scathing lines about the last three prewar "presidentiads"—"scum floating atop of the waters . . . bats and night-dogs askant in the capitol," while "these States sleep" ("To the States"). The roadside metaphor suggests the journey of American promise is being thwarted or delayed.

Following the crisis Civil War poems in "Drum-Taps" and "Memories of President Lincoln" groupings come the fourth new cluster, healing poems of "Autumn Rivulets"—"songs of continued years," Whitman called them in the first poem of the cluster ("As Consequent, Etc.")—and of peace and hope born by the "rivulets" swelled by the storm of the war.

Spiritual poems in the last new cluster—"From Noon to Starry Night"—provide comforting resolution for the conflicts and suffering of the tragic narrative, leading to "Songs of Parting," the grouping with which Whitman had ended each edition since he began experimenting with cluster arrangements in 1860. In all of the new clusters Stark discerns structural parallels to Shakespeare’s tragedies about Britain and episodes of crisis in the history of Israel from the Bible—literary models for Whitman’s work. Penultimate poems, first poems, repeated metaphors, and allusions also unify the clusters in relation to the Civil War and Leaves of Grass as a whole, Stark has shown.

Even granting the coherence of Whitman’s final design, the superior literary standing of prewar poems and clusters will probably endure. However, instead of blaming the abstractness of postwar poems and programmatic clusters in the 1881–1882 edition on a waning of poetic powers—a subtle form of ageism—critics can recognize the logic of the volume as Whitman designed it, acknowledging that twentieth-century readers have admired Whitman’s achievement as a lyric poet more than the larger communal and national purposes he envisioned for his work.

Bibliography

Allen, Gay Wilson. The New Walt Whitman Handbook. 1975. New York: New York UP, 1986.

____. The Solitary Singer: A Critical Biography of Walt Whitman. 1955. Rev. ed. 1967. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985.

Bradley, Sculley, Harold W. Blodgett, Arthur Golden, and William White. Introduction. Leaves of Grass: A Textual Variorum of the Printed Poems. Ed. Bradley, Blodgett, Golden, and White. Vol. 1. New York: New York UP, 1980. xv–xxv.

Crawley, Thomas Edward. The Structure of "Leaves of Grass." Austin: U of Texas P, 1970.

Miller, James E., Jr. A Critical Guide to "Leaves of Grass." Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1957.

Stark, Mary Virginia. "Clustered Meaning in Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass." Diss. U of Iowa, 1990.

Warren, James Perrin. "The ‘Paths to the House’: Cluster Arrangements in Leaves of Grass, 1860–1881." ESQ 30 (1984): 51–70.

Whitman, Walt. The Correspondence. Ed. Edwin Haviland Miller. 6 vols. New York: New York UP, 1961–1977.

____. "Preface 1876— Leaves of Grass and Two Rivulets." Leaves of Grass: Comprehensive Reader’s Edition. Ed. Harold W. Blodgett and Sculley Bradley. New York: New York UP, 1965. 744–754.

R.W. French

Copyrighted in 1891, published in 1892, the 1891–1892 so-called Deathbed edition of Leaves of Grass is, strictly speaking, not an edition at all, but an impression; nor does the epithet "deathbed" pertain accurately to the text that has come to be so identified.

While the 1891–1892 volume was the ninth published during Whitman's lifetime to be entitled Leaves of Grass, and is therefore sometimes referred to as the ninth edition, it does not qualify as an edition according to generally accepted modern standards, since it contained no significant new material. The authentic editions of Leaves of Grass that Whitman compiled would be those of 1855, 1856, 1860, 1867, 1871, and 1881. With twenty-three minor revisions, pages 3–382 of the 1891–1892 Leaves of Grass reprint the 1881 text from the plates of James R. Osgood, the Boston publisher; the revisions include corrections of misspellings, changes of punctuation, and other alterations of the Osgood text that Whitman made for the 1882 and 1889 publications of Leaves of Grass and for the Complete Poems & Prose of 1888.

In the 1881 edition—the seventh publication of Leaves of Grass and the sixth (and last) true edition—the 293 poems, seventeen of them new, were given their final order and arrangement. The "clusters," as Whitman called his special groupings of poems under various titles, would now remain unchanged, having gone through extensive revision since their first appearance in the 1860 Leaves; and the twenty-five poems standing prominently outside the clusters were given their final placements. Although one additional poem, "Come, said my Soul," would later be restored to the Leaves as epigraph, it would appear on the title page, reclaiming a position it had first occupied in the impression of 1876.

In 1881 the poems of Leaves of Grass had achieved their final design. The plates for the 1881 edition were used in all subsequent publications of Leaves of Grass during Whitman's lifetime, as well as for the edition of 1897; thus no poem written after 1881 appears in Leaves of Grass proper. Whitman continued to write, however, and additional poems were published in two volumes, the poems of which were later to be included in the 1891–1892 Leaves of Grass as annexes rather than being integrated into the total structure.

The first annex was printed initially in the varied collection entitled November Boughs, published in 1888 by David McKay in Philadelphia. In its 140 pages the volume included a long prefatory essay entitled "A Backward Glance O'er Travel'd Roads" and sixty-five new poems, all short, as well as a collection of prose works. November Boughs appeared in its entirety as part of the Complete Poems & Prose of 1888; and then, under the title "Sands at Seventy," the poems of November Boughs were annexed first to the 1888 and 1889 impressions of Leaves of Grass, and finally to the 1891–1892 impression as pages [383]–404. "A Backward Glance O'er Travel'd Roads" was published in the 1889 Leaves of Grass and then was made the concluding text of the 1891–1892 volume as pages [423]–438. Between the poems and the essay, filling pages 405–422, appeared the second annex, "Good-Bye my Fancy," a collection of thirty-one short poems taken from the gathering of prose and poetry published under that title by McKay in 1891.

A posthumous gathering of poetry, "Old Age Echoes," edited by Horace Traubel, with the title supplied by Whitman, was included in the 1897 text of Leaves of Grass published by Small, Maynard and Company of Boston. In addition to its thirteen short poems it contained Traubel's preface, "An Executor's Diary Note, 1891," consisting mostly of Whitman's responses to two questions that Traubel, one of Whitman's literary executors, had asked him about the disposition of poems written after publication of the forthcoming 1891–1892 Leaves of Grass. Whitman is reported to have said, in part, "So far as you may have anything to do with it I place upon you the injunction that whatever may be added to the Leaves shall be supplementary, avowed as such, leaving the book complete as I left it, consecutive to the point I left off, marking always an unmistakable, deep down, unobliterable division line. In the long run the world will do as it pleases with the book. I am determined to have the world know what I was pleased to do" (Comprehensive 575). Not generally recognized as part of the Leaves of Grass canon, "Old Age Echoes" appears in some, but not all, volumes of Whitman's "complete poetry."

As the Textual Variorum of the Printed Poems indicates, the 1891–1892 Leaves of Grass appeared in two distinct versions before the final publication by David McKay in the spring of 1892. While both included the annexes and other additional materials, there were differences in the texts of the poems of Leaves of Grass. One version, assembled in December of 1891, was a paperbound volume that contained unbound sheets of the 1889 impression; "rude, flimsy cover," was Whitman's comment about it in a letter to Dr. Bucke dated 6 December 1891, "but good paper, print & stitching" (Correspondence 5:270). These sheets incorporated the various minor corrections that Whitman had been making over the years to the plates of the 1881 edition, and the corrected plates of 1881 were used for the 1889 impression as well as for that of 1891–1892. Therefore, while the 1881 Leaves of Grass established the order, arrangement, and essential texts of the poems, the Deathbed edition was not, as is sometimes stated, simply a reprinting, with additional materials, of the 1881 Leaves, since Whitman later made a number of revisions to that volume—minor, to be sure, but revisions nonetheless.

A second version was bound in December of 1891 for presentation to friends in time for Christmas; it contained uncorrected sheets of the 1888 Leaves of Grass, sheets incorporating only the few minor changes made for the 1882 impression. The presentation copies were bound in heavy paper, with plain covers in gray or dark brown, and on the spine only a pasted label, showing the author's name and the title.

The production of the assembled volumes was a makeshift job, done in some haste so that Whitman might have a copy of the final Leaves before his death, and it came not a moment too soon. In the same letter of December 6 to Dr. Bucke, Whitman remarked on his physical condition—"Bad days & nights with me, no hour without its suffering"—and expressed satisfaction over the completion of his long labors: "L. of G. at last complete—after 33 y'rs of hackling at it, all times & moods of my life, fair weather & foul, all parts of the land, and peace & war, young & old—the wonder to me that I have carried it on to accomplish as essentially as it is, tho' I see well enough its numerous deficiencies & faults" (Correspondence 5:270). On December 17 Whitman came down with a chill and had to be helped to bed. He was found the next day to have congestion in the right lung; his physicians sensed that the end was near. Despite an improvement in January, Whitman did little more than endure, often in considerable pain, until his death on 26 March 1892.

While the 1891–1892 Leaves of Grass has come to be known as the Deathbed edition, that epithet would most properly be applied to the paperbound texts of 1891 rather than to the hardbound Leaves that would be published in the spring of 1892; still, it should be noted that the "deathbed" epithet, while romantically appealing, is in any case not wholly accurate, since compilation of the authorized text had been completed at least some weeks before the author's final illness (although he was assuredly in very poor health at the time). As early as 1 December 1891, Whitman noted in a letter to Dr. Bucke, "no books last edn L of G yet f'm binder, but expect them every day" (Correspondence 5:268). Bucke received his copy by 8 December; on 10 December Whitman wrote again to say that he was awaiting additional copies with heavier paper covers, one of which he would send to Bucke, and commented, "As I now consider it finished as I propose & laid out—even its deficiencies are provided for, or plainly hinted at—to me its best points are an unmistakable atmosphere and with any maturity or stamina or the like its being in process (or evolution) qualities f'm first to last" (Correspondence 5:271).

Actual publication of the 1891–1892 Leaves of Grass took place several months into 1892. Issued by David McKay, the book had plain covers, a hardbound cloth binding of dark green, and on the spine gold-stamped lettering bearing the title and the names of author and publisher. The final text of Leaves of Grass that Whitman authorized, then, began with the epigraphic poem "Come, said my Soul" on the recto of the title page, and on the verso it presented Whitman's definitive statement of preference for the 1891–1892 text. "As there are now several editions of L. of G.," he wrote, "different texts and dates, I wish to say that I prefer and recommend this present one, complete, for future printings, if there should be any; a copy and fac-simile, indeed, of the text of these 438 pages. The subsequent adjusting interval which is so important to form'd and launch'd work, books especially, has pass'd; and waiting till fully after that, I have given (pages 423–438) my concluding words" (Variorum 1:xxv). Whitman's statement was followed by the 1889 text of the poems of Leaves of Grass; the two annexes, "Sands at Seventy" and "Good-Bye my Fancy"; and finally the essay "A Backward Glance O'er Travel'd Roads" with its closing words—"the strongest and sweetest songs yet remain to be sung"—bringing the book to an end (Comprehensive 574). The total number of poems is 389.

The question inevitably arises, since the poems are not in chronological order of composition, What does the structure mean? Various attempts have been made to find a coherent principle of organization, but none has proven definitive. Whitman himself compared the growth of Leaves of Grass to the successive growth of a tree, but a tree follows chronological order, while Whitman did not. It could, however, be said in general that the 1891–1892 Leaves of Grass demonstrates, at least in broad outline, a recognizable thematic structure.

The book begins with a prelude introducing major and minor themes to follow; this section includes the prefatory poem "Come, said my Soul" and the short poems gathered in the "Inscriptions" cluster. It then turns to varied explorations of human life in "Starting from Paumanok," "Song of Myself," and the "Children of Adam" and "Calamus" clusters, poems largely youthful in their passions, their sorrows, their expectations, and their energies. The dominant poem is of course "Song of Myself," with its celebrations both of human physicality and of a transcendent universe.

The book proceeds to move outward from personal experience to public, as it explores the mature poet's perceptions of human experience, beginning with poems significantly entitled "Salut au Monde!" and "Song of the Open Road." The central poem of this section is "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry," in which the poet looks out beyond himself to the lives of people present and future. The tone then darkens as the book turns to poems expressing mature awareness of loss, poems imbued with the inherent sadness of humanity. This section includes such "Songs of Experience" as "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking" and "As I Ebb'd with the Ocean of Life" in the "Sea-Drift" cluster; it also includes poems of a philosophical and meditative nature, such as "On the Beach at Night" and "On the Beach at Night Alone."

Following the brief poems of "By the Roadside," poems that, as the title suggests, are vignettes of passing life, Leaves then turns to the life of a nation with the two war-time sections, "Drum-Taps" and "Memories of President Lincoln." Following the carnage of war, the concluding sections of Leaves of Grass are distinctly elegiac, taking us into advancing age and the approach of death, as in the dominant poem, "Passage to India." The titles of the clusters themselves tell a story: "Autumn Rivulets"; "Whispers of Heavenly Death"; "From Noon to Starry Night"; and "Songs of Parting."

In sum, Leaves of Grass takes its readers through the course of a human life, from birth to death. Significantly, the first lines of "Starting from Paumanok," the initial major poem following the brief introductory poems of "Inscriptions," speak of origins—"Starting from fish-shape Paumanok where I was born / Well-begotten, and rais'd by a perfect mother"—and the concluding lines of the final poem, "So Long!," in the "Songs of Parting" cluster, are spoken as from the grave: "Remember my words, I may again return, / I love you, I depart from materials, / I am as one disembodied, triumphant, dead." In between the two poems, Leaves of Grass ranges widely through the stages and circumstances of human life.

Beyond this general framework, however, there seems to be no clear plan; and even the broad scheme outlined above is subject to dispute, for many placements of poems may seem arbitrary rather than purposeful, as appropriate to one place as to another—indeed, a significant number of poems had already been in other places, since the arrangements of poems within and without the clusters had been so frequently revised over the course of more than twenty years.

Thus the structure of Leaves of Grass will always be open to differing perceptions. That is as it should be, for Whitman was not writing according to a strict blueprint, but according to his own spontaneous nature and lyric sensibility. Leaves of Grass may have the cumulative force of epic, but its components have the vitality and the variety of lyric.

Perhaps Whitman's summarizing comment in "A Backward Glance O'er Travel'd Roads" deserves the final say. "Leaves of Grass," he insisted, "has mainly been the outcropping of my own emotional and other personal nature—an attempt, from first to last, to put a Person, a human being (myself, in the latter half of the Nineteenth Century, in America,) freely, fully and truly on record" (Comprehensive 573–574). While Whitman made a number of assertions about the nature of his book, some of them highly ambitious, some of them conflicting, this modest statement, taken with due regard for Whitman's characteristic reticence about precise details of his life as well as for the force of his artistic creativity, suggests at the very least a possible route into the large landscape of Leaves of Grass.

R.W. French

Bibliography

Allen, Gay Wilson. The New Walt Whitman Handbook. 1975. New York: New York UP, 1986.

____. A Reader's Guide to Walt Whitman. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1970.

Bowers, Fredson. Principles of Bibliographical Description. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1949.

Crawley, Thomas Edward. The Structure of "Leaves of Grass." Austin: U of Texas P, 1970.

Miller, James E., Jr. A Critical Guide to "Leaves of Grass." Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1957.

____. "Leaves of Grass": America's Lyric-Epic of Self and Democracy. New York: Twayne, 1992.

____. Walt Whitman. Updated ed. 1962. Boston: Twayne, 1990.

Whitman, Walt. The Correspondence. Ed. Edwin Haviland Miller. 6 vols. New York: New York UP, 1961–1977.

____. Leaves of Grass: A Textual Variorum of the Printed Poems. Ed. Sculley Bradley, Harold W. Blodgett, Arthur Golden, and William White. 3 vols. New York: New York UP, 1980.

____. Leaves of Grass: Comprehensive Reader's Edition. Ed. Harold W. Blodgett and Sculley Bradley. New York: New York UP, 1965.

John Reitz

As an appendix to the second (1856) edition of Leaves of Grass, Whitman published "Leaves-Droppings" (perhaps a pun on "eavesdropping"), primarily a collection of critical responses to the first (1855) edition. The first section, entitled "Correspondence," consists of Emerson's famous letter to Whitman, heralding Leaves of Grass as "the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed" (Comprehensive 729), followed by Whitman's 3,800-word reply to his "Master." Emerson was angry and embarrassed, and the literary world in general was offended, because the letter, a private note that did not express Emerson's considerable reservations about the poetry, was published without his permission. Whitman's epistolary reply to Emerson is essentially an announcement of his literary ambitions and the American poetics he had first (and more successfully) elaborated in the 1855 Preface. The letter also baldly exaggerates the popular success of the first edition and predicts the steady growth of the poet's popularity and importance in future years. 

The second section of "Leaves-Droppings," entitled "Opinions. 1855-6," reprints nine reviews of the 1855 Leaves that had originally appeared in 1) the London Weekly Dispatch, 2) the Brooklyn Daily Times, 3) the Christian Spiritualist, 4) Putnam's Monthly, 5) the American Phrenological Journal, 6) the Critic, 7) the Examiner, 8) the London Leader, and 9) the Boston Intelligencer. This collection nearly equaled the "Correspondence" in generating controversy, since two of the reviews (numbers two and five) were written (though unsigned) by Whitman himself. Moreover, he did not shy away from including puzzled, mixed, or even flatly negative reviews in this collection, further showcasing the controversial nature of his poetry. 

"Leaves-Droppings" illustrates the shamelessness and skill with which Whitman promoted Leaves of Grass early in his career, gaining himself a degree of useful notoriety and establishing himself as a literary outsider. "Leaves-Droppings" has never been reprinted in its entirety, but the "Correspondence" appears in Leaves of Grass: Comprehensive Reader's Edition, and the reviews have been reprinted individually in Milton Hindus's Walt Whitman: The Critical Heritage. 

Bibliography

Hindus, Milton, ed. Walt Whitman: The Critical Heritage. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1971. 

Kaplan, Justin. Walt Whitman: A Life. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1980. 

Traubel, Horace. With Walt Whitman in Camden. Vol. 3. New York: Mitchell Kennerley, 1914. 

Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass. Brooklyn: Fowler and Wells, 1856. 

____. Leaves of Grass: Comprehensive Reader's Edition. Ed. Harold W. Blodgett and Sculley Bradley. New York: New York UP, 1965. 

Stephen A. Black

Widely considered the cornerstone of modern poetry, Whitman's book of poems in all its transformations may be the most radically original book of important poetry. In the first poem of the first edition, Whitman sings of "Myself." With the gradual success that came during the last 36 years of his life, for better and for worse, the book established the poet's self as the central topic and process of poetry. 

The poet insists he is inseparable from his poems, that he is his poems, that he creates himself by writing poems, and that his readers and he become part of each other when the poems are read. Egotistical, defiant of manners and conventions, a loner, disingenuous, tactless, his obvious flaws of character failed to put off a host of partisans who devoted themselves to Walt with intense loyalty that carried on beyond his lifetime. By his death in 1892 Leaves of Grass was finding some acceptance in the literary establishment. A century later it seems the preeminent book of American poetry, the book that defines American poetry. 

Simultaneously obscure and exhilarating, Leaves of Grass has never been an easy book for readers. Long unmetrical lines define their own rhythms as they go along. The poems are Homerically digressive, often seeming aimless to the point of incoherence. The meanings of the poems seem inseparable from the process by which they are made. Words, phrases, and images that fill the lines arise in a poet's whim that wanders wherever the eye looks next. In making the poems, the poet seems to drift regressively into his deepest self—beyond the reach of conventions, logic, or inhibitions. 

First lines announce a poem's topic, and then the poet names objects, images, impressions that occur to him in connection with the topic. By naming things, the poet creates his connection to the topic and also creates a context which defines the topic for him. He demands that readers suspend all preconceptions about the world, about language, about poetry, and even about themselves. Those who can let themselves flow along in the poet's flood of good-humored energy may escape the puzzlements. Like the poet they must be able and willing to tolerate a vast degree of disorder and be confident that when the need arises, they can step back into the world of other people and ordinary discourse. 

Whitman's poems do not describe actual or psychological events; they are the events. The poet made himself from line to line and poem to poem. So the book grew. In 1855 there were a dozen poems, including "Song of Myself." Fourteen months later there were 32 poems which he printed as the second Leaves of Grass. Eight months later he wrote a friend that he had written 68 new poems and was about to publish a third edition of a hundred poems. Instead, there was a delay of about 18 months when Whitman apparently wrote little. There was almost certainly an emotional crisis, possibly involving an affair with an actual lover. The act of writing the Calamus poems, poems about the love of comrades, seems deeply involved with the crisis. 

When the third Leaves of Grass finally appeared (1860), it contained 156 poems, including nearly all Whitman's best poems. Although he would write nearly 250 more poems, only a few more would involve the deeply regressive journeys to the sources of poetry that produced works like "Song of Myself," "The Sleepers," "There Was a Child Went Forth," "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry," or "Song of the Broad-Axe." In his first five years as a poet Whitman created a style and a voice, and all but a handful of the great poems he would ever write. It was truly a miraculous event of poetic fecundity. After 1860 Whitman almost ceased to undertake the very deep regressive journeys which had produced his first great flowering. 

The new poems written after the crisis, especially "Out of the Cradle," and "As I Ebb'd with the Ocean of Life," differed from most previous Leaves of Grass poems in often having distinct beginnings, middles, and ends; they reflected a new need for conscious order and structure. The poet became increasingly able to turn away from his almost exclusive preoccupation with the self, turning to the Not Me and to circumstances. He now wrote impressionistic sketches of Civil War scenes, Drum-Taps, sketches that work in words as impressionist paintings work in colors. The eye that records the war scenes is more attuned to otherness than the voice that speaks the earlier poems of Leaves of Grass. The new receptiveness to the Not Me reaches its height in the superb elegy to Lincoln, "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd," but it continues to be present in numerous brief lyrics. Two more major poems remained to be written: "Passage to India" (1871) and "Prayer of Columbus" (1874). 

In the 1867 edition, Whitman began the restless sorting, organizing, and classifying of poems that would occupy him for the rest of his life. Apparently he sought an external, conscious structure to answer critics who said his work was formless or obscure. Through revisions, Whitman also tried to ameliorate the extremity of the early poems, some revisions being so severe that no more than a line or two of the original poem remained. The revisions, too, seemed a gesture in the direction of being more sociable, less the loner. Gay Wilson Allen calls the fourth the "Workshop Edition," and judges it the most "chaotic" of them all (118). Whitman's critical vigor was not in harmony with his creative achievements. 

Through the remaining five editions (of 1871-1872, 1876, 1881-1882, 1889, and 1891-1892) Whitman continued to seek outward structure and order. Scholars have devised numerous descriptions of whatever plan they perceive, but the plurality of descriptions suggests that, like the poems themselves, Whitman's scheme for giving order to his book requires the active engagement of the reader—and even then, nothing is clear. It is conservative and perhaps least unsatisfactory to posit that changes in the book and poems reflect changes in its author as he passed through life's various changes. 

When the meaning of the poems seems inseparable from the process of their creation, particular problems arise concerning questions of preferred texts. Which version of Leaves of Grass is best and should be recommended to readers may be a question that cannot be answered to everyone's satisfaction. In 1995 only the first and last editions were in print. Many scholars (including Roy Harvey Pearce, Edwin Miller, Leslie Fiedler, and David Cavitch) have argued that the poems should be read in early printed versions. Cornell University Press heroically kept the 1860 edition in print for decades and dropped it only recently. Perhaps someone else will pick it up. When the poet's journey is everything and arriving is little, the journey should not be concealed. 

Bibliography

Allen, Gay Wilson. The New Walt Whitman Handbook. New York: New York UP, 1975. 

Black, Stephen A. Whitman's Journeys into Chaos: A Psychoanalytic Study of the Poetic Process. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1975. 

Cavitch, David. My Soul and I: The Inner Life of Walt Whitman. Boston: Beacon, 1985. 

Feehan, Michael. "Multiple Editorial Horizons of Leaves of Grass." Resources for American Literary Study 20 (1994): 213-230. 

Fiedler, Leslie. Introduction. Whitman. The Laurel Poetry Series. New York: Dell, 1959. 7-22. 

Miller, Edwin Haviland. Introduction. Whitman's "Leaves of Grass": Selections. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1970. vii-x. 

Pearce, Roy Harvey. Introduction. Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman: Facsimile Edition of the 1860 Text. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell UP, 1961. vii-li. 

Warren, James Perrin. "The 'Paths to the House': Cluster Arrangements in Leaves of Grass, 1860-1881." ESQ 30 (1984): 51-70. 

Gregory Eiselein

The death of Abraham Lincoln had a profound impact on Walt Whitman and his writing. It is the subject of one of his most highly regarded and critically examined pieces, "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd" (1865-1866) and one of his best-known poems, "O Captain! My Captain!" (1865-1866). Whitman also delivered (sporadically) annual public lectures commemorating Lincoln's death beginning in April 1879. Although the two never met, Whitman and Lincoln, both deeply committed to the Union, remain intertwined in Whitman's writing and in American mythology. 

Whitman intensely admired Lincoln from the late 1850s onward, remarking at one point, "After my dear, dear mother, I guess Lincoln gets almost nearer me than anybody else" (Traubel 38). On the Friday of 14 April 1865, when John Wilkes Booth shot Lincoln at Ford's Theater in Washington, D.C., Whitman was in New York and read about the assassination in the daily newspapers and extras. 

His first poem responding to Lincoln's death came only a couple of days later when he added to Drum-Taps (1865), already in press, a short piece titled "Hush'd Be the Camps To-day" (1865). Although it ends solemnly with "the heavy hearts of soldiers," this public commemoration of Lincoln's funeral—spoken to the poet by and for Union soldiers—asks us to "celebrate" his death, as it remembers "the love we bore him." "Hush'd Be the Camps To-day" is not one of Whitman's best-known poems, but it is significant not merely because it was his first poetic word on Lincoln's death, but also because it exemplifies the primary features that generally characterize Whitman's poetic treatment of Lincoln's death: as in "Lilacs," the poem mourns for the dead but celebrates death; it identifies Lincoln's death with the coming of peace; and it remembers Lincoln not because he was a great leader or conqueror but because he was well-loved. The poem also associates Lincoln with the war's ordinary soldiers, an association that prefigures "Lilacs" and its treatment of Lincoln's death as a metonymy for all the war dead. 

"Hush'd Be the Camps To-day" and the other Lincoln poems ("Lilacs," "O Captain!," and "This Dust Was Once the Man" [1871]) never mention Lincoln by name. As some critics have noted, Whitman had no need in the postbellum era to refer directly to Lincoln because his readers would easily recognize these poems as elegies for President Lincoln. Later, after the immediacy of Lincoln's death had faded into historical memory, Whitman identified the subject of these poems by grouping the four of them together, first in a cluster titled "President Lincoln's Burial Hymn" in an annex to Passage to India (1871) and later in the "Memories of President Lincoln" cluster in the 1881 edition of Leaves of Grass. Other critics believe that the lack of direct reference to Lincoln indicates the poet's attempt to address universal themes. 

Whitman does, of course, use Lincoln's death to talk about subjects beyond the events at Ford's Theater, including the subject of death itself. In "Lilacs," Whitman reconciles himself and the nation to Lincoln's death and death in general by fashioning the historical fact of the assassination and burial into a spiritual embrace of death in which death becomes both a personal and a national regeneration and cleansing. The treatment of Lincoln's death in "Lilacs" is famous for its symbolism and its formal, musical qualities. Indeed the poem relentlessly transforms its historical content into symbols. Lincoln as a person disappears only to reappear as a "western fallen star" and as the evoked metonymic associations of the poem's other symbols and images—coffin, lilacs, cloud, and the hermit thrush's song. 

Whitman's handling of Lincoln's death in the lectures diametrically reverses the musical, ethereal, often abstract, heavily symbolized style of "Lilacs." In his lecture on the "Death of Abraham Lincoln" (1879), Whitman depicts the scene of the murder with dramatic immediacy, as if he were an eyewitness. The narration is suspenseful, detailed, and focuses on specifics (sometimes minutiae). Although Whitman was not an eyewitness, his close companion, Peter Doyle, was at Ford's Theater, and Whitman made impressive use of Doyle's story in his imaginative retelling. In the lecture, the president's murder is not a bizarre denouement to an inevitable war but rather the culmination of and solution to all the historic, national conflicts of the Civil War era. Lincoln's death becomes a metaphor for the bloody war itself and the climax of a lofty tragic drama that redeems the Union. Whitman's lecture turns Lincoln's assassination into the ceremonial sacrifice that gives new life to the nation. 

Whitman's Lincoln possessed an undeniably heroic stature. Whitman called him "the grandest figure yet, on all the crowded canvas of the Nineteenth Century" (Prose Works 2:604). Still, the poet did not merely apotheosize the dead president; he also transformed Lincoln and his death into a symbolic referent for thoughts on the war, comradeship, democracy, union, and death. Perhaps best exemplified by the "Lilacs" elegy, Lincoln's death became the event around which Whitman twined so sadly and beautifully his understanding of death's affiliation with love.   

Bibliography

Allen, Gay Wilson. The Solitary Singer: A Critical Biography of Walt Whitman. 1955. Rev. ed. 1967. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985. 

Erkkila, Betsy. Whitman the Political Poet. New York: Oxford UP, 1989. 

Larson, Kerry C. Whitman's Drama of Consensus. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1988. 

Reynolds, David S. Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography. New York: Knopf, 1995. 

Traubel, Horace. With Walt Whitman in Camden. Vol. 1. Boston: Small, Maynard, 1906. 

Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass: Comprehensive Reader's Edition. Ed. Harold W. Blodgett and Sculley Bradley. New York: New York UP, 1965. 

____. Memoranda During the War & Death of Abraham Lincoln. Ed. Roy P. Basler. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1962. 

____. Prose Works 1892. Ed. Floyd Stovall. 2 vols. New York: New York UP, 1963-1964. 

____. Walt Whitman's "Drum-Taps" (1865) and "Sequel to Drum-Taps" (1865-6): A Facsimile Reproduction. Ed. F. DeWolfe Miller. Gainesville: Scholars' Facsimiles and Reprints, 1959. 

Karen Karbiener

Described by Whitman as his "first real venture" (Specimen Days 287), this weekly newspaper was founded by him in 1838 in his hometown of Huntington. Whitman had been teaching school for three years and was clearly eager to return to journalism. Although the Long Islander is still in print today, Whitman's involvement in his project was shortlived: he sold the paper within ten months. He later claimed his restlessness had kept him from establishing permanent residence on Long Island, but a note in the Hempstead Inquirer of 20 July 1839 suggests that Huntington residents had not evinced a "desire to support a newspaper among themselves" (qtd. in Funnell 50). Of course, Whitman also may have grown tired of the too regular and time-consuming work. 

Whitman set up shop in a small building about half a block west of the Long Islander 's present home, bringing a press and an assortment of types. Upstairs he fashioned his frugal sleeping quarters; downstairs he performed his duties as editor, compositor, pressman, and printer's devil. In the evenings, the boys of the village gathered in the printing room to hear him read stories or some of his own poetry: "yawps" (qtd. in Funnell 46), as he then called his verses. 

As the Long Island Star had warned the nineteen-year-old editor, a country newspaper was a dubious business venture. Expenses accumulated because subscribers and advertisers often paid in potatoes and cordwood instead of cash. Whitman also found it necessary to buy a horse and establish a weekly 30-mile paper route through Babylon, Smithtown, and Commack. Despite the rough roads and the time commitment—the journey took a full day and night each week—Whitman later declared, "I never had happier jaunts" (287). 

Though there is no extant copy of Whitman's Long Islander, some of its content is available because newspapers of the time customarily borrowed articles from one another. On 8 August 1838, for example, the Long Island Democrat reproduced Whitman's article "Effects of Lightning" from the Long Islander; this remains his earliest extant writing. Whitman's poem "Our Future Lot," appearing in the Democrat on 31 October 1838, was also copied "from the Long Islander." 

In his later years, Whitman showed a sentimental fondness for the Long Islander. He reminisced about the newspaper's beginnings in Specimen Days, and he proudly showed his Camden visitors a copy of the newspaper he had founded as a boy. Richard Maurice Bucke reported that he and Whitman stopped in the offices of the Long Islander when they visited Huntington in 1881. Sinking into the editor's chair, Whitman took time to contemplate the changes that had come about since he had left. 

The Long Islander rarely mentioned its founder until George Shepard, the third publisher after Whitman, wrote a scathing review of Leaves of  Grass. As Whitman gained literary prestige, the Long Islander took more positive notice of Whitman's work; since 1959, the newspaper has published an annual "Walt Whitman Page" or "Supplement" to commemorate the poet's birthday. 

Bibliography

Funnell, Bertha H. Walt Whitman on Long Island. Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat, 1971. 

Kaplan, Justin. Walt Whitman : A Life. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1980. 

White, William. Walt Whitman's Journalism: A Bibliography. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1969. 

Whitman, Walt. Specimen Days. Vol. 1 of Prose Works 1892. Ed. Floyd Stovall. New York: New York UP, 1963. 

____. The Uncollected Poetry and Prose of Walt Whitman. 1921. Ed. Emory Holloway. 2 vols. Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1972.

Robert Leigh Davis

"My idea is a book of the time, worthy the time" (Correspondence 1:171), Whitman wrote to the Boston publisher James Redpath in October 1863, proposing a Civil War narrative he planned to title "Memoranda of a Year." Redpath turned down the offer and Whitman's Civil War autobiography would be another ten years in the making. In 1874 Whitman published a version of his original project, now entitled "'Tis But Ten Years Since," in six articles for the New York Weekly Graphic. A year later he collected and republished the Weekly Graphic articles as Memoranda During the War in a private printing of less than one hundred copies. In 1876 Whitman republished Memoranda During the War as a section of Two Rivulets, the second volume of the Centennial edition of his work, and then again as a section of Specimen Days & Collect (1882).

Much had happened in the ten years since the war. Published three years after the Credit Mobilier scandal of the Grant administration, two years after the "salary grab" of 1873, and in the midst of the worst economic depression in American history, Memoranda During the War is indeed "a book of the time," as Whitman knew. But it is a book as implicated in the cultural contexts of the Gilded Age as in the Civil War itself. The America emerging from the ashes of war frankly baffled the poet. Whitman's dream of a democratic republic of free labor was overwhelmed by the emergence of an industrialized power-state, what he called the "leviathan" of postwar America. That America, in Whitman's eyes, was despotic, stratified, hypocritical and corrupt—even less committed to the possibilities of popular democracy, even less interested in the destiny of the common people than American culture before the war. The nation had become a huge body, Whitman wrote in Democratic Vistas (1871), "with little or no soul" (Prose Works 2:370).

Memoranda responds to that diminishment. As Betsy Erkkila argues in Whitman the Political Poet, the book is an anthology of republican virtue, a case study of democratic idealism implicitly attacking the business ethos of the Gilded Age. The central issue in Memoranda is not politics but character. Whitman is largely silent on the major public issues of the era: slavery, emancipation, Reconstruction, suffrage. Mythologizing the war as a demonstration of what he terms "the latent Personal Character and eligibilities of These States" (Memoranda 4), Whitman subordinates political issues to brief, intimate portraits of common courage and self-sacrifice. He has little to say about battles, generals, tactics or turning-points. His heroes are not Grant and Lee, but Calvin Harlowe and Thomas Haley. And his focus is almost exclusively on the suffering of common soldiers. His titles signal that emphasis: "Two Brooklyn Boys," "A New York Soldier," "A Secesh Brave," "Bad Wounds, the Young." Facing a spectacle of postwar greed and political scandal, Whitman returns to the hospitals and battlefields of the Civil War with a sense almost of relief. There he finds the latent character of the American people—in a Massachusetts soldier returning from Andersonville, in an Armory Square nurse sitting at the bedside of a dying patient, in a middle-aged Southerner comforting the wounded at Chancellorsville.

This is the "interior history" of Whitman's Civil War, the "soul" bargained away by Gilded Age America. Whitman summons that soul in the pages of his text. "They summon up," he begins, "even in this silent and vacant room as I write, not only the sinewy regiments and brigades, marching or in camp, but the countless phantoms of those who fell . . ." (Memoranda 3). If the Memoranda is a jeremiad in the tradition of Emerson and Thoreau, it is also a kind of romance. Like Hawthorne and Poe, Whitman resurrects the dead. He stirs the ghosts of a recent past—tis but ten years since—and restores the reality of past suffering to a postwar America all too willing to forget. The Civil War hospital is Whitman's House of Pain, his House of the Seven Gables, and he conjures the phantoms of the dead to connect the present age to the living history of its own war, a war "in danger," Whitman feared, "of being totally forgotten" (Memoranda 5).

Bibliography

Aaron, Daniel. The Unwritten War: American Writers and the Civil War. 1973. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1987.

Erkkila, Betsy. Whitman the Political Poet. New York: Oxford UP, 1989.

Sweet, Timothy. Traces of War: Poetry, Photography, and the Crisis of the Union. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1990. 

Thomas, M. Wynn. The Lunar Light of Whitman's Poetry. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1987. 

Whitman, Walt. The Correspondence. Ed. Edwin Haviland Miller. 6 vols. New York: New York UP, 1961–1977.

____. Memoranda During the War & Death of Abraham Lincoln. Ed. Roy P. Basler. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1962.

____. Prose Works 1892. Ed. Floyd Stovall. 2 vols. New York: New York UP, 1963–1964.

Geoffrey M. Sill

On his sixth-fifth birthday, 26 March 1884, Walt Whitman moved into the only home he ever owned. His brother George had recently retired and moved his family to a farm 12 miles outside of Camden, but Walt had come to like the city and refused to leave. With a savings fund of $1,250, earned through royalties from the 1882 edition of Leaves of Grass, and a loan of $500 from George W. Childs, he purchased a humble two-story frame house that was for sale on nearby Mickle Street. The house had many deficiencies—it had no furnace, needed repairs, was close to the railroad yards and the ferry terminals, and seemed overpriced to his brother George. But Walt liked it, and on 20 April 1884 he wrote to Anne Gilchrist, "I have moved into a little old shanty of my own . . . am much more contented" (Whitman 368). 

The house that Whitman bought had probably been constructed around 1847 by Adam Hare on a lot that was laid out by Edward Sharp in 1820. The house passed to Rebecca Jane Hare in 1873, who sold it to Whitman in 1884. When Whitman died in 1892, he left the house to his brother Edward, and gave his housekeeper, Mrs. Mary Oakes Davis, the right to live there as a tenant for the rest of her life. Edward's death in that same year, however, left the house in the hands of George, who evicted Mrs. Davis because of a claim she had made against the estate. The house passed to Walt's niece Jessie Whitman of St. Louis on George's death, and Jessie sold it to the city of Camden for restoration as a memorial to the poet in 1921. 

The efforts to preserve Whitman's house had begun almost immediately after his death. Though the house number had recently been changed from 328 to 330 Mickle Street, the address was still spoken with reverence by Whitman's admirers around the world. A campaign organized by Horace Traubel in 1892 was not successful, but a second effort led by J. David and Juliet Lit Stern in 1920 led to its purchase. The Walt Whitman Foundation was established to administer the house, with Whitman's physician, Dr. Alexander McAlister, as its first chairman. The foundation furnished the house with artifacts collected from the neighborhood, including Whitman's rocking chairs, his deathbed, and other furniture that had belonged to Mrs. Davis. The house was acquired by the State of New Jersey in 1946, and the foundation was re-incorporated as the Walt Whitman Association in 1965. The association led efforts to restore the neighboring buildings at 326 and 328 Mickle Boulevard for use as library and exhibit space. The Walt Whitman Library, comprising chiefly rare editions of Whitman's works and based on collections by Mr. Charles Feinberg and Colonel Richard Gimbel, was dedicated in October 1984 and is open for supervised use by visitors and scholars. 

Bibliography

Allen, Gay Wilson. The Solitary Singer: A Critical Biography of Walt Whitman. 1955. Rev. ed. 1967. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985. 

Carpenter, George Rice. Walt Whitman. New York: Macmillan, 1909. 

Sill, Geoffrey M. "A Thumbnail History of the Walt Whitman Library." The Mickle Street Review 9 Part 1 (1987): iii-v. 

Stern, J. David. Memoirs of a Maverick Publisher. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1962. 

Whitman, Walt. The Correspondence. Ed. Edwin Haviland Miller. Vol. 3. New York: New York UP, 1964. 

Winterich, Douglas, Curator of the Walt Whitman House. Personal Interview. 17 Feb. 1995. 

Ed Folsom

Whitman's adult life was framed by two of the defining events in nineteenth-century Native American history—the infamous "Trail of Tears" in 1838 and 1839, when Whitman was twenty, and the Wounded Knee Massacre at the end of 1890, just over a year before his death. During Whitman's teenage years, the Choctaws, the Creeks, the Chickasaws, and finally the Cherokees were moved across the Mississippi and into the Oklahoma territory. During the formative years of Leaves of Grass, many of the most explosive Western battles between natives and whites occurred, including the Pueblo uprising in 1847, the Grattan fight in 1854, and the Rains fight in 1855. As Leaves of Grass grew through its various editions, countless battles and skirmishes took place, and their names entered American memory: Birch Coulee, Canyon de Chelly, Rosebud, Warbonnet Creek, Sand Creek. By the time of Whitman's death, Wounded Knee had underscored the fact that active, armed Native American resistance to the United States was at an end. 

Whitman was not unaffected by Native American life and events. While his own experience with Native Americans was limited, it was not insubstantial. He encountered American Indians as a boy on Long Island and as a young editor in New Orleans. He admired Indian troops who fought in the Civil War, and he was the only major American poet to work in the Indian Bureau of the Department of the Interior (1865), where he met several impressive Native delegations and had what he called "quite animated and significant" conversations with them (Prose Works 2:579). On his Western trip in the 1870s, he commented on the Indians he met in Topeka, and he visited a Chippewa settlement during his trip to Canada in 1880. 

Whitman's interest in Native Americans is evident from very early on in his writing. One of his earliest published poems is "The Inca's Daughter," about the noble suicide of a "captive Indian maiden" (Early 6), and his 1842 temperance novel, Franklin Evans, contains a long chapter ("The Death of Wind-Foot") that consists of a Native American revenge tale. A few years later, he wrote a novella, "The Half-Breed: A Tale of the Western Frontier," about a deformed and treacherous amalgam of the worst qualities of the white and red races. He wrote frequently about Native Americans and their history in various newspaper essays and articles. In the first edition of Leaves of Grass, Indians appear in five of the twelve poems, including the poem that would later be titled "The Sleepers," where Whitman records a haunting dream-memory of a "red squaw" (section 6) who visits his mother for an afternoon and then disappears forever, and the poem later titled "Song of Myself," where he offers an extended tableau of "the marriage of the trapper in the open air in the far west, the bride was a red girl" (section 10)—a scene that has been read as suggestive of the white domination of the Native, but also indicative of the possibility of a joining of the races and all they represented in nineteenth-century America. 

In a notebook he kept in the late 1850s, Whitman sketched out plans for a " poem of the aborigines " that would incorporate "every principal aboriginal trait, and name" (Notebooks 1:275). He never wrote that poem, but Leaves of Grass contains more Native American elements than is generally noted. In "Starting from Paumanok," for example, Whitman pauses to "pronounce what the air holds of the red aborigines," and he goes on to catalogue their names—"Okonee, Koosa, Ottawa, Monongahela, Sauk, Natchez"—and to lament the Natives' disappearance while celebrating the way they have "charg[ed] the water and the land with names" (section 16). Whitman loved Native American words—"All aboriginal names sound good," he announced in his American Primer (18)—and he argued that Native names should replace the various classical and European names that had been imposed on the North American continent. His own efforts at reinstituting Native names included his insistence on calling Long Island "Paumanok" and New York City "Mannahatta." Native words had an authenticity for Whitman: they fit the American landscape, and, absorbed into English, they tinctured the language with native sounds. Whitman was therefore annoyed with the word "Indian" because it was an example of European misnaming, the imposition of a misidentification upon a whole group of cultures, "a great mistake perpetuated in a word . . . calling the American aborigines Indians," he wrote, is a lesson in how "names or terms get helplessly misapplied & wrench'd from their meanings" (Notebooks 5:1664). He preferred the term "aborigine," with its echo of "original," but mostly he loved to list and say the various tribal names—"Wabash, Miami, Saginaw, Chippewa" ("Starting from Paumanok," section 16). 

While Whitman occasionally employed the language and assumptions of savagism—with its attendant belief in the inevitable demise of the Natives in the face of the United States' claim to manifest destiny—he also was capable of questioning and complicating those assumptions, as he did in "Song of Myself," where he calls for a new "friendly and flowing savage" (section 39) whose mysterious appearance would help unsettle the already too repressed American civilization. Whitman's attitudes toward Native Americans remained ambivalent and wavering throughout his life. He could condemn Natives in reductive and stereotypical ways—"The real reds of our northern frontiers, of the present day, have propensities, monstrous and treacherous, that make them unfit to be left in white neighborhoods" (Notebooks 2:565)—but he could also celebrate them as some of the noblest examples of humanity: "There is something about these aboriginal Americans, in their highest characteristic representations, essential traits . . . arousing comparisons with our own civilized ideals" (Prose Works 2:578-579). 

Finally, though, Whitman's evolutionary faith led him to accept the notion that Native Americans were doomed to extinction, the victims of a Darwinian struggle of races and cultures. He usually expressed sadness at this inevitable loss, as he did in his late poems "Red Jacket (from Aloft)," "Yonnondio," and "Osceola." These poems, written in the last decade of his life, were final acknowledgments of the importance he ascribed to the presence of Native Americans in the developing American poem; Whitman wanted to include them, even as they seemed to be disappearing as an active part of American history, and he wanted to afford them a kind of linguistic afterlife by employing their words, so that every time Americans spoke the names of the country's towns and states and rivers, their voices would echo with Native sounds. 

Whitman, then, was ultimately more interested in the representation of Native Americans than in their actual cultures. He knew George Catlin, the artist who portrayed Indian cultures; he kept a print of Catlin's portrait of Osceola on the wall of his Camden home, and he supported the movement to have the United States government purchase Catlin's collection of Indian paintings so that the nation could have a collective visual memory of the tribes. One of Whitman's favorite paintings was John Mulvany's Custer's Last Rally, and he wrote a long meditation about the painting's conflicted portrayal of the Natives, a portrayal that resonated with Whitman's own handling of the Custer battle in his 1876 poem "From Far Dakota's Cañons." 

Contemporary Native American writers have responded to Whitman's poetry in a variety of ways. Some, like Joseph Bruchac, find Whitman's poetry close in spirit and even style to Native American song and thus view him as a kind of spiritual brother. Others, like the Mohawk poet Maurice Kenny, attack Whitman's "indifference" to Natives and his complicit acceptance of manifest destiny. Still others, like the Acoma poet Simon Ortiz, record an ambivalent reaction to Whitman, curious about how the great poet of democracy reacted to the decimation of Native peoples, curious about why he did not say more than he did.

Bibliography

Bruchac, Joseph. "To Love the Earth: Some Thoughts on Walt Whitman." Walt Whitman: The Measure of His Song. Ed. Jim Perlman, Ed Folsom, and Dan Campion. Minneapolis: Holy Cow!, 1981. 274-278. 

Folsom, Ed. Walt Whitman's Native Representations. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994. 

Kenny, Maurice. "Whitman's Indifference to Indians." The Continuing Presence of Walt Whitman. Ed. Robert K. Martin. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 1992. 28-38. 

Ortiz, Simon. From Sand Creek. Oak Park, N.Y.: Thunder's Mouth, 1981. 

Whitman, Walt. An American Primer. 1904. Stevens Point, Wis.: Holy Cow!, 1987. 

____. The Early Poems and the Fiction. Ed. Thomas L. Brasher. New York: New York UP, 1963. 

____. Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts. Ed. Edward F. Grier. 6 vols. New York: New York UP, 1984. 

____. Prose Works 1892. Ed. Floyd Stovall. 2 vols. New York: New York UP, 1963-1964. 

Maverick Marvin Harris

Since its founding in 1718 by Jean Baptiste Lemoine, Sieur de Boinville, New Orleans has been the largest, most important city in Louisiana. Located in the hollow of a three-sided bend of the Mississippi River as it reaches the Gulf of Mexico—hence its name "The Crescent City"—it has from earliest times been a commercial and cultural center. Walt Whitman's three-month stay there from 25 February to 25 May in 1848, while he worked for the newly-founded New Orleans Crescent, significantly impacted his development as a poet and essayist.

The first occupants of this low-lying, swampy, palmetto-covered area were adventurers, gold hunters, thieves, pirates, and the riff-raff of society. As people of means and social standing were later drawn to the new land of opportunity, a Creole society evolved. New Orleans developed under the flags of Spain and France until 1803, at which time it passed to the young United States via the Louisiana Purchase. The Battle of New Orleans in 1815 and the Mexican War (1846–1848) highlighted the significance of the city as a port of entry to the interior regions of the growing nation.

Whitman, with his fourteen-year-old brother Jeff, left New York in February 1848 at the invitation of J.E. McClure to help establish the New Orleans Crescent. Traveling by rail, coach, and boat for the 2,400 mile trip, Whitman experienced the vastness of the American land and fixed in his mind the fullness and diversity of his beloved America.

Arriving on the St. Cloud on 25 February, Whitman and Jeff took temporary quarters but later moved into the Tremont House in the American district across from the St. Charles Hotel and the offices of the Crescent. The city was at the height of the festival season; General Taylor's men, back from the Mexican War, swarmed the streets. Over the next few weeks, as he roamed the streets in early morning, during break times, and late at night, Whitman observed bustling wharves lined with steamboats, active courtrooms, lively theaters, the opulent opera, the candle-lit cathedral, gaming houses, fancy brothels, jaunty parades, and Saturday night balls. He absorbed the exotic French-Spanish flavor of the flowered courtyards. He enjoyed lounging in large barrooms and hotel saloons, drinking the select drinks they afforded. But most of all, he enjoyed strolling along the levees and marketplaces, where he listened to Indian and Negro hucksters proffer their wares and where he bought coffee and a biscuit for breakfast from a large Creole mulatto woman. These experiences and impressions formed the basis of feature articles in the Crescent and, later, "New Orleans in 1848" in November Boughs (1888).

Most scholars now reject the idea that Whitman was involved with a Creole woman of higher social rank than his own and that his sudden exit from New Orleans was due to complications deriving from this relationship. The theory of a New Orleans romance, started by Henry Bryan Binns in his A Life of Walt Whitman (1905), proposes to explain the mystery of Whitman's letter to John Addington Symonds in which he discussed his life down South and mentioned six illegitimate children (for which there is no documented evidence). It is also used to explain the dramatic change in Whitman after the New Orleans trip, his sexual awakening, and the inspiration for the first edition of Leaves of Grass (1855). Some biographers think the lines "O Magnet-South! O glistening, perfumed South! My South! / O quick mettle, rich blood, impulse and love! good and evil! O all dear to me!" in "Longings for Home" (later "O Magnet-South") suggest a New Orleans romance. Some quote the first five lines of "I Saw in Louisiana a Live-Oak Growing" as support for the idea. Basil De Selincourt asserts in his 1914 critical study of Whitman that "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking" bemoans the death of one who was all but wife to him—the genteel New Orleans lady. Still others see further evidence in "Once I Pass'd through a Populous City," in which Whitman penned, "Yet now of all that city I remember only a woman I casually met there who detain'd me for love of me . . . who passionately clung to me." However, Whitman's earlier manuscript, which read "the man" instead of "a woman," is telling. Current scholarship by and large rejects the theory.

Due to a contentious relationship with the owners of the Crescent, Whitman resigned on 25 May and returned to New York.

Bibliography

Allen, Gay Wilson. The New Walt Whitman Handbook. 1975. New York: New York UP, 1986.

Binns, Henry Bryan. A Life of Walt Whitman. London: Methuen, 1905.

Bucke, Richard Maurice, Thomas B. Harned, and Horace L. Traubel. Introduction. The Complete Writings of Walt Whitman. By Whitman. Vol. 1. New York: Putnam's, 1902. xiii–xcvi.

De Selincourt, Basil. Walt Whitman: A Critical Study. London: Martin Secker, 1914.

Holloway, Emory. Whitman: An Interpretation in Narrative. New York: Knopf, 1926.

Kaplan, Justin. Walt Whitman: A Life. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1980.

Miller, James E., Jr. Walt Whitman. 1962. Updated ed. Boston: Twayne, 1990.

Whitman, Walt. Prose Works 1892. Ed. Floyd Stovall. 2 vols. New York: New York UP, 1963–1964.

Zweig, Paul. Walt Whitman: The Making of the Poet. New York: Basic Books, 1984.

Maverick Marvin Harris

Established in 1848 by J.E. McClure and A.H. Hayes, the New Orleans Crescent joined the Picayune and the Delta as the third major newspaper in the Crescent City. It became an immediate success, gaining 2,000 subscribers within a few weeks. The first issue was Sunday, 5 March 1848, but thereafter it appeared on weekdays only. Walt Whitman was associated with the fledgling newspaper from late February 1848 to late May 1848. 

The exact nature of Whitman's position with the Crescent is uncertain. Though he may have been an editor, likely he was not the sole editor. The staff consisted of Whitman as "exchange editor," a full-time editorial writer named Larue, a city news reporter named Reeder, a translator of Mexican and foreign news items known as DaPonte, and Jeff Whitman, the office boy. Whitman's job was essentially twofold: to clip general news items in other newspapers received in the mail and thus make up the day's edition, and occasionally to contribute feature articles. 

The first issue of the Crescent contained Whitman's feature story entitled "Crossing the Alleghenies." The next day, 6 March 1848, his poem "The Mississippi at Midnight" appeared, as well as two prose pieces—his impressions of Cincinnati and Louisville, and a controversial editorial defending Dr. Collyer's "Model Artists," a show with scantily clad models. Four days later he published "The Habitants of Hotels" and other sketches of people types, such as Daggerdraw Bowie-Knife, Esq., a murderous scoundrel; John J. Jinglebrain, a New Orleans dandy; and a sentimental lover named Samuel Sensitive. His popular "Sketches of the Sidewalks and Levees," though inferior to his prior work on the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, reveal his fascination with New Orleans life and also his ability to mix pleasure with business. Some have judged these pieces to be flippant and sentimental, perhaps because Whitman was attempting humor, for which he was not well equipped. Better were the descriptive pieces about America's new frontier based on the notes he took on his 2,400 mile trip from Brooklyn to New Orleans. Though not as impressive as later prose works, these articles were notably visual and show his developing ability to see as a painter. 

On 25 May 1848, a mere three months after arriving in New Orleans, Whitman resigned his position at the Crescent, returned to New York, and started a weekly newspaper, the Brooklyn Freeman. The reason for his sudden departure after such a short tenure is a matter of conjecture. Whitman has written that for some reason unknown to him, the owners grew cold toward him and irritable toward Jeff, who had been ill most of the time while in the city. A squabble over a cash advance precipitated the final break that ended Whitman's association with the newspaper and sent the two brothers home. Even so, Whitman later characterized his situation with the Crescent as "a rather pleasant one" (Prose Works 2:607).

Bibliography

Allen, Gay Wilson. The New Walt Whitman Handbook. 1975. New York: New York UP, 1986. 

____. The Solitary Singer: A Critical Biography of Walt Whitman. 1955. Rev. ed. 1967. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985. 

Canby, Henry Seidel. Walt Whitman: An American. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1943. 

Kaplan, Justin. Walt Whitman: A Life. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1980. 

Whitman, Walt. Prose Works 1892. Ed. Floyd Stovall. 2 vols. New York: New York UP, 1963-1964. 

____. The Uncollected Poetry and Prose of Walt Whitman. Ed. Emory Holloway. 2 vols. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page, 1921. 

Zweig, Paul. Walt Whitman: The Making of the Poet. New York: Basic Books, 1984. 

M. Wynn Thomas

"This is the city," wrote Whitman, "and I am one of the citizens" ("Song of Myself," section 42). For most of the first forty years of his life, New York was the great milieu that crucially affected every aspect of his existence. Yet he had not been born there, never really lived there, worked there only intermittently, and was devoted to the rival, "parasitical" town of Brooklyn. This may help explain his complex relationship to New York proper—his ability to relate to it simultaneously as spectator and participant, as knowing insider and dazed or chronically awed outsider; his easy accommodation of the contrasting claims of city and country (see "Give Me the Splendid Silent Sun"); his nonpossessive sense of the fluidity of New York's identity; and his anti-nativist appreciation of the hospitable openness of its "proud, friendly, turbulent" character ("First O Songs")—so different from that of its prim Yankee rival, Boston. 

Moving from roominghouse to dingy roominghouse throughout 1835-1836 while working as a rookie printer, he grew into manhood amidst the feverish whirl of the city streets. Returning there in 1842 as rookie editor of the Aurora, he quickly joined in its ferocious political squabbles, and discovered the underlying violence, squalor, and degradation that served to heighten its social glitter. Even as the young autodidact set about acquiring his intellectual education from museums, sermons, speeches, and public lectures, he received an equally valuable streetwise education in the galvanic ways of a city caught in the throes of a socioeconomic revolution that turned it into the very image of the throbbingly modern. 

As it exploded from 123,706 in 1820 into a metropolis of 813,669 (almost half of them immigrants) in 1860, New York disintegrated socially. Ethnic ghettos like Kleindeutschland appeared alongside such exclusive refuges of the rich as Astor Place. Plate-glass windows in that new wonder, the department store, displayed the goods and mirrored the fashion show on Broadway, while the immigrant poor were penned into the infamous Five Points District, where conditions, stinking of vice and crime, were appreciably worse than in the notorious East End of Dickens's London. No wonder that in his early poetry (1855-1860) Whitman worked to reintegrate society by means of such linking, collectivizing, or aggregating structures as choric rhythm, syntactical parallelism, and promiscuously inclusive cataloguing of activities and occupations. 

He also produced a deliberately hybridized art, innovatively mixing high and low to create the verbal equivalent of that novel New York concoction, the cocktail. That ruffianly lower-class swell, the Bowery B'hoy—already a hero of the raucous popular theater frequented by Whitman—lent his outrageous swagger to "Song of Myself" (1855). Gaudy, vibrant New York glutted Whitman's passion for all the mixed entertainments of "art and heart"—from Italian Opera to folksy harmonizing, from stylishly histrionic Shakespeare to the street theater of carnivalesque popular festivals and the cutthroat rivalry of the fire-companies' chariot races. All these first became part of the young journalist who went forth every day during the 1840s, licensed to loafe at his ease around the streets, collecting "copy" that later, from Leaves of Grass (1855) onwards, turned him into a Barnumesque self-promoter and a nineteenth-century Cecil B. De Mille who produced spectacular urban epics with casts of thousands, sometimes using the visual techniques he'd learned from the photographic studios he'd visited, or the grand dioramas and panoramas he'd seen. 

Although beginning as a city dandy, and always a natural flaneur, he quickly became a hardened political infighter, social commentator and committed liberal reformer. As newspaper editor (on and off from 1842 through 1859), Whitman campaigned on issues ranging from ferry charges to clean water, raged against the appalling slum housing conditions, and argued for hygienic control of prostitution. Very much the product of the "new journalism" that had resulted from New York's invention, in the thirties, of that quintessentially urban phenomenon the mass newspaper, Whitman was alive to both the responsibilities and the opportunities of his trade. He saw himself as an educator, helping to turn raw New Yorkers (many of them immigrants) into full democratic citizens. He was aware of the newspaper's capacity to act both as urban mirror and urban map—enabling readers to find their bearings in a chaotically changeful world and thereby helping them to create a new civic space. 

But he was also mindful of the urban population's appetite for thrills and scandals. Although he came to despise the unprincipled opportunism of the sensationalizing penny press, he skillfully exploited the market for urban shockers in early fiction such as Franklin Evans (1842), a crude example of his fascination with the unbridled violence of New York's energies. And as Graham Clarke has shown, Whitman exhibits in a Poe-esque poem like "The Sleepers" (1855) a troubled psychic affinity with the twisted souls and poor misshapen bodies of New York's multitudinous social rejects, living in their own twin city of dreadful night. How far such an affinity implies a kind of covert identification remains an open question. There seems to be evidence aplenty in the poetry that a Whitman uneasy with fixed gender and social identity valued New York as an unprecedented solvent of traditional social ties and promoter of new (sometimes secret and proscribed) modes of relationship. Likewise, as one perhaps permanently in psychic transit, Whitman was fascinated with the stage drivers, horsecar conductors, and ferry pilots who participated in what a contemporary saw as an orgasm of locomotion. For this, as for many other reasons, it is appropriate that probably his single greatest urban poem is "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" (1856). 

However, the highly mediated manner in which the city is represented in that poem is typical of the difficulties the poetry puts in the way of critics who seek to assign it firmly to the actual, historical New York. Whitman himself signaled the separate, textual, and perhaps visionary, character of his poetry's city when, objecting to the hateful colonial provenance of the name "New York," he replaced it with the aboriginal "Mannahatta," supposedly the Indian word for " A rocky founded island—shores where ever gayly dash the coming, going, hurrying sea waves " ("Mannahatta [My city's fit . . . ]" [1888]). As the invocatory poem "Mannahatta [I was asking . . . ]" (1860) shows, such redemptive renaming allowed Whitman to refashion a city that had been rigidly grid-blocked for the convenience of commerce, transfiguring it into a landscape as fluid with possibility as the surrounding waters that magically transformed New York for him into a city of ships. Such "metropolitan pantheism" (Conrad 12) allowed Whitman to assimilate New York to his evolutionary "cosmos," a strategy seen by some critics as a (suspect?) way of turning a real recalcitrant cityscape into a malleable personal mindscape. But others view it as Whitman's remarkable means of rendering the novel psychology of modern urban experience. Along with Baudelaire, he has therefore been credited with pioneering discourses for exploring anomie, estrangement, isolation, euphoric togetherness, and many of the other symptoms of urban consciousness that sociologists were later to identify and analyze. 

Whitman's feelings about a New York he significantly preferred to apostrophize in maternal terms were deeply and fruitfully ambivalent, veering between ecstatic faith and deep misgivings. His doubts centered on the city's callous (and in his view anti-republican) "i-doller-try," its increasingly selfish and cynical politics (the fifties saw Fernando Wood pave the way for Boss Tweed's Tammany machine), and its disregard for the egalitarianism that was for Whitman the very bedrock of democracy. His faith was placed in the indomitably radical spirit of New York's working class, in the irresistible energy for social progress he sensed in the dynamism of the streets, and in the newness that was inscribed in New York's very name and guaranteed by the regular influx of an immigrant population in flight from the old. But could such faith withstand the shock of discovering during the Civil War exactly how reactionary New York's politics could be, and the bewilderment of viewing, from a distance (for Whitman left Brooklyn in 1862 never really to return), the emergence of a booming postwar city more socially ravaged and riven than ever before? While most critics argue that these circumstances only intensified Whitman's longstanding arguments with himself, M. Wynn Thomas has suggested that from the early sixties there was a qualitative change in Whitman's relationship to the city, reflected in a decline in his poetry. His deepening bafflement made his affirmations increasingly hollow and his poetry correspondingly vapid, as he could no longer hold vision and contemporary urban reality in a single rapt focus. Thomas claims to find evidence for this in the way Whitman strains to address New York in Democratic Vistas (1871), and in those sections of Specimen Days (1882) where he records his nostalgia for the prewar years, exhaustively details what seems to be a compensatory postwar love of nature, and includes an unconvincingly portentous description of his recovered faith in a New York he briefly revisited in 1878. All this is seen by Thomas as touching evidence of the breakdown of the old authentic relationship that had been so memorably underwritten by creative engagement. 

What is, however, certain beyond all such argument is that in his prime as a poet (about 1855-1865) Whitman was indeed "of Manhattan the son" ("Song of Myself," section 24) and that his yearningly boastful prediction about New York has proved true: "City whom that I have lived and sung in your midst will one day make you illustrious" ("City of Orgies"). 

Bibliography

Brand, Dana. The Spectator and the City in Nineteenth-Century American Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991. 

Clarke, Graham. Walt Whitman: The Poem as Private History. London: Vision, 1991. 

Conrad, Peter. The Art of the City. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1984. 

Jackson, Kenneth T., ed. The Encyclopedia of New York City. New Haven: Yale UP, 1995. 

Johnson, John H. The Poet and the City. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1984. 

Kaplan, Justin. Walt Whitman: A Life. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1980. 

O'Connell, Shaun. Remarkable, Unspeakable New York: A Literary History. Boston: Beacon, 1995. 

Reynolds, David S. Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography. New York: Knopf, 1995. 

Seaport: New York's History Magazine 26 (1992). Special Whitman number. 

Sharpe, William Chapman. Unreal Cities. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1990. 

Spann, E.K. The New Metropolis: New York City, 1840-1857. New York: Columbia UP, 1981. 

Thomas, M. Wynn. The Lunar Light of Whitman's Poetry. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1987. 

____. "Whitman's Tale of Two Cities." American Literary History 6 (1994): 633-657. 

Versluys, Kristiaan. The Poet in the City. Tubingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 1987. 

Joseph Andriano

Part of New York University Press's The Collected Writings of Walt Whitman (Gay Wilson Allen and Sculley Bradley, general editors), this six-volume set edited by Edward F. Grier comprises all of Whitman's notebooks and unpublished prose manuscripts except those published in William White's Daybooks and Notebooks (1978). The material ranges from random aphoristic jottings to long trial runs for major works. Some of it is of limited interest and value (e.g., Whitman's factual notes on geography in volume 5); even William White questioned whether lists of melons and other meaningless or only partially legible fragments should be included in The Collected Writings, but as Betsy Erkkila points out, what appears useless now might some day turn out to be significant. In any case, the 2,000 pages contain many treasures; indeed most of the material is indispensable to serious Whitman scholars and critics interested in the genesis of the poet's major works. And much of it is fascinating for readers who like to see a record of a genius exercising his mind. For these reasons—and the pervasive editorial excellence—this set is "an approved edition" of the MLA's Center for Scholarly Editions. 

Of the 1,300 items included, about half were not previously published, but even the ones that can be found elsewhere (e.g., Emory Holloway, ed., The Uncollected Poetry and Prose of Walt Whitman [1921], or Clifton J. Furness, ed., Walt Whitman's Workshop [1928]) were never before edited so meticulously or presented so readably. Each manuscript is introduced with a lucid and concise headnote that lets the reader know where the manuscript is located (if extant), what it looks like, when it was probably written (dating the manuscripts was a daunting task for many reasons, including Whitman's occasional practice of going back to early jottings and reworking them), where it was first published, and how it relates to Whitman's published works. Each manuscript itself is printed plainly, with no attempt—save for a few choice illustrations—to typographically reproduce Whitman's random placement of passages (photocopies of many of the actual manuscripts are available elsewhere for scholars interested in the actual appearance of the page, and some of the notebooks have even been reproduced on the Internet). Copious footnotes for each manuscript give Whitman's deletions and insertions, and often include valuable information linking the manuscript to Whitman's published works. 

The set is organized in the most useful manner for scholars. The front matter of volume 1 contains a concise introduction, lists of abbreviations, illustrations, and titles (which comprise the first word or phrase of each ms., and which are listed in the order in which they appear), and a chronology of Whitman's life and work. The first three volumes contain the manuscripts in roughly chronological order: Family Notes and Autobiography, Brooklyn and New York (volume 1); Washington (volume 2); Camden (volume 3). The last three volumes contain the notes, organized topically: Proposed Poems, Explanations/Introduction to Leaves of Grass, Attempts to Define the Poet's Role and Tradition, Needs of American Literature (volume 4); Study Projects, Words, notes on various writers, on history, on geography, on natural history (volume 5); and notes on philosophy, religion, politics, slavery, education, oratory, and health (volume 6). The comprehensive index of titles and names is in volume 6 (in spite of the parenthetical note to the "List of Titles" on page xxix of volume 1 misinforming the reader that the index is at the end of volume 4—an erratum resulting from the last-minute expansion of the set to six volumes). The index is especially useful for scholars working on specific texts to discover quickly whether any mention of the texts is in the manuscripts and notebooks. 

Ten of the notebooks Thomas B. Harned (one of Whitman's three literary executors) donated to the Library of Congress mysteriously disappeared in 1942, when they were being moved because of fear of aerial bombardment from Japan (it was not until the crates were opened in 1944 that the Library of Congress discovered they were missing). Since four of the missing notebooks (and the famous cardboard butterfly) turned up in early 1995, Grier's headnotes will have to be revised for them in the next printing. One of them is the earliest known notebook, and one of the most fascinating: "albot Wilson" (Notebooks 1:53-82). It contains prose (punctuated mainly with dashes) that eventually breaks into free verse, most of it obvious trial flights for the 1855 Leaves. Reading this and other notebooks will dispel any notion that Whitman's greatest lines—like "I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars" ("Song of Myself," section 31)—were born perfectly formed Athena-like from his head. Whitman wrote in his notebook: "And saw the journeywork of suns and systems of suns, / And that a leaf of grass is not less than they" (Notebooks 1:70-71). In imagining his soul enfolding "the countless stars" and asking whether it would then be satisfied, Whitman originally wrote: "No, when we fetch that height, we shall not be filled and satisfied but shall look as high beyond" (Notebooks 1:61). The line eventually became "No, we but level that lift to pass and continue beyond" ("Song of Myself," section 46). In another of the stolen manuscripts recently recovered, "You know how the One" (Notebooks 1:124-127), a striking prose passage about the power of operatic music is the embryonic form of section 26 of "Song of Myself." 

While these notebooks and manuscripts give the reader a vivid picture of Whitman's creative processes, they do not give much insight into his personality. Indeed, some of the most personal passages were worked over, as he knew they would be read at least by Bucke, Harned, and Traubel, if not by posterity: for example, in "Epictetus," exhorting himself to "avoid seeing her, or meeting her" (Notebooks 2:889), he had originally written "him," referring to Peter Doyle, whom he felt he loved too much—to the point of "feverish disproportionate adhesiveness" (Notebooks 2:890). Here and in a few other notebooks, the reader gets a rare glimpse of the private, tormented soul of the man. But on the whole, these pieces are not for the literary voyeur; they are for the serious scholar and critic interested in the genesis and development of Whitman's great ideas, images, symbols, and themes. 

Bibliography

Birney, Alice L., ed. "The Thomas B. Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman." Walt Whitman Home Page: http://lcweb2.loc.gov/wwhome.html/ 

Erkkila, Betsy. Rev. of Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts, ed. Edward F. Grier. The Mickle Street Review 10 (1988): 102-115. 

Fineberg, Gail. "LC's Missing Whitman Notes Found in N.Y." Library of Congress Gazette 24 Feb. 1995. Rpt. http://lcweb2.loc.gov/wwhome.html/gazette1.html/ 

____. Rev. of Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts, ed. Edward F. Grier. Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 3 (1985): 25-27. 

Folsom, Ed. Rev. of Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts, ed. Edward F. Grier. Philological Quarterly 65 (1986): 287-291. 

Price, Kenneth M. Rev. of Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts, ed. Edward F. Grier. American Literary Realism, 1870-1910 18 (1985): 271-277. 

Whitman, Walt. Daybooks and Notebooks. Ed. William White. 3 vols. New York: New York UP, 1978. 

____. Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts. Ed. Edward F. Grier. 6 vols. New York: New York UP, 1984. 

James E., Jr. Barcus

When Whitman suffered his physical collapse in 1888, from which he never fully recovered, he was working on a new collection of prose and poetry, intending to break a seven-year silence. With the help of Horace Traubel, who handled the details of publication, carrying copy to the printer, bringing proofs to Whitman, and acting as business manager, Whitman resumed work on the volume. David McKay published the volume, named November Boughs, later in 1888, purchasing from Whitman the rights to print further copies of the volume in 1888, 1889, and 1890 for a royalty fee of twelve cents per copy sold. 

Like Two Rivulets (1876), the book is a mixture of prose and poetry. In the 140 pages are a long preface called "A Backward Glance O'er Travel'd Roads," approximately sixty very short poems which are collected under the title of "Sands at Seventy," and reprints of articles already published elsewhere. The preface, a combination of two articles that Whitman had published in 1884 and 1887, contains a retrospective on his literary theories and practices. He admits that he has not been accepted in his own time, but that he hopes for future recognition. He also recognizes that although Leaves of Grass was a financial failure, it was always intended as an experiment. He explains his primary purpose in his poems: "to exploit that Personality [his own], identified with place and date, in a far more candid and comprehensive sense than any hitherto poem or book" (658). He also expresses reservations about his poetic form, no longer certain that his poems stand firmly on their unique employment of music and rhythm. 

Whitman grouped the poems under the title "Sands at Seventy," perhaps reflecting not only his distress at aging and physical frailty, but also a recognition of his failing poetic powers. These poems he later annexed to Leaves of Grass. Clearly they lack the fire and lyricism of his early work, but they also contain a to-be-envied self-knowledge. And he is thankful that he was able to write them "in joy and hope" ("A Carol Closing Sixty-Nine"). Nevertheless he fears that his long poetic career may be drawing to a close, but he refuses to go gently, underscoring his unwillingness to depart and his expectation to be "[g]arrulous to the very last" ("After the Supper and Talk"). 

The collected prose pieces have received little critical attention, but read as a group they summarize many of Whitman's themes and concerns. They too serve as a kind of retrospective on the issues which both made Whitman the man and poet and which Whitman made the focus of his life and poetry. Central, of course, is Whitman's enthusiasm for democracy and the common man at the core of the American experiment. He urges eminent visitors to the United States not to be deluded by the effete Americans who entertain them in elevated segments of society: the real American genius is in the common people. Elias Hicks, the leader of the divisive movement which split the Quakers, Whitman praises for being the "most democratic of the religionists" (1221). And George Fox, the nearly illiterate founder of the Quaker movement and near contemporary of Shakespeare, inspired Hicks, his open-air pulpit still remembered on Long Island. 

In his comments on Shakespeare and his works, Whitman finds the democratic spirit the distinguishing essence. In the historical plays, Shakespeare undermines, perhaps unconsciously, the feudal system. He suggests that someday critics, "diving deeper . . . may discover . . . the inauguration of modern Democracy" (1150). In contrast, Shakespeare's sonnets are too medieval and feudal. Robert Burns, however, speaks to the American spirit, for he loved the plough and knew the working man. Tennyson, although nondemocratic, is admired for his personal character and the moral dimensions of his work. Whitman points specifically to Tennyson's facility to charm with the English language and recommends the Idylls of the Kings by title. 

Entranced by language, Whitman analyzes the place of slang in English, which he correctly sees as being an accretive language. English, he says, is a "universal absorber" (1165). In English, slang functions like the clowns in Shakespeare's plays. Slang is an attempt of common humanity to escape from bald literalism. Common people understand how slang operates, for they innately use circumlocution to enrich language which arises out of the work, needs, and joys of humanity. 

In "The Bible as Poetry," Whitman finds the roots of American democracy in the Old and New Testament. Rejecting aestheticism as one of the evils of his age, Whitman praises the scriptures for their depth. True, compared to Grecian epics, the scriptures may be "simple and meagre" (1140), but the daring metaphors, extravagant loves and friendships, accounts of religious ecstasy, and suggestions of mortality are unsurpassed. Thus, it is no surprise that Whitman finds the oratory of a preacher like Father Taylor extraordinary and similar to that of the Quaker Elias Hicks. In Taylor as in Hicks, one finds passion, tenderness, and firmness expressed in majestic, picturesque, and colloquial language borrowed from Oriental and biblical forms. 

Whitman also praises the multicultural sources of American society, noting the nobility of the Native American and the importance of the overlooked Spanish influence. The Indians stirred his artistic enthusiasm. Whitman quotes with approbation a correspondent who says, "They [the Indians] certainly have more of beauty, dignity and nobility mingled with their own wild individuality, than any of the other indigenous types of man" (1173). He doubts that any artistic representation, either visual or verbal, does the Native American justice. In a reprinted letter, he suggests that the Spanish influence has been marginalized in American culture, but he predicts it will see a resurgence. 

Not to be omitted are Whitman's accounts of his days spent nursing the wounded and dying Civil War soldiers. In the midst of suffering, agony, death, and occasional survival, Whitman captures the nobility of the human spirit, of husbands and fathers yearning for word from home and desperate to send letters, but hampered by disease and poverty. In declining health and faced with incapacity, Whitman remembers what he had discovered years before: that sudden death, even death in battle, may not be the worst ending.  

Bibliography

Allen, Gay Wilson. The Solitary Singer: A Critical Biography of Walt Whitman. 1955. Rev. ed. 1967. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985. 

____. Walt Whitman Handbook. Chicago: Packard, 1946. 

Asselineau, Roger. The Evolution of Walt Whitman: The Creation of a Book. Trans. Roger Asselineau and Burton L. Cooper. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard UP, 1962. 

____. The Evolution of Walt Whitman: The Creation of a Personality. Trans. Richard P. Adams and Roger Asselineau. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard UP, 1960. 

Reynolds, David S. Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography. New York: Knopf, 1995. 

Whitman, Walt. Complete Poetry and Collected Prose. Ed. Justin Kaplan. New York: Library of America, 1982. 

Gregory Eiselein

Though stylistically atypical of his verse, "O Captain! My Captain!" is one of Walt Whitman's most popular poems. It first appeared in the Saturday Press (4 November 1865) and subsequently in Sequel to Drum-Taps (1865-1866). After modestly revising it, Whitman placed it in "President Lincoln's Burial Hymn" in Passage to India (1871) and finally in the "Memories of President Lincoln" cluster in Leaves of Grass (1881). 

The rhyme, meter, stanza, and refrain in "O Captain" are conventional. The poem makes deliberate use of traditional metaphors, picturing the Union as a ship and the president as its captain. Although the ship has weathered the storm and re-entered the harbor safe and victorious, the captain (like the recently assassinated Lincoln) is dead. Capturing the triumph and grief of the war's end, "O Captain" is a public poem for a mass audience, an elegy remembering a beloved president. 

Intended for a large, inclusive readership, "O Captain" became the most recited and popular of Whitman's works. It was usually a requisite selection at Whitman's readings and until recently his most widely anthologized poem. Because of its acclaim at the expense of his other poems, Whitman expressed some small regret about writing "O Captain," but insisted that it had an emotional, historically necessary purpose. No longer so celebrated, "O Captain" continues to be a revealing representation of the rhetorics of despair and celebration that followed the war, and it remains Whitman's most successful attempt to reach a national audience. 

Bibliography

Erkkila, Betsy. Whitman the Political Poet. New York: Oxford UP, 1989. 

Kaplan, Justin. Walt Whitman: A Life. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1980. 

Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass: Comprehensive Reader's Edition. Ed. Harold W. Blodgett and Sculley Bradley. New York: New York UP, 1965. 

Deshae E. Lott

Walt Whitman met William Douglas O'Connor in 1860 at the short-lived firm of Thayer and Eldridge, which that year published Whitman's third edition of Leaves of Grass and O'Connor's only novel, Harrington: A Story of True Love. Two years later their paths crossed again when Whitman traveled to Washington, D.C., to search its military hospitals for his brother George, who had been wounded in the Battle of Fredericksburg. O'Connor welcomed Whitman into his home and quickly became Whitman's friend and an ardent defender of Whitman's poetry. Since their first meeting, O'Connor had turned from his artistic pursuits as a daguerreotypist, poet, short-story writer, novelist, essayist, journalist, and editor (at the Saturday Evening Post in Philadelphia) to the more steady position of a clerk in the Treasury Department.

For five months Whitman lived with O'Connor and his family, sharing meals at their table. And for nearly another ten years he was a regular guest in the O'Connor home for nightly discussions on literature, politics, and social issues. During this time O'Connor helped procure Whitman a position as a clerk in the Indian Affairs Bureau of the Department of Interior (1865). A few months later, when Secretary of the Interior James Harlan fired Whitman due to the moral character of Leaves of Grass, O'Connor found his first significant opportunity to defend Whitman.

Risking his own career, O'Connor did two things: regain Whitman a governmental position and assail the forces of censorship in defense of Leaves of Grass. First, he went to his friend Assistant Attorney General J. Hubley Ashton, who spoke with both Harlan and Attorney General James Speed; the former agreed not to interfere, and the latter agreed to hire Whitman, who maintained that job until 1874, when the appointment was vacated because of Whitman's poor health. Second, O'Connor published The Good Gray Poet: A Vindication (1866), a 46-page pamphlet that criticized Harlan and other Whitman critics while lauding and joining those who admitted the merits of Whitman's poetry. The label "Good Gray Poet" was to stick, gaining Whitman many readers.

Further defenses of Whitman appeared as letters to the editor and fiction. For instance, letters by O'Connor defending Whitman appeared in The Round Table in 1866 and 1867 (for example, "Letter to the Editor," 3 February 1866, and "'C' on Walt Whitman," 16 February 1867); in the New York Times in 1866 and 1867 (for example, "Walt Whitman," 2 December 1866); and in the New York Tribune in 1876 and 1882 (for example, "Walt Whitman: Is He Persecuted?" 22 April 1876; "Suppressing Walt Whitman," 27 May 1882; and "Emerson and Whitman," 18 June 1882). In 1868 O'Connor published "The Carpenter," a short story with a Christlike portrayal of Whitman. O'Connor argued that he did not intend to depict Whitman as the reincarnated Christ; the character merely represented the spirit of Christ that he thought was present in any good man. Either way, O'Connor's edification of Whitman continued. He also helped to place in The Radical "A Woman's Estimate of Walt Whitman" (1870), a favorable piece by the Briton Anne Gilchrist.

O'Connor had always favored liberal and noble causes. In the 1850s he worked for antislavery papers and wrote short stories dealing with the contemporary reform themes of prohibition, abolition, welfare, women's rights, divorce laws, and even spiritualism. His support of Whitman emanated from a similar spirit. However, he and Whitman often debated the efficacy of external, socially-imposed reform as opposed to internal, personally-motivated reform. One night near the close of 1872, Whitman walked out during their debate on Charles Sumner's war policies and Reconstruction legislation (the Fifteenth Amendment, giving black adult males the right to vote), which O'Connor supported and Whitman opposed.

After Whitman's departure, O'Connor's wife (Ellen M. Tarr O'Connor) defended Whitman's stance. O'Connor held a grudge against them both and promptly established a separate residence. Although he visited his daughter Jean and his wife and sent them each of his governmental paychecks, O'Connor would not again live with his wife until just before his death, when he needed her care.

The legend in family correspondence suggests that O'Connor saw Whitman in the street the day after their heated debate, that Whitman extended his hand, and that O'Connor bowed low but continued on his way. Although the two men would not directly converse for ten years, O'Connor faithfully supported Whitman's literary works. Following the reunion of their friendship in 1882, O'Connor allowed Whitman's friend, Dr. Richard Maurice Bucke, to reprint The Good Gray Poet in his biography of Whitman (1883). O'Connor also provided an introductory letter for the reprinted piece that carried an additional 25 pages in praise of Whitman and his poetry. In 1882 O'Connor created a fervor for the newspapers when he responded to Osgood and Company's withdrawal of its contract to publish Leaves of Grass. The Massachusetts State District Attorney Oliver Stevens, prompted by State Attorney General George Marston, had threatened prosecution unless extensive emendations were made. In fact, largely due to the publicity O'Connor created in the 1880s, for the first time Whitman received fairly steady royalties when his book subsequently was published in Philadelphia.

Bibliography

Freedman, Florence Bernstein. William Douglas O'Connor: Walt Whitman's Chosen Knight. Athens: Ohio UP, 1985.

Loving, Jerome. Walt Whitman's Champion: William Douglas O'Connor. College Station: Texas A&M UP, 1978.

O'Connor, William Douglas. "The Carpenter: A Christmas Story." Putnam's Monthly Magazine ns 1 (1868): 55–90. 

____. The Good Gray Poet: A Vindication. New York: Bunce and Huntington, 1866.

Donald Barlow Stauffer

Italian opera and opera singers were an important influence on Whitman's creative development during those crucial years in the early 1850s when Leaves of Grass was germinating. Probably no other single influence is more important than this one. When we consider how many poems Whitman calls songs or chants, and how many references he makes to the voice and to singing, we come to realize that music and singing were central to the creation of his poetry. "But for the opera," he declared, "I could never have written Leaves of Grass " (qtd. in Trowbridge 166). 

Even a quick glance at Whitman's poems will show the extent to which he thought of them in musical terms: from "Song of Myself" and the numerous other songs, to "Chants Democratic" and hundreds of references to the voice, singing, carols, hymns, choruses, musical instruments and the like. Operatic singing in particular, with its emotions, its atmosphere of close rapport between singer and audience, and its varied styles—particularly recitative and aria—is the ground upon which Whitman built many of his poems. It is possible to conceive of many of the long passages in "Song of Myself" and other poems as recitative in the Italian opera style: not only the catalogs, which rhythmically enumerate his experiences and perceptions, but the narrative or dramatic passages as well. Interspersed throughout these recitative passages are lyrical sections, such as the apostrophe to "voluptuous cool-breath'd earth" in section 21, that approximate operatic arias. Such analogies with recitative and aria are made explicit in"Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking," where the mockingbird sings its aria of loss, and in "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd," in which the hermit thrush sings its carol of death. 

Whitman was particularly responsive to musical influences during the late 1840s and early 1850s, when Leaves of Grass was in its gestation stage and he was regularly attending the performances of Italian opera singers and companies in New York. The moods awakened in him by music played and sung in the streets, in the theater and in private shaped many of the poems he wrote. His own voice, "orotund sweeping and final," was a response to the almost mystical ecstasy he experienced when listening to grand opera and the singing of his favorite tenors and sopranos. In his manuscript notebooks he wrote of "the chanted Hymn whose tremendous sentiment shall uncage in my breast a thousand wide-winged strengths and unknown ardors and terrible ecstasies" (Uncollected 2:85)—a passage he reworked and included at the end of section 26 of "Song of Myself," beginning, "I hear the chorus, it is a grand opera, / Ah this indeed is music—this suits me." 

Whitman was first exposed to opera in the 1840s, when the operas of Gaetano Donizetti and Giuseppe Verdi were performed in the Park Theater by companies featuring some of the great Italian singers of the day: Cesare Badiali, Marietta Alboni, Allesandro Bettini and others. Although he had earlier denounced the opera in 1845 as foreign and decadent, he quickly became a passionate convert, around the time when Don Francisco Marti's Italian opera company arrived from Havana in 1847 for a month-long season at the Castle Garden. 

He began hearing opera regularly at the Astor Place Opera House from the time it opened in 1847; he also attended productions at the Park and Broadway theaters and others, and after 1854 at the beautiful new Academy of Music. It was during these years that he came to love the lyrical belcanto style of the operas of Giacchino Rossini, Vincenzo Bellini, Donizetti and the early Verdi and became a devoted opera lover. The belcanto style has its origins in the operas of Rossini, but was used by other Italian opera composers, including Donizetti, the early Verdi, and most notably Bellini, whose operas present a challenge to the singer's vocal technique. Bel canto consists of long passages of simple melody alternating with outbursts of elaborate vocal scrollwork, which turns the voice into a complex wind instrument. The desired effect was to heighten the dramatic meaning and significance of the words through attention to pitch, dynamics, melody, and timing. This highly emotional and intense use of the human voice was in Whitman's view the highest form of art. 

In a piece in Specimen Days Whitman recalls his opera-going experiences in the early 1850s: "I heard, these years, well render'd, all the Italian and other operas in vogue, 'Somnambula,' 'The Puritans' [both by Bellini], 'Der Freischutz' [Carl Maria von Weber], 'Huguenots' [Giacomo Meyerbeer], 'Fille d'Regiment' [Donizetti], 'Faust' [Charles Gounod], 'Etoile du Nord' [Meyerbeer], 'Poliuto' [Donizetti], and others. Verdi's 'Ernani,' 'Rigoletto,' and 'Trovatore,' with Donizetti's 'Lucia' or 'Favorita' or 'Lucrezia,' and Auber's 'Massaniello,' or Rossini's 'William Tell' and 'Gazza Ladra,' were among my special enjoyments" (Prose Works 1:20). 

Whitman was an enthusiastic fan of the great Italian singers who came to New York. His favorite tenor was Allesandro Bettini, who had a deep and lasting effect on him. The voice of Bettini, who performed the title role of Ernani and sang in Donizetti's La Favorita in August 1851, moved Whitman to tears; "the singing of this man," he wrote, "has breathing blood within it; the living soul, of which the lower stage they call art, is but the shell and sham" (Uncollected 1:257). Bettini is almost certainly the tenor whom Whitman describes in section 26 of "Song of Myself." Another of his favorites was the great Cesare Badiali, in Whitman's opinion the "superbest of all superb baritones" in the world: "a big, coarse, broad-chested, feller, invested, however, with absolute ease of demeanor—a master of his art—confident, powerful, self-sufficient" (Traubel 173). Others include the soprano Angiolina Bosio, who later became the toast of Europe; Giulia Grisi and her husband Giuseppe Mario, who Whitman said was "inimitable" in Lucrezia Borgia. A poem written in Whitman's later years commemorates the death and funeral of another tenor, Pasquale Brignoli, whom he had heard years earlier in many roles in the 1840s and 1850s. The poem, "The Dead Tenor" (1884), acknowledges the strong influence of the singing voice on his own "chants." 

But his favorite singer by far was the contralto Madame Marietta Alboni, one of the greatest singers of the nineteenth century, who created a sensation in her only New York season in 1852-1853. In the fall she appeared at Niblo's Garden in twelve operas, and gave eleven more performances at other houses in the winter and spring. In addition she gave twelve operatic recitals and was a soloist in Rossini's Stabat Mater. One music critic wrote, "Alboni's performances are as purely and absolutely beautiful as it is possible for anything earthly to be" (qtd. in Faner 29). Whitman was obviously in agreement, since he recalled in Specimen Days that he "heard Alboni every time she sang in New York and vicinity" (Prose Works 1:20). His poem "To a Certain Cantatrice" (1860) is addressed to Madame Alboni, who he says is as deserving of his tribute as heroes, generals, and other "confronter[s] of despots." She is also prominently featured in the poem most richly commemorating his operatic enthusiasms, "Proud Music of the Storm" (1869): "The teeming lady comes, / The lustrous orb, Venus contralto, the blooming mother, / Sister of loftiest gods, Alboni's self I hear" (section 3). Alboni's most profound influence is on the aria of the mockingbird in "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking" and the carol of the hermit thrush in "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd," both of which are distillations of Whitman's experiences in listening to her singing. 

These two poems, in fact, employ a recitative-aria structure quite consciously modeled on Italian operatic style. In "Out of the Cradle" the bird songs are printed in italics in order to emphasize the lyrical quality of the aria, while the recitative parts underline the dramatic content and structure of the poem, which, like Italian opera, tells a tragic story of love, separation, and death. "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd" contains more recitative than aria, and does not so clearly distinguish between them. The arias are not italicized, but they have an effect similar to those in "Out of the Cradle." In construction, however, the poem is closer in form to the sonata or symphony than to opera. 

The poem in which Whitman mentions opera most extensively is "Proud Music of the Storm" (1869), a kind of musical autobiography, in which he lists the variety of musical influences on his life and poetry. If he resisted the influence of European culture in many ways, he clearly did not when it came to music; he devotes over a third of the poem to the operas of Rossini, Meyerbeer, Donizetti, Verdi, Gounod and Mozart, singling out "Italia's peerless compositions" and the roles of Norma, Lucia and Ernani. "Proud Music" also celebrates Rossini's Stabat Mater (in which he had heard Alboni perform), and the symphonies and oratorios of Beethoven, Handel and Haydn, including The Creation. 

His preference was clearly for the passionate Italian style of singing. He had little interest in what the critic Richard Grant White called "the thin, throaty, French way of singing" (qtd. in Faner 63), nor did he share the widespread popular enthusiasm for the dazzling recitals of the Swedish singer Jenny Lind, a creature of P.T. Barnum who became a great celebrity during her 1851-1852 New York season. After hearing her perform Whitman commented on the singing of this "strangely overpraised woman," writing that she "never touched my heart in the least," and that "there was a vacuum in the head of the performance . . . It was the beauty of Adam before God breathed into his nostrils" (Uncollected 1:257). 

Another important influence upon Whitman's developing taste for operatic music was George Sand's novel Consuelo (1843), a story of the career of a great singer that he described to many of his friends as a masterpiece. In highly rhetorical and florid passages describing the almost unearthly quality of the heroine's voice, the novel's English translation gave Whitman a language for describing the effect on his readers he desired his poems to create. The reaction of Consuelo's lover to her singing, for example, is described in language that could be Whitman's own describing his poetry: "Music expresses all that the mind dreams and foresees of mystery and grandeur. It is the manifestation of a higher order of ideas and sentiments than any to which human speech can give expression. It is the revelation of the infinite; and when you sing, I only belong to humanity in so far as humanity has drunk in what is divine and eternal in the bosom of the Creator" (qtd. in Faner 47). The novel had much to do with forming his taste for great singing and the experience of listening to it, as well as inspiring in him a mystical response to the glories of the human voice. 

In addition to his poems about opera and opera singers Whitman wrote a number of reviews and essays about them. In 1846-1847, when editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, he published thirteen articles on musical subjects. His first critical opera review was of Rossini's The Barber of Seville in March 1847. His most extended prose piece onopera and the pleasures of opera-going is "Letter from Paumanok," published on 14 August 1851, in the New York Evening Post. Another relatively long essay, "The Opera," appeared in Life Illustrated in November 1855, just four months after the publication of Leaves of Grass. In later years he included reminiscences of his opera-going days in Specimen Days and in an essay, "The Old Bowery," collected in the prose section of Good-Bye My Fancy. 

Bibliography

Cooke, Alice L. "Notes on Whitman's Musical Background." New England Quarterly 19 (1946): 224-235. 

Faner, Robert D. Walt Whitman & Opera. 1951. London: Feffer and Simons, 1972. 

Lawrence, Vera Brodsky. "'Unloos'd Cantabile': Walt Whitman and the Italian Opera." Seaport 26.1 (1992): 38-45. 

Pound, Louise. "Walt Whitman and Italian Music." AmericanMercury 6 (1925): 58-63. 

Spiegelman, Julia. "Walt Whitman and Music." SouthAtlantic Quarterly 41(1942): 167-176. 

Traubel, Horace. With Walt Whitman in Camden. Vol. 2. New York: Appleton, 1908. 

Trowbridge, John Townsend. "Reminiscences of Walt Whitman." Atlantic Monthly 89 (1902): 163-175. 

Whitman, Walt. Prose Works 1892. Ed. Floyd Stovall. 2 vols. New York: New York UP, 1963-1964. 

____. The Uncollected Poetry and Prose of Walt Whitman. Ed. Emory Holloway. 2 vols. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page, 1921. 

Mark Bauerlein

"Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking" is one of Whitman's most moving and difficult poems. The poem was first published under the title "A Child's Reminiscence" in the New York Saturday Press for 24 December 1859, with the opening verse paragraph bearing the heading "Pre-Verse." The issue contained also a notice on the editorial page probably written by Henry Clapp, the editor of the Press and a close friend of Whitman, which terms the poem "our Christmas or New Year's present to [our readers]." When the Cincinnati Daily Commercial published an attack upon the poem a few days later, the Saturday Press of 7 January 1860 reprinted the attack along with an anonymous response by Whitman entitled "All About a Mocking-Bird." There, in one of his first defenses against hostile criticism, Whitman justifies the poem and his craft and prophesies a new edition of Leaves of Grass, what would become the 1860 edition. "Out of the Cradle" appeared in that edition as "A Word Out of the Sea," with the heading "Reminiscence" placed between the first and second verse paragraphs. Whitman made several changes in the poem for the 1867 edition, used the title "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking" for the first time in the 1871 edition, and gave the poem virtually its final form in the 1881 edition. In the Deathbed edition, it stands prominently at the head of the "Sea-Drift section. 

"Out of the Cradle" dominates the "Sea-Drift" grouping because it condenses Whitman's themes of love, death, sexuality, loss, and their relation to language and poetry into a single setting and situation. On the beach at night, a curious boy wanders alone, witnessing two birds living and loving together. Then one vanishes, the other searches fruitlessly, the boy questions also only to hear the ocean's final assertion of death, and the man notes "My own songs awaked from that hour." Here is Whitman narrating his awakening to death and his simultaneous projection into poesy. Out of this primal scene of eros and thanatos, of a "musical shuttle" made of "pains and joys," Whitman derives an intense and somber lesson in mortality and inspiration. 

However, despite the ardor of the experience described, "Out of the Cradle" is remarkable in that here Whitman reveals a masterful formal control of his material. The opening of the poem is a tour de force of poetic suspense: a single sentence, twenty-two lines of sustained anaphora and parallelism, of gliding prepositional phrases and arousing half-allusions culminating in the simple bardic verb "sing." This haunting recitation introduces the four voices in the poem—bird, boy, man, sea—and arranges them into a sequence of "afflatus." That is, the bird calls "those beginning notes of yearning and love," the boy listens and "translat[es]" them as the italicized lines in the poem, the man records the translation and comments on the boy's condition, and the sea taciturnly provides the final word on the matter, the "word of the sweetest song and all songs"—death. And out of the boy's observance of love and loss and his hearkening to the sea's "hissing" iteration, "Death, death, death, death, death," comes a new destiny for the boy—to become a spirit dedicated to poetry. As the boy listens to the he-bird's progress from odes to timeless love to lament over the disappearance of the she-bird to peals of desperate hope that his love may return to piercing recognition of perpetual loss, the boy (as reflected upon by the man) turns to the sea for explanation, for some "clew" as to why such suffering comes about. The sea's patient answer solves nothing. Instead, it lifts the question out of its local context, provoking a universalization of the she-bird's departure, a conversion of individual pain into natural law. 

This is the inspiration to sing, to write poetry. If death is not exactly the birth of language, it is the birth of song, the mother of beauty. As the essays by Stephen Whicher, Paul Fussell, Richard Chase, and Roy Harvey Pearce (all printed in an English Institute volume entitled The Presence of Walt Whitman) attest, "Out of the Cradle" raises the prospect of annihilation and concludes that there is nothing to do about it but sing it. In doing so, the poem places itself in a traditional genre of poems recounting the birth of poetry out of death. That is, "Out of the Cradle" dramatizes an archetypal experience of loss and reaches a familiar outcome: verse. In this genre, there is nothing else to do with irreversible loss but to describe its happening. How else can the bird recall his absent object of desire but by announcing its absence until his "carol" becomes in Whitman's rendition a worldwide annunciation? What else can Whitman make of his forsakenness but to dramatize it, to generalize bereavement into a human condition, the word of all songs? One love is lost, and all of life is changed. 

This poetic psychodrama has led other scholars to interpret the love-loss-poetry pattern as it appears in "Out of the Cradle" in psychobiographical terms. Certainly the poem's language and narrative lend themselves to psychological description, with phrases such as "The unknown want, the destiny of me," or "A man, yet by these tears a little boy again," or "cries of unsatisfied love" virtually soliciting a reading that borrows upon concepts of repression and the unconscious. Accordingly, critics such as Gustav Bychowski, Edwin Haviland Miller, Stephen Black, David Cavitch, and M. Jimmie Killingsworth have read the poem using a more or less psychoanalytical framework. Read within the purview of the unconscious, Whitman's poetic expressions come to be seen as the culmination of a psychic process, one characterized by sublimation and substitution and displacement. Psychoanalytical interpretation entails recovering clearly the psychic content which "Out of the Cradle" represents in a distorted fashion. That is, it begins with Whitman's Oedipal situation—a complex one, especially considering his excessively adoring portraits of his mother and his virtual silence about his father—and decodes the poem accordingly. 

In this case, "Out of the Cradle" and its story of ideal love and traumatic separation and the abandoned he-bird's all-encompassing lament actually reenact Whitman's own trauma of separation. In the boy's humble testimony, Whitman vicariously expresses the pain of loss, the withdrawal of, perhaps, mother or recent lover (indeed, the latter would only be an aggravation of the former). The peremptory voice of the maternal sea marks Whitman expanding the source of that pain beyond his real mother, thereby expanding (or repressing) his desires away from the narcissistic needs of the infant. Whitman still desires to overcome separation, to reexperience the "oceanic feeling" characterizing the mother-newborn relation, but that unity must now come at a cosmic level, not a personal one. (This may be because of his mother's threatening aspect, her tendency to absorb Walt's ego into her own, or because of his father's intemperate, distant attitude toward him.) Individual love means loss and dereliction, along with all the guilt and abjection that the ego takes upon itself to explain that catastrophe. But if that excruciating loneliness and self-recrimination—that emotional death—be linked to a universal lament, then Whitman may feel involved in a larger process of life and death, unified with all other things that experience the same pain. If this cosmic unification marks yet another sublimation, it is a creative one, more comprehensive and orderly than the he-bird's despairing cries or the boy's confused inquisitions. 

Of course, this rough approximation of psychobiographical interpretations of "Out of the Cradle" smooths out differences in the readings offered by the critics mentioned above. It also does not take into account a methodological question: How does the poem represent Whitman's psycho-sexual tensions? This question is posed by another group of readings of "Out of the Cradle." These readings may be termed "theoretical" in that they ask not so much about the content of the representation as they explore the relation between representation and represented, psyche and word, intention and expression. 

In theoretical readings of "Out of the Cradle" by critics such as Diane Wood Middlebrook, Kerry Larson, and Mark Bauerlein, the focus lies on the nature of the process of translation carried out in the poem. If the poem records Whitman's discovery of his "tongue's use," then the poem must proceed to show how the boy-man-poet learns to translate life and death into words that affect others, to transform formative experiences and dim memories into songs that transcend their circumstances. What is exceptional about "Out of the Cradle" in this respect is precisely the translation model Whitman sets his poetic inspiration within. For, as opposed to most conceptions of poetic origins, Whitman locates his inspiration in another's experience—the mockingbird's—and assumes the duty of translator, not originator of pathos. He becomes a singer of "warbling echoes" and "reverberations," imitating, "perpetuating" the bird, who is himself an imitator, a mockingbird. In other words, Whitman's birth as a poet happens when he joins a procession of singers and listeners—mockingbird, boy, man, poet, reader—attending to the cries of lonesome love. 

This is what distinguishes his song from the bird's song. Upon losing his love, the bird remains frenzied, disbelieving, his cries addressing solely his loss, his pain allowing for no other realization but the return of his love. Even when he does begin to accept the loss, all he can do is repeat "Loved!" five times and say blankly, " But my mate no more, no more with me! " His lament remains self-centered, eventually trailing off into self-torture and despair. His song cannot succeed the way Whitman's does because he has no awareness of joining in a procession of communications, of communion. He fails to realize that poets work by "Taking all hints to use them, but swiftly leaping beyond them," beyond their contingent aspects and beyond the poet's own private concerns. Conceiving himself as an origin and end of song, the bird-poet can only insistently repeat his trauma. He needs a translator, one who can recast his notes as a beautiful permutation of elegiac narrative. Great poets require an apprehension of more than just their own individuality, and of course the absolute limit to individuality is death. This is why death is the word of all songs. It forces poets to see and sing beyond their own personal experience. 

Such a conclusion reverses the romantic conception of the poet and belies the commonplace interpretation of Whitman as the most egotistical of writers. But in "Out of the Cradle," translation is not a fallen condition and self-absorption is a failure. The boy who sits in the bushes "translating" the "notes" seems free and natural, wholly devoid of irony or insincerity or narcissism. Perhaps the connection of innocence and interpretation contributes to the appeal of "Out of the Cradle." In any case, whether considered as a supreme instance of conventional elegy, a charged reflection of psychosexual tensions, or a complex meditation upon how to give words to trauma, "Out of the Cradle" remains a centerpiece of Whitman's poetry and poetics. In its poignant evocation of a lonely beach where a "curious boy" sits "peering, absorbing," hearing a mockingbird's natural cries of love and despair and feeling those notes turn to poems within him, "Out of the Cradle" embodies for many the Whitmanian poetic moment, the emotive origin and measure of his song. 

Bibliography

Bauerlein, Mark. Whitman and the American Idiom. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1991. 

Black, Stephen. Whitman's Journeys into Chaos. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1975. 

Bychowski, Gustav. "Walt Whitman: A Study in Sublimation." Psychoanalysis and the Social Sciences. Ed. Geza Roheim. New York: International Universities, 1950. 223-261. 

Cavitch, David. My Soul and I: The Inner Life of Walt Whitman. Boston: Beacon, 1985. 

Killingsworth, M. Jimmie. Whitman's Poetry of the Body: Sexuality, Politics, and the Text. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1989. 

Larson, Kerry. Whitman's Drama of Consensus. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1988. 

Lewis, R.W.B., ed. The Presence of Walt Whitman. New York: Columbia UP, 1962. 

Middlebrook, Diane Wood. Walt Whitman and Wallace Stevens. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell UP, 1974. 

Miller, Edwin Haviland. Walt Whitman's Poetry: A Psychological Journey. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1968. 

Renner, Dennis K. "Reconciling Varied Approaches to 'Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking.'" Approaches to Teaching Whitman's "Leaves of Grass." Ed. Donald D. Kummings. New York: MLA, 1990. 67-73. 

Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass: Comprehensive Reader's Edition. Ed. Harold W. Blodgett and Sculley Bradley. New York: New York UP, 1965. 

George and David Drews Hutchinson

Whitman has commonly been perceived as one of the few white American writers who transcended the racial attitudes of his time, a great prophet celebrating ethnic and racial diversity and embodying egalitarian ideals. He has been adopted as a poetic father by poets of Native American, Asian, African, European, and Chicano descent. Nonetheless, the truth is that Whitman in person largely, though confusedly and idiosyncratically, internalized typical white racial attitudes of his time, place, and class. 

The poet not only grew up in a racist environment, a descendant of slaveowners, but also followed (without always embracing) forms of "ethnological science" that throughout the nineteenth century presented racist arguments contradicting the poet's egalitarian principles. As a result, Whitman's racial attitudes were unstable and inconsistent. The inconsistencies particularly appear in differences between his journalism and unpublished notes, on the one hand, and his poetry and visionary essays on the other—as if Whitman did not trust himself on racial issues and therefore largely avoided them, or veiled his attitudes in the work by which he wanted to revitalize American culture and finally to be remembered as democracy's bard. 

Concerning people of African descent, what little is known about the early development of Whitman's racial awareness suggests he imbibed the prevailing white prejudices of his place and time, thinking of black people as servile, shiftless, ignorant, and given to stealing, although he would remember individual blacks of his youth in positive terms. His later experiences in the South apparently did nothing to mitigate early impressions, although readers of the twentieth century, including black ones, imagined him as a fervent antiracist. 

Whitman's attitudes to people of African descent must be distinguished from his attitudes toward slavery. In an 1857 editorial for the Brooklyn Daily Times, for example, he articulated his antislavery position in white nationalist terms, opposing "the great cause of American White Work and Working people" to "the Black cause" (I Sit 88). The misnomer "the Black cause," by which Whitman means the slaveowners' cause, betrays the psychological slippage between his attitude toward the institution of slavery and his attitude toward its contemporary victims. Indeed, its victims awaken in him a feeling of dread. Elsewhere he refers to slave labor as a "black tide" threatening white workingmen. At one point Whitman suggested regarding the whole debate over slavery in terms of racial nationalism, as a contest between "the totality of White Labor" and the interference of "Black Labor, or of bringing in colored persons on any terms" (I Sit 90). And yet in his unpublished manuscript "The Eighteenth Presidency!" (written in 1856) he expresses a definite sense of black working people as "American" working people with no less importance to the democratic cause than white workers. Moreover, only a few years prior to his expressions of a racial nationalist stance, Whitman editorialized in the New York Aurora against all immigration restriction, insisting that America must embrace immigrants of all backgrounds, including Africans. He still held these views in the last years of his life. 

When Whitman defended exclusion of blacks from the new Western territories, he rationalized his position (which he recognized as morally suspect) by suggesting that separation would best serve both blacks and whites—an argument also made by some black nationalists of the time. He argued, for example, that blacks would only become an "independent and heroic race" if they were out from under the heel of white racism, which he saw as endemic in the United States (I Sit 90). 

In fact, if there is one consistent strain in Whitman's confused and contradictory prose meditations on race and slavery, it is an emphasis on the importance of self-determination to human dignity. Late in life, Whitman said that his ambivalence about "ultra-abolitionism," and even his suspicions about black inferiority, derived from his perception that the masses of black people lacked a defiant love of liberty and the drive for self-reliance. (These views, it must be said, matched contemporary racial theories that identified different "temperamental" and "cultural" attributes with different "races.") Particularly in old age, his private argument against African Americans was that he saw little tendency to self-determination in their "group" character. Nor was he disposed to recognize such self-determination where it revealed itself. When reminded of Wendell Phillips's famous oration on Toussaint l'Ouverture, he replied that he thought it exaggerated; and when mentioning Frederick Douglass, he could not help bringing up that eloquent freedom fighter's "white blood." Moreover, in the wake of the Civil War he feared the idea of blacks gaining political power. 

After the war, Whitman began wondering whether blacks were innately inferior to whites and bound to disappear. He even considered that fate "most likely" though far off. Contact with the "stronger" and more arrogant white race, Whitman generally suspected, would finally prove fatal. His reading of post-Civil War "ethnological science" deeply influenced Whitman on this issue. To Horace Traubel he said, "The nigger, like the Injun, will be eliminated: it is the law of races, history, what-not" (With Walt Whitman 2:283). His statements along these lines are sometimes hesitant and ambiguous, sometimes quite certain. 

One does not find suggestions of the disappearance of the Negro before the Civil War. The early poetry occasionally reveals a view of blacks as being at an early stage of evolutionary development but with the assumption that they will in time reach the poet's side. They have a great future before them, not a tragic or merely pathetic end. In the late 1850s Whitman rejected racist ethnologists' arguments that Negroes were incapable of developing great "civilizations," considering early Egypt a refutation of this view. 

Whitman was surely aware of how his racist tendencies belied the fundamental convictions that suffused Leaves of Grass, particularly since some of his most devoted early supporters were antiracists. He admitted to Horace Traubel that he had probably been "tainted" by the "New York" attitude toward antislavery, and he came to blame his split with William Douglas O'Connor upon his own shortcomings in this respect (With Walt Whitman 3:75-76). His solution to the contradiction was to avoid racial issues, much as he would avoid issues concerning the genocide being perpetrated against Native Americans. Clearly, Whitman could not consistently reconcile the ingrained, even foundational, racist character of the United States with its egalitarian ideals. He could not even reconcile such contradictions in his own psyche. 

African-American readers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries greatly admired Whitman's poetic treatment of their people; they did not find in Leaves of Grass the condescension and exoticism they found in virtually all other white literature with black characters. They considered Whitman uniquely immune to the racism of his countrymen and a model to black authors themselves, treasuring lines that glorified the "divine-soul'd African, large, fine-headed, nobly-form'd, superbly destin'd, on equal terms with me!" ("Salut au Monde!," section 11). Even "Ethiopia Saluting the Colors," today generally considered stereotypical if not racist in its portrait of an old slave woman, was widely admired by black intellectuals before World War II, and was set to music as a "war song" for World War I by Harry T. Burleigh, a prominent black composer. Black writers lamented that Whitman's influence had been limited by the unpopularity of his poetic form. Only in the mid-twentieth century would Whitman's actual racial attitudes begin to be more broadly recognized by both white and black readers, mainly specialists in American literature. 

Just as Whitman suspected late in life that blacks would not survive in the long run, he accepted the dominant view that Native Americans (whom he often called "aborigines" in preference to "Indians") would "die out" in the competition for survival—an idea shared by his friend and admirer Daniel Brinton, at the time America's premier ethnological "authority" on Native American languages. Poems such as "Pioneers! O Pioneers!" and "Song of the Redwood-Tree" suggest that Whitman viewed the displacement of Native Americans by whites inevitable and even fitting. He could admire individual "specimens" of aboriginal humanity—particularly elders who had not been corrupted by white civilization and therefore maintained their rugged "natural" beauty and eloquence; but he appears to have seen no place for them in the future nation of nations. His views are suggested in "Song of the Redwood-Tree," where "a mighty dying" redwood, having " fill'd [its] time, " yields willingly to the axes of " a superber race." He told Horace Traubel point-blank, "The Injun, will be eliminated" (With Walt Whitman 2:283). 

Once again, Whitman's postwar social Darwinism clashes with the egalitarian spirit of his poetry. In Leaves of Grass we find a poet who celebrates racial difference and embraces diversity: "Of every hue and caste am I, of every rank and religion" ("Song of Myself," section 16). In "Song of Myself" he tenderly depicts the marriage between a white trapper and a young Native American girl—a portrayal that conflicts with his negative portrayal of "half-breeds" in other contexts. Whitman's "friendly and flowing savage" in "Song of Myself" (section 39), a sort of model American, is a cultural hybrid of "red" and "white" attributes; yet Whitman found many of the Indians he met or saw in "white" towns and cities "degraded" and "shiftless." Even Whitman's idealization of what he often regarded as Native "nobility" and its "relics" could waver during fits of indignation over, for example, reports of an Indian massacre of whites in Minnesota. Whitman never felt driven to take up the cause of the multitudes of Native Americans massacred by white soldiers and settlers throughout his poetic career. Instead, he eulogized the idea of the "vanishing" Indian whose positive traits he hoped would be absorbed by white Americans to help distinguish them from Europeans. 

In contrast to his belief in the inferiority of African Americans and Native Americans, Whitman viewed the peoples of Asia in what could be considered an egalitarian light. The poet's great appreciation for the ancient Asian spiritual texts probably accounts for his admiration for those cultures. In fact Whitman's privileging of Asian cultures over African and Native American ones might be based in part on a respect for cultures with a written tradition and a devaluing of those that he believed had not independently developed methods of writing—a crucial distinction to Enlightenment thinkers. In private conversations, Whitman adamantly attacked popular anti-immigration attitudes directed against Asian newcomers. This does not mean he was beyond the influence of long-established stereotypes. Whitman accused Sadakichi Hartmann, a Whitman admirer of Japanese and German heritage, of having a "Tartaric makeup" and embodying an "Asiatic craftiness, too—all of it!" (With Walt Whitman 5:38). Nonetheless, as Xilao Li has observed, Whitman viewed Asia as the origin of the human race and of all religions. In "Passage to India" the final connection made between Old Asia and New America suggests the ultimate fruition of human civilization. Whitman seems to have no trouble fitting people of Asian descent into his personal world vision, or his vision of American identity. 

Because of the radically democratic and egalitarian aspects of his poetry, readers generally expect, and desire for, Whitman to be among the literary heroes that transcended the racist pressures that abounded in all spheres of public discourse during the nineteenth century. He did not, at least not consistently; nonetheless his poetry has been a model for democratic poets of all nations and races, right up to our own day. How Whitman could have been so prejudiced, and yet so effective in conveying an egalitarian and antiracist sensibility in his poetry, is a puzzle yet to be adequately addressed.   

Bibliography

Aspiz, Harold. Walt Whitman and the Body Beautiful. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1980. 

Folsom, Ed. Walt Whitman's Native Representations. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994. 

Klammer, Martin. Whitman, Slavery, and the Emergence of "Leaves of Grass." University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 1995. 

Li, Xilao. "Walt Whitman and Asian American Writers." Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 10 (1993): 179-194. 

Loving, Jerome. Walt Whitman's Champion: William Douglas O'Connor. College Station: Texas A&M UP, 1978. 

Peeples, Ken, Jr. "The Paradox of the 'Good Gray Poet' (Walt Whitman on Slavery and the Black Man)." Phylon 35 (1974): 22-32. 

Price, Kenneth. "Whitman's Solutions to 'The Problem of the Blacks.'" Resources for American Literary Study 15 (1985): 205-208. 

Sill, Geoffrey. "Whitman on 'The Black Question': A New Manuscript." Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 8 (1990): 69-75. 

Traubel, Horace. With Walt Whitman in Camden. Vol. 2. New York: Appleton, 1908; Vol. 3. New York: Mitchell Kennerley, 1914; Vol. 5. Ed. Gertrude Traubel. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1964. 

Whitman, Walt. I Sit and Look Out: Editorials from the Brooklyn Daily Times. Ed. Emory Holloway and Vernolian Schwarz. New York: Columbia UP, 1932. 

____. Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts. Ed. Edward F. Grier. Vol. 6. New York: New York UP, 1984. 

____. Walt Whitman of the New York Aurora. Ed. Joseph J. Rubin and Charles H. Brown. State College, Pa.: Bald Eagle, 1950.

Luke Mancuso

In many ways, the Reconstruction years (1863–1877) were a time of disruption for Walt Whitman. As the United States came apart in civil war, and then sought to recompose its Union ideology, so Whitman experienced the war and its aftermath with disquieting intensity. Reconstruction America became activated for Whitman in December 1862, when the poet journeyed to Fredericksburg, Virginia, in order to find his wounded brother, George, after notice that his sibling had been injured in battle. Rather than return home to Brooklyn, Whitman relocated to the nation's hub, Washington, D.C., and thus inaugurated his first geographical displacement from New York, which would last until he suffered a debilitating stroke in January 1873. Whitman supported himself (and to some extent his mother) first as a part-time clerk in the Army Paymaster's Office (1863–1865), then as a clerk in the Department of the Interior (1865), and finally as a clerk in the Attorney General's Office (1865–1873). Aside from his desultory schedule as a government employee, Whitman's consuming passion remained his visits to Civil War hospitals, where he visited and consoled up to 100,000 veterans from all corners of the United States.

Whitman widened his circle of friends, meeting Peter Doyle, his closest personal friend who was a streetcar conductor and former Confederate soldier, as well as William Douglas O'Connor, his literary companion who published the first Whitman biography, The Good Gray Poet (1866). A year later, American naturalist John Burroughs published the second Whitman biography, Notes on Walt Whitman as Poet and Person (1867), and William Michael Rossetti attracted British readers to Whitman's work by a laudatory notice in July 1867 in the London Chronicle. When Rossetti published an expurgated English edition of Whitman in 1868, called simply Poems, Mrs. Anne Gilchrist fell in love with the poet, began a series of love letters in 1871, and actually moved to Philadelphia in 1876 in order to be near the poet. Whitman also encountered resistance to his poetic reputation, most notably in his firing from the Secretary of the Interior's Office by Senator James Harlan in 1865, on the grounds that he was the author of the notoriously frank Leaves of Grass. Shortly after Whitman's first major stroke in 1873, his mother passed away, and the poet was forced to leave Washington, D.C., for the confines of his brother George's home in Camden, New Jersey. Thus, after initiating Reconstruction in search of his brother George, Whitman ends the Reconstruction decade as a convalescent with his brother George.

Aside from geographical displacement, the Reconstruction years were constituted by a prolific outpouring of editorial and creative work. Critics have largely ignored this pivotal period in Whitman's long career, outside of biographical and bibliographical notices, but the direction of Whitman's work splinters across eight major publications: Drum-Taps (1865), Sequel to Drum-Taps (1865–1866), Leaves of Grass (1867 edition), Democratic Vistas (1871), Leaves of Grass (1871–1872 edition), Memoranda During the War (1875–1876), and the Centennial edition of Leaves of Grass and Two Rivulets (1876). There are two significant points about such a dispersion of his creative output. First, the previous organic unity of Leaves gives way to a fracturing of his major work into multiple annexes appended to Leaves along the way: Drum-Taps, Sequel, Songs Before Parting in 1867; Passage to India and After All, Not to Create Only, or later "Song of the Exposition," in 1871–1872; and the gathering of all his major Reconstruction statements into Two Rivulets in 1876. Second, Whitman makes a bid as a serious prose writer in such essays as Democratic Vistas and Memoranda During the War, in which the poet both looks forward to the evolution of American democracy and backward to the Civil War as the impetus for the growth of American promise. This intriguing middle period of Whitman's poetic career has been hastily passed over by critics, who have reinforced the notion that after the Civil War, Whitman's output indicates a period of decline following his spectacular debut as an antebellum genius. Whitman himself assisted such a dismissal, when he decreed that the final arrangement of Leaves (1881) should guide the readers of the future. Though recently critics have recovered the 1855 Leaves, the 1860 Leaves, Drum-Taps, Democratic Vistas, and even Memoranda During the War, the gap has yet to be bridged across his other Reconstruction publications as artifacts worthy of attention in their own right.

The improvisational nature of many of these arrangements of texts can be analyzed across the discourses afloat in the Reconstruction years, as the Union sought to replace the secession years with the consolidation of national interests over against regional and sectional differences. Even in their physical manifestations, Whitman's editions were broken into "sectional" pieces, seeking coherence in their shuffling of older and newer compositions with each appearance. In the 1872 Preface to As a Strong Bird on Pinions Free, Whitman makes a proposal to accompany Leaves, which he called the book of the " Democratic Individual," with a companion volume which would fulfill nationalist aspirations (the book of " Democratic Nationality "). While Whitman's assertion is hesitant, the poet persists in his prospectus for such a centralizing volume. In fact, Whitman delivered the volume Two Rivulets to accompany the 1876 Leaves, and the former comes closest to representing any book of "democratic nationality" as Whitman ever produced. In Two Rivulets, Whitman gathered together most of his major Reconstruction documents (including Passage to India, Democratic Vistas, and Memoranda During the War) in a strategy that can be read as either a haphazard or deliberate alignment of centralizing statements to be used for national purposes. 

The disruption of America's governmental structure by the Civil War created a divide between the localized understandings of regional identity before the war and the hegemony of federal authority asserting a national identity after the war. The reconstructive energies of postwar culture lurched forward during the Reconstruction years, not least in the coercive domination of the Republican North over against the resistance of the unreconstructed South. In the legislative workshop of Washington, civil and political rights for ex-slaves were grudgingly affirmed from 1865 to 1870 through such landmark statutes as the Civil War amendments to the Constitution: the Thirteenth Amendment (1865), which abolished slavery; the Fourteenth Amendment (1868), which recognized African-American citizenship; and the Fifteenth Amendment (1870), which granted suffrage to African-American males. Such Constitutional reform provoked widespread resistance, and required federal surveillance of state jurisdictions on a scale that was not equalled until the 1950s and 1960s. Whitman's Reconstruction texts continually collapse federal-state frictions in favor of cooperative alliances between the two jurisdictional forums, but they also place a greater rhetorical weight on centralization through their deployment of nationalist images. As the representative poet, Whitman legislates unlimited promise for the national identity knitting together in the turbulent postwar years, while recognizing the continual dangers inherent in representative democracy. By 1876, just as Radical Reconstruction was breaking apart under the forces of racist violence and segregation, Whitman nonetheless issued Two Rivulets as a summa of his Reconstruction projects. This underrated volume is dominated by images of a radical democracy that seeks to dismantle discrimination in all its forms, through the implementation of a nationality that promotes localized social barriers giving way to the federated identity of cooperative citizens. The Reconstruction Whitman remains the Whitman who has yet to be fully scrutinized by Whitman scholars and readers alike.

Bibliography

Allen, Gay Wilson. The New Walt Whitman Handbook. 1975. New York: New York UP, 1986.

____. The Solitary Singer: A Critical Biography of Walt Whitman. 1955. Rev. ed. 1967. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985. 

Erkkila, Betsy. Whitman the Political Poet. New York: Oxford UP, 1989. 

Mancuso, Luke. "'The Strange Sad War Revolving': Reconstituting Walt Whitman's Reconstruction Texts in the Legislative Workshop, 1865–1876." Diss. U of Iowa, 1994.

J.R. LeMaster

In a time when lyceums were failing, James Redpath began the Boston Lyceum Bureau in 1869. In order to provide his audience variety he booked such speakers as Emerson and Mark Twain. Abolitionist author of The Public Life of Captain John Brown and editor of the North American Review, Redpath published some of Whitman's articles. Redpath was a writer for the firm of Thayer and Eldridge, who were closely identified with abolition. Although he remained a moderate, Whitman befriended such radical writers as Redpath and William Douglas O'Connor. 

In a long letter written from Washington to Redpath dated 8 August 1863 Whitman asked for his friend's help in soliciting funds to carry on his work in the hospitals there. A short time later, 21 October 1863, Whitman wrote Redpath about publishing a book entitled Memoranda of a Year, but nothing came of it. It was published by the author in 1876 as Memoranda During the War and was included in Two Rivulets in the same year. For details see especially volumes 1, 2, and 4 of The Correspondence, edited by Edwin Haviland Miller, and volume 2 of Horace Traubel's With Walt Whitman in Camden.

Bibliography

Allen, Gay Wilson. The Solitary Singer: A Critical Biography of Walt Whitman. 1955. Rev. ed. 1967. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985. 

Kaplan, Justin. Walt Whitman: A Life. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1980. 

Myerson, Joel. Walt Whitman: A Descriptive Bibliography. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1993. 

Reynolds, David S. Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography. New York: Knopf, 1995 

Whitman, Walt. Selected Letters of Walt Whitman. Ed. Edwin Haviland Miller. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 1990.

Jan Whitt

Because he was a printer and editor, Walt Whitman placed high demands on those who worked in publishing, and the production of the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass was no exception. Just three year before, Whitman had competed for business with various printers in Brooklyn and had assessed their competence. For his prized manuscript, Whitman selected the Rome brothers. Immigrants from Scotland, brothers Andrew, James, and Thomas Rome ran a print shop known primarily for its legal publications. Andrew Rome had known Whitman since 1849, and the Rome family saw Whitman as someone who soon would make his mark on the world. 

When Whitman approached them in the spring of 1855, they happily agreed to print the first edition of Leaves of Grass. Letting Whitman supervise (and even set approximately ten pages of type), the brothers consulted with Whitman on all facets of the publication, including typefaces, ink, type of paper and layout. Whitman selected a typeface from Scotland. The twelve pages of the Preface were set in 10-point type; the 83 pages of poetry, in 12-point type. The printers provided him with 800 copies in quarto format, and then the sheets were sent to an engraver and binder. 

In addition, the Rome brothers provided access to a comfortable, small print shop, similar to the one where Whitman had done his apprenticeship years before. Most mornings that spring Whitman appeared at the shop, read the New York Tribune, and settled in to work on page proofs. While there he also wrote a prose piece about the role of the poet and poetry in American life and included the essay at the beginning of the volume. 

In 1858-1859 the Rome brothers set Whitman's new poems in type and gave him copies for prospective publishers of a new and enlarged edition of Leaves of Grass. 

Bibliography

Allen, Gay Wilson. The Solitary Singer: A Critical Biography of Walt Whitman. 1955. Rev. ed. 1967. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985. 

Greenspan, Ezra. Walt Whitman and the American Reader. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990. 

Rubin, Joseph Jay. The Historic Whitman. University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 1973. 

Stovall, Floyd. The Foreground of "Leaves of Grass." Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1974. 

Sherwood Smith

One of Whitman's most important European editors, critics, and supporters, William Michael Rossetti, brother of Dante Gabriel and Christina Rossetti, was the editor of The Germ (1850), journal and manifesto of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Rossetti received a copy of Leaves of Grass (1855) soon after its publication, as a gift from William Bell Scott, who had been introduced to it by Thomas Dixon of Sunderland. Rossetti responded enthusiastically and discussed it with many other British writers, among them Swinburne. An article by Rossetti in the London Chronicle (6 July 1867) created great interest in Whitman in Britain and America and was much appreciated by John Burroughs, William D. O'Connor, and Whitman himself. It was reprinted in several publications in the United States. At the suggestion of Moncure D. Conway, who gained Whitman's permission for the publication of a selection of his poems, with a few changes in text, and at the invitation of London publisher John Camden Hotten, Rossetti agreed to edit a selection of Leaves of Grass from the 1867 edition, omitting any poem he thought likely to offend English readers (and censors). His editing of Whitman's Poems (1868), including the 1855 Preface (which Whitman doubted was worth republishing), was a major event in the growth of Whitman's reputation and readership in America and Europe. Rossetti's prefatory notice admitted that Whitman had what Rossetti considered many faults of diction and subject matter, but asserted that Whitman was among the greatest poets of the English language. Rossetti's edition contained about one half of the 1867 text; the poems included were printed without omissions or emendations, though a few changes were made in the text of the Preface. Rossetti insisted that his edition was unexpurgated and only preliminary to an English publication of the complete Leaves of Grass, but O'Connor and Whitman had strong reservations about it, and Whitman later referred to it as "the horrible dismemberment of my book" (Correspondence 2:133). 

Throughout the rest of his life Rossetti championed Whitman, praising him even in his 1870 edition of Longfellow as by far the greatest American poet. In 1872 Rossetti published American Poems, "dedicated with homage and love to Walt Whitman," including 32 poems by Whitman. He included one poem ("A Boston Ballad (1854)") by Whitman in his anthology Humourous Poems (1872). He brought out a new edition of Whitman's Poems in 1886. Rossetti's letters and diaries contain many references to Whitman and show his deep affection for Whitman as poet and correspondent, as well as his sympathy with Whitman's social and political ideals. 

Rossetti was important in the editing and publishing of Anne Gilchrist's "An Englishwoman's Estimate of Walt Whitman" (Boston Radical, 1870), and suggested the beginning of the correspondence between Whitman and Mrs. Gilchrist which led to her visit to Philadelphia in 1876. 

In 1876, after an article appeared in the West Jersey Press (Camden) about Whitman's poverty and neglect in the United States, and subsequent heated discussions of this in English and American journals, Rossetti offered Whitman the assistance of his English admirers, and Whitman agreed to accept it. Rossetti's efforts led to many generous subscriptions to the 1876 Centennial edition of Leaves of Grass, which Whitman said "pluck'd me like a brand from the burning, and gave me life again" (Prose Works 2:699-700). Famous personages among the subscribers were John Ruskin, Edmund Gosse, George Saintsbury, Alfred Tennyson, and Edward Dowden. In 1886, Rossetti directed the collection and distribution of the equivalent of almost two thousand dollars in cash gifts from British friends. Tireless in his efforts, he even wrote a letter to President Grover Cleveland proposing that the United States grant Whitman a government pension. 

Bibliography

Blodgett, Harold. Walt Whitman in England. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell UP, 1934. 

Rossetti, William Michael. The Diary of W.M. Rossetti, 1870-1873. Ed. Odette Bornand. Oxford: Clarendon, 1977. 

____. Letters . . . Concerning Whitman, Blake, and Shelley. Ed. Clarence Gohdes and Paull Franklin Baum. Durham, N.C.: Duke UP, 1934. 

____. Selected Letters of William Michael Rossetti. Ed. Roger W. Peattie. University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 1990. 

____, comp. Rossetti Papers, 1862 to 1870. 1903. New York: AMS, 1970. 

____, ed. American Poems. London: E. Moxon, 1872. 

____, ed. Humorous Poems. London: E. Moxon, 1872. 

Whitman, Walt. The Correspondence. Ed. Edwin Haviland Miller. 6 vols. New York: New York UP, 1961-1977. 

____. Poems. Ed. William Michael Rossetti. London: John Camden Hotten, 1868. 

____. Prose Works 1892. Ed. Floyd Stovall. 2 vols. New York: New York UP, 1963-1964. 

James E., Jr. Miller

Themes of sex and sexuality have dominated Leaves of Grass from the very beginning and have shaped the course of the book's reception. The first edition in 1855 contained what were to be called "Song of Myself," "The Sleepers," and "I Sing the Body Electric," which are "about" sexuality (though of course not exclusively) throughout. From the very beginning, Whitman wove together themes of "manly love" and "sexual love," with great emphasis on intensely passionate attraction and interaction, as well as bodily contact (touch, embrace) in both. Simultaneously in sounding these themes, he equated the body with the soul, and defined sexual experience as essentially spiritual experience. He very early adopted two phrenological terms to discriminate between the two relationships: "amativeness" for man-woman love and "adhesiveness" for "manly love." Although Whitman did not in the 1855 Preface call direct attention to this element in his work, in one of his anonymous reviews of his book ("Walt Whitman and His Poems," 1855) he wrote of himself and the 1855 Leaves : "The body, he teaches, is beautiful. Sex is also beautiful. . . . Sex will not be put aside; it is a great ordination of the universe. He works the muscle of the male and the teeming fibre of the female throughout his writings, as wholesome realities, impure only by deliberate intention and effort" (Poetry and Prose 535). 

Whitman added other sex poems to his book in 1856, including "Poem of Procreation" (now "A Woman Waits for Me") and "Bunch Poem" ("Spontaneous Me"). At the end of the volume he included, without permission, Emerson's letter praising the 1855 Leaves (its "great power," and "free and brave thought"), and alongside it he published his own letter in reply. He may have been misled by the nature of Emerson's praise to emphasize the centrality of his themes of adhesiveness and amativeness: "As to manly friendship, everywhere observed in The States, there is not the first breath of it to be observed in print. I say the body of a man or woman, the main matter, is so far quite unexpressed in poems; but the body is to be expressed, and sex is" (Poetry and Prose 529). 

It was not until the 1860 edition of Leaves that Whitman gathered the poems celebrating sexuality into the cluster "Enfans d'Adam" ("Children of Adam") and the poems celebrating "manly love" into "Calamus." When Whitman came to Boston to see his book through the press there, Emerson tried to persuade him to withdraw the sex poems, but Whitman refused. He probably understood that if he really desexed Leaves it would be like self-castration. Although Emerson never publicly withdrew his endorsement of Whitman, he passed up opportunities to repeat it. Emerson's silence together with Whitman's loss of his job at the Interior Department in 1865, charged with writing "indecent poems," were early warning signs that he and his Leaves were embarked on a difficult road ahead. 

In subsequent editions of Leaves, Whitman revised and shifted his poems of amativeness and adhesiveness, but by and large his dominant themes became not the body but the soul, not youth but old age—and death. His experience in the Civil War hospitals seems to have provided a turning point for Whitman's focus. He even claimed, in "A Backward Glance O'er Travel'd Roads" (1888), that the war revealed to him, "as by flashes of lightning," the "final reasons-for-being" of his "passionate song" (Poetry and Prose 516). In his Civil War poems, Drum-Taps (1865, later included in the 1867 Leaves), the "Calamus" theme runs throughout—"cropping out" as Whitman himself said of it in his 1876 Preface to Two Rivulets (Prose Works 2:471). Whitman critics have not failed to notice in "Drum-Taps" the poet's theme of adhesiveness—the joy in the physical transmuted by the war into pain and anguish—in such poems as "The Wound-Dresser," "Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field One Night," and "A March in the Ranks Hard-Prest, and the Road Unknown." 

In 1868 W.M. Rossetti published a British edition of Whitman's poetry, Poems by Walt Whitman. In effect, this was an expurgated Leaves, with "Song of Myself," "Children of Adam," and "Calamus" omitted, except for a few poems of the "Calamus" cluster placed in a section entitled "Walt Whitman." In spite of Rossetti's gutting of the book, it established Whitman's reputation in England and attracted many ardent admirers. Some, when they became familiar with the poems purged by Rossetti, became even more ardent, while others turned hostile. The former included Anne Gilchrist, who fell in love with Whitman and wrote an article "An Englishwoman's Estimate of Walt Whitman" (Boston 1870), especially praising Whitman's sex poems. Algernon Swinburne wrote a poem in praise of Whitman in Song Before Sunrise (1871), but loudly reversed himself in his 1887 essay, "Whitmania," after encountering all of Leaves. John Addington Symonds read Whitman's poems as a young man, and, bowled over, found his way to the whole of "Calamus." He would later strike up a correspondence with Whitman in Camden, pressing him on the real meaning of his "Calamus" poems, leading Whitman ultimately to reply in a notorious letter in 1890 claiming to have had six illegitimate children during his "jolly" "times south" (Poetry and Prose 958). 

Although in the fifth edition (1871-1872) of Leaves, Whitman seemed temporarily to lose his way in shaping Leaves to contain his new work ("Passage to India" and related poems), some ten years later, in the sixth edition (1881-1882), he adopted his earlier practice of integrating the poems of a lifetime into a single structure. Before the book could be distributed by its publisher in Boston, however, it was found to be immoral by the Society for the Suppression of Vice; because Whitman refused to remove the offensive parts, the book was withdrawn and published in Philadelphia. The Boston censors found offensive not only the whole of "A Woman Waits for Me," "The Dalliance of the Eagles," and "To a Common Prostitute," but also passages vital to the life of a number of Whitman's greatest works, including "Song of Myself." But the "Calamus" cluster with its songs of "manly love" was left intact! 

In "A Backward Glance," Whitman made his final assessment of the sex poems that had given him so many problems. Writing a bit after the most recent attempt to censor his book, Whitman affirms boldly—" Leaves of Grass is avowedly the song of Sex and Amativeness, and even Animality. . . . Of this feature . . . I shall only say the espousing principle of those lines so gives breath of life to my whole scheme that the bulk of the pieces might as well have been left unwritten were those lines omitted" (Poetry and Prose 518). A similar claim might have been made for the "Calamus" poems of adhesiveness; that no such claim was made was attributable, surely, to the fact that they had never inspired public controversy as had the sex poems. 

Whitman said in "A Backward Glance," "I have not gain'd acceptance of my own time, but have fallen back on fond dreams of the future" (507). It is clear that near the end of the twentieth century, Whitman's book has won a worldwide reputation that would astonish him. The story of that acceptance, beginning after his death in 1892, has been told only in part—and is still unfolding. At the center of the story is a shift from concern about his poems of "Sex and Amativeness" to concern about his poems of "manly attachment" and adhesiveness. Providing a frame of reference for understanding this shift are changes in perspective brought about in the first half of the century by Freudian and psychoanalytic thought, and in the latter half by the rights movements of gays, lesbians, and feminists (allied to the black civil-rights movement). 

Emory Holloway, in his Whitman: An Interpretation in Narrative (1926), provided the first scholarly biography of the poet, and his experience may stand as an example of the continuing controversy over Whitman. In his research, Holloway happened to run across the manuscript of a "Children of Adam" poem, "Once I Pass'd through a Populous City," and discovered that it had originally been addressed to a man—and therefore "belonged" in the "Calamus" cluster. He was the first biographer to agonize over how to write about Whitman's sexuality. A revealing footnote to Holloway's biography is that he later became obsessed with demonstrating that Whitman was telling the truth in his claims to fatherhood in his letter to Symonds; his obsession led to his publication, after long years of research, of Free and Lonesome Heart: The Secret of Walt Whitman (1960), claiming discovery of "Whitman's son." 

Holloway's dilemma has been inherited, in one form or another, by subsequent biographers and critics of Whitman. What can be assumed factually about sexuality in Whitman's life? What may be said validly about sexuality in his poetry? 

As to the life: Gay Wilson Allen's biography, The Solitary Singer, published first in 1955, revised in 1967, and reprinted 1985, remains indispensable. In his preface to the latest edition, Allen pointed out that attitudes toward Whitman's sexuality had changed since he first wrote his book. He had decided, he explained, to use the word "homoerotic" to indicate that his "sexual emotions were stronger for men than for women"; he had avoided the use of "homosexual," he said, because "at the time that term implied a practitioner of pederasty," for which there was no evidence (Allen xi). Justin Kaplan, whose biography, Walt Whitman: A Life, appeared in 1980, followed Allen in using the word "homoerotic." And in his essay, "The Biographer's Problem" (1989), Kaplan pointed out that the biographer's requisite "intimate evidence" on Whitman's sexuality remained elusive (25). Kaplan's point is borne out by a brief and informative biography of Peter Doyle, Martin G. Murray's "'Pete the Great': A Biography of Peter Doyle" (1994), which sketches Whitman's relationship with the horse-car conductor he met in Washington at the end of the Civil War—a relationship well-known since 1897, after the appearance of a collection of Whitman's letters to Doyle under the deliberately chosen title Calamus. Though the warmth and intensity of the bonding are clear, the "intimate evidence" is still missing. About Doyle, Kaplan concluded: "Maybe it doesn't matter"; the "evidence" for Whitman's homosexuality exists, he asserted, in his poetry and letters (26). 

As to the poetry: Robert K. Martin's The Homosexual Tradition in American Poetry (1979) has brought the controversy about how to interpret the sexuality of Whitman's Leaves into clear focus. His opening chapter on Whitman begins: "Although Whitman intended his work to communicate his homosexuality to his readers, and although homosexual readers have from the very beginning understood his homosexual meanings, most critics have not been willing to take Whitman at his word" (3). Martin's edited volume, The Continuing Presence of Walt Whitman: The Life After the Life (1992), brings together an international array of critics and poets who start from Martin's basic assumption. By their very nature these works set new directions for the continuing discussion of Whitman. Two other critics have taken Whitman "at his word" and assume his homosexuality a given: Michael Moon, Disseminating Whitman: Revision and Corporeality in "Leaves of Grass" (1991), and Byrne R.S. Fone, Masculine Landscapes: Walt Whitman and the Homoerotic Text (1992). In their approaches, all these critics have brought new and valuable insights into the many meanings of Leaves. 

But have they, in clearing away some distortions, contributed others of their own? There are many critics who agree on the pervasive homoeroticism in Whitman's life, letters, and poetry, and even on his latent if not overt homosexuality; they are not, however, ready to adopt such a singular and reductive assumption about what Whitman "intended" in his Leaves —"to communicate his homosexuality to his readers." Throughout his prefaces and "A Backward Glance"—and in his poetry—Whitman wrote at length about his purposes, including his themes of amative and adhesive love, but also (among others) his themes of selfhood and freedom, being and becoming, democracy and equality, war and tragedy, spirituality and death. Nor are all critics ready to accept the assumption that such seismic chasms divide readers as implied by such ponderous sexual labeling. There remains the fact that innumerable "heterosexual" readers, both men and women, have felt the power, sexual and other, of Whitman's Leaves. His appeal is universal, not exclusive. Sexual labels are simplistic, distorting as they do the complexity of any "real" individual's sexuality. In short, all readers can share, consciously and/or unconsciously, Whitman's omnisexual vision—omnisexual in the all-encompassing sense of embracing auto-, homo-, and hetero-erotic impulses. Individuals possess these impulses within them by the fact of being human and sexual, assimilated in passing through the stages of growing up. There is much more in their sexuality that brings human beings together than divides them, whatever the nature of their "sexual preference," whatever the nature of their sexual experience—experience central to human experience, and allied closely always, as Whitman reiterated, to the spiritual: "Lacks one lacks both" ("Song of Myself," section 3). 

Bibliography

Allen, Gay Wilson. The Solitary Singer: A Critical Biography of Walt Whitman. 1955. Rev. ed. 1967. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985. 

Aspiz, Harold. Walt Whitman and the Body Beautiful. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1980. 

Folsom, Ed, ed. Walt Whitman: The Centennial Essays. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 1994. 

Fone, Byrne R.S. Masculine Landscapes: Walt Whitman and the Homoerotic Text. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1992. 

Kaplan, Justin. "The Biographer's Problem." Walt Whitman of Mickle Street: A Centennial Collection. Ed. Geoffrey M. Sill. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1994. 18-27. 

Killingsworth, M. Jimmie. Whitman's Poetry of the Body: Sexuality, Politics, and the Text. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1989. 

Martin, Robert K. The Homosexual Tradition in American Poetry. Austin: U of Texas P, 1979. 

____, ed. The Continuing Presence of Walt Whitman: The Life After the Life. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 1992. 

Miller, James E., Jr. A Critical Guide to "Leaves of Grass." Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1957. 

____. "Leaves of Grass": America's Lyric-Epic of Self and Democracy. Twayne's Masterwork Studies 92. New York: Twayne, 1992. 

Moon, Michael. Disseminating Whitman: Revision and Corporeality in "Leaves of Grass." Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1991. 

Murray, Martin G. "'Pete the Great': A Biography of Peter Doyle." Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 12 (1994): 1-51. 

Shively, Charley, ed. Drum Beats: Walt Whitman's Civil War Boy Lovers. San Francisco: Gay Sunshine, 1989. 

Whitman, Walt. The Poetry and Prose of Walt Whitman. Ed. Louis Untermeyer. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1949. 

____. Prose Works 1892. Ed. Floyd Stovall. 2 vols. New York: New York UP, 1963-1964. 

Matt Cohen

Whitman's roughly two dozen short stories and vignettes were initially published between 1841 and 1848 in news and literary papers. Whitman collected and edited nine of them for Specimen Days & Collect (1882). Many of the stories were republished, with slight alterations, during the years Whitman spent working on newspapers in New York City and Brooklyn. In style and theme the stories reflect the mass-market reading taste in the America of Whitman's youth; their relation to his later work has recently become a question of critical interest.

In many cases the stories were published under a pseudonym or anonymously, making exact identification of Whitman's authorship uncertain; there may still remain unidentified short works by Whitman. Nine of the short stories appeared first in the United States Magazine and Democratic Review, beginning with "Death in the School Room (a Fact)" in August 1841. Columbian Magazine and The Aristidean also published many of Whitman's fictional efforts. The last known short story debut was "The Shadow and the Light of a Young Man's Soul," published in June 1848 in the Union Magazine of Literature and Art. An excellent review of the complex publication history of Whitman's fiction is found in Thomas Brasher's edition of The Early Poems and the Fiction.

To some extent one can ascertain the stylistic and thematic content of Whitman's short fiction from the story titles. The sensationalism of "Death in the School Room (a Fact)" and the pathos of "Dumb Kate.—An Early Death" (1844) reflect the popular taste in magazine fiction Whitman exploited in these early tales. Many of the stories, in tune with their contemporaries, concern death and dying, apparitions, and the conversion of guilty consciences. The short fiction also treats many of the often-debated reform issues of the day, including temperance and the disciplining of children. Some of the stories, such as "The Little Sleighers. A Sketch of a Winter Morning on the Battery" (1844) are mere vignettes, reminiscent of the snatches of city life listed in Whitman's later poetry. Others, like "The Child-Ghost; a Story of the Last Loyalist" (1842), show Whitman's early patriotism and enthusiasm for American democracy. 

Some of the stories contain autobiographical elements. "My Boys and Girls" (1844), critics agree, is a reminiscence about Whitman's many brothers and sisters. "The Shadow and the Light of a Young Man's Soul" concerns a man who is forced by poverty out of the city into a rural teaching position—an experience Whitman had after the great fire of 1835 in New York City hindered his career as a printer there.

Whitman's short fiction is relatively little-studied. These stories show a journalist's sense of popular taste and reveal the early Whitman grappling with popular issues of the day. Early biographers such as Gay Wilson Allen use the stories to illustrate the progress of Whitman's adaptation to the literary marketplace of New York City, but criticize the lack of originality shown in the fiction. Paul Zweig's psychoanalytic approach sees in these stories a Whitman obsessed with his father and anxious about leaving his familial responsibilities behind. Critics continue to find the artistic gap between the early fiction and Leaves of Grass tantalizing, but recent scholarly work forgoes aesthetic judgments and attempts to show the connections between Whitman and his political and artistic contemporaries. Despite Whitman's pervasively symptomatic fictional style and subject matter, for example, he was being published in the Democratic Review along with the greatest American literary luminaries of his time. Several scholars have pointed out, for example, that Whitman borrowed from Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne in his stories; all three published in the Democratic Review. David Reynolds has made the most systematic exploration of the connections between the early stories and the concerns of the later poetry. Reynolds and other recent Whitman students emphasize the tension shown in the early fiction (and poetry) between Whitman's economic need to publish and his desire to produce literature that would be considered artful by the standards of his day.

Ultimately, the stories speak not only to Whitman's early life and artistic development, but to the literary atmosphere in which he worked and lived. The short fiction has only been touched on by critics so far, and despite Whitman's dismissal of his early publications, they are an important piece of the aesthetic puzzle Whitman represents.

Bibliography

Allen, Gay Wilson. The Solitary Singer: A Critical Biography of Walt Whitman. 1955. Rev. ed. 1967. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985.

Kaplan, Justin. Walt Whitman: A Life. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1980.

Reynolds, David S. Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography. New York: Knopf, 1995.

Whitman, Walt. The Early Poems and the Fiction. Ed. Thomas L. Brasher. New York: New York UP, 1963.

Zweig, Paul. Walt Whitman: The Making of the Poet. New York: Basic Books, 1984.

Martin Klammer

Walt Whitman's seemingly inconsistent and self-contradictory attitudes toward slavery have long been a source of critical debate. On one hand, Whitman's opposition to slavery is demonstrated in Leaves of Grass by the way in which he consistently includes African Americans in his vision of an ideal, multiracial republic and portrays them as beautiful, dignified, and intelligent. On the other hand, various Whitman texts show that he had little tolerance for abolitionism, that he thought blacks were inferior to whites, and that his opposition to the extension of slavery had little, if anything, to do with sympathy for slaves. 

Whitman's attitudes toward slavery and abolitionism can best be understood by tracing the development of his thinking in the context of the national debate over slavery from the mid-1840s until the Civil War. Whitman began his journalistic career as an ardent Free-Soiler, but within several years his poetry experiments articulated a much different and more sympathetic attitude toward slaves. Whitman held these two attitudes in unresolved tension until 1854, when national events related to slavery radicalized Northern opinion and so encouraged Whitman to publish his poetry. In the 1855 Leaves of Grass Whitman's passages on slaves and slavery proclaim a radically egalitarian vision of persons of African descent while at the same time argue for popular political positions, such as opposition to the Fugitive Slave Law. A brief review of how Whitman's attitudes evolved makes clear the significant role slavery plays in his development as a poet. 

Whitman's involvement with slavery began with his newspaper editorials on the 1846 Wilmot Proviso. The proviso, which stated that slavery was to be excluded from territory acquired in the war with Mexico, was eventually blocked by the Senate in March 1847 after rancorous sectional debate. But despite the proviso's defeat, the bill gave rise to the "free-soil" sentiment that would lead in 1848 to the formation of the Free Soil party. 

Whitman consistently supported the Wilmot Proviso and the free-soil movement, beginning with his first editorials at the Brooklyn Daily Eagle until the 1850 Compromise. In his Eagle editorials in 1846-1847 Whitman argues, as did free-soil Northerners in Congress, that the introduction of slavery into new territories would discourage, if not prohibit, whites from migrating to those areas because white labor could not economically compete with slave labor and would be "degraded" by it. In this way, Whitman's opposition to slavery was directly connected to his dreams for the settlement and expansion of democracy into the West. "The voice of the North proclaims that labor must not be degraded," Whitman writes in a 27 April 1847 editorial. "The young men of the free States must not be shut out from the new domain (where slavery does not now exist) by the introduction of an institution which will render their honorable industry no longer respectable" (Gathering 1:205-206). 

From 1846 until the Civil War Whitman consistently opposed the extension of slavery on these grounds. He did not directly criticize the institution of slavery in the South and in fact opposed abolitionism, which he considered the work of radical extremists to destroy the compact of the Union. Such attitudes were already apparent in his 1842 temperance novel, Franklin Evans, or the Inebriate. In one episode of the novel, Whitman's protagonist journeys south to a Virginia plantation where he comes to understand from a wise slave owner that, contrary to abolitionist arguments, slavery is not sinful but beneficial, a source of sustenance and happiness for slaves. Moreover, Whitman's depiction of a Creole slave woman in this episode as sexually alluring yet also violent and vengeful suggests that his attitudes about blacks were drawn largely from contemporary racist stereotypes. Whitman's seeming indifference to the plight of blacks in his journalism and early fiction reflects a standard attitude of many white Northerners, including the New York Democratic party's Barnburner faction, of which Whitman was a member. 

In 1848 Whitman became more active in the free-soil movement, serving as a local delegate to a national convention in Buffalo that August, when the Free Soil party was born, and editing a short-lived free-soil newspaper, the Brooklyn Freeman. While the Free Soil party elected only a few members to Congress that November, it succeeded in forcing the Whigs and Democrats to consider slavery as the primary issue on the national agenda. 

By 1850, however, compromises between North and South so weakened the free-soil movement that Whitman abandoned his free-soil journalism. When regional divisions cast the future of the Union in doubt, Congress passed a series of resolutions that cumulatively came to be known as the 1850 Compromise. Whitman and Free-Soilers were outraged by several of these resolutions, including the organization of some Western territories without restrictions on slavery and a stringent Fugitive Slave Law. Yet Unionist sentiment prevailed, and Whitman, who had focused much of his journalistic writing on slavery, wrote three letters to the free-soil journal National Era that fall, but was not to be heard from again for several years. 

In these same years, however, Whitman was experimenting with an altogether different voice and attitude toward slavery in his notebook poetry experiments. Begun in 1847, this poetry makes clear the vital link between Whitman's emerging sense of a poetic self and attitudes toward slaves and slavery which are startlingly unlike those of his free-soil journalism. When Whitman breaks into poetry in these notebooks, his first fragment proclaims: "I am the poet of slaves and of the masters of slaves / I am the poet of the body / I am" (Notebooks 1:67). Whitman defines his very vocation as poet in terms of slavery, leveling the differences created by slavery and claiming to represent both slaves and their masters. Further on Whitman adds: "I go with the slaves of the earth equally with the masters . . . Entering into both so that both will understand me alike" (Notebooks 1:67). Neither Whitman's radical egalitarianism nor his identification with slaves could have been anticipated by his free-soil journalism, with its focus on white labor. 

How Whitman achieved such a vision is difficult if not impossible to trace. One possibility is that Whitman's reading of Emerson, which occurred at about the same time, may have prompted Whitman toward a sense of his own divinity which he recognized as connected to the divinity of all others, including slaves. He may later have been sensitized to the plight of slaves during a four-month stint as editor of the New Orleans Crescent in 1848, when he wrote about persons of color he encountered and likely witnessed slave auctions. At any rate, by the late 1840s Whitman had established a pattern of opposing the extension of slavery as a Free-Soiler journalist while imagining persons of African descent in radically sympathetic and inclusive terms in his poetry. 

Whitman was not heard from as a journalist or a poet in the early 1850s. Yet when two national events in 1854 radically altered Northern attitudes about slavery, Whitman discovered an audience that would now be receptive both to his free-soil concerns and his new poetry about slaves. The passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in May infuriated many Northerners because the bill repealed the 1820 Missouri Compromise ban on slavery north of 3630'. Such a repeal seemed to reserve Nebraska for freedom and Kansas for slavery, violating the fragile trust between North and South that had emerged with the 1850 Compromise. Northern reaction was further galvanized a short time later when Anthony Burns, an escaped slave from Virginia, was arrested in Boston and placed under federal guard. When anger fomented by the Kansas-Nebraska bill inspired an attempt to rescue Burns in an attack on the courthouse, federal troops were called in to ensure Burns's return to his master. By June 1854 these two events ignited an explosion of antislavery sentiment in the North. Several Northern state legislatures called for the immediate repeal of both the Kansas-Nebraska Act and the Fugitive Slave Law. 

With the public mood shifting, Whitman felt liberated, perhaps even compelled, to publish his poems in 1855. In the wake of recent events, Leaves of Grass portrays both the suffering and the dignity of African Americans, seen in the present as victims of slave-catchers but envisioned in the future as partners with whites in an egalitarian democracy. In the "hounded slave" episode from "Song of Myself" (section 33), the speaker not only sympathizes with, but in fact identifies with, the fugitive slave: "I am the hounded slave, I wince at the bite of the dogs." Whitman's change of the pronoun from "He" to "I" some time earlier in his notebooks now signals a central moment in the poem as the speaker merges his identity with others in the world: "I do not ask the wounded person how he feels, I myself become the wounded person." Yet this passage also reveals how Whitman's portrayal of slaves could serve his political purposes, especially his opposition to the Fugitive Slave Law, which was based, in fact, not on sympathy for slaves but on what he felt was the unwarranted intrusion of federal authority in a local matter. 

Elsewhere in Leaves of Grass Whitman portrays African Americans with great depth and sensitivity. In the portraits of the "negro" drayman in "Song of Myself" or of the slaves at auction in "I Sing the Body Electric," Whitman celebrates African-American beauty, dignity, and strength in contrast to popular stereotypes, and he demonstrates the centrality of black persons to the democratic future of America. "Examine these limbs, red, black or white," ("I Sing," section 7) Whitman says of the auctioned slave, figuring him as emblem of a multiracial body politic. In the 1855 poem that later became "The Sleepers," Whitman gives voice to the slave's desire for vengeance which most Americans wished not to acknowledge: "I have been wronged . . . I am oppressed . . . I hate him that oppresses me, / I will either destroy him, or he shall release me" (1855 Leaves). 

After 1855 Whitman would diminish the power of these images and claims by the diffusion of focus on blacks through the addition of new poems. None of the new poems in 1856 or 1860 contain passages longer than two lines on slavery. Moreover, Whitman's prose writings in these years appear to apologize for slavery and disavow any humane commitment to slaves. In an 1857 editorial he avers that "the institution of slavery is not at all without its redeeming points" (I Sit 88), and in 1858 he editorializes: "Who believes that the Whites and Blacks can ever amalgamate in America? Or who wishes it to happen?" (I Sit 90). 

Whitman's seeming change of heart must be understood in light of the effect of historical circumstance on his fundamental understanding of slavery. Whitman consistently believed that slavery was to be judged according to its threats to democracy. In the late 1840s Whitman's free-soil writings respond to the threat to democracy posed by the extension of slavery into the West. By the late 1850s Whitman's antislavery rhetoric turns conciliatory in response to the threat to the very existence of the Union. 

Yet these political positions do not explain the eloquent empathy in his passages about blacks in the 1855 Leaves of Grass. One way to make sense of Whitman's seeming inconsistencies on slavery is to recognize that his journalism addressed the realities of the present, while his poetry pointed toward his hopes for America's democratic future. Whitman writes in the 1855 Preface concerning the great poet: "As he sees the farthest he has the most faith" (Complete 9). In this way Whitman's poetry about slaves captured what his politics could not, a faith in the humanity and dignity of African Americans and in their rightful place as free and equal citizens in the United States. 

Bibliography

Allen, Gay Wilson. The Solitary Singer: A Critical Biography of Walt Whitman. 1955. Rev. ed. 1967. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985. 

Foner, Eric. Politics and Ideology in the Age of the Civil War. New York: Oxford UP, 1980. 

Klammer, Martin. Whitman, Slavery, and the Emergence of "Leaves of Grass." University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 1995. 

McPherson, James M. Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era. New York: Oxford UP, 1988. 

Rubin, Joseph Jay. The Historic Whitman. University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 1973. 

Thomas, M. Wynn. The Lunar Light of Whitman's Poetry. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1987. 

____. "Walt Whitman and the Dreams of Labor." Walt Whitman: The Centennial Essays. Ed. Ed Folsom. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 1994. 133-152. 

Whitman, Walt. Complete Poetry and Collected Prose. Ed. Justin Kaplan. New York: Library of America, 1982. 

____. The Early Poems and the Fiction. Ed. Thomas L. Brasher. New York: New York UP, 1963. 

____. The Gathering of the Forces. Ed. Cleveland Rodgers and John Black. 2 vols. New York: Putnam's, 1920. 

____. I Sit and Look Out: Editorials from the Brooklyn Daily Times. Ed. Emory Holloway and Vernolian Schwarz. New York: Columbia UP, 1932. 

____. Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts. Ed. Edward F. Grier. 6 vols. New York: New York UP, 1984.

James E., Jr. Miller

In the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, "Song of Myself" came first in the series of twelve untitled poems, dominating the volume not only by its sheer bulk, but also by its brilliant display of Whitman's innovative techniques and original themes. Whitman left the poem in the lead position in the 1856 edition and gave it its first title, "Poem of Walt Whitman, an American," shortened to "Walt Whitman" in the third edition of 1860. By the time Whitman had shaped Leaves of Grass into its final structure in 1881, he left the poem (its lines now grouped into 52 sections) in a lead position, preceded only by the epigraph-like cluster "Inscriptions" and the programmatic "Starting from Paumanok." 

"Song of Myself" portrays (and mythologizes) Whitman's poetic birth and the journey into knowing launched by that "awakening." But the "I" who speaks is not alone. His camerado, the "you" addressed in the poem's second line, is the reader, placed on shared ground with the poet, a presence throughout much of the journey. As the poem opens, the reader encounters the poet "observing a spear of summer grass" and extending an invitation to his soul. He vows to "permit to speak at every hazard, / Nature without check with original energy" (section 1). Leaving "[c]reeds and schools" behind, he goes "to the bank by the wood to become undisguised and naked" (sections 1 and 2), clearly preparing himself for the soul's visit of section 5, which dramatizes the transfiguring event that launches the poet on his lifelong quest. 

This event may best be described as the organic union of the poet's body and soul, the latter appearing first in the disembodied "hum" of a "valvèd voice." In highly charged erotic imagery, the soul settles his head "athwart" the poet's hips, "gently" turns over upon him, parting his shirt from his "bosom-bone" and plunging his "tongue" to the poet's "bare-stript heart"—while reaching simultaneously to feel his "beard" and to hold his "feet." In short, the soul with his phallic tongue (instrument of his "valvèd voice") penetrates directly to the poet's heart, bestowing there, without aid of mind or "reason," the teeming sperm of life-affirming intuitive knowledge, in effect the foundation for transcendent self-assurance that will sustain the poet on his search. Held in the trance-like grip of the soul from beard to feet, the poet suddenly awakens to the "peace and knowledge that pass all the argument of the earth," a fragmentary but certain knowledge: "that the spirit of God is the brother of my own," "that all the men ever born are also my brothers, and the women my sisters and lovers," "that a kelson of the creation is love." These sweeping affirmations trail off into what seems a heap of incoherent images—"limitless" "leaves," "brown ants," "elder, mullein and poke-weed." In effect, the incomprehensible multiplicity of nature, in its smallest manifestations, is also embraced in the all-inclusive affirmations of God and brotherhood. 

As the awakening portrayed in section 5 has prepared the poet for a new kind of knowledge, section 6 launches him on his journey into knowing, beginning with exploration of a child's question, " What is the grass? " This phase of the journey extends through section 32, providing ample occasion for the poet to establish many of the subjects and themes that are addressed elsewhere in Leaves of Grass. From the focus on the grass imagery in section 6, the poet moves on to the theme of "en-masse," in sections 7-16. He becomes Walt Whitman, American, roaming the continent, celebrating everyday scenes of ordinary life. He presents himself (in section 13) as the "caresser of life wherever moving . . . Absorbing all to myself and for this song." This movement rises in a crescendo to the extended catalogue of section 15, with its rapid-fire snapshots of American types and scenes. 

Moving away from American diversity in section 17, the poet turns to human commonality—to "the grass that grows wherever the land is and the water is." In sections 18-24, the poet proceeds to collapse traditional discriminations, celebrating "conquer'd and slain persons" (section 18) along with victors, the "righteous" along with the "wicked"—extending his embrace to include outcasts and outlaws. But increasingly his focus fixes on the equality of body and soul and ways of rescuing the body from its inferior status. He turns to himself and his own body, presenting in section 24 a nude portrait of "Walt Whitman, a kosmos," providing a catalogue, meticulously metaphoric, for every item of his anatomy ("Firm masculine colter," "duplicate eggs"). 

Throughout sections 18-32 of "Song of Myself," the poet celebrates the erotic dimension of all the senses, but he turns to the miraculous touch in section 28: "Is this then a touch? quivering me to a new identity?" In some of the most surrealistic lines in all of Leaves, the poet proceeds to portray himself in a scene of self-induced sexual arousal to the climactic point of orgasm. Section 29 presents the poet's tender farewell to complicit touch, while sections 30-32 explore the knowledge bestowed by the experience: "What is less or more than a touch?" Having experienced and affirmed the most intense of physical ecstasies, the poet contemplates becoming one with the animals: he mounts and races a "gigantic beauty of a stallion." But he ends by "resign[ing]" the stallion, realizing that deeper knowledge lies in wait. 

Adjusted to his new identity bestowed by touch, he is now ready for the second major phase of his journey. Section 33 begins with new and higher affirmations: "Space and Time! now I see it is true, what I guess'd at, / What I guess'd when I loaf'd on the grass." In this longest section of "Song of Myself," the poet feels the exhilaration of being no longer bound by the ties of space and time: he is "afoot with" his "vision." He feels able, indeed, to range back and forth over all time, and to soar like a meteor out into space. But in one of the strangest reversals in "Song of Myself," this peak of exaltation in section 33 glides into its opposite as the poet begins to identify more and more closely with the outcasts and rejected: "I am the man, I suffer'd, I was there." He becomes the "old-faced infants and the lifted sick," the mother "condemned for a witch," "the hounded slave." A note of despair sounds louder and louder through sections 34-37, until at the end the poet becomes a homeless beggar. Such despair, unfelt during similar identifications with outcasts in sections 17-20, suggests that the poet has moved obscurely beyond the knowledge of his previous phase. 

Section 38, opening with strong rejection of the role of beggar he has assumed ("Enough! enough! enough!") suddenly resets the direction for the poet on his journey: "I discover myself on the verge of a usual mistake." Although he is never quite explicit about the basis for what he knows, he says that he "remember[s] now" and resumes "the overstaid fraction." He suggests metaphorically that the nature of this "overstaid fraction" is contained in the resurrection that followed (or follows) crucifixion, in lines implying humankind's identification with the universalized experience of Christ: "The grave of rock multiplies what has been confided to it, or to any graves, / Corpses rise, gashes heal, fastenings roll from me." Thus out of his despair, the poet emerges "replenish'd with supreme power," a power that reaches beyond identification with the downtrodden and rejected, a power indeed to bring "help for the sick as they pant on their backs" as well as "yet more needed help" for "strong upright men" (section 41). 

This stage, in which the poet is confident in his transcendent power, extends through the closing sections, 38-49. In section 43 the poet affirms all religious faiths ("worship ancient and modern and all between ancient and modern"), and in section 44 he celebrates his place in evolutionary theory: both religion and science contain the seeds that provide the source for his supreme power. 

The reader learns in section 46 that the poet's is a "perpetual journey," that he has "no chair, no church, no philosophy," that he cannot travel the road for "you," but "you must travel it for yourself." In sections 48-49, he again affirms the body equal with the soul, as he affirms the identity of selfhood and Godhead. And similarly, he proclaims death and life so inseparably bonded as to render one unimaginable without the other. Near the end of section 49, the poet appears to give up further effort to convey in words what he knows and turns to the natural world for help: "O suns—O grass of graves—O perpetual transfers and promotions, / If you do not say any thing how can I say any thing?" 

In section 50 the poet seems to be emerging from a trance-like state similar to that he entered in section 5: "Wrench'd and sweaty—calm and cool then my body becomes, / I sleep—I sleep long." Coming out of his deep sleep, the poet stammers almost incoherently: "I do not know it . . . it is a word unsaid, / It is not in any dictionary, utterance, symbol" (emphasis added). Readers may guess that "it" refers to the ineffable transcendent meaning of the poet's experience on his dream-like journey. That meaning can be conveyed only by oblique analogy: "Something it swings on more than the earth I swing on, / To it the creation is the friend whose embracing awakes me" (emphasis added). In the end the poet addresses those "brothers and sisters" first evoked in section 5, trying to hit upon a word that might convey some notion, however inadequately, of the transcendent meaning discovered on his journey: "It is not chaos or death—it is form, union, plan—it is eternal life—it is Happiness." 

As the poet's camerado from the beginning, "you" the reader come to the fore in the two concluding sections (51-52) of the poem. The poet does not deny but dismisses his "contradictions," asserting, "I am large, I contain multitudes." On beginning his journey (section 1) he promised he would "permit to speak at every hazard, / Nature without check with original energy"; similarly, at the end, he describes himself as "not a bit tamed," as "untranslatable," as one who sounds his "barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world." His journey over and done, he prepares for departure, bequeathing himself "to the dirt to grow from the grass" he loves, and tells the reader: "If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles." To the end, the poet insists that his transcendental knowledge gained on his spiritual journey cannot be embodied in words, but that nevertheless it can be conveyed indirectly. Readers will come to "know," not because he has conveyed his meaning abstractly, but rather because he has come to "filter and fibre" their blood. At the end, the poet admonishes his readers to "keep encouraged" and continue their search for him, promising: "I stop somewhere waiting for you." 

Like most poetic works of genius, "Song of Myself" has defied attempts to provide a definitive interpretation. In a very real sense, no reading of the poem has clarified the sum of its many mysteries. Critics have provided useful readings, concentrating on one or another dimension of the poem: Carl F. Strauch on the solidity of a fundamental structure, Randall Jarrell on the brilliance of individual lines, James E. Miller, Jr., on the portrayal of an "inverted mystical experience," Richard Chase on the often-overlooked comic aspects, Malcolm Cowley on the affinities with the inspired prophecies of antiquity, Robert K. Martin on the resemblance to a "dream vision based on sexual [essentially homosexual] experience." In addition, Edwin Haviland Miller has provided a guide through the various readings in Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself": A Mosaic of Interpretations (1989). In the final analysis, readers must find their own way through "Song of Myself." They will know that they are on the right path when they begin to feel something of the "great power" that Ralph Waldo Emerson felt in 1855 (Whitman 1326).   

Bibliography

Chari, V.K. Whitman in the Light of Vedantic Mysticism. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1964. 

Cohen, B. Bernard. Whitman in Our Season: A Symposium. Hartford: Transcendental Books, 1971. 

Kummings, Donald D., ed. Approaches to Teaching Whitman's "Leaves of Grass." New York: MLA, 1990. 

Martin, Robert K. The Homosexual Tradition in American Poetry. Austin: U of Texas P, 1979. 

Miller, Edwin Haviland. Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself": A Mosaic of Interpretations. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 1989. 

Miller, James E., Jr. "Leaves of Grass": America's Lyric-Epic of Self and Democracy. New York: Twayne, 1992. 

____, ed. Whitman's "Song of Myself": Origin, Growth, Meaning. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1964. 

Whitman, Walt. Complete Poetry and Collected Prose. Ed. Justin Kaplan. New York: Library of America, 1982. 

Karen Wolfe

This poem was written for the fortieth National Industrial Exposition of the American Institute and recited in New York by Whitman on 7 September 1871. The poem was first printed alone in a pamphlet by Roberts Brothers with the title After All, Not to Create Only in 1871 and appeared under the same title at the end of the 1872 Leaves of Grass. In 1876 it appeared in TwoRivulets under the current title and was prefaced for the Centennial Exposition at Philadelphia although Whitman was not asked to read there. It was retained in the 1881 Leaves of Grass, with the addition of the opening parenthetical expression and the deletion of nineteen satirical lines and numerous dashes, capitalizations, and other alterations. 

Whitman was solicited by the American Institute Board of Managers a month prior to the event. The Institute offered him $100 payment and traveling expenses and guaranteed publication in the "metropolitan press" (With Walt Whitman 1:326-329). Whitman accepted the invitation four days later. The poem was reprinted in twelve newspapers, and several editorials appeared on the day of or soon after the reading. As was his tendency, Whitman probably authored several of them. The New York Tribune published excerpts, and soon after, a parody by Bayard Taylor. 

Critical attention has given this poem a secondary place. It is true that it does not bear multiple readings. The fault does not lie in construction or in vocabulary, but perhaps in its origin. The poem was written in a month's time, and was intended to be spoken and deserves to be treated so. As an oration it carries cadences in the transition of language that are missed in the silent reading. From the opening section's grand style to the third section's arrogant sales pitch, to the seventh section's passionate sincerity, Whitman takes full advantage of his subject, industrial civilization, and his object of elevating the common man based on this societal advance. 

In The Solitary Singer, Allen calls it a "pathetic episode" which was "unfortunate in every respect" (435). In the Comprehensive Reader's Edition, Blodgett and Bradley note, "it remains one of WW's comparative failures because it does not surmount its own rhetoric" (196n). Whitman himself, in 1889, dubs the occasion "memorandum" and of the Board of Managers' tender of thanks says, "'magnificent original poem' is putting it on pretty thick" (With Walt Whitman 4:484). 

The poem's purpose is much like that of Democratic Vistas or "A Song for Occupations," though in Democratic Vistas Whitman acknowledges the people's "crude defective streaks" (Prose Works 2:379). In comparison, the laborer in "Song of the Exposition" is likened unto God and as a worker becomes the theme the Muse should inspire. A few years later Whitman would write "Song of the Universal," which expresses much the same idea, compacted, and speaks directly to the Muse. 

The Muse in "Song of the Exposition" approaches the scene at the beck of Whitman. His treatment of her, as it is with most of the "sacred" things of the Old World, is irreverent, though not derogatory. He conveys her image of arrival to the audience with the famous, "She's here, install'd amid the kitchen ware!" (section 3). Contrast this to the reverence he displays when describing the people and works of America, "the People themselves . . . elate, secure in peace" (section 6). 

Whitman employs his catalogues in this poem to demonstrate the diversity of the present, in honor of and exampled by the exhibition, and also to demarcate the Old World from the New. In the switching from old to new is also the shift in tone, so that the sacred mountains of Greece are to be leased and the muse may take up residence in the "great cathedral sacred industry" (section 5). After this shift, in the fifth section, the poem becomes more and more intent and loses much of its potential in overstatement. 

Section seven is one of the better sections, in which Whitman's years spent nursing wounded Civil War soldiers infuses his remarks with a true passion—"Away with themes of war! away with war itself!" This directive is accompanied by one to be rid of old romance, so that the Muse will inspire songs of society and progress and the laboring life. 

The concluding stanza, like the opening, is a poetic contrast to the dogma of the body of the poem, and alone is purpose enough to justify the final inclusion of the poem in the canon: material production and profit are but the manifestation of the spiritual growth of the nation.   

Bibliography

Allen, Gay Wilson. The Solitary Singer: A Critical Biography of Walt Whitman. 1955. Rev. ed. 1967. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985. 

Blodgett, Harold W., and Sculley Bradley, eds. Leaves of Grass: Comprehensive Reader's Edition. By Walt Whitman. New York: New York UP, 1965. 

Kennedy, William Sloane. The Fight of a Book for the World. West Yarmouth, Mass.: Stonecroft, 1926. 

Reynolds, David S. Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography. New York: Knopf, 1995. 

Traubel, Horace. With Walt Whitman in Camden. Vol. 1. Boston: Small, Maynard, 1906; Vol. 4. Ed. Sculley Bradley. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1953. 

Whitman, Walt. The Correspondence. Ed. Edwin Haviland Miller. Vol. 2. New York: New York UP, 1961. 

____. Leaves of Grass: A Textual Variorum of the Printed Poems. Ed. Sculley Bradley, Harold W. Blodgett, Arthur Golden, and William White. Vol. 3. New York: New York UP, 1980. 

____. Prose Works 1892. Ed. Floyd Stovall. 2 vols. New York: New York UP, 1963-1964. 

George and David Drews Hutchinson

Specimen Days first appeared in 1882 within a volume entitled Specimen Days & Collect, published by Rees Welsh and Company in Philadelphia. Composed in 1881 largely out of notes, sketches, and essays written at various stages of the poet's life from the Civil War on, it is the closest thing to a conventional autobiography Whitman ever published. 

The largest and arguably the most important work of Whitman's old age (except for the reordering of Leaves of Grass during the same period), the book deserves attention as more than a source of information or for its moving descriptions of the poet's experiences in the Civil War, which have in the past been the chief sources of its interest to scholars. The book attempts to link Whitman's life history to national and natural history while presenting itself as the casual reminiscence of a man approaching death. It therefore resembles what students of aging term "life review." 

The volume was provoked in part by a trip to Whitman's childhood haunts and the family graveyards on Long Island that the poet took with Richard Maurice Bucke in 1881, in connection with Bucke's aim to write his biography. The text is presented as a series of brief, titled fragments, almost like a scrapbook, and is divisible into five sections or "acts" framed by introductory and concluding remarks. The sections cover the author's genealogy and early life, the Civil War, Whitman's recuperation from a stroke during a few months spent on a farm near Philadelphia, a brief trip to Canada and then another trip west in 1879-1880, and finally the author's thoughts about a variety of earlier authors such as Emerson, Carlyle, and Poe. 

Many of the fragments that compose the book had been published previously in periodicals, and most of the Civil War section had formed a book entitled Memoranda During the War (1875-1876). By piecing the fragments together and bathing them in an informal tone of reminiscence, Whitman creates a casual mood that conveys authenticity yet veils the seriousness of his structure and the carefully constructed nature of his pose. The rhetorical effect is thus to make Whitman's prophetic interpretation of his life all the more convincing, because apparently unstudied and "natural." 

Throughout, Whitman emphasizes that his personal history has been shaped by geography and history, which in turn are the results of cosmic, natural processes. At the same time, he implies that he was in just the right places at the right moments to experience the epic transformations of the nineteenth century. The result is a kind of justification of his life course as the author accommodates himself to his physical debility and the approach of death—and strives to ensure his place in the continuum of American democratic development. 

Specimen Days presents the formation of a self through participation in communal and even ecological process; unlike most confessional autobiographies in the Western tradition, Whitman's emphasizes the dependence of individual identity upon community identity, and thus upon historical placement. Even in the early genealogical portion of the book (the conventional starting point for biographies of the day) the poet links his family experience to the public experience of the nation as a whole. Meditating on the succession of generations buried in the Whitman and Van Velsor cemeteries on Long Island, representing a lineage going back to the first European settlement of the area, he also describes the setting in nationalistic terms, drawing attention to a grove of old black walnuts, "the sons or grandsons, no doubt, of black-walnuts during or before 1776" (Specimen Days 6). 

Similarly, when narrating the key experiences of his early life, Whitman emphasizes such events as learning to set type under a man who remembered the American Revolution, being lifted up as a child and kissed by Lafayette a half century after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, and experiencing the growth of New York City—which for Whitman epitomizes the emergence of modern America. Throughout the book one finds such links between geography and historical epochs. Thus the Civil War memoranda dramatize how Whitman participated in the nation's terrifying rite of passage. At the same time, he refers to the conflict in metaphors of natural catastrophe. The will of "the people" for Union, for example, he describes as a stratum of bedrock "capable at any time of bursting all surface bonds, and breaking out like an earthquake" (25). The fatefulness of the war implies the fatefulness of his own life course at the defining moment for both the poet and the nation. Moreover, much of the Civil War section is composed of diary notes, thus forcing the reader's participation in the construction of the narrative. We are invited to discover the design supposedly immanent in Whitman's life history—a brilliant strategy not only for making readers experience the war as part of a common world continuous with the present but also for making us believe the poet's career has been written in the book of fate, that he was destined to be the bard of the nation at the turning point of its history. Whitman's assertions that Leaves of Grass "revolves around the Four Years' War" (Comprehensive 750) are connected with this self-justifying function. But they also reveal how the very process of composing Specimen Days was part of his own process of accommodating himself to a new "self"—that of the half-paralytic, made so, he liked to assert, by the blows the war experience delivered to his own body. 

Following the Civil War section, Whitman presents a series of meditative descriptions of the natural world written when he lived at the Stafford Farm on Timber Creek, in part attempting to recover from a paralytic stroke. Here we follow the change in the bodily rhythms of the poet as he puts himself in "rapport" with trees, water, and clear skies. He describes the elements of the natural world around him, but also his own physical immersion in that world, whether bathing in the stream or "wrestling" with trees in exercises he invented for physical therapy. Inasmuch as this section of the narrative begins in May 1876, as Linck Johnson has suggested, Whitman symbolically connects his own rejuvenation with that of the nation in the centennial celebrations. This explains a ten-year gap in the narrative between the end of the war and the centennial year. The decade 1865-1875 was very lonely and depressing for the poet, not easy to integrate into the story he is trying to construct of his life course and the nation's.

Finally Whitman emerges into the public world again, experiencing city life, sailing up the Hudson to John Burroughs's home, and then taking a trip to Denver. The notes on the trip west, when Whitman first crossed the Great Plains and saw the Rocky Mountains, balance the earlier notes concerning his youth in New York and suggest the poet's projected relationship to the next generation of American bards. The poet envisions the new American poets emerging from the geography of the trans-Mississippi West to produce a literature "altogether our own, without a trace or taste of Europe's soil, reminiscence, technical letter or spirit" (Specimen Days 219). The Western poets to come will realize the prophetic implications of Whitman's own life's work. 

This section also seeks to ground the chronological development of the nation in geographical features. The immensity of the mountains and rivers themselves match, for Whitman, the immensity of the democratic experiment; and what the Mediterranean was to early Europe the poet believes the Mississippi is to the new democratic epoch of the United States. This relationship between geography, geological scales of time, and human history further suggests the fit Whitman strives to make between interlocking personal, national, and cosmic cycles in his life story. 

Ultimately the narrative of Specimen Days returns us to Camden and meditations on intellectual or literary predecessors and contemporaries—Thomas Carlyle, Elias Hicks, Emerson, Longfellow, Poe, Whittier, and Bryant. Whitman stresses particularly the old age and death of these men, in addition to their contributions to the tradition with which he identifies. In this way he incorporates himself into a cultural continuum and at the same time models his own pose for his declining years. Moreover, he once again places individual identity amidst the process of nature. He asks, for example, whether Thomas Carlyle (one of Whitman's early models) does not remain "an identity still," though chemically dissolved, "perhaps now wafted in space among those stellar systems, which, suggestive and limitless as they are, merely edge more limitless, far more suggestive systems?" (253). Such meditations are, in part, a means of bolstering the faith of the "good gray poet" in the integrity of his own identity and in its immortality. 

Specimen Days is, then, a new form of autobiography shaped in part by new challenges to the aging self brought on by rapid modernization and swift transformations of society that have characterized the industrializing and post-industrial period. For all its emphasis on memory and continuity, it is a peculiarly "modern" book. 

The key to this deceptively informal and colloquial text may lie in what recent students of aging have to say about the uses of reminiscence in modern societies. Reminiscences, unlike histories, convey a rich sense of individual lives as components of larger social and historical processes; they create a complex identification with the world held in common with others both alive and dead, a deep sense of interconnectedness with other forms of being. Reflecting on Specimen Days, one comes to see how such interconnectedness is less a natural given than a creative achievement of self-making and of human desire.  

Bibliography

Aarnes, William. "Withdrawal and Resumption: Whitman and Society in the Last Two Parts of Specimen Days." Studies in the American Renaissance. Ed. Joel Myerson. Boston: Twayne, 1982. 401-432. 

Allen, Gay Wilson. The Solitary Singer: A Critical Biography of Walt Whitman. 1955. Rev. ed. 1967. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985. 

Erkkila, Betsy. Whitman the Political Poet. New York: Oxford UP, 1989. 

Hutchinson, George B. "Life Review and the Common World in Whitman's Specimen Days." South Atlantic Review 52 (1987): 3-23. 

Johnson, Linck C. "The Design of Walt Whitman's Specimen Days." Walt Whitman Review 21 (1975): 3-14. 

Kazin, Alfred. Introduction. Specimen Days. By Walt Whitman. Ed. Lance Hidy. Boston: Godine, 1971. xix-xxiv. 

Price, Kenneth M. "Whitman on Other Writers: Controlled 'Graciousness' in Specimen Days." Emerson Society Quarterly 26 (1980): 79-87. 

Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass: Comprehensive Reader's Edition. Ed. Harold W. Blodgett and Sculley Bradley. New York: New York UP, 1965. 

Arnie Kantrowitz

Harry Stafford was only eighteen years old in 1876 when he took a job as an errand boy at the Camden New Republic. He was a moody adolescent, given to fits of brooding and impulsive behavior. Walt Whitman, then 57 and still recovering from his stroke of 1873, came to the office to work on the Centennial edition of Leaves of Grass, and the two began one of the most intense relationships of the poet's life.

Stafford took Whitman to visit his parents at White Horse Farm, near Kirkwood, New Jersey. The farm adjoined Timber Creek (now called Laurel Springs), and Whitman made his way down to the creek to regenerate his health by wrestling with birch saplings and taking "Adamic" mud baths. He also found time to meet there with a Stafford farm hand named Ed Cattell, but he kept those encounters secret from Stafford.

Stafford and Whitman slept together in the same top floor bedroom, and when they traveled together Whitman referred to him as "my nephew" and insisted that they be accommodated in the same bed (Whitman 68). Whitman's friend John Burroughs complained that they "cut up like two boys" (qtd. in Whitman 79, n19), and he found their frolicsome behavior annoying. The Stafford family, however, were pleased to see the well-known man act as mentor to their son and gladly forgave any bad manners, chalking them up to artistic temperament. They hung a picture of the poet on their sitting room wall.

Despite the frolicking, the relationship was a stormy one. They quarreled frequently, and several times Stafford returned a friendship ring given to him by Whitman. Stafford wrote that there was "something wanting to compleete [sic] our friendship" (qtd. in Shively 143), perhaps meaning sexual relations. At another time, he wrote of wanting to buy a suit of clothes like Whitman's so he could earn the admiration of his friends. He also wrote, "I am thinking of what I am shielding, I want to try and make a man of myself" (qtd. in Miller 6), perhaps referring to guilt about homosexuality or simply to immaturity.

The nature of their bond remains mysterious, and critics have interpreted it as everything from asexual and paternal to erotic and promiscuous. Whitman seems to have been less ambivalent. He wrote in his notebooks of their peaceful times together and of his dismay at Stafford's mercurial anxiety. At one point, he wrote of his gratitude for Stafford's help in his medical recovery, declaring, " you, my darling boy, are the central figure of them all " (Whitman 215).

Stafford went from one job to another until he returned to the family farm. He and Whitman remained close until Stafford married Eva Westcott in 1884, after which the poet visited occasionally. When he died, Whitman left Stafford his silver watch, originally intended for Peter Doyle.  

Bibliography

Allen, Gay Wilson. The Solitary Singer: A Critical Biography of Walt Whitman. 1955. Rev. ed. 1967. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985.

Callow, Philip. From Noon to Starry Night: A Life of Walt Whitman. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1992.

Kaplan, Justin. Walt Whitman: A Life. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1980.

Miller, Edwin Haviland. Introduction. The Correspondence. By Walt Whitman. Ed. Miller. Vol. 3. New York: New York UP, 1964. 1–9.

Shively, Charley. Calamus Lovers: Walt Whitman's Working Class Camerados. San Francisco: Gay Sunshine, 1987.

Whitman, Walt. The Correspondence. Ed. Edwin Haviland Miller. Vol. 3. New York: New York UP, 1964.

Andrew C. Higgins

John Addington Symonds, a prominent biographer, literary critic, and poet in Victorian England, was in his time most famous as the author of the seven-volume history The Renaissance in Italy. But in the smaller circles of the emerging upper-class English homosexual community, he was also well known as a writer of homoerotic poetry and a pioneer in the study of homosexuality, or sexual inversion as it was then known.

After receiving his B.A. degree from Oxford, Symonds became a fellow of Magdalen College in 1862. However, within a short time charges of homosexuality were leveled against him. Symonds, though cleared of the charges, was forced to leave. Soon after this he began his career as an independent scholar and reviewer, and over the next thirty years produced studies of Dante, Shelley, Shakespeare, Michelangelo, various other Renaissance figures, and Walt Whitman.

In 1891 Symonds published A Problem in Modern Ethics, which explored the notion of sexual inversion. This work gave him his first widespread exposure as a homosexual. He was subsequently sought out by the young psychologist Havelock Ellis to write a scientific exploration of homosexuality. The work, titled Sexual Inversion, was first published in Germany in 1896, and a year later in England. Symonds, however, had died in Rome on 19 April 1893, the same day on which his biography of Walt Whitman was published in London.

Symonds first read Whitman in 1865, and began corresponding with him six years later. His most famous letter was written in August of 1890 wherein, after years of indirect questioning, Symonds directly asked Whitman about the homosexual content of the "Calamus" poems. This prompted Whitman's famous reply in which he denied the "morbid inferences" (Whitman 282) and, as way of proof, claimed to have fathered six children, apparently unaware that Symonds himself had fathered four. Whitman's fantastic paternal claim has since been the source of many a wild goose chase on the part of Whitman biographers intent on proving the poet's heterosexuality. Critics who acknowledge Whitman's homosexual leanings have also given this letter much thought, offering a range of reasons for its tone and exaggeration, from Whitman's concern about his public image and literary reputation to his hostility to Symonds's rigid conception of sexuality.  

Bibliography

Grosskurth, Phyllis. John Addington Symonds. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1964.

Symonds, John Addington, Jr. The Letters of John Addington Symonds. Ed. Herbert M. Schueller and Robert L. Peters. 3 vols. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1967–1969.

____. Memoirs of John Addington Symonds. Ed. Phyllis Grosskurth. New York: Random House, 1984.

____. Walt Whitman: A Study. 1893. New York: Dutton, 1906.

Whitman, Walt. Selected Letters of Walt Whitman. Ed. Edwin Haviland Miller. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 1990.

David Breckenridge Donlon

Thayer and Eldridge was a Boston publishing firm responsible for the third edition of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass (1860). The firm also published Echoes of Harper's Ferry (1860), by James Redpath, and William Douglas O'Connor's Harrington (1860), as well as other abolitionist books and pamphlets. 

When the publishers, who saw Whitman's poetry as consistent with their politics, learned the New York firm Fowler and Wells (printers of the 1855 and 1856 volumes of Leaves of Grass) had severed its relationship with Whitman, they composed a letter imploring the poet to allow them to publish his work. According to William Wilde Thayer's unpublished autobiography (1892), the letter was drafted by Thayer and approved by his partner, Charles W. Eldridge. Whitman readily agreed. 

Whitman oversaw all the details of the printing himself with little interference from Thayer and Eldridge. His letters show that his plans for the book met with skepticism from the printers at first because of its idiosyncratic design, with multiple type-faces and illustrations. But like the poet's two previous editions, the Thayer and Eldridge publication showed that Whitman's ability as a designer was nearly as great as his poetic genius, and even the taciturn Boston printers were won over in the end. 

According to Thayer's account, Whitman's stereotype plates cost $800, apparently the highest figure Thayer and Eldridge ever paid for plates. The poet was to receive a ten percent royalty on the sales of the book. The book was first issued in May, and by July the publishers announced that they expected a second printing to sell out in a month's time, proposing that the third printing be split between a cheaper paperback and a deluxe hardbound edition. 

Buoyed by his publisher's enthusiasm, Whitman planned a new volume of poems, Banner at Day-Break, which Thayer and Eldridge advertised in November. But by December the expectation of prolonged hostilities between the North and South dried up the capital for investments, and Thayer and Eldridge, overextended and victimized by poor business dealings, declared bankruptcy. Neither Whitman's new volume nor the planned third issue of the 1860 Leaves of Grass ever came to fruition. 

After the collapse of the publishing firm, Thayer drifted out of publishing and became a newspaper editor in the Midwest and West, remaining a committed activist and republican. Eldridge maintained a friendship with Whitman for many years, and in fact helped the poet secure his position in the army paymaster's office in Washington, D.C., during the war. 

Bibliography

Allen, Gay Wilson. The Solitary Singer: A Critical Biography of Walt Whitman. 1955. Rev. ed. 1967. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985. 

Callow, Phillip. From Noon to Starry Night: A Life of Walt Whitman. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1992. 

Thayer, William Wilde. "Autobiography of William Wilde Thayer." Unpublished manuscript, 1892. Library of Congress, Manuscript Division.

Harold Aspiz

Untitled in the first edition, called "Poem of The Child That Went Forth, and Always Goes Forth, Forever and Forever" in 1856, and grouped in the "Leaves of Grass" cluster in 1860 and 1867, the poem received its present title in 1871. Successive revisions improved its style but probably lessened its emotional impact. 

Called by Whitman "the most innocent thing I ever did" (Traubel 157) and by Edwin Haviland Miller "one of the most sensitive lyrics in the language and one of the most astute diagnoses of the emergent self" (27-28), this 39-line poem is a retrospective view describing the absorption of everything the poem's child beholds. Each sensation becomes "part of" the child (a phrase repeated six times) and by implication foreshadows his maturation into the Whitman poet-persona. 

Sandwiched between the poem's opening assertion that each experience "became part of" the child and the closing line's recapitulation of the same idea, a compact catalogue records an astounding four dozen metaphorically-charged images or sounds that the child absorbs (in a phrase deleted in later editions) "with wonder or pity or love or dread" (1855 Leaves). His development is shown objectively by interlinked patterns of space, colors, passing time, and social phenomena; subjectively by his developing cognitive powers. 

Coincidentally or not, the poem illustrates the phrenological formula for educating the superior child by cultivating its powers of observing all surrounding phenomena. "The inductive method of studying nature, namely, by observing facts and ascending through analogous facts up to the laws that govern them is the only way to arrive at correct conclusions" (Spurzheim 16-17). The young child progressively observes a colorful array of plant and animal life, including the grass, "early lilacs," the ovoid "white and red morning-glories" (corresponding to the glorious morning of his world), young farmyard animals, and—in language suggesting the intersection of his objective and subjective worlds—fish "curiously" suspended in "the beautiful curious liquid." In an intimation of good and evil, he views the passing spectacle of children and adults. The statement that "all the changes of city and country" became "part of him" signals his growing powers of cognition. 

The poem's second half tests the child's cognitive powers. Whitman was aware of the phrenological principles that a child's character is basically formed by the blending of the physical and mental characteristics of its parents and by its familial nurture. These principles also state that great poets are descended from gifted mothers—hence the poem's eugenically significant statement that the child's parents "became part of him." Lines 22-25 are sometimes read as literal portraits of Whitman's parents, but the mild, sweet-smelling matriarch resembles the idealized mother figures in Whitman's poems and the "strong, self-sufficient, manly" father is not demonstrably Walter Whitman, Senior. In phrenological terms, the father's aggressive traits endow the child with the self-confidence needed to balance the gentler traits inherited from the mother. 

The growing child's innocence—his perceptions and his "yearning and swelling heart"—is threatened by "The doubts of day-time and the doubts of night-time." His questionings are not resolved, but his departure from home, through the bustling city, affords him auguries of divinity: views of sunset "[s]hadows, aureola, and mist" and the "strata of color'd clouds, the long bar of maroon-tint away solitary by itself, the spread of purity it lies motionless in." (These luminous tints complement the pastels of the child's earlier sightings.) The final image of the "horizon's edge . . . salt marsh and shore mud" mingles metaphors of land and sea, suggesting the man-child's initiation into the mysteries of life and death. 

The poem's ending repeats the idea that this child who "will always go forth every day" has been molded by his absorptions. The first published version ends with the (deleted) line: "And these become [part] of him or her that peruses them now" (1855 Leaves), implying that the poem can recapture the child's wonder world for every reader. Although the poem's child-persona is apparently an isolated observer, Whitman's musical and sensuous rendering of its observations has kept the poem perennially fresh. 

Bibliography

Aspiz, Harold. "Educating the Kosmos: 'There Was a Child Went Forth.'" American Quarterly 18 (1966): 655-666. 

____. Walt Whitman and the Body Beautiful. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1980. 108-141. 

Doherty, Joseph P. "Whitman's 'Poem of the Mind.'" Semiotica 14 (1975): 345-363. 

Miller, Edwin Haviland. Walt Whitman's Poetry: A Psychological Journey. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1968. 

Spurzheim, J.G. Education: Its Elementary Principles Founded on the Nature of Man. 1821. New York: Fowler and Wells, 1847. 

Traubel, Horace. With Walt Whitman in Camden. Ed. Gertrude Traubel and William White. Vol. 6. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1982. 

Waskow, Howard J. Whitman's Explorations in Form. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1966. 

Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass: A Textual Variorum of the Printed Poems. Ed. Sculley Bradley, Harold W. Blodgett, Arthur Golden, and William White. Vol. 1. New York: New York UP, 1980.

Susan L. Roberson

Henry David Thoreau, best remembered for his stay at Walden Pond, was one of the Concord school of writers, a transcendentalist, and a naturalist. In addition to Walden (1854), Thoreau's major works include A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849), "Resistance to Civil Government" (later known as "Civil Disobedience") (1849), and his prodigious Journal (1906). The standard edition of Thoreau's works is the 1906 Walden edition, but it is being superseded by the new, controversial Princeton edition, to run to twenty-five volumes (1971). 

Earning a living at odd jobs, teaching, lecturing, pencil making, and surveying, Thoreau never realized the success of his writing, dying of tuberculosis at age forty-four. He was, however, well-regarded by his friends, who included Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ellery Channing, Bronson Alcott, and the children of Concord. An ardent admirer of nature, Thoreau devoted much of his time to sauntering through its domain and closely observing its inhabitants. Composed initially to explain his two-year stay at Walden Pond while composing the memorial to his brother John (A Week), Walden is regarded as America's best example of nature writing. A critic of American life and politics, Thoreau infused Walden with biting commentary on the mundane life, and in "Civil Disobedience" he argued for the individual's right to resist government when it runs counter to higher laws. Though "Civil Disobedience" has been one of his most influential pieces, making an impact on the politics of Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., the lectures on his excursions to the Maine Woods, Cape Cod, and Canada were popular with his contemporaries. 

Thoreau met Whitman on an excursion he took with Alcott to New York in November 1856. Thoreau was already familiar with Whitman's poetry, having a copy of the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass in his library and having sent a copy to Thomas Cholmondeley. The visit made an impression on him, as his letter to Harrison Blake attests (19 November 1856). He describes Whitman as "the greatest democrat the world has seen" but feels himself "somewhat in a quandary about him." Thoreau's mixed reaction to Whitman continued even after his reading of the second edition of Leaves of Grass. Again sharing with Harrison Blake his reaction (7 December 1856), Thoreau commented that he found "two or three pieces . . . which are disagreeable, to say the least, simply sensual." Even so, he found it "exhilarating encouraging" and Whitman to be "a great fellow" (qtd. in Harding 374-375). Whitman's reaction to Thoreau was similarly mixed, for though he liked Thoreau he found him to be morbid. They seemed to appreciate each other, despite their differences. 

Though never a great champion of Whitman's poetry, Thoreau recognized its truthfulness and urgency, themes in his own writing. 

Bibliography

Buell, Lawrence. "Whitman and Thoreau." Calamus 8 (1973): 18-28. 

Cavell, Stanley. The Senses of "Walden." New York: Viking, 1972. 

Harding, Walter. The Days of Henry Thoreau. New York: Knopf, 1965. 

Metzger, Charles R. Thoreau and Whitman: A Study of Their Esthetics. Seattle: U of Washington P, 1961. 

Scharnhorst, Gary. Henry David Thoreau: A Case Study in Canonization. Columbia, S.C.: Camden House, 1993. 

Thoreau, Henry David. The Writings of Henry David Thoreau (Walden Edition). Ed. Bradford Torrey. 20 vols. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1906.

Ed Folsom

Horace Traubel is best known as the author of a nine-volume biography of Whitman's final four years, With Walt Whitman in Camden. He visited the poet virtually daily from the mid-1880s until Whitman's death in 1892, and he began taking copious notes of their conversations in March of 1888. Every night he transcribed his notes and published three large volumes of them (1906, 1908, 1914) before his death, leaving behind manuscripts for six more. His original goal had been to bring out one volume a year until all were in print, but the final two volumes did not appear until 1996, over a century after they were written. 

Traubel described himself as Whitman's "spirit child," and for the twenty-seven years he lived on after Whitman's death, he served the poet as a dutiful son: he became the most active of Whitman's three literary executors (the other two were Richard Maurice Bucke and Thomas Harned); he founded, edited, and published The Conservator, a journal dedicated to keeping Whitman's works alive; he published his own Whitman-inspired poetry and prose in three large volumes; and he carried on a tireless correspondence with Whitman enthusiasts around the country and around the world, weaving together an international fellowship of disciples who worked to assure Whitman's immortality. 

Only thirty-three years old at the time of Whitman's death, Traubel had already known the poet for nearly twenty years. Born and reared in Camden, New Jersey, Traubel first met Whitman soon after the half-paralyzed poet decided to live in his brother George's Camden home in 1873. Traubel was then not yet fifteen years old, but he soon became Whitman's companion;they took walks and discussed books endlessly. At first, the young man's relationship with Whitman caused something of a scandal; Traubel recalled that neighbors went to his mother and "protested against my association with the 'lecherous old man'" (Traubel, Introduction ix). 

Following in his master's footsteps, Traubel stopped his formal education by the age of twelve and spent his teenage years learning the printing trade and newspaper business; after leaving school, he became a typesetter, a skill he would employ throughout his life as he often set the type for his monthly journal and for his various pamphlets. By the time he was sixteen, he had become foreman of the Camden Evening Visitor printing office. After that, he worked in his father's Philadelphia lithographic shop, was a paymaster in a factory, and became the Philadelphia correspondent for the Boston Commonwealth. None of these jobs paid well, but they gave him a wealth of experience, a confidence in his writing skills, and an understanding of how words could be made public and powerful through the labor of printing. Traubel's middle name was Logo, a sign of the faith in words his father Maurice—a German immigrant artist—instilled in him. 

As a young adult, Traubel became increasingly involved with radical reformist thought and persistently urged a reluctant Whitman to admit that Leaves of Grass endorsed a socialist agenda. Traubel was indefatigable in his support of Whitman's work, and he made sure that the major radical leaders of his day read and discussed it. He founded the Walt Whitman Fellowship International and served as its secretary-treasurer from 1894 until a year before his death. 

His own books can be read as socialist refigurings of Whitman's work, each of his titles subtly adjusting Whitman's terminology: Chants Communal (1904) took the individualistic edge off Whitman's "Chants Democratic"; Optimos (1910) redefined Whitman's "kosmos" as an optimized "cheerful whole" (qtd. in Bain 39); and his ecstatically revolutionary essays, Collects (1914), collectivistically pluralized Whitman's Collect. His journal, The Conservator, which he began two years before Whitman's death and continued until his own death in 1919, was an influential organ of radical ideas about everything from women's rights to animal rights. Every issue began with one of Traubel's idiosyncratic "Collect" essays, always written in his repetitive, staccato style. 

Traubel traced his liberalism and egalitarianism not only to Whitman but to his hybrid heritage, especially to his father's Jewish background; he said he loved "being a Jew in the face of your prejudices and your insults" (qtd. in Wiksell 119). He always retained his democratic identification with the persecuted and remained a dedicated political and intellectual radical. He kept up a tireless correspondence with leftist and reformist political and artistic figures—including Eugene Debs, Emma Goldman, and Upton Sinclair—and he was involved with the Arts and Crafts movement and helped publish The Artsman from 1903 to 1907, espousing the belief that radical reforms in art, design, and production were essential to social reform. 

Traubel's radicalism did not come without cost. His one stable, salaried position was as a clerk in a Philadelphia bank, a job he began during the last years of Whitman's life and held until 1902, when he published an attack on one of Philadelphia's most powerful businessmen. Under pressure from the bank, Horace resigned and began a life of self-imposed poverty, living on the meager proceeds from his writings and gifts from his supporters. 

His principled decision affected more than just himself, for by then he had a family to support. Traubel had married Anne Montgomerie in Whitman's home 28 May 1891; their daughter Gertrude was born the following year, and their son Wallace the year after that. In 1898, young Wallace died of scarlet fever. Three months later, Horace's beloved father committed suicide. Horace, however, was always on the rebound and refused to allow personal tragedy to drain his optimism and energy. He enlisted his wife and remaining child in his causes: Anne became associate editor of The Conservator in 1899, and Gertrude, whom Horace and Anne educated at home, joined the staff of the journal when she was fourteen. 

During the decade after he quit his bank job, Traubel lived an energetic life. He read most nights until four or five in the morning, then took the morning ferry to Philadelphia so he could work in his garret office on Chestnut Street. While riding the Camden ferry in 1909, he was trampled by a horse and suffered severe rib injuries. By 1914, his health had become a major concern, as rheumatic fever left him with a faulty heart valve. The outbreak of the Great War was particularly traumatic for this pacifist and believer in universal brotherhood, and over the next few years he steadily declined, suffering his first heart attack in June of 1917, the night before Gertrude's wedding in New York. He suffered additional heart attacks during the next year, and in the summer of 1918 he had a cerebral hemorrhage. He and Anne moved to New York in the spring of 1919 to be close to Gertrude and their new grandson. Traubel was determined to live through the centenary anniversary of Whitman's birth, and on 31 May he attended the New York celebration, where he was given a standing ovation by the two hundred Whitmanites (including Helen Keller) in attendance. 

Traubel attended one last centenary event—the August dedication of a huge granite cliff at the Bon Echo estate in Canada, to be named "Old Walt" and inscribed with Whitman's words in giant letters. On 28 August Traubel, while sitting in a tower room where he could look out on Old Walt, shouted that Whitman had just appeared above the granite cliff "in a golden glory": "He reassured me, beckoned to me, and spoke to me. I heard his voice but did not understand all he said, only 'Come on'" (qtd. in Denison 196). Traubel died at Bon Echo on 3 September and was buried in Harleigh Cemetery in Camden, close to Whitman's tomb. 

Bibliography

Bain, Mildred. Horace Traubel. New York: Albert and Charles Boni, 1913. 

Denison, Flora MacDonald. "A Dedication and a Death." Walt Whitman's Canada. Ed. Cyril Greenland and John Robert Colombo. Willowdale, Ontario: Hounslow, 1992. 196-200. 

Karsner, David. Horace Traubel: His Life and Work. New York: Egmont Arens, 1919. 

Traubel, Horace. Chants Communal. Boston: Small, Maynard, 1904. 

____. Collects. New York: Albert and Charles Boni, 1914. 

____. Introduction. Leaves of Grass (I) & Democratic Vistas. By Walt Whitman. London: Dent, 1912. vii-xiii. 

____. Optimos. New York: B.W. Huebsch, 1919. 

____. With Walt Whitman in Camden. 9 vols. Vols. 1-3. 1906-1914. New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 1961; Vol. 4. Ed. Sculley Bradley. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1953; Vol. 5. Ed. Gertrude Traubel. Carbondale: U of Southern Illinois P, 1964; Vol. 6. Ed. Gertrude Traubel and William White. Carbondale: U of Southern Illinois P, 1982; Vol. 7. Ed. Jeanne Chapman and Robert MacIsaac. Carbondale: U of Southern Illinois P, 1992; Vols. 8-9. Ed. Jeanne Chapman and Robert MacIsaac. Oregon House, Calif.: W.L. Bentley, 1996. 

Walling, William English. Whitman and Traubel. 1916. New York: Haskell House, 1969. 

Wiksell, Percival. "Horace Traubel." The FRA 7 (1911): 117-121.

Frances E. Keuling-Stout

The Author's edition of Two Rivulets is the companion volume to the 1876 Author's edition of Leaves of Grass. In the past, this two-volume centennial set was ignored in large measure by critics for a number of reasons. Whitman ran off only 750-800 copies of Rivulets at the New Republic Print shop in Camden (see Myerson 194-205 for detailed facts of publication). In addition to the scarce number of originals, the first known reprint or facsimile did not become available for over 100 years, in 1979. Also, up until recently, the volume was considered either a hodgepodge of printing methods and poetic techniques or simply the miscellaneous overflow from an already too bulky Leaves. Today, though, Rivulets's reputation is being rescued from obscurity and disrepute. Ed Folsom in 1994 offered the dramatic possibility that it—as well as the 1876 Leaves—might represent Whitman's culminating poetic moment. 

Indeed, rather than an illustration of the poet's decline, Rivulets presents an impressive number of graphic "firsts" to help make it a startling venture into breaking down "the barriers of form between Prose and Poetry" (Rivulets 28). Whitman clearly announces this poetic mission in "NEW POETRY"—a small prose unit of the first section in Rivulets. Further, by using the visible mediums of print and photo to "talk" to (Whitman's dialectical strategy) its verbal composition, Rivulets sets up novel typographic and visual experiments on the page. 

For the first time, Whitman creates a two-volume matched set which he imprints "Author's Edition" on the title pages of Rivulets and Leaves. And in an odd printing move, he transfers Passage to India out of Leaves and into Rivulets. He also has a photo (cf. Linton engraving) and a poem ("The Wound-Dresser") in Leaves talk to the poem "Out from Behind This Mask" in Rivulets. In Rivulets, Whitman interweaves prose sections with poetry sections: Two Rivulets (poetry with prose), Democratic Vistas (prose), Centennial Songs—1876 (poetry), As a Strong Bird on Pinions Free (poetry), Memoranda During the War (prose), and Passage to India (poetry). In the first section of Rivulets, he has prose and a bold wavy line (a printer's ornament) run simultaneously under poetry for eighteen pages. Strangely, too, in the same printing issue of Rivulets, Whitman labels his book spine differently. He stamps "Verse" on some copies and "Prose and Verse" on others (Myerson 201). He also inserts not one but two prefaces in Rivulets (1876 and 1872). And finally, in the introductory Preface (1876), Whitman tries to define as well as market his 1876 set (Leaves and Rivulets) as one of his "wilful" and poetic "escapades" (11). 

In Rivulets, the poet seeks an original way to celebrate America's second century in this 1876 centennial year. He does so by envisioning an "ideal" America of limitless possibilities without relinquishing the "real" America of national, political, and economic embroilments. 

To give a sense of how radical an experiment this volume was, there follows a short lyric unit excerpted from the first section of Rivulets (28). The poem is entitled "Wandering At Morn" and its prose "rivulet" is entitled "NEW POETRY": 

Yearning for thee, harmonious Union! thee, Singing Bird divine! Thee, seated coil'd in evil times, my Country, with craft and black dismay—with every meanness, treason thrust upon thee; 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I see of course that the really maturing America is at least just as much to loom up, expand, and take definite shape; . . . from the States drain'd by the Mississippi and from those flanking the Pacific, or bordering the Gulf of Mexico.

Whitman places his prose (set in smaller type) under a wavy line beneath the wings of his characteristically long lines of verse (set in larger type). The prose offers expansive assertions of hope in a typographically reciprocal reply to the poem's yearning apostrophe. Whitman thus attempts to bond poetry and prose together by a new form that can be seen as the visual interacting of texts. It is the poet's graphically symbolic model for overcoming traditional barriers between forms. 

At this juncture, an important question to ask is, why did Whitman call his new volume Two Rivulets? The OED defines Rivulets as both a small stream and as a specific type of moth/(butterfly?) called "GRASS RIVULET." So Whitman—from the very title itself—subtly fuses Leaves of "GRASS" to Two "RIVULETS" as he warns the reader in the 1876 Preface:

 

The arrangement in print of TWO RIVULETS—the indirectness of the name itself . . . —are but parts of the Venture which my Poems entirely are. (11) 

It is this type of indirection that creates, drives, and sustains his 1876 two-volume, one-unit "Venture" for Leaves and Rivulets. 

To grant the possibility that Whitman, at age fifty-seven, still possessed his full poetic powers is to accept the 1876 Rivulets as the work of a mature master. And it permits us to see Rivulets as an effective literary composition rather than a mere bibliographic curiosity. 

Bibliography

Allen, Gay Wilson. The New Walt Whitman Handbook. 1975. New York: New York UP, 1986. 

____. Introduction. Two Rivulets. By Walt Whitman. Norwood, Pa.: Norwood, 1979. iii-vi. 

Folsom, Ed. "Prospects for the Study of Walt Whitman." Resources for American Literary Study 20 (1994): 1-15. 

Myerson, Joel. Walt Whitman: A Descriptive Bibliography. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1993. 

Scovel, J.M. "Walt Whitman. His Life, His Poetry, Himself. 'The Good Gray Poet' Self-Estimated." Springfield Daily Republican 23 July 1875, sec. 3: 1-3. 

Whitman, Walt. The Correspondence. Ed. Edwin Haviland Miller. Vol. 3. New York: New York UP, 1964.

____. Two Rivulets. Camden, N.J.: Author's Edition, 1876.

Denise Kohn

Sarah Thorn Tyndale was an abolitionist and Fourierist from Philadelphia. She was married to Robinson Tyndale, a glass and china merchant, and was the mother of Hector Tyndale, a brigadier general in the Union Army. 

Sarah Tyndale first met Whitman when she visited him in Brooklyn with Bronson Alcott and Henry David Thoreau on 10 November 1856. Whitman received them in his attic bedroom—the bed he shared with his brother Edward was unmade and the chamber pot was in view. He told his visitors that he bathed daily in midwinter and enjoyed riding atop the city omnibus all day. Alcott's efforts to foster conversation between Thoreau and Whitman failed, but Tyndale stayed to talk more with Whitman after her companions had left. She and Whitman became friends and began a correspondence. She later introduced her son Hector to the poet. On 20 July 1857 Whitman wrote to her that he had a hundred poems for a third edition of Leaves of Grass and wanted to buy the plates of the second edition from the publishers Fowler and Wells, who he believed were not helping his career. Tyndale concurred with his assessment of his publishers in her reply on 27 July 1857 and offered to lend him $50 to buy the plates. 

Tyndale was important to Whitman as a friend and confidante. Although she was concerned that some of his poetry might be misunderstood and thus dangerous to the weak-minded, the two seemed to share many of the same beliefs and interests. 

Bibliography

Allen, Gay Wilson. The Solitary Singer: A Critical Biography of Walt Whitman. 1955. Rev. ed. 1967. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985. 

Johnson, Allen, and Dumas Malone, eds. Dictionary of American Bibliography. New York: Scribner's, 1964. 

Kaplan, Justin. Walt Whitman: A Life. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1980. 

Reynolds, David S. Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography. New York: Knopf, 1995. 

Zweig, Paul. Walt Whitman: The Making of the Poet. Basic Books: New York, 1984.

Amy M. Bawcom

Affectionately known as "Amy," Naomi Williams was Whitman's maternal grandmother. She married Cornelius Van Velsor and in 1795 gave birth to the daughter, Louisa, who would become Whitman's mother. According to John Burroughs, Amy "was a Friend, or Quakeress, of sweet sensible character, housewifely proclivities, and deeply intuitive and spiritual" (qtd. in Whitman 9). Her death in February 1826 profoundly saddened the six-year-old Walt. However, he would inherit from Amy Van Velsor a sympathy with Quaker customs as well as a number of family stories, some of which would find their way into Leaves of Grass. For instance, in section 35 of "Song of Myself," Whitman recounts a tale involving Amy's father, Captain John Williams, who served under John Paul Jones in an "old-time sea-fight" on 23 September 1779, a battle between Jones's ship, the Bon Homme Richard, and the British Serapis. 

Bibliography

Allen, Gay Wilson. The Solitary Singer: A Critical Biography of Walt Whitman. 1955. Rev. ed. 1967. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985. 

Whitman, Walt. Specimen Days. Vol. 1 of Prose Works 1892. Ed. Floyd Stovall. New York: New York UP, 1963.

Charley Shively

Canadian born in 1837 of Irish parents, Frederick B. Vaughan lived with Walt Whitman while the poet finished his "Calamus" poems which their love helped shape. After hearing Emerson lecture, Vaughan wanted New York to erect a Fred-Walt statue "with an immense placard on our breasts, reading SINCERE FRIENDS!!!" (qtd. in Shively 39). In 1860 Whitman sent Vaughan galleys from Boston when the 1860 Leaves of Grass went to press. 

Bemoaning lover problems, Whitman in 1870 compared Vaughan with Peter Doyle, admonishing himself: "Remember Fred Vaughan" (Whitman 890). Vaughan confessed to Whitman: "Father used to tell me I was lazy. Mother denied it. . . . I used to tell your mother you was lazy and she denied it" (qtd. in Shively 49). Vaughan's drinking (frequently in Pfaff's) ended in what he called their "estrangement" (qtd. in Shively 49). 

In 1862 Vaughan married, and he eventually became the father of four children. Whitman left New York and seldom returned. After Vaughan visited Camden in 1890, Whitman told Traubel, "Yes: I have seen him off and on—but now, poor fellow, he is all wrecked from drink" (Traubel 399). Despite his estrangement from Whitman, Vaughan wrote a poem about Williamsburg Ferry (with echoes of "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry") which concludes: "From among all out of all Connected with all and yet distinct from all arises thee Dear Walt" (qtd. in Shively 49). 

Bibliography

Shively, Charley. Calamus Lovers: Walt Whitman's Working-Class Camerados. San Francisco: Gay Sunshine, 1987. 

Traubel, Horace. With Walt Whitman in Camden. Ed. Gertrude Traubel and William White. Vol. 6. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1982. 

Whitman, Walt. Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts. Ed. Edward F. Grier. Vol. 2. New York: New York UP, 1984.

Larry D. Griffin

James William Wallace, an English architect, was a Whitman enthusiast, a founding member of Bolton "College," a Whitman correspondent, a visitor to Walt Whitman in Camden in 1891, and coauthor of a book with Dr. John Johnston (d. 1918), fellow Bolton "College" Member, about their separate visits to Whitman. 

In 1885 Wallace, thirty-one and unmarried, organized Monday night meetings at his father's house on Eagle Street in Bolton, England. Known locally as "The Eagle Street 'College'" and abroad as Bolton "College," this group included mostly working-class men with limited educational backgrounds. The appellation "College" shows the humor of the group, which met without formal organization or purpose for discussion of local interest topics, politics, humor, and spiritual matters. 

After the death of his mother in January of 1885, Wallace had a mystical experience about which he wrote and which Dr. Richard Maurice Bucke (1837-1902) included in his Cosmic Consciousness. 

Wallace and Johnston began a correspondence with Walt Whitman in 1887. By the time of his death, Whitman wrote the two men more than 120 letters and postcards. Whitman also presented his stuffed canary to Wallace. Today, the Metropolitan Library in Bolton holds the canary and other Whitman gifts to the group. 

In 1891 Wallace visited Whitman in Camden and Bucke in London, Ontario. Wallace also visited Andrew H. Rome in New York and the Cranberry Street room where the Romes printed Leaves of Grass (1855). He visited the Whitman Birthplace, Jayne's Hill, both Whitman maternal and paternal homesteads and burial grounds, and various Whitman relatives on Long Island. 

Bibliography

Bucke, Richard Maurice. Cosmic Consciousness: A Study in the Evolution of the Human Mind. Philadelphia: Innes, 1901. 

Hamer, Harold. A Catalogue of Works by and Relating to Walt Whitman in the Reference Library, Bolton. Bolton, England: Libraries Committee, 1955. 

Johnston, John, and J.W. Wallace. Visits to Walt Whitman in 1890-1891. London: Allen and Unwin, 1917. 

Salveson, Paul. Loving Comrades: Lancashire's Links to Walt Whitman. Bolton, England: Worker's Educational Association, 1984. 

Wallace, J.W. Walt Whitman and the World Crisis. Manchester: The National Labour Press, 1920.

Martin G. Murray

The decade that Walt Whitman lived in the nation's capital proved remarkably rich for him both professionally and personally. Whitman's Civil War experiences gave rise to Drum-Taps and Memoranda During the War, his grief for the slain president was expressed in the Lincoln elegies, and his disgust with the corruption and materialism of postwar society erupted in Democratic Vistas. The man who had proclaimed himself the "poet of comrades" ("These I Singing in Spring") formed loving friendships with Charles Eldridge, Lewy Brown, William and Ellen O'Connor, John and Ursula Burroughs, and Peter Doyle. But for a stroke that caused him to retire to Camden, New Jersey, Whitman might have spent the remainder of his days in the Federal District.

Drawn initially to D.C. to nurse his brother George, a Union soldier who had been wounded at the Battle of Fredericksburg (13 December 1862), Whitman remained in the capital to comfort the casualties of the Civil War. Psychically wounded by the prospect that the Union would falter, Whitman found healing in the willingness of his countrymen to defend the Republic against the evil twins, Secession and Slavery. A self-styled "dweller in camps" ("Hush'd be the Camps To-day"), Whitman could easily walk to barracks set up in government office buildings, as well as in larger campgrounds such as Carver Barracks on the grounds of Columbian College or in the numerous defensive forts that ringed the city. Daily visiting one of the dozens of Washington hospitals—Armory Square, Finley, and Harewood being a small sample—Whitman befriended scores of soldiers. The camaraderie that Whitman witnessed and often shared with such convalescents as Lewy Brown, Tom Sawyer, and Reuben Farwell affirmed the belief expressed in "Over the Carnage Rose Prophetic a Voice" that "affection shall solve the problems of freedom yet."

Whitman's poetical response to the War, Drum-Taps, was ready for the printer when Robert E. Lee's army surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House, Virginia, on 9 April 1865. This zenith for the Union was succeeded five days later by its nadir, the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln at Ford's Theater in Washington, D.C. The poet's quaternary on the death of Lincoln includes Whitman's most popular poem, "O Captain! My Captain!," and one of his most critically acclaimed, "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd."

During his Washington years, Whitman published nearly a hundred new poems. He shepherded Leaves of Grass through two new editions (1867 and 1871) and separately published a major poem, Passage to India (1871). He also cooperated with William Michael Rossetti's publication of a selection of Whitman's poems in England (1868), an edition which gained Whitman an appreciative and influential British audience that included Anne Gilchrist, Edward Carpenter, Edward Dowden, Bram Stoker, and John Addington Symonds.

Between 1863 and 1873 Whitman supported himself in the same manner as most Washingtonians, by working for the federal government. Through Charles Eldridge, the publisher of the third edition of Leaves of Grass (1860) who was serving as Assistant Army Paymaster during the War, Whitman obtained part-time employment in the Paymaster's office. A full-time berth came in January 1865, when Whitman was appointed to a First Class (lowest grade) clerkship in the Interior Department's Bureau of Indian Affairs, located in the Patent Office Building. There the "poet-chief" (Notebooks 2:881) welcomed visiting delegations of Indian tribes, when not performing the more prosaic duties of his job, such as writing reports for Congressional oversight committees. Dismissed on 30 June 1865 by Interior Secretary James Harlan for authoring "that book" (Notebooks 2:799), Whitman started work the next day through the influence of his friends in the Attorney General's office in the Treasury building, adjacent to the White House. Investigating government malfeasance during the Johnson and Grant administrations provided steady employment for Whitman, who rose to a Third Class clerkship.

Whitman lived modestly on his clerk's salary, settling for inexpensive rooms in boardinghouses. He relied on his married friends, William and Ellen O'Connor, and John and Ursula Burroughs, to provide social stimulation. At the O'Connors' evening salons, Whitman met many of Washington's political and literary elite, including John and Sarah Piatt (poets), John Hay (Lincoln's personal secretary), Count Adam Gurowski (Polish ex-patriot and radical Abolitionist), and Frank Baker (later head of the National Zoo ).

O'Connor and Burroughs were strong Whitman loyalists. After Whitman was fired from Interior, O'Connor took on the poet's persecutors in a stirring polemic he titled The Good Gray Poet (1866). In the process, Whitman obtained additional celebrity status and a lasting sobriquet. Burroughs provided a more balanced assessment in the poet's first critical biography, Notes on Walt Whitman as Poet and Person (1867).

Whitman found friendship with Peter Doyle. The twenty-one-year-old horsecar conductor and former Confederate soldier became acquainted with the forty-five-year-old Whitman in the early months of 1865. Thereafter, the comrades were inseparable, spending long hours riding on Doyle's streetcar, or taking moonlight walks along the Potomac, or feasting on melons at Center Market on Pennsylvania Avenue.

With its unpaved roads and swampy terrain, wartime Washington was notorious as a city of mud. After the war, Washington experienced a building boom under the leadership of Alexander "Boss" Shepherd, whose administration laid sewers, paved roads, and built schools. Municipal corruption mirrored national scandals such as the Credit Mobilier and formed the backdrop to Democratic Vistas (1871), Whitman's lamentation on the unfulfilled promise of the "American Experiment."

During and after the War, the city's population was swelled by Southern refugees, especially African Americans escaping oppression and poverty. The large influx of poor blacks exacerbated racial tensions in the nation's capital, whose residents had long regarded themselves as more Southern than Northern in their beliefs and practices. While Eldridge and the O'Connors worked tirelessly to improve the life of the district's freedmen, Whitman refrained from personal involvement in their plight. David Reynolds attributes Whitman's conservative political perspective, in part, to his warm personal regard for Attorneys General Henry Stanbery and William Evart, under whom Whitman served. Both Stanbery and Evart were closely tied to President Andrew Johnson's Reconstruction policies favoring Southern whites at the expense of blacks. William O'Connor's advocacy of Negro suffrage and Whitman's indifference bordering on hostility was the fault line running through their friendship, which finally ruptured in 1872.

While reading in his office in the Treasury Building on the evening of 23 January 1873, Whitman suffered a stroke. Exactly four months later, on 23 May, he was dealt an equally painful blow when his mother died. Moving that summer to his brother George's home in Camden, New Jersey, Whitman never regained the health that would have enabled him to return to Washington, D.C.

Bibliography

Allen, Gay Wilson. The Solitary Singer: A Critical Biography of Walt Whitman. 1955. Rev. ed. 1967. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985.

Freedman, Florence Bernstein. William Douglas O'Connor: Walt Whitman's Chosen Knight. Athens: Ohio UP, 1985.

Green, Constance McLaughlin. Washington, A History of the Capital, 1800–1950. 1962. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1976.

Leech, Margaret. Reveille in Washington, 1860–1865. New York: Harper, 1941.

Reynolds, David S. Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography. New York: Knopf, 1995.

Wecter, Dixon. "Walt Whitman as Civil Servant." PMLA 58 (1943): 1094–1109.

Whitman, Walt. Notebooks and Unpublished Manuscripts. Ed. Edward F. Grier. 6 vols. New York: New York UP, 1984.

R.W. French

As an elegy on the death of Abraham Lincoln, "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd" may be placed in contexts both historical and literary. The historical facts need only brief mention. While attending a performance at Ford's Theater in Washington, D.C., on the evening of 14 April 1865, President Lincoln was shot by the actor John Wilkes Booth; mortally wounded, he died the following morning. On 20 April his body lay in state at the Capitol, and the next day it began a 1,600-mile journey by rail across the landscape and through major cities on its way to Springfield, Illinois, for interment on 4 May. 

At the time of the assassination Whitman was with his mother in Brooklyn. As he recalls in Specimen Days, "The day of the murder we heard the news very early in the morning. Mother prepared breakfast—and other meals afterward—as usual; but not a mouthful was eaten all day by either of us. We each drank half a cup of coffee; that was all. Little was said. We got every newspaper morning and evening, and the frequent extras of that period, and pass'd them silently to each other" (Prose Works 1:31). Composition of "Lilacs" began almost immediately after the assassination and was completed within weeks. Initial publication was in Sequel to Drum-Taps, issued by Gibson Brothers in the fall of 1865 and bound with Drum-Taps; the poem made its first appearance in the text of Leaves of Grass in 1881, although Sequel, along with Drum-Taps and Songs Before Parting, had been bound with the fourth (1867) edition. 

Whitman had for years admired and defended the president. "I believe fully in Lincoln," he commented in an 1863 letter; "few know the rocks & quicksands he has to steer through" (Correspondence 1:163-164). Whitman had been present at Lincoln's second inauguration just weeks before the assassination. The president, he noted in a Specimen Days entry, "look'd very much worn and tired; the lines, indeed, of vast responsibilities, intricate questions, and demands of life and death, cut deeper than ever upon his dark brown face; yet all the old goodness, tenderness, sadness, and canny shrewdness, underneath the furrows. (I never see that man without feeling that he is one to become personally attach'd to, for his combination of purest, heartiest tenderness, and native western form of manliness.)" (Prose Works 1:92). 

While the assassination of President Lincoln is the occasion of "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd," the subject, in the manner of elegy, is both other and broader than its occasion. "Lilacs" turns out to be not just about the death of Abraham Lincoln, but about death itself; in section 7, just after the poet has placed a sprig of lilac on the coffin, the poem makes a pointed transition: "Nor for you, for one alone," the poet chants, "Blossoms and branches green to coffins all I bring." Significantly, Lincoln is never mentioned by name in "Lilacs," nor does the poem relate the circumstances of his death; indeed, the absence of the historical Lincoln in the poem is one of its more striking features. Historical considerations give way to universal significance. The fact of assassination, for example, is not mentioned, for, while all people die, assassination is the fate of only a few. 

Discussion of the poem has focused largely on its style, on its structure, on the significance of its three major symbols of lilac, star, and thrush, and on the nature of the final resolution, with its distinction between "the thought of death" and "the knowledge of death," with whom the poet walks as companions (section 14). Stylistically, as opposed to the earlier Whitman of "Song of Myself," the poet of "Lilacs" works in a more Tennysonian mode, creating a poetry refined, mellifluous, and carefully controlled. Making no pretense of spontaneity, the poem proclaims on every line its artifice and its artistry. 

The general structure of "Lilacs" follows the traditional pattern of elegy in its movement from grief to consolation, and it includes such traditional elegiac elements as the funeral procession, the mourning of nature, the placing of flowers upon the coffin, the contrast between nature's cyclical renewal and humanity's mortality, the eulogy, and the final resolution of sorrow; the development, however, is notably indirect. "Lilacs" circles and turns back on itself, seeking direction until it finds rest in the concluding reconciliation; the pattern suggests the fluctuations of emotion rather than the strict progressions of logical development. The structure of "Lilacs" has also been likened to music, with its use of themes and motifs recurring in isolation and set off against each other, but moving always toward a concluding harmony. 

The three major symbols of the elegy—lilac, star, and hermit thrush—had particular significance for Whitman. In his lecture on Lincoln, delivered on a number of occasions from 1879 to 1890, Whitman recalled the day of the assassination. "I remember," he said, "where I was stopping at the time, the season being advanced, there were many lilacs in full bloom. By one of those caprices that enter and give tinge to events without being at all a part of them, I find myself always reminded of the great tragedy of that day by the sight and odor of these blossoms. It never fails" (Prose Works 2:503). 

The star—actually, the planet Venus—was indeed low in the sky at the time of the assassination, as Whitman describes in the poem. In a Specimen Days entry dating from around the time of Lincoln's second inauguration, Whitman wrote, "Nor earth nor sky ever knew spectacles of superber beauty than some of the nights lately here. The western star, Venus, in the earlier hours of evening, has never been so large, so clear; it seems as if it told something, as if it held rapport indulgent with humanity, with us Americans" (Prose Works 1:94). 

A notebook entry of 1865 suggests the significance of the hermit thrush in the elegy: "Solitary Thrush . . . sings oftener after sundown sometimes quite in the night / is very secluded / likes shaded, dark, places in swamps . . . his song is a hymn . . . he never sings near the farm houses—never in the settlement / is the bird of the solemn primal woods & of Nature pure & holy" (Notebooks 2:766). 

In "Lilacs," the three major symbols accumulate meaning as the poem develops. While there are differing interpretations of each, the three being resonant and profound, in the nature of complex symbols, still, it is generally agreed that the star introduced in section 2 ("O great star disappear'd") is to be associated with the man who has died, although by no means is it to be considered simply as "Lincoln," and the lilac that enters the poem in section 3 ("tall-growing with heart-shaped leaves of rich green") suggests an exuberant, vital, sensuous nature, a nature of fecundity and eternal renewal. The thrush is of course also of nature, but in the poem it becomes more than merely natural. A creature "of Nature pure & holy," as in the notebook jotting quoted above, it expresses itself in song, and thus has been considered a figure of the bardic poet or the seer, a visionary singer of ultimate insight. 

While attention has been focused on the three major symbols, other images in the poem also take on symbolic value, most notably the cloud and the swamp. The cloud appears early, in section 2, as an image of oppression ("O harsh surrounding cloud that will not free my soul"), and it returns late, in section 14; significantly, it is seen in that section immediately prior to the moment when the poet attains enlightened knowledge ("And I knew death, its thought, and the sacred knowledge of death"), an illumination it is unable to prevent, for by then it has become powerless, and the poet is free to make his journey to the swamp. 

Home of the secluded thrush, the swamp is a place of revelation, where words are given to intuitive knowledge. Like the beach, another setting important to Whitman as a site of revelation, the swamp is an in-between state, a meeting-place of earth and water; the poet specifically describes himself in section 14 as going "Down to the shores." 

As the major symbols suggest, "Lilacs" is firmly based in the natural world, and it is there that the poem must find its consolations. Whitman refused to seek comfort in the supernatural; the Christian vision of eternal life in heaven that Milton found in "Lycidas" was not available to him, and he deliberately avoided any suggestion of it. The lilacs will return; Lincoln will not, and he will have no life other than the one he has lost, not even in nature, for Whitman significantly refrained from invoking the view taken in section 6 of "Song of Myself," that death is no more than part of the continuum of life ("The smallest sprout shows there is really no death . . .") and thus may be dismissed as inconsequential. Whitman's experience of the Civil War, including of course his service in the hospitals, had evidently tempered his outlook; he had seen too much of death to dismiss it so readily. 

"Lilacs" offers the explicit consolation that death is a release from the sufferings of life. But if that rationale were all, there would be no need of the thrush, whose song is a joyous carol in praise of death, not a lament about the sorrows of human life. When the poet is ready to hear that song, he has already reconciled "the thought of death" with "the sacred knowledge of death" (section 14). While interpretations differ, it is significant that the word "sacred" is applied only to the latter. A thought may be fleeting and changeable, concerned with a particular death, while sacred knowledge suggests ultimate insight: complete comprehension of death itself and its place in the universal order. 

Whitman has the tact not to try to explain this insight, for it is necessarily intuitive and inexpressible. It comes suddenly, without prelude, at the unlikely moment when the cloud returns: "And I knew death, its thought, and the sacred knowledge of death" (section 14). One simply knows, as in the visionary passage of "Song of Myself," section 5, when the poet attains enlightenment: "Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and knowledge that pass all the argument of the earth. . . ." 

"Passing the visions, passing the night," the poet of "Lilacs" moves on toward conclusion (section 16), ready to reclaim the life he has left, putting the experience of the night behind him, but by no means abandoning it. "Yet each to keep and all, retrievements out of the night," he chants, knowing that the experience has been transforming, for the vision granted him has brought ultimate knowledge of life and death. At the end of "Lilacs," all disparate elements have been reconciled: "Lilac and star and bird twined with the chant of my soul, / There in the fragrant pines and the cedars dusk and dim." 

Bibliography

Adams, Richard P. "Whitman's 'Lilacs' and the Tradition of Pastoral Elegy." PMLA 72 (1957): 479-487. 

Betts, William W., Jr., ed. Lincoln and the Poets. n.p.: U of Pittsburgh P, 1965. 

Erkkila, Betsy. Whitman the Political Poet. New York: Oxford UP, 1989. 

Whitman, Walt. The Correspondence. Ed. Edwin Haviland Miller. 6 vols. New York: New York UP, 1961-1977. 

____. Leaves of Grass: Comprehensive Reader's Edition. Ed. Harold W. Blodgett and Sculley Bradley. New York: New York UP, 1965. 

____. Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts. Ed. Edward F. Grier. 6 vols. New York: New York UP, 1984.

Martin G. Murray

As a soldier in war and a workman in peace, George Washington Whitman manifested the common American manliness that his brother Walt Whitman lauded in poetry and prose. George's disinterest in Whitman's art was also typical of the average American, much to the poet's eternal frustration and disappointment.

Ten years Walt's junior, George Whitman was born in Brooklyn, New York, on 29 November 1829. His boyhood was spent in the Long Island countryside to which Walter and Louisa Whitman had moved the family in 1834. In "My Boys and Girls" Whitman fondly recalls carrying on his shoulders young George, "his legs dangling down upon my breast, while I trotted for sport down a lane or over the fields" (248). George learned his "3 Rs" from Walt during Whitman's brief career as a village schoolmaster.

George Whitman was trained in carpentry by his father and worked alongside his brothers Andrew and Walt in the family's house-building ventures in Brooklyn. The publication of the first edition of Leaves of Grass (1855) did not impress George, who recalled: "I saw the book—didn't read it all—didn't think it worth reading—fingered it a little" (Traubel, "Notes" 35).

George Washington Whitman proved he was fittingly named after America's first patriot when he responded with full measure to his country's call following the Rebel attack on Fort Sumter. George joined the local militia (Thirteenth New York) in the spring of 1861 and then enlisted that fall with the Fifty-first New York Volunteers to serve for the remainder of the Civil War. Walt Whitman's war ministry in the capital's hospitals followed upon his nursing of brother George on the camp grounds of Falmouth, Virginia, after the Battle of Fredericksburg. In Specimen Days Whitman has left a permanent record of familial pride in this brother whose battleground heroism at New Bern, Antietam, Fredericksburg, Second Bull Run, the Wilderness, and Petersburg was reflected in the stripes (sergeant, captain, major, breveted lieutenant colonel) he successively earned.

After the war was won, George Whitman returned to Brooklyn. Unsuccessful in his initial house-building ventures, he obtained work inspecting iron pipes in Brooklyn and Camden, New Jersey. He married Louisa Orr Haslam on 14 April 1871 and settled in Camden. A year later, he moved his ailing mother and retarded brother Edward in with them. Mother Whitman died on 23 May 1873. Walt Whitman, who had suffered a debilitating stroke in January, came to George's home to convalesce in the summer of 1873, and never left Camden.

The brothers lived amicably together. George and Louisa named their first son, who died in infancy, after Walt. (A second boy, named for his father, was still-born.) Walt relieved George of much of the emotional and financial burden caused by Eddie's care.

George Whitman held responsible positions as a pipe inspector for the city of Camden and the New York Metropolitan Water Board, giving rise to Whitman's quip that George was interested "in pipes, not poems" (Traubel, With Walt Whitman 1:227). In 1884 George and Louisa moved into a new house they had built on a small farm outside Camden. When Walt decided to remain in the city, buying a house of his own on Mickle Street, a rift between the brothers occurred. Although Whitman remained close to his sister-in-law, he never again had warm relations with George.

Walt Whitman died on 26 March 1892. Later that year, Louisa died, followed by Edward. George Whitman lived alone on his farm in Burlington, New Jersey, until his death on 20 December 1901. He left a sizeable estate, which supported his sister Hannah and niece Jessie (Jeff's daughter). George and Louisa Whitman are buried in Harleigh Cemetery in Walt Whitman's tomb.

Bibliography

Loving, Jerome M., ed. Civil War Letters of George Washington Whitman. Durham, N.C.: Duke UP, 1975. 

Traubel, Horace. "Notes from Conversations with George W. Whitman, 1893: Mostly in His Own Words." In Re Walt Whitman. Ed. Traubel, Richard Maurice Bucke, and Thomas B. Harned. Philadelphia: McKay, 1893. 33–40.

____. With Walt Whitman in Camden. Vol. 1. Boston: Small, Maynard, 1906.

Whitman, Walt. The Early Poems and the Fiction. Ed. Thomas L. Brasher. New York: New York UP, 1963.

Sherry Ceniza

Louisa Van Velsor Whitman, mother of nine children, eight of whom lived to adulthood, is best known, of course, for her birthing of her second child, Walt, born when Louisa was twenty-four years old. It has turned out that this second son not only is known for his innovative poetry, but he is also the child whom Louisa came to cherish and depend on more than any of her other children. Walt returned the love and the emotional connection, saying to his friend Horace Traubel, "How much I owe her! It could not be put in a scale—weighed: it could not be measured—be even put in the best words: it can only be apprehended through the intuitions. Leaves of Grass is the flower of her temperament active in me. . . . I wonder what Leaves of Grass would have been if I had been born of some other mother" (Traubel 113–114).

Louisa's letters to Walt are filled with news about the family, which Walt desired, but also with her observations on the political events of the day. The letters contain, as well, Louisa's repeated words of thanks and appreciation for Walt's generosity; not only did he consistently send her money, but he also sent her books, newspapers, almanacs, and articles. She, in turn, spoke frequently to him about critical reviews of his work which she had read, astutely assessing, at the time of its appearance, the value of Anne Gilchrist's 1870 "A Woman's Estimate of Walt Whitman," appearing in the Boston Radical. 

Louisa's own style of writing merits attention. Louisa, often described as being "illiterate," did not use standard punctuation. She rarely capitalized letters; she frequently misspelled words, and sometimes did not observe what is to contemporary readers correct grammar. She was not "literate" in the written sense, but she read; she was intelligent and aware of her world, the public as well as her own private world. Reading Louisa's letters, a person soon becomes aware of learning to read in a new way—of following the rhythm of Louisa's prose, of actively creating the sentence breaks. Louisa's prose encourages active reading and also rewards the reader with a recognition of Louisa's unique sense of storytelling. A careful reader of her letters soon senses the import of Whitman's recognition of her own writing/thinking skills. "I favor her," Whitman said to Traubel, "'favor' they call it up on Long Island—a curious word so used, yet a word of great suggestiveness. Often people would say—men, women, children, would say—'You are a Whitman: I know you.' When I asked how they knew they would up with a finger at me: 'By your features, your gait, your voice: they are your mother's.' I think all that was, is, true: I could see it in myself" (280).

In addition to contributing to the formation of her son's style, Louisa's effect on her son can be seen in Whitman's representation of gender. Louisa's own strength contributed to Walt's sense of gender fluidity. Accordingly, in one of his notebooks, Whitman wrote: "Could we imagine such a thing—let us suggest that before a manchild or womanchild was born it should be suggested that a human being could be born" (Uncollected 2:76). Though Whitman certainly was at times caught in his culture's ideology, and in this regard at times essentializes women and men, there is a more pervasive move in his thinking, a move towards what is now called social construction. That is, Whitman could see the role society played in formulating a person's view of self and of others. Thus, he wished to inscribe in his poetry and prose a view of democracy much more idealized than the actuality in which he lived, outside his home. 

Louisa also contributed to Walt's evolving understanding of the concept of "comradeship." This concept came to take on a progressively more inclusive meaning for Whitman, especially as a result of the Civil War. The war caused Whitman to fear the possible failure of democracy in the United States. He frequently revised in order to inscribe into his poetry more and more the ethic of care. "Comradeship" became an inclusive term for Whitman, not narrowed by gender, age, sexual orientation, or relationship. Though the strong individual was ever a concern for Whitman, he came to fear the excess of unthinking individualism, resulting in the fracturing of his country. Thus, the image of the Mother of All, representing comradeship, became intensified, post Civil War. Certainly, Louisa Van Velsor Whitman served as a model for Whitman for this Mother of All image.

Bibliography

Erkkila, Betsy. Whitman the Political Poet. New York: Oxford UP, 1989.

Traubel, Horace. With Walt Whitman in Camden. Vol. 2. 1908. New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 1961.

Whitman, Louisa Van Velsor. The largest collection of Louisa's letters to Walt is held in the Trent Collection at the Duke University Library. Also see her letters in the Hanley Collection, held in the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center in Austin, Texas, and her letters to Helen Price held in the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York City. Helen Price's letters to Louisa are held in the Trent Collection. Letters to Louisa from various friends and relatives are found in the Whitman-Feinberg Collection, Library of Congress.

Whitman, Walt. The Correspondence. Ed. Edwin Haviland Miller. Vols. 1–2. New York: New York UP, 1961.

____. The Uncollected Poetry and Prose of Walt Whitman. Ed. Emory Holloway. 2 vols. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page, 1921.

Randall Waldron

Walt Whitman's favorite brother, "Jeff," was the only one with whom he had much in common by way of interests and sensibility and the only one to achieve distinction in life beyond being kin to the famous poet. In Jeff's youth, Walt helped him learn to read, played games with him, and stimulated his love of music. In 1848, when Walt left Brooklyn to edit the New Orleans Crescent, Jeff went along, working as office boy at the paper and writing newsy letters to the family back home. Later, Walt helped make the connections that would lead Jeff into the civil engineering career in which he became, as Superintendent of Water Works in St. Louis, a nationally recognized figure in his field. 

Without suggesting any actual sexual intimacy, Dennis Berthold and Kenneth Price (editors of Jeff's letters) argue convincingly that Walt Whitman's love for Jeff may have been the earliest manifestation of the brother-son-beloved-comrade relationships he formed throughout his life and celebrated in his work. Perhaps an indicator of the nature and intensity of the poet's feeling for Jeff is that it was profoundly shaken and altered by the latter's marriage in 1859—though Jeff's wife Martha ("Mattie") was herself to become an object of Walt's deep affection. It would be a mistake, however, to suggest that the two brothers were drawn together only by the pull of strong emotion, for they had interests and traits of personality in common as well. Their many letters to one another testify to shared enthusiasms for music (especially opera), politics, and other subjects. Jeff worked assiduously to raise money for Walt's hospital work and—alone among the Whitmans—took fervent interest in his literary career. For his part, undoubtedly with pride in Jeff's accomplishments in mind, Walt praised the great achievements of modern engineering in his poems, most notably in "Passage to India" (1871), where such marvels of the day as the Suez Canal and the Atlantic Cable figure as transcendent symbols for the coming together of all people, nations, and cultures in universal oneness. Ironically, while the poet's imagination was thus stirred by the great feats of his brother's profession, Jeff's own advancement in the field may have had some chilling effect on their relationship. As Berthold and Price point out, communication between Jeff and Walt dropped off radically in 1869, possibly because the younger man's success and self-sufficiency had put him outside the sphere of dependency which nourished Walt's affections. Though perhaps driven somewhat apart in this way, they were drawn together powerfully in feeling when Mattie died in 1873, and in the winter of 1879-1880 Walt spent several months in St. Louis with Jeff and his daughters, Manahatta and Jessie Louisa. During the next ten years the brothers saw one another only occasionally, when Jeff was in the East on business, but the warmth between them was again rekindled, sadly enough, by the sudden death of Manahatta in 1886 and by Walt's illness and progressive weakening. 

When Jeff Whitman died in 1890, numerous obituaries, including several in major engineering journals, testified to his stature as a professional and public figure. One of these, written by Walt for the Engineering Record, added to that testimony while also recalling the intimate and exuberant affection in which the poet held the most beloved of his brother-comrades: "how we loved each other—how many jovial good times we had!" (Prose Works 2:693). 

Bibliography

Allen, Gay Wilson. The Solitary Singer: A Critical Biography of Walt Whitman. 1955. Rev. ed. 1967. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985. 

Kaplan, Justin. Walt Whitman: A Life. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1980. 

Whitman, Martha Mitchell. Mattie: The Letters of Martha Mitchell Whitman. Ed. Randall H. Waldron. New York: New York UP, 1977. 

Whitman, Thomas Jefferson. Dear Brother Walt: The Letters of Thomas Jefferson Whitman. Ed. Dennis Berthold and Kenneth M. Price. Kent, Ohio: Kent State UP, 1984. 

Whitman, Walt. The Correspondence. Ed. Edwin Haviland Miller. 6 Vols. New York: New York UP, 1961-1977 (with a Second Supplement published by Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, 1991). 

____. Prose Works 1892. Ed. Floyd Stovall. 2 Vols. New York: New York UP, 1963-1964.

John Rietz

Appropriate to his politics, Walter Whitman, Sr., the poet's father, was born the day the Bastille was stormed, 14 July 1789, to Jesse W. and Hannah (Brush) Whitman. A free-thinking rationalist who rejected organized religion and regularly read left-leaning books and journals, he was proud to have known Thomas Paine personally, and he took his son Walt to hear Elias Hicks, the Quaker iconoclast, and Frances Wright, the feminist/socialist reformer, when they spoke in New York. All three became family heroes about whom the poet spoke admiringly all his life. But if Whitman readily embraced his father's radical politics, he was reluctant to recognize the more general influence of his father's troubled personality.

On 8 June 1816 Walter Whitman married Louisa Van Velsor, with whom he had nine children, the second being the poet, his namesake. The Whitmans had lived in Huntington and West Hills, Long Island, since their Puritan forebears settled there in the seventeenth century, but in 1823 Walter Whitman moved his family to Brooklyn, where they changed addresses frequently. He was a skilled, hardworking carpenter who, once in Brooklyn, tried to better the family's fortunes through real estate speculation: buying a lot, building on it, moving his family there for a few months, and then selling and moving again once he had built the next house. His business ventures failed perennially.

Even before his worldly failures made him bitter, however, Whitman's father was, by all accounts, moody, dour, and inflexible, and the one surviving photographic portrait seems to reflect such a temperament. In "There Was a Child Went Forth" (1855), the father is described as "strong, self-sufficient, manly, mean, anger'd, unjust," a man associated with "[t]he blow, the quick loud word, the tight bargain, the crafty lure," a fair description of the poet's own father. That slight, indirect, and unflattering reference is typical of Whitman, who rarely spoke of his father—far less often, certainly, than he spoke of his mother, whose gentle, affectionate disposition he openly admired and emulated. Clearly, the poet wanted to see himself as being more like his mother and struggled against the latent tendency towards brooding rigidity he inherited from his father. That interior struggle was not only outwardly manifest in conflicts between the poet and his father in the 1840s but was also reflected in Whitman's fiction from that period; stories like "Bervance: or, Father and Son" (1841) and "Wild Frank's Return" (1841) express Whitman's sense of suffocation and resentment in melodrama: a protagonist son is rejected by a cruel father who is later filled with remorse when that rejection results in the son's utter destruction (e.g., insanity or hideous death).

Their antagonism (and Whitman's apparent desire for self-destructive revenge) seems to have eased when, in the late 1840s, Whitman began to take control of the family as his father's health failed. That reversal, made complete by his father's death on 11 July 1855, seems to have been liberating, perhaps even freeing him to launch his poetic career. When, in the opening lines of the Preface to Leaves of Grass (published just a week earlier), Whitman spoke of the son who calmly observes the father's corpse being borne from the house, essentially dismissing it as irrelevant, he was announcing the triumph of the sunny, healthy poetic persona over the brooding and unstable shadow he had repressed. Images of the father became as scarce in the subsequent poetry as they had been pervasive in the earlier fiction, and it was at this time, too, that he first cast off his father's name and signed his work "Walt" rather than "Walter." Only late in life could Whitman acknowledge, "As I get older, and latent traits come out, I see my father's [influence] also" (Daybooks 3:658).

Bibliography

Allen, Gay Wilson. The Solitary Singer: A Critical Biography of Walt Whitman. 1955. Rev. ed. 1967. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985.

Kaplan, Justin. Walt Whitman: A Life. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1980.

Molinoff, Katherine. Some Notes on Whitman's Family. Brooklyn: Comet, 1941.

Whitman, Walt. Daybooks and Notebooks. Ed. William White. 3 vols. New York: New York UP, 1978.

____. Leaves of Grass: Comprehensive Reader's Edition. Ed. Harold W. Blodgett and Sculley Bradley. New York: New York UP, 1965.

____. The Uncollected Poetry and Prose of Walt Whitman. Ed. Emory Holloway. Vol. 1. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page, 1921.

Zweig, Paul. Walt Whitman: The Making of the Poet. New York: Basic Books, 1984.

Richard Raleigh

Born Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde in Dublin, Wilde is most famous for his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), his dramatic comedy The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), and the poem "The Ballad of Reading Gaol" (1898), written after his release from jail where he served two years after being found guilty of homosexual offenses under the Criminal Law Amendment. 

On 18 January 1882 Wilde visited Walt Whitman in Camden, where the poet was then living with his brother and sister-in-law. Wilde told Whitman that his mother had purchased a copy of Leaves of Grass when it was first published, that Lady Wilde had read the poems to her son, and that later, at Oxford, he and his friends carried Leaves to read on their walks. Flattered, Whitman offered Wilde, whom he later described as "a fine large handsome youngster" (Whitman 264), some of his sister-in-law's homemade elderberry wine, and they conversed for two hours. Asked later by a friend how he managed to get the elderberry wine down, Wilde replied: "If it had been vinegar I would have drunk it all the same, for I have an admiration for that man which I can hardly express" (qtd. in Allen 502). In a letter to Whitman postmarked 1 March, Wilde writes: "Before I leave America I must see you again. There is no one in this wide great world of America whom I love and honour so much" (100). Wilde was true to his word, making a second visit to Whitman the following May. 

The chief proponent of the aesthetic movement, Wilde was notorious for his eccentricity in appearance and manner, and his court trial in London in 1895, when he was at the peak of his career, became a public sensation. 

Bankrupt and in ill-health, he lived the last three years of his life in France under the pseudonym Sebastian Melmoth, dying in Paris after converting to Roman Catholicism. 

Bibliography

Allen, Gay Wilson. The Solitary Singer: A Critical Biography of Walt Whitman. 1955. Rev. ed. 1967. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985. 

Ellman, Richard. "Oscar Meets Walt." New York Review of Books 3 December 1987: 43-44. 

____. Oscar Wilde. New York: Knopf, 1988. 

Whitman, Walt. The Correspondence. Ed. Edwin Haviland Miller. Vol. 3. New York: New York UP, 1964. 

Wilde, Oscar. The Letters of Oscar Wilde. Ed. Rupert Hart-Davis. London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1962. 

Julian Mason

Bronson Alcott, educator and philosopher, was born at Spindle Hill, Connecticut, on 29 November 1799. His formal schooling ended when he was thirteen, and he became a peddler. After being impressed by Quaker beliefs in 1822, he adapted many of them to his use as a teacher and thinker, particularly the belief that there is something of God in each person. This informed the teaching he did (beginning in 1824) in a series of schools, primarily in New England, over much of the rest of his life. In 1830 he married Abigail May, and they eventually had four daughters, including Louisa May (1832), the writer. His liberal ideas about education were often controversial and misunderstood, and his difficult-to-read writings were not very helpful. He was a participant in the transcendental movement and moved to Concord, Massachusetts, in 1840, where he lived most of the rest of his life. His family was often in financial uncertainty until the authorial success of Louisa. He was paralyzed by a stroke in 1882 and died in Boston on 4 March 1888. 

Walt Whitman and Alcott shared various general beliefs, including those related to transcendentalism and those growing out of the interest of each in Quaker ideas and practice. In the fall of 1856 Alcott went to New York for several months. During the preceding winter he had been introduced to Whitman's 1855 Leaves of Grass and found himself enthusiastic about it, so on 4 October 1856 he went to Brooklyn to visit Whitman. Alcott visited with Whitman a number of times over the ensuing weeks and was given a copy of the 1856 Leaves of Grass. Although they were different in temperament and demeanor, they came to admire each other and to consider themselves friends, a friendship which lasted the rest of their lives. They not only explored each other's ideas, but Whitman was also glad to be able to discuss Ralph Waldo Emerson with someone who knew Emerson. Over the years, they occasionally corresponded and exchanged things they had published. Their last meeting came on 17 September 1881 when Whitman visited New England. As time passed, Alcott's admiration for Whitman as both man and writer had steadily grown, and he had come to think of Whitman as a wise representative of America and its potential. Whitman thought Alcott's best trait to be his upholding of the supremacy of the spiritual aspects of humanity and life. Alcott wrote to Whitman on 28 April 1868, "I am interested in all you choose to communicate" (Letters 435), and on 10 October 1856 he wrote to Abigail Alcott, "I am well rewarded for finding this extraordinary man" (Letters 200). In 1888, after Alcott's death, Whitman said, "Alcott was always my friend" (With Walt Whitman 1:333) and called him one of "the wise wondering seers . . . quite exceptional" (With Walt Whitman 3:267).  

Bibliography

Alcott, A. Bronson. The Journals of Bronson Alcott. Ed. Odell Shepard. Boston: Little, Brown, 1938. 

____. The Letters of A. Bronson Alcott. Ed. Richard L. Herrnstadt. Ames: Iowa State UP, 1969. 

Dahlstrand, Frederick C. Amos Bronson Alcott: An Intellectual Biography. Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1982. 

Shepard, Odell. Pedlar's Progress: The Life of Bronson Alcott. Boston: Little, Brown, 1937. 

Traubel, Horace. With Walt Whitman in Camden. Vol. 1. New York: Small, Maynard, 1906; Vol. 3. New York: Mitchell Kennerley, 1914.

Phillip H. Round

Boston, the capital of the state of Massachusetts, was founded in 1630 by English Puritans under the leadership of John Winthrop, a Suffolk lawyer. Boston was early on a center for the literary culture of English-speaking America, establishing within its jurisdiction a printing press at Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1638 and another in Boston proper in 1675. The city's importance to American literary culture was sustained in the nineteenth century by the establishment of the prestigious publishing houses of Ticknor and Fields and James Osgood, and the founding of two important journals— The North American Review in 1815 and the Atlantic Monthly in 1857.

Whitman's ongoing relationship with Boston was both symbolic and actual, at times bringing him face to face with an actual city of well-wishers and publishers, and at other times, with a symbolic metropolis of abolitionist strength and, just as often, Victorian hypocrisy. But it was the old city's crooked streets and "multitudinous angles" that most delighted the poet, and in Specimen Days he describes its haphazard beauty in language that reflects his own improvisational poetics: "crush up a sheet of letter paper . . . throw it down, stamp it flat, and that is a map of old Boston" (Prose Works 1:265).

Whitman's first public recognition of Boston refers to the symbolic city, recording its struggles with the slave question in "A Boston Ballad (1854)," a near doggerel satire written in 1854 on the transport of fugitive slave Anthony Burns. The poet actually visited Boston for the first time on 15 March 1860, in order to oversee the publication of the third edition of Leaves of Grass by the firm of Thayer and Eldridge. Almost as soon as he arrived, Ralph Waldo Emerson called on him, and, as Whitman recalled later, spent much of his time trying to convince the poet not to include the "Children of Adam" poems in the forthcoming edition. Within days, Emerson had acquired borrowing privileges for him at the Boston Athenaeum, the venerable private library frequented in Whitman's day by the likes of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (with whom he shared a "short but pleasant" visit), James Russell Lowell, and Oliver Wendell Holmes. For the next few months, Whitman divided his time in the Massachusetts capital between reading proof sheets and sauntering along Boston Common, discovering on these walks that "Everybody here is so like everybody else—and I am Walt Whitman!" (Correspondence 1:50). On Sunday mornings, he liked to visit the Seaman's Chapel to hear the Methodist minister Edward Thompson Taylor deliver his sermons in the powerful nautical language that Melville had reproduced in Moby Dick in the oratory of "Father Mapple"; Whitman eventually produced an essay on the subject, "Father Taylor (and Oratory)" (1887). During his visit Whitman also took time out from his work to attend the trial of Frank B. Sanborn, who was being tried for aiding some of John Brown's followers. It was on this trip, as well, that Whitman met William Douglas O'Connor, who would become one of his most vehement and vigilant supporters.

Whitman would not return to Boston until April of 1881, when he traveled to the city to deliver his Lincoln lecture in the Hawthorne Room of the St. Botolph Club on the anniversary of the president's death. In August of that year, Whitman found himself back in the city, this time to supervise a new edition of Leaves of Grass to be brought out by James R. Osgood, one of America's leading publishers. He quickly settled into the routine he had developed twenty-one years before, reading page proofs in a small office in the forenoon and strolling on Boston Common or meeting with friends in his time off. It was during this trip that Frank Sanborn took Whitman to Concord to visit the rapidly aging Emerson, with whom the poet sat quietly during their several evenings together, soaking up his early mentor's aura and chatting with Mrs. Emerson about the personal life of Henry Thoreau, who had died in 1862. While in Concord, Whitman also visited "Sleepy Hollow" cemetery and the graves of Hawthorne and Thoreau; took in the Old Manse, where Hawthorne had written several of his best tales; and toured the Concord battlefield, where the Revolutionary War had begun. 

While in Boston completing the page proofs to the 1881 edition, Whitman received news that President Garfield had died of the wounds inflicted by an assassin's bullet more than a year before, and he responded with "The Sobbing of the Bells," inserting the freshly composed poem into the "Songs of Parting" cluster just before the pages were set.

In March of 1882, after Osgood had printed three issues of the book amounting to 2,000 copies, the Boston District Attorney ordered the publisher to cease publication, having officially declared Leaves to be obscene literature. After agreeing to revise "a half a dozen . . . words or phrases" (Correspondence 3:267), Whitman found Boston's District Attorney unwilling to budge and finally reached a settlement with Osgood in May in which he received the plates, dies, and remaining copies of the edition (along with $100) and the freedom to seek another publisher.

Bibliography

Allen, Gay Wilson. The Solitary Singer: A Critical Biography of Walt Whitman. 1955. Rev. ed. 1967. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985.

Baxter, Sylvester. "Walt Whitman in Boston." New England Magazine 6 (1892): 714–721.

Furness, Clifton J. "Walt Whitman Looks at Boston." New England Quarterly 1 (1928): 353–370. 

Kaplan, Justin. Walt Whitman: A Life. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1980.

Whitman, Walt. The Correspondence. Ed. Edwin Haviland Miller. 6 vols. New York: New York UP, 1961–1977.

____. Prose Works 1892. Ed. Floyd Stovall. 2 vols. New York: New York UP, 1963–1964.

Howard Nelson

Bucke was a Canadian physician and student of the human mind who became one of Whitman's most devoted friends and supporters in the poet's later years. He was Whitman's first biographer, and his book Cosmic Consciousness (1901), which features Whitman and Bucke's messianic view of him, has won its author a minor but enduring fame.

After several years of wandering, work, and adventure—including a battle with Shoshone Indians and a trek through the Rocky Mountains in winter that cost him one of his feet and part of the other due to frostbite—Bucke received an inheritance which allowed him to attend McGill University Medical School. Further study in Europe followed. Bucke then returned to Canada, married, and for several years lived the life of a small town doctor. In 1876 he was appointed superintendent of a hospital for the insane, his profession from then on. He gained a reputation as one of the leading "alienists" of his day, and his approach to treatment of the mentally ill was progressive, deemphasizing alcohol, drugs, and physical restraints in favor of useful work and a more healthful living environment.

Always a wide-ranging reader, Bucke first encountered Whitman's work in 1867. He read Whitman's poetry with intensity and fascination for several years, committing much of it to memory. (It has been alleged that eventually Bucke knew all of Leaves of Grass by heart.) One evening in 1872 Whitman's poetry led to one of the key experiences of Bucke's life. After an evening of reading poetry (Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, and especially Whitman) aloud with friends, he experienced an overwhelming state of illumination and joy; he felt himself literally surrounded with light from an inner fire. The man of science with strong introspective and metaphysical leanings was from this time on a mystic as well.

Something similar occurred when he finally met Whitman in person. In Philadelphia on professional business, Bucke crossed the river to Camden and looked the poet up. Though their visit was outwardly unremarkable, after parting Bucke found himself in a state of "mental exaltation." This feeling continued for the next six weeks, and Bucke's devotion to Whitman continued for the rest of his life.

Many people have judged Whitman extraordinary in a variety of ways, but none has made a larger claim for him than Bucke. He believed that Whitman was not only a great writer but a breakthrough in humanity's psychic and moral evolution comparable to Buddha or Jesus; in fact, Bucke felt that Whitman surpassed even these. Bucke dedicated Man's Moral Nature (1879), his first book on his theory of evolving consciousness, "to the man of all men past and present that I have known who has the most exalted moral nature—Walt Whitman."

Bucke's biography of Whitman (1883) was an unconventional book, as much an anthology of documents about the poet as a biography. It was also a collaboration; Whitman advised throughout, revised Bucke's text, and wrote significant portions of the book himself. Always uncomfortable with Bucke's inclination to view him as a demi-god, Whitman's reworking of Bucke's text removed such claims, emphasizing instead the robustness of his personality. Bucke continued to devote much time and energy to writing, editing, and overseeing the publication of Whitman materials, including poetry, prose, correspondence, and criticism. Along with Horace Traubel and Thomas Harned, he served as Whitman's literary executor. Cosmic Consciousness was in a sense the book that Whitman would not let him write in the biography, because it does not merely present Bucke's theory of moral and spiritual evolution but also uses Whitman as central example.

Besides his literary efforts on Whitman's behalf, Bucke was also a medical consultant throughout the last years of the poet's life. Their correspondence includes a steady stream of advice from Bucke, who also treated Whitman directly when he visited. He was on hand during a crisis in 1888, and Whitman credited Bucke with having brought him through. Bucke's role was not just that of a self-appointed disciple and intellectual/mystical apostle; he was also an extremely dependable, knowledgeable, and practical man, and a loyal friend.

In 1880 Whitman spent the summer with Bucke at his home in Canada. His observations of religious services at the asylum are recorded in a haunting entry in Specimen Days (1882). They traveled together down the St. Lawrence River, and the following year, in preparation for the biography, they visited places important in Whitman's earlier years in Long Island and Manhattan. The 1880 visit was the basis for an engaging but factually unreliable Canadian feature film, Beautiful Dreamers (1992), with Rip Torn as Whitman and Colm Feore as Bucke.

Bibliography

Bucke, Richard Maurice. Calamus: A Series of Letters Written During the Years 1868–1880 by Walt Whitman to a Young Friend (Peter Doyle). Boston: Laurens Maynard, 1897.

____. Cosmic Consciousness: A Study in the Evolution of the Human Mind. 1901. New York: Dutton, 1969.

____. Man's Moral Nature: An Essay. New York: Putnam's, 1879.

____. Richard Maurice Bucke, Medical Mystic: Letters of Dr. Bucke to Walt Whitman and His Friends. Ed. Artem Lozynsky. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1977.

____. Walt Whitman. 1883. New York: Gordon, 1972.

____. The Wound Dresser: A Series of Letters Written from the Hospitals in Washington. Boston: Small, Maynard, 1898.

Coyne, James H. Richard Maurice Bucke: A Sketch. Rev. ed. Toronto: Saunders, 1923.

Jaffe, Harold. "Bucke's Walt Whitman : A Collaboration." Walt Whitman Review 15 (1969): 190–194.

Shortt, S.E.D. "The Myth of a Canadian Boswell: Dr. R.M. Bucke and Walt Whitman." Canadian Bulletin of Medical History 1 (1984): 55–70.

Traubel, Horace L., Richard Maurice Bucke, and Thomas B. Harned, eds. In Re Walt Whitman. Philadelphia: McKay, 1893.

Whitman, Walt. Specimen Days. Vol. 1 of Prose Works 1892. Ed. Floyd Stovall. New York: New York UP, 1963.

Joseph P. Hammond

On 30 June 1865 James Harlan, Secretary of the Interior, discharged Walt Whitman from his second-class clerkship in the Bureau of Indian Affairs. The facts surrounding Whitman's dismissal are ambiguous, though its results are certain: Harlan achieved a notoriety that initiated the decline of his political career, while Whitman's public stature began to grow. 

Soon after taking office, Harlan, a former college president and Methodist minister, circulated a notice dated 30 May which expressed his intention of releasing all employees who performed perfunctory or unnecessary services, or whose "fidelity to duty" and "moral character" were questionable (qtd. in Allen 344). Most Whitman biographers conclude that Harlan dismissed Whitman on the sole grounds of his being the author of Leaves of Grass. J. Hubley Ashton, at the behest of Whitman's fiery, combative supporter, William Douglas O'Connor, held a personal interview with Harlan the following day. Ashton reports that Harlan, while snooping through the building after hours, discovered a copy of Leaves of Grass either on or in Whitman's desk. Since Whitman was in the process of editing poems for subsequent editions, Harlan found numerous underlined, amended, and marked off passages. Curious, he carried it back to his office. Upon further reading, he declared the book obscene and its author immoral, discharging Whitman the next day. 

Within 24 hours of Whitman's dismissal, Ashton secured for him a position in the Attorney General's office. At the time, Whitman did not respond publicly to the affair, but later he would privately berate Harlan's "cowardly despicable act" (Traubel 477). Harlan afterward expressed regret concerning the incident, yet insisted that he fired Whitman for no reason other than that of forced economy. Whitman was often absent from his desk attending the sick and wounded soldiers, an activity which spoke volumes for his personal character but which also may have rendered his services dispensable. Most likely, Harlan dismissed Whitman for a combination of the reasons stated in his letter of 30 May. 

The situation's apparent injustice galvanized support for Whitman and helped to form the beginnings of his literary following. O'Connor's spirited defense of Whitman's moral character, The Good Gray Poet: A Vindication, enhanced Whitman's public image, influencing a gradual change in the poet's public reception. Gay Wilson Allen notes that Harlan's actions may have caused Whitman to become less acquiescent in the face of prudish critics, and may even have led him to retain and strengthen specific, overtly sexual passages in the "Calamus" poems.

Bibliography

Allen, Gay Wilson. The Solitary Singer: A Critical Biography of Walt Whitman. 1955. Rev. ed. 1967. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985. 

Loving, Jerome. Walt Whitman's Champion: William Douglas O'Connor. College Station: Texas A&M UP, 1978. 

Traubel, Horace. With Walt Whitman in Camden. Vol. 3. New York: Mitchell Kennerley, 1914.

Marion Walker Alcaro

Anne Burrows Gilchrist was born in London, the daughter of a prominent solicitor and, through her mother, the descendant of an old and distinguished family in Essex. A brilliant student, after completing the courses at a school for girls, she continued her education on her own, reading widely in science and philosophy. During the ten years of her marriage to Alexander Gilchrist, a young writer, in addition to having four children and acting as her husband's critic and amanuensis, she published five scientific essays and a book for children. After Alexander's death in 1861, with the help of his friends William Michael and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Anne finished his biography of Blake, still a standard reference. 

Anne Gilchrist is best known in American literature as the Englishwoman who fell passionately in love with Walt Whitman when she read Leaves of Grass, lent to her by William Rossetti in 1869. Undaunted by words and subject matter that shocked most Victorians, she recognized that this was a great work of art. Privately, she also responded to the poems by falling in love with the poet. She wrote a series of enthusiastic letters to Rossetti, who, realizing that this was exactly the kind of appreciative criticism that Whitman desperately needed, persuaded her to rewrite them for publication. "A Woman's Estimate of Walt Whitman" (changed to "An Englishwoman's Estimate of Walt Whitman" in 1887 by Herbert Gilchrist) was published anonymously in Boston in 1870. This brilliantly analytical essay, with its unqualified defense of Whitman, established Anne Gilchrist as one of the first great critics of Leaves of Grass. 

To Anne's disappointment, Whitman sent his thanks to the anonymous writer through Rossetti. After a year, she wrote a long letter directly to the poet: introducing herself, confessing her love and her conviction that she was the ideal mate whom she believed "the tenderest lover" was seeking; and telling him that, when circumstances permitted, she planned to go to America to be near him. Walt's reply was cautious but kind. For six years they exchanged letters. Hers were frequent and ardent, his less frequent and friendly. However, Anne's belief that once they met Walt would return her love with equal ardor never waned. In 1876, although Walt tried to dissuade her, Anne came to Philadelphia bringing with her three of her children and her furniture, pictures, china, silver, and books. 

Anne and Walt met in the hotel where the Gilchrists were staying until they found a house. For both, the meeting had an unexpected outcome. If Walt had been uneasy about meeting the woman who had wooed him for six years, his fears vanished when he met Anne Gilchrist. He was instantly taken with the charming Englishwoman and her attractive children, and felt wonderfully comfortable with them. For Anne, the encounter was both a blow and a revelation. From their first handclasp, it was clear that, although the poet was genuinely glad to see her, the responding fervor that she had hoped for was not there and never would be. It was the end of her romantic fantasy, but the beginning of a loving friendship that lasted all their lives. 

The two years that the Gilchrists lived in Philadelphia was a happy period for Walt. He was an almost daily visitor at their house on North 22nd Street, entertaining his friends as freely as if it were his own, and sometimes living there in a room that was always kept ready for him. He was devoted to Anne's children: Beatrice, a medical student; Herbert, an artist; and Grace, who studied singing. For the only time in his life, Walt was the father figure in a family that included children and was presided over by, in his words, "a true wife & mother" (Whitman 91). What delighted him most, however, was the sparkle and depth of his conversations with Anne. They discussed art, science, literature, philosophy, politics, and personalities—always with spirit, if not always in agreement. "The best of her was her talk," Walt would tell Traubel in one of his tender reminiscences (Traubel 268). And to William Sloane Kennedy he wrote that with Anne "you did not have to abate the wing of your thought downward at all, in deference to any feminine narrowness of mind" (qtd. in Alcaro 178). 

The Gilchrists left Philadelphia in April, 1878, and spent the following year in Concord, Boston, and New York. Anne became a celebrity. Wherever she went, the gracious friend of the Carlyles, Tennysons, Rossettis, and the Pre-Raphaelites—with her "fine presence" that Horace Scudder recalled with admiration (qtd. in Alcaro 195)—was lionized in literary circles. Anne and Walt met briefly in New York before the Gilchrists left America in 1879. Their parting was deeply emotional. After her return to England, Anne wrote "A Confession of Faith," a second essay on Leaves of Grass; edited a second edition of the Life of Blake; and wrote a biography of Mary Lamb, still in print. Walt remained a focal point in her life. Her letters—no longer passionate but reflecting a loving companionship—were frequent, and she worked tirelessly to raise funds for him. Anne died in 1885. Whitman's "Going Somewhere" was written for her: "My science-friend, my noblest woman-friend, / (Now buried in an English grave—and this a memory-leaf for her dear sake . . . )."   

Bibliography

Alcaro, Marion Walker. Walt Whitman's Mrs. G: A Biography of Anne Gilchrist. Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1991. 

Traubel, Horace. With Walt Whitman in Camden. Vol. 1. 1906. New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 1961. 

Whitman, Walt. The Correspondence. Ed. Edwin Haviland Miller. Vol. 2. New York: New York UP, 1961. 

Joann P. Krieg

Whitman's nurse in his final illness, Frederick Warren Fritzinger, or "Warry," as he was known, was a sailor before coming to stay at 328 Mickle Street.  He and his brother Henry (whose son was named Walter Whitman Fritzinger) had been raised by Mrs. Mary Davis, Whitman's Camden housekeeper, and Warry came to help her care for Whitman in October 1889.Whitman was very fond of him and spoke to J.W. Wallace of his good nature.

Fritzinger met Wallace and Dr. J. Johnston when they visited Camden and maintained contact with them after their return to Bolton, England.  In a series of four letters written in 1891 and 1892, Fritzinger provided Wallace and Johnston with news of Whitman's last illness.  The letters reveal a warm and affectionate caretaker.  Whitman's final words, "Shift, Warry," were addressed to Fritzinger as a request to be turned in his bed.

Following Whitman's death, Fritzinger testified on behalf of Davis in her lawsuit brought against George Whitman for recovery of money she believed he owed her.  He later married and worked as a clerk in a Camden shop.  A photograph by Johnston taken at the Camden wharf in 1890 shows Fritzinger with Whitman.

Bibliography

Folsom, Ed.  "'This Heart's Geography's Map': The Photographs of Walt Whitman."  Special issue of Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 4.2–3 (1986–1987): 37.

Keller, Elizabeth Leavitt.  Walt Whitman in Mickle Street.  New York: Kennerley, 1921.

Krieg, Joann P.  "Letters from Warry."  Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 11 (1994): 163–173.

William G. Lulloff

Walt Whitman's temperance novel, Franklin Evans; or the Inebriate: A Tale of the Times, was originally published in the New World (2.10, Extra Series, November 1842: 1-31). Reprinted as an "off-print from the New World " (Brasher 336), the 1843 edition appeared under the title: Franklin Evans: Knowledge Is Power. The Merchant's Clerk, in New York; or the Career of a Young Man from the Country. A third printing of the novel appeared in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle during the period that Whitman served as that paper's editor (March 1846-January 1848). Serialized episodes appeared in the Eagle from 16-30 November 1846. For this edition not only did Whitman change the title but he also edited the novel, making major deletions. Whitman's new title for this publication was Fortunes of a Country-Boy; Incidents in Town—and His Adventures at the South. Whitman also disguised his authorship of the novel by attributing it to "J.R.S." (Brasher 125). His reason for assigning the novel to a pseudonymous author is unknown. In addition to making radical revisions of the latter portion of the novel, Whitman deleted the introduction, conclusion, and chapter mottoes, as well as several incidents and embedded tales. In 1929, the original New World version of Franklin Evans was published in the Uncollected Poetry and Prose of Walt Whitman and by Random House as a book with an introduction by Emory Holloway. 

In 1842 two advocates of the temperance movement, Park Benjamin and James Aldrich, asked Whitman to write a "short novel for a worthy cause" (Winwar 73). In May of 1888, in a conversation with Horace Traubel, Whitman recalled that the request to write the novel came from "Parke Godwin and another somebody" (Traubel 93); however, biographers attribute the request to Benjamin and Aldrich. Because Benjamin and Aldrich offered a down payment of 75 dollars and a follow-up payment of 50 dollars if the publication sold, and because Whitman was "so hard up at the time" (Traubel 93), he agreed to attempt the task. Whitman claims to have completed the novel in three days; however, a noted twentieth-century biographer questions whether he could have written 20,000 words per day even if he had been fortified with "gin cocktails" as he once claimed (Brasher 125). In order to assist and to speed up the writing of the novel, Whitman included some stories that he had previously written. Probably the stories of the Indian in chapter two; "Little Jane," in chapter 14; and possibly the allegorical dream in chapter 21 had been written previously. 

In the same 1888 conversation with Horace Traubel, Whitman called the novel "damned rot—rot of the worst sort" (Traubel 93). Contemporary biographers and critics seem to agree with Whitman's assessment. For example, Gay Wilson Allen calls Franklin Evans a "melodramatic maudlin story" (59). Miller considers it "inept as a temperance plea and worthless as fiction" (19). 

The temperance theme of the novel is apparent even in the first chapter, before the plot involving young Franklin Evans begins. As Evans sets out for New York, he and a companion enter a tavern. Evans has been acquainted with the tavern keeper prior to this meeting. He relates to readers that he can well remember when the tavern keeper's "eyes were not bleared" (Whitman, Evans 10). He adds that the tavern keeper now has "a face flushed with redness" and the appearance of a man "enfeebled by disease" (10). Evans draws the conclusion that alcoholic beverages have been the man's downfall. As the novel continues, Franklin Evans, as first person narrator, relates the story in which strong drink causes his downfall. Predictably, by the end of his narrative, Franklin Evans concludes that "total abstinence" is the only safe course for him to follow (236). 

Whitman's introduction to the novel sounds convincing. Of course, his journalistic experience helped him to write acceptable prose. By the time he came to write Franklin Evans, he had accumulated considerable experience in writing for newspapers, and Henry Seidel Canby says that Whitman was a "good journalist" (41). He was not, however, a fiction writer, even though Franklin Evans was advertised before publication as having been written by "one of the best Novelists of this country" (qtd. in Brasher 124). The avowed purpose of the novel was to "rescue Young Men from the demon of intemperance" (qtd. in Brasher 124). Although Whitman said that he "never cut a chip off that kind of timber again" (Traubel 93), he did start a second temperance novel, "The Madman." An opening chapter appeared in the New York Washingtonian and Organ on 28 January 1843. No additional chapters of the novel have survived. 

The novel Franklin Evans does demonstrate Whitman's powers of observation and attention to detail. He says in the introduction that the novel will stir the memories of his readers, for they will know that the happenings are real. Whether he had experienced the happenings or had merely heard about them, he renders the scenes with elements of realism. 

In the introduction to Franklin Evans Whitman writes that the novel "is not written for the critics but for the people" (5). His statement serves as a harbinger of the role he later sought for himself in society, to be the poet of the people.

 

William G. Lulloff

Bibliography

Allen, Gay Wilson. The Solitary Singer: A Critical Biography of Walt Whitman. 1955. Rev. ed. 1967. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985. 

Brasher, Thomas L., ed. The Early Poems and the Fiction.By Walt Whitman. New York: New York UP, 1963. 

Canby, Henry Seidel. Walt Whitman: An American.Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1943. 

Miller, James E., Jr. Walt Whitman. New York: Twayne, 1962. 

Traubel, Horace. With Walt Whitman in Camden. Vol. 1. Boston: Small, Maynard, 1906. 

Whitman, Walt. Franklin Evans. 1842. New York: Random House, 1929. 

____. The Uncollected Poetry and Prose of Walt Whitman. Ed. Emory Holloway. Vol. 2. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page, 1921. 

Winwar, Frances. American Giant: Walt Whitman and His Times. New York: Harper, 1941. 

Madeleine B. Stern

Walt Whitman's interest in phrenology led him on 16 July 1849 to the Phrenological Cabinet of Fowlers and Wells in New York City's Clinton Hall, where he sat for a phrenological examination. The Fowler brothers from Cohocton, New York, were practitioners of the science of mind which held that mental faculties are indicated by the skull's conformation and can be analyzed and improved. The Phrenological Depot established by O.S. and L.N. Fowler in 1842 offered casts of skulls, phrenological busts, and books, as well as phrenological examinations. With the admission of their brother-in-law, Samuel R. Wells, in 1844 the firm was restyled Fowlers and Wells. 

Whitman's examination was made by Lorenzo Fowler, a skilled practitioner, and the written analysis, followed by a listing of faculties with their sizes, made a strong impression upon the subject. It was a perceptive reading that appraised Whitman as strong in "animal will" with large Amativeness, Self-Esteem, and Individuality. Whitman quoted from the analysis and published it several times. Phrenological themes and language appeared in his poetry. 

In 1855 Fowlers and Wells advertised Leaves of Grass as for sale at their new Phrenological Depot at 308 Broadway. With the departure from the firm of Orson S. Fowler, occupied now with the octagonal house he had built in Fishkill, New York, and with his writings on phrenological subjects, the firm became Fowler and Wells. Its London agent, William Horsell, would play a part in establishing Whitman's English reputation. In October 1855 the American Phrenological Journal, published by Fowler and Wells, carried Whitman's unsigned review of Leaves of Grass. By November, Whitman became a staff writer for another Fowler and Wells periodical, Life Illustrated, his contributions including the series "New York Dissected." 

The expanded second edition of Leaves of Grass was published anonymously by Fowler and Wells in August 1856. Stamped in gold on the spine of each volume appeared, without authorization, Emerson's words, "I Greet You at the Beginning of a Great Career." 

The book's unfavorable reception led the firm to withdraw their support of and relationship with the poet who, in turn, became disenchanted with the phrenologist-publishers. As for the Fowler brothers, through lectures, publications, and phrenological examinations during the decades that followed, each continued to popularize the belief that self-knowledge through phrenological analysis could lead to self-improvement. This they did without reference to Walt Whitman, the poet they had once perceptively analyzed and published without an imprimatur.

Madeleine B. Stern

Bibliography

Hungerford, Edward. "Walt Whitman and His Chart of Bumps." American Literature 2 (1931): 350-384. 

Stern, Madeleine B. Heads & Headlines: The Phrenological Fowlers. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1971. 

Huck Gutman

"Drum-Taps" is a sequence of 43 poems about the Civil War, and stands as the finest war poetry written by an American. In these poems Whitman presents, often in innovative ways, his emotional experience of the Civil War. The sequence as a whole traces Whitman's varying responses, from initial excitement (and doubt), to direct observation, to a deep compassionate involvement with the casualties of the armed conflict. The mood of the poems varies dramatically, from excitement to woe, from distant observation to engagement, from belief to resignation. Written ten years after "Song of Myself," these poems are more concerned with history than the self, more aware of the precariousness of America's present and future than of its expansive promise. In "Drum-Taps" Whitman projects himself as a mature poet, directly touched by human suffering, in clear distinction to the ecstatic, naive, electric voice which marked the original edition of Leaves of Grass.

First published as a separate book of 53 poems in 1865, the second edition of Drum-Taps included eighteen more poems (Sequel to Drum-Taps). Later the book was folded into Leaves of Grass as the sequence "Drum-Taps," though many individual poems were rearranged and placed in other sections. By the final version (1881), "Drum-Taps" contained only 43 poems, all but five from Drum-Taps and Sequel. Readers looking for a reliable guide to the diverse issues raised in the sequence would be advised to turn to the fine study by Betsy Erkkila. Interested readers will find the more ironic and contemplative poems of Herman Melville's Battle Pieces and Aspects of the War (1866) a remarkable counterpoint to Whitman's poems.

The first eight poems in the sequence express Whitman's exuberance, and his doubts, as America headed into a fratricidal war. Deeply threatened by a divided nation, Whitman insists that the American union should be maintained at all costs. His perspective on the war was very close to that of Abraham Lincoln, who likewise maintained that the central issue in the war was the preservation of the Union. (Most of their contemporaries saw slavery, not the Union, as the war's most pressing issue.) Since Whitman's earlier prose and poetry had explored a parallel between an American political union which was comprised of diverse states, and even more diverse peoples, and the coherence of the poet's own identity, formed of his large and diverse needs and interests, he felt the threat of the nation's dissolution keenly on personal as well as political grounds.

The opening poems of "Drum-Taps" represent a call to arms, a passionate cry to defend the imperiled nation. Most readers find these poems overly rhetorical, though M. Wynn Thomas argues cogently that the long colloquy "Song of the Banner at Daybreak" vividly presents a dialectical opposition between democratic brotherhood and democratic renewal (disturbingly, renewed through violence), an opposition deeply embedded in Whitman's own consciousness. A similar colloquy occurs in "The Centenarian's Story"; a veteran of Washington's campaign recalls for a Civil War volunteer the heroism of war, while simultaneously recollecting, "It sickens me yet, that slaughter!"

Following are four poems unique in Whitman's work, precise word-pictures of men at war which have been variously and oppositely described as imagist, naturalist, subjective, and objective. What is clear and unarguable is the manner in which these four poems exploit a mode of seeing associated with the discovery of photography. They possess the same visual clarity, the same precise focus, found in contemporary photographs of the war, such as those taken by Mathew Brady. Photography was in Whitman's time a novel technology, and the Civil War provided an important opportunity to explore the esthetic and communicative powers of the new medium of film. Whitman's vision is shaped in these four poems by this new art.

The poems describe an army either at march or at rest: at march in "Cavalry Crossing a Ford," at rest as day ends and night descends in "Bivouac on a Mountain Side," marching toward combat in "An Army Corps on the March," sleeping at night as seen by a sleepless soldier who sits beside his campfire in "By the Bivouac's Fitful Flame." Each reveals the lyric beauty of a collective body of men moving or resting. Whitman presents to the reader the immediacy of military experience, the sense of being part of an army and observing it from the midst of a military campaign. Informed by the many letters he received from his brother George during his four years of service in the Union army, by conversations he had with wounded soldiers, and by his own trips to the front lines, the four poems are recreations of the perceptions that would have been available to an ordinary soldier.

The following group of five poems confront, in measured but deeply moving fashion, the injury, death, and suffering occasioned by the Civil War. The first, "Come Up from the Fields Father," is a poem of sentiment, since it draws its emotional power from family tragedy. Recounting the experience of a mother inconsolable when she learns of the injury and death of her son in battle, Whitman uses maternal loss to convey the ineradicable pain occasioned by the violence of war. That the poem is held in critical disfavor by some critics today reveals more about changes in literary sensibility, from sentimentality to ironic distance, than it does about the poem itself.

"Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field One Night" is an elegiac meditation on the comradeship felt on the battlefield. Whitman always sought the comradeship he celebrated so powerfully in the "Calamus" sequence. The Civil War, despite or perhaps because of its violence, disruption, and widespread suffering, paradoxically allowed him to experience that comradeship on the most profound level. The narrator in "Vigil Strange" reveals his intimate relation with the soldier who dies by his side in battle, and to whose corpse he returns at night. The imagery of the poem ("one touch of your hand to mine O boy . . . son of responding kisses . . . you dearest comrade . . . I faithfully loved you . . . boy of responding kisses") conveys physical love as well as intimacy. The biographer Paul Zweig sees in Whitman's ability to touch and comfort soldiers—Whitman nursed and nurtured over 80,000 injured men in Washington hospitals during the war—an acceptance of the human body and of the profound links between all men. He perceptively points out that prior to the cataclysm of the Civil War and Whitman's active involvement in nursing wounded soldiers, the poet had only been able to prophesy and not experience this comradeship. The critic Joseph Cady sees "Vigil Strange" as Whitman's attempt, in a culture that as yet had no word for "homosexual," to present to readers the physical and emotional tenderness that he recognized existed between men.

An essential companion to reading "Drum-Taps" is Whitman's autobiographical memoir, Specimen Days. The large central portion of that work recounts Whitman's daily experiences and meditations during the Civil War. Consonant with the middle section of "Drum-Taps," it reveals that for the poet the dominating metaphor for the war is a hospital, filled with injured men who must be nursed or, if dying, comforted. Whitman's early enthusiastic response to the war shifted dramatically when his brother George was injured in December 1862 and Whitman went to the front in Virginia to seek him out. From this time forward, Whitman would spend most of his days visiting military hospitals, primarily in the nation's capital, to comfort and nurture the wounded solders, Union and Confederate, who were convalescing there.

"A March in the Ranks Hard-Prest, and the Road Unknown" describes a battlefield hospital. Its narrator takes on the role of nurse, attendant to the sufferings of injured soldiers. Entering a church converted into a hospital, he sees a young man dying of a stomach wound amid a crowd of wounded companions. This is the poetry of witness: although he at first finds the scene "a sight beyond all the pictures and poems ever made," Whitman proceeds to record this wartime scene and claim it for poetry. "Then before I depart I sweep my eyes o'er the scene fain to absorb it all, / Faces, varieties, postures beyond description, most in obscurity, some of them dead . . . These I resume as I chant, I see again the forms, I smell the odor." As happens in war, the soldiers must move on, and the poet-narrator must leave the hospital. Still, he is aware that, even in extremity, a human bond has been established: "But first I bend to the dying lad, his eyes open, a half-smile he gives me." Such intimacy is all the poet has to sustain him. Beyond it, in a world of pain and suffering and dying, there is only "darkness, / Resuming, marching, ever in darkness marching, on in the ranks, / The unknown road still marching." The imperative of life is to continue, even though moving onward must proceed through a darkness that is metaphorical as well as actual.

There is general agreement that "The Wound-Dresser," which Whitman placed at the center of every version of "Drum-Taps," is the thematic center towards which the sequence moves. Questioned by young people long after the war about what the war was like, the old veteran who narrates the poem summarizes not only Whitman's own experience, but the overall structure of the poems in the "Drum-Taps" sequence: "Arous'd and angry, I'd thought to beat the alarum, and urge relentless war, / But soon my fingers fail'd me, my face droop'd and I resign'd myself, / To sit by the wounded and soothe them, or silently watch the dead." The first section of the poem ends with the demand of the young listeners, "what saw you to tell us? / What stays with you latest and deepest?"

In the second section, the old veteran recalls his experiences as a soldier, only to say that they are not what was most memorable. Adopting the pose of the worshiper—this is both humility before suffering, and reverence for the war which provided Whitman what he claimed was the most profound experience of his life—he returns "with hinged knees" to his deepest memory. "Bearing the bandages, water and sponge, / Straight and swift to my wounded I go." The section concludes with the old veteran once again bending his knees, "onward . . . [w]ith hinged knees and steady hand to dress wounds."

In the third section, the veteran recalls soldiers, not in their totality but in their individuality, each defined by the specificity of his wound. "Such was the war," Whitman writes in Specimen Days. "It was not a quadrille in a ball-room" (Whitman 779). The veteran understands anewthe courage it took to face the devastation: the loss of limbs, the putrefaction of flesh, the suffering, the presence of death. "I am faithful, I do not give out," the veteran asserts. At the same moment he reveals that although he goes about his rounds with a professional manner, he is deeply moved, "a burning flame" flaring deep within his breast.

Returning through memory to the hospitals, in section 4 the veteran achieves an understanding that such comradeship, providing comfort to one's fellow human beings in need, is the deepest experience that life can offer. "The hurt and wounded I pacify with soothing hand, / I sit by the restless all the dark night, some are so young, / Some suffer so much, I recall the experience sweet and sad." The poem concludes with a remarkable parenthesis, one which lends emphasis to those who read the central portion of "Drum-Taps" as testimony to Whitman's discovery in his own life of that love and comradeship—and physical contact with his fellow men—which his poetry always celebrates: "(Many a soldier's loving arms about this neck have cross'd and rested, / Many a soldier's kiss dwells on these bearded lips.)." The best commentary on these two lines is Whitman's own description, in Specimen Days, of his experiences in military hospitals: "Those three years I consider the greatest privilege and satisfaction . . . the most profound lesson of my life. . . . It arous'd and brought out and decided undream'd-of depths of emotion" (Whitman 776).

Little critical attention has been paid to the poems which follow the climactic "The Wound-Dresser," in large part because they eschew the deep conflicts addressed in early poems of "Drum-Taps" and the direct encounter with the war and its victims that the central poems in the sequence take for their subject. "Look Down Fair Moon" recalls the visual glimpses of earlier poems in the sequence, but without their photographic completeness. "The Artilleryman's Vision" is interesting for two opposing reasons. Its recollection of wartime experience as purely experiential, rather than ethical, prefigures modern concerns with the problematic relation between esthetics and warfare, and its nocturnal setting, in which a sleepless narrator is forced to recollect his war-time experience, reveals a recognition of what today is called post-traumatic stress syndrome.

Bibliography

Cady, Joseph. " Drum-Taps and Male Homosexual Literature." Walt Whitman: Here and Now. Ed. Joann P. Krieg. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1985.

Erkkila, Betsy. Whitman the Political Poet. New York: Oxford UP, 1989.

Glicksberg, Charles I., ed. Walt Whitman and the Civil War. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1933.

Thomas, M. Wynn. The Lunar Light of Whitman's Poetry. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1987.

Whitman, Walt. Complete Poetry and Collected Prose. Ed. Justin Kaplan. New York: Library of America, 1982.

Zweig, Paul. Walt Whitman: The Making of the Poet. New York: Basic Books, 1984.

Arthur Golden

The Blue Book (bound in blue paper wrappers) was Whitman's personal, annotated copy of the 1860 (third) edition of Leaves of Grass. Over the span of the Civil War (1861–1865), Whitman carefully revised the bulk of the poems in the third edition, bringing them more closely in line with his on-the-spot responses to the war. The Blue Book was to serve as the revised text of the next (1867) edition of Leaves, but Whitman, for the most part, rejected many of these revisions in favor of the 1860 text. For this reason, the Blue Book enables one to recover Whitman's overall poetic strategies for Leaves of Grass under the urgent pressures of war during this crucial period of his career.

Whitman had termed the third edition of Leaves of Grass his "New Bible" (Blue Book 2:xxxi). To the thirty-two poems of the 1855 and 1856 editions Whitman added 146 new poems to Leaves. These included most of the poems that formed the programmatic-nationalistic "cluster," or grouping of poems, "Chants Democratic and Native American"; the "Children of Adam" cluster, celebrating heterosexual love; the "Calamus" cluster, in which Whitman often interwove an intense homosexual emotion with the general theme of the "Brotherhood of Man"; and various miscellaneous clusters. Very little had escaped Whitman's attention in the Blue Book. All but 34 of its 456 pages often show heavy revisions, excisions, paste-on slips containing fresh lines, marginal notations, and erasures, all variously in ink and pencils of different colors.

Throughout Leaves of Grass, Whitman's integral nationalist bonding metaphor was that of the celebration of the "divine average," of the American people "en-masse." The war stifled this idea of the organic oneness of the states. In the Blue Book, Whitman's aim was to bring the divided nation to a prewar visionary nationalistic homogeneity. In effect, his revisory strategy was to hold in suspension two separate attitudes toward the South. For example, in his heavy revisions for the "Chants Democratic" poem "By Blue Ontario's Shore," it was as though the South, not mentioned by name, was some foreign aggressor attacking the United States. In a paste-on addition, we get these lines, retained in 1867:

The menacing, arrogant one, that strode and advanced with his senseless scorn, bearing the murderous knife!Lo! the wide swelling one, the braggart that would yesterday do so much!Already a carrion dead, and despised of all the earth—an offal rank,This day to the dunghill maggots spurn'd.

(Blue Book 2:114)

But for the "other" South, the South of the "people," in the 1860 poem "Longings for Home" ("O Magnet-South"), Whitman in light revision retained almost intact his antebellum romantic view of the South.

In this connection, faced at the early stages of the war with the possible dissolution of the Union, and with such foreign powers as England and France antagonistic to the Union cause, Whitman's intense nationalism at times shifted during this period to the xenophobic. In the poem "Our Old Feuillage," Whitman wished to "demain [or cut America off from the rest of] the continent!" (Blue Book 2:160). With a Northern victory, he rejected this revision in 1867. Following the end of the war, with an occasional exception (e.g., "By Blue Ontario's Shore") Whitman rejected in 1867 most of his harshest nationalistic revisions.

In the Blue Book Whitman was also preoccupied with subjecting the 45-poem "Calamus" cluster to heavy revision. The calamus image derives from the calamus plant, a phallic-shaped, aromatic plant found in remote marshy areas. It served Whitman as the combined metaphor for the themes of the "Brotherhood of Men" and the often intense homosexual emotion. Elsewhere in the Blue Book, Whitman in revision regularly interwove the "Calamus" theme with the nationalistic theme, as, for example, in "Starting from Paumanok," thus giving its initial democratic motif a more intense bonding of "manly love."

In this connection, in the revised "Calamus" grouping, Whitman often considerably strengthened the homosexual motif. In an apparent effort to tighten matters and avoid repeating the same theme and emotion he had explored variously in 1860, Whitman initially had rejected no fewer than thirteen poems, later restoring four. Had he followed through on his Blue Book revisions in 1867, one-fifth of the "Calamus" cluster would have disappeared. Had Whitman intended to suppress passages or entire poems that delineated his homosexual sensibility, he certainly would have done so in the extensively revised "Calamus" group. That is, any logical assumption of suppression would presuppose the outright elimination, or the watering down, of the "Calamus" metaphor in poems, stanzas, lines. On the contrary, in poem after poem Whitman retained through extensive revision passages as revealing in the intensity of the "Calamus" emotion as anything he had rejected. And, for example, in "Whoever You are Holding Me Now in Hand," the revised version was, if anything, even more intensely evocative and personal than in 1860. On the other hand, the quietly suggestive "A Glimpse" remained more or less as in 1860. Whitman saw fit to reject most of the "Calamus" revisions in 1867. The three 1860 "Calamus" poems he dropped from the 1867 edition were certainly highly personal, but no more so contextually than the revised Blue Book "Calamus" poems, or the sexually explicit "Calamus" poems he retained in 1867. In all, forty poems were variously rejected, with six restored. It appears to have been Whitman's aim not merely to revise the poems, but also to achieve overall a broader economy of statement. Only six new poems appeared in the 1867 edition. During this period, Whitman had also completed the Drum-Taps (1865) poems.

The Blue Book had gained notoriety over the years as the volume that led to Whitman's dismissal in 1865 from his clerkship in the Indian Office of the Department of the Interior. Whitman had kept the book in his desk. Secretary of the Interior James Harlan somehow got hold of the copy, was scandalized by its openness, and fired Whitman. Through the influence of friends, Whitman was hired the next day in the Attorney General's Office, where he remained free from official smut-hounds until 1873, when he suffered a stroke and left government service.

One of Whitman's literary executors, Horace Traubel, tried unsuccessfully over the years to issue a facsimile edition of the Blue Book. In 1968 the noted Whitman collector Oscar Lion, who gave to the New York Public Library his important Whitman collection, generously made possible the publication of an exact facsimile edition of the Blue Book and an accompanying introduction and analysis of all the revisions. Both the print facsimile edition and the Whitman Archive online edition now allow one to follow Whitman's advice to Traubel and take "a glimpse into the workshop" without being put off by the myths that had obscured its importance over the years.

Bibliography

Golden, Arthur. "New Light on Leaves of Grass: Whitman's Annotated Copy of the 1860 (Third) Edition." Bulletin of the New York Public Library 69 (1965): 283–306.

Killingsworth, M. Jimmie. Whitman's Poetry of the Body: Sexuality, Politics, and the Text. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1989.

Miller, James E., Jr. A Critical Guide to "Leaves of Grass." Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1957.

Whitman, Walt. Prose Works 1892. Ed. Floyd Stovall. 2 vols. New York: New York UP, 1963–1964.

____. Walt Whitman's Blue Book. Ed. Arthur Golden. 2 vols. New York: New York Public Library, 1968.

____. Walt Whitman's Civil War. Ed. Walter Lowenfels. New York: Knopf, 1960.

____. Whitman's Manuscripts: "Leaves of Grass" (1860). Ed. Fredson Bowers. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1955.

Christopher O. Griffin

Sylvester Baxter was a Boston journalist and publicist largely associated with the Boston Herald and involved in the improvement and historical preservation of Boston and New England. Most of his writings concern the publicizing or evaluation of Boston's industrial, cottage, and leisure complexes, but Baxter also wrote about Mexico and New Mexican Indians and produced two collections of poetry.

Baxter first met Whitman in April 1881 at one of the poet's Lincoln lectures. That the two were amiable associates is evidenced by Whitman's writing to Baxter later in that year, asking for help in finding a room in Boston while the poet was seeing his forthcoming edition of Leaves of Grass through press. Baxter repeatedly wrote favorable reviews of Whitman's work, which certainly increased the poet's esteem for, and, thereby, association with the Boston journalist.

On 6 December 1886 Baxter promoted a government pension to support the poet, and in early 1887 Congressman Henry B. Lovering of Massachusetts introduced the twenty-five-dollar-per-month pension bill into the House. Apparently it passed committee but was then dropped, probably due to Whitman's objection to the idea. A substantial monetary gift from admirers in England most likely influenced Whitman in his decision.

Despite the abandonment of the pension bill, Baxter continued to work on the poet's behalf. In 1887, he and William Sloane Kennedy raised $800 to build a cottage for Whitman on Timber Creek, where he had spent several summers beginning in 1876 at the farm of George and Susan Stafford. Unfortunately, after assuming full control of both the money and the executive decisions regarding location and construction of the cottage, Whitman had to use the money for more urgent financial demands.

Bibliography

Gohdes, Clarence, and Rollo G. Silver, eds. Faint Clews & Indirections: Manuscripts of Walt Whitman and His Family. Durham: Duke UP, 1949.

Whitman, Walt. The Correspondence. Ed. Edwin Haviland Miller. Vol. 4. New York: New York UP, 1969.

Christina Davey

Philadelphia-born Mary Whitall Smith Costelloe, a Quaker, was a political activist and an art historian and critic. She was well known in England for lectures on social reform (1885–1890) and in America for those on art criticism (1903–1904; 1909). As Mary Logan, she wrote most of her works about art, including Guide to the Italian Pictures at Hampton Court (1894) and "The New Art Criticism" (1895). She wrote travel books as Mary Berenson (1930; 1935; 1938). Ernest Samuels provides a useful list of many of Costelloe's works; however, Barbara Strachey should be consulted for more reliable biographical information.

Costelloe, daughter of Hannah Whitall and Robert Pearsall Smith, was educated at Smith and Harvard Annex (Radcliffe). She married Benjamin Francis Conn Costelloe in England (1885). Following the death of her first husband, Costelloe married Bernard Berenson in Italy (1900). Her friendship with Whitman began at Christmas time in 1882. He visited the Smith home in Germantown, Pennsylvania, at the invitation of Costelloe's father, who knew about his daughter's admiration for Whitman. Having read Leaves of Grass at Smith, Costelloe proclaimed herself a "Whitmanite" and eschewed social conventions and restrictions (Berenson 36). In 1889 Whitman praised Costelloe for pursuing activities outside her home and described her as "a true woman of the new aggressive type" (Traubel 188). In England, Costelloe helped promote interest in Whitman. Her article "Walt Whitman at Camden. By One who has been there" appeared in the 23 December 1886 Pall Mall Gazette, one of that periodical's series of works focusing on Whitman between late 1886 and mid-1887.

Costelloe became the poet's "staunchest living woman friend" (Correspondence 4:89).

Bibliography

Berenson, Mary. Mary Berenson: A Self-Portrait from Her Letters & Diaries. Ed. Barbara Strachey and Jayne Samuels. New York: Norton, 1983.

Samuels, Ernest. Bernard Berenson: The Making of a Connoisseur. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1979.

Strachey, Barbara. Remarkable Relations: The Story of the Pearsall Smith Family. London: Gollancz, 1980. Rpt. as Remarkable Relations: The Story of the Pearsall Smith Women. New York: Universe Books, 1982.

Traubel, Horace. With Walt Whitman in Camden. Ed. Sculley Bradley. Vol. 4. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1953.

Whitman, Walt. The Correspondence. Ed. Edwin Haviland Miller. 6 vols. New York: New York UP, 1961–1977.

Marion Walker Alcaro

Herbert Gilchrist, a painter, was born in London, son of Alexander and Anne Gilchrist. In 1876, when he accompanied his mother and sisters to America, he was a student at the Royal Academy of Arts. During the two years that the Gilchrists lived in Philadelphia, he continued painting on his own—for the most part, painting Whitman. However, in the winter that the Gilchrists spent in New York (1878–1879), he studied under William Merritt Chase.

Herbert's devotion to Whitman was the dominating force in his life. Like his mother's devotion to the poet, it began long before they met. When he was seventeen, Anne wrote to Walt that Herbert had read Leaves of Grass "quite through" with "a large measure of responsive delight" (qtd. in Alcaro 149). In America, Walt became the center of his existence. In Philadelphia, in addition to seeing the poet almost daily at the Gilchrists' house, Herbert often visited him in Camden and joined him at the Staffords' farm. There can be little doubt that Herbert was one of Walt's young lovers. When the Gilchrists returned to England (1879), like his mother, Herbert wrote regularly to Walt and helped collect funds for him. After Anne died in 1885, Herbert hastily compiled a biography, Anne Gilchrist: Her Life and Writings (1887), and returned to Philadelphia to paint Walt's portrait.

Herbert's powerful portrait of Whitman was warmly acclaimed in London. In Philadelphia its reception was less enthusiastic. Whitman preferred Eakins's portrait, claiming that Herbert had "prettified" him, given him "Italianate" curls (qtd. in Alcaro 175). However, Horace Traubel also recorded Walt's refusal to be too hard on it: "I love Herbert too much," Walt told Thomas Harned (Traubel 156). Herbert lived in Philadelphia for several years, visiting the ailing poet faithfully. He was a speaker at Walt's seventieth birthday celebration. After Whitman's death, Gilchrist returned to England. In 1914 he took his own life.

Bibliography

Alcaro, Marion Walker. Walt Whitman's Mrs. G: A Biography of Anne Gilchrist. Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1991.

Traubel, Horace. With Walt Whitman in Camden. Vol. 1. 1906. New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 1961.

Joel Myerson

David McKay was born in Dysart, Scotland, and emigrated to America in 1871. He entered the employ of J.B. Lippincott of Philadelphia in 1873, working as a bookseller. In 1881, Rees Welsh convinced McKay to take over his bookselling business, which McKay did. In the following year, McKay took a few hundred dollars of his own and about twenty-five hundred he borrowed and bought both of Welsh's bookselling and publishing businesses, changing the name of the firm to indicate the new owner. The business prospered: McKay sold the bookselling division in 1896 and enlarged his firm by buying a number of smaller ones, including Street and Smith's line of juveniles. At his death, he left a wife and five children.

After the 1881 edition of Leaves of Grass was declared "obscene literature" by the district attorney of Massachusetts, and Whitman refused to delete the offending passages, the publisher, James R. Osgood of Boston, withdrew and sold the plates and stock to Whitman on 17 May 1882. On 5 June, McKay wrote Whitman on behalf of Rees Welsh and offered to publish the book. A contract was signed on 22 July and a new edition of Leaves was published on 17 or 18 July, rapidly going through five printings under the Rees Welsh imprint. McKay "formally bo't out and assumed" Rees Welsh's business in October (Whitman 314), and thereafter was Whitman's American publisher. McKay also took over the publication of Specimen Days & Collect from Rees Welsh after one printing, and later published November Boughs (1888), Good-Bye My Fancy (1891), and Gems from Walt Whitman (1889) on his own. After Whitman's death, McKay published Whitman's Complete Prose Works (1892). McKay's contract with Whitman contained one unusual clause: Whitman was allowed to sell copies of his works on his own and keep the profits, which he did, most notably with sales of the Complete Poems & Prose (1888) volume to Britain.

Bibliography

"David McKay, 1860–1918." Publishers Weekly 30 Nov. 1918: 1799.

Myerson, Joel. Walt Whitman: A Descriptive Bibliography. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1993.

Whitman, Walt. The Correspondence. Ed. Edwin Haviland Miller. Vol. 3. New York: New York UP, 1964.

David G. Miller

George and Susan Stafford were the parents of Harry Stafford, a young man Whitman met and befriended in the mid-1870s. Harry's parents were tenant farmers in Laurel Springs, outside of Glendale, near Camden, New Jersey. Harry invited Whitman to his family home, and Whitman immediately fell in love with the homestead and the intimate atmosphere. It reminded him of the Whitman family farm on Long Island that his parents had inherited from Whitman's paternal grandparents, Jesse and Hannah Whitman. After the initial visit to the Stafford farm, Whitman was to return several times over the following years, often staying for weeks at a time and paying for his lodging in order to help with family finances.

While he was with the Staffords, Whitman found the time to work on Specimen Days, an autobiographical piece in which he, among other things, wanted to record his reactions to the war. In that memoir he turns from the horrors of war's destruction to the comforts and joys of his adopted home. The Stafford family serves as a counterpoint to the disruption of the Civil War. At the farm he also planned much of the 1881 edition of Leaves of Grass. Whitman only stopped going to the farm when his friendship with Harry Stafford became strained, which made the visits uncomfortable. He later wrote that among the Staffords he felt both loved and able to love, and that they had in a real way saved his life after the horrors of the Civil War.

Bibliography

Kaplan, Justin. Walt Whitman: A Life. 1980. New York: Bantam Books, 1982.

Reynolds, David S. Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography. New York: Knopf, 1995.

Whitman, Walt. The Correspondence. Ed. Edwin Haviland Miller. 6 vols. New York: New York UP, 1961–1977.

Paula K. Garrett

Hannah Louisa Whitman was the younger sister of Walt Whitman, and she was the single family member who seemed to understand Whitman's writing. She attended the Hempstead Female Seminary and taught school prior to her marriage in March 1852 to Charles L. Heyde, a landscape artist to whom Whitman had introduced her. She moved with Heyde to Rutland, Vermont, where they lived a tumultuous, impoverished life together.

Named for her paternal grandmother, Hannah Brush Whitman, and her mother, Louisa Van Velsor Whitman, Hannah Whitman appears to have been Whitman's favorite sister, and they shared a love of literature. Hannah Whitman appears in Whitman's story "My Boys and Girls" (1844) as a fair and delicate youth.

Throughout her married life, Hannah and Walt exchanged many letters; in fact, in the last two years of his life Whitman wrote almost forty letters to her. She speaks favorably of his writing in her early letters, particularly admiring Leaves of Grass (1855). Her husband, Charles Heyde, grew uncomfortable around Whitman, even leaving when Whitman would visit, and he had a particular dislike of Leaves.

Having visited his sister in Vermont, and having seen the conditions in which she was living, with his letters Whitman often sent the Heydes money for clothes and furnishings. Hannah and Charles also received money from neighbors in spite of the fact that many of them witnessed violent fights between the two.

Later in life, Hannah became reclusive and hypochondriacal, and her letters reveal a neurotic tendency to overstate the family's wealth and social position. In his first will Whitman left Hannah one gold ring; in his final will, however, he left her one thousand dollars.

Charles Heyde died in an insane asylum in 1892, and Hannah Whitman Heyde died sixteen years later in 1908. She is buried in the Whitman mausoleum in Harleigh Cemetery (Camden, New Jersey), as the poet had planned.

Walt Whitman's sister Hannah appears to have been an important figure in his life. Not only did he care for her financially, but he was close to her. She seems to have been the one favorable connection between his family and his writing, since she read and enjoyed her brother's work.

Bibliography

Allen, Gay Wilson. The Solitary Singer: A Critical Biography of Walt Whitman. 1955. Rev. ed. 1967. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985.

Kaplan, Justin. Walt Whitman: A Life. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1980.

Molinoff, Katherine. Some Notes on Whitman's Family. Brooklyn: Comet, 1941.

Reynolds, David S. Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography. New York: Knopf, 1995.

Philip W. Leon

Born in Aversall, Lancashire, poet and critic Robert Buchanan grew up in Scotland and attended the University of Glasgow. He became acquainted with Dickens, George Eliot, and Browning, but ran afoul of the Pre-Raphaelites with his article "The Fleshly School of Poetry," appearing in the Contemporary Review of October 1871, in which he attacked the eroticism in their work. Dante G. Rossetti and Algernon Charles Swinburne were his particular targets, both of whom ironically also admired Whitman at that time. Swinburne, who later wrote some strongly deprecating remarks about Whitman, also unleashed his vitriol on Buchanan, calling him a "hack rhymester" (qtd. in Stephens 795). Though Buchanan later apologized to Rossetti, whom he never met, this article irreparably damaged his career.

Lamenting the lack of his critical and popular reception in America, Whitman wrote to Rudolf Schmidt of Copenhagen in January 1872 that "Robert Buchanan, Swinburne, the great English and Dublin colleges [Edward Dowden], affectionately receive me and doughtily champion me" (Whitman 1001). In stark contrast to his condemnation of the "fleshly" Pre-Raphaelites, Buchanan regarded Whitman as a moral poet and admired his pioneering spirit. He solicited from friends funds to send to Whitman in 1876 and 1877, and in 1884 he traveled to Camden and met Whitman, forming a lasting friendship with him and calling him in 1898 "Socrates in Camden" (qtd. in Cassidy 32).

Bibliography

Browning, D.C., comp. Everyman's Dictionary of Literary Biography. New York: Dutton, 1969.

Cassidy, John A. Robert W. Buchanan. New York: Twayne, 1973.

Stephens, James, Edwin L. Beck, and Royall H. Snow, eds. Victorian and Later English Poets. 1934. New York: American, 1949.

Whitman, Walt. Complete Poetry and Selected Prose and Letters. 1938. Ed. Emory Holloway. London: Nonesuch, 1967.

Carol J. Singley

Mary Oakes Davis was Walt Whitman's housekeeper at 328 Mickle Street in Camden, New Jersey, from 1885 until the poet's death in 1892. Davis is known for her steadfast, patient service to Whitman, who grew increasingly infirm, kept irregular habits, and often frustrated Davis's efforts to impose order on the household. She worked for him without pay and after his death successfully sued his estate for lost wages.

Mary Oakes had a long history of nursing the ill and elderly. In Camden, she cared for a dying schoolmate and her husband, and took charge of their two children. She married a sea captain named Davis, but was soon widowed. Whitman became acquainted with her in 1884, when he brought her clothes to mend and ate meals at her house at 412 West Street. After he purchased his Mickle Street house, he proposed that—since he owned a home but no furniture and she owned furniture but paid rent—they combine households. She moved into the house on 24 February 1885, with no formal agreement, bringing with her several pets and an orphan girl she cared for. Whitman left her one thousand dollars in a revised will of 1891; he left his house to his brother Edward.

Critics agree that Whitman—crippled and increasingly dependent—greatly benefited from Davis's services. Horace Traubel leaves no doubt of her attentive care, especially as the poet's health declined. The fairness of Whitman's bargain with the housekeeper is less clear. The arrangement apparently favored Whitman: Davis received no wages for her work and, as Gay Wilson Allen notes, claimed after Whitman's death that she had paid most of the grocery bills. David Reynolds notes that Whitman kept a careful eye on his pocketbook; however, Davis, accustomed to self-sacrifice, may have allowed his financial impositions. The precise nature of Whitman and Davis's relationship is also a matter of speculation. Emory Holloway wonders whether Davis had romantic feelings that Whitman did not return; Henry Seidel Canby suggests that he viewed her as a mother substitute. Davis's strongest defender is Whitman's nurse, Elizabeth Leavitt Keller, who portrays Davis as selflessly devoted to Whitman and subject to his manipulations as well as to neighbors' gossip about an unmarried couple living together. Whitman's arrangement with Davis required mutual accommodation: she rendered loyal service but little understood the poet's idiosyncrasies or genius; he acknowledged her care but may have underestimated its value.

Bibliography

Allen, Gay Wilson. The Solitary Singer: A Critical Biography of Walt Whitman. 1955. Rev. ed. 1967. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985.

Canby, Henry Seidel. Walt Whitman: An American. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1943.

Holloway, Emory. Whitman: An Interpretation in Narrative. New York: Knopf, 1926.

Keller, Elizabeth Leavitt. Walt Whitman in Mickle Street. New York: Kennerley, 1921.

Reynolds, David S. Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography. New York: Knopf, 1995.

Traubel, Horace. With Walt Whitman in Camden. 9 vols. Vol. 1. Boston: Small, Maynard, 1906; Vol. 2. New York: Appleton, 1908; Vol. 3. New York: Mitchell Kennerley, 1914; Vol. 4. Ed. Sculley Bradley. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1953; Vol. 5. Ed. Gertrude Traubel. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1964; Vol. 6. Ed. Gertrude Traubel and William White. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1982; Vol. 7. Ed. Jeanne Chapman and Robert Maclssac. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1992; Vols. 8–9. Ed. Jeanne Chapman and Robert MacIsaac. Oregon House, Calif.: W.L. Bentley, 1996.

Philip W. Leon

Born in Cork, Ireland, Edward Dowden was educated at Queen's College, Cork, and at Trinity College, Dublin, where he became professor of English literature in 1867. His substantial literary reputation rests upon his prolific writings about William Shakespeare; he also wrote biographies of Robert Southey, Robert Browning, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Montaigne. Whitman called Dowden "one of the best of the late commentators on Shakspere" (Whitman 884). As did so many other British scholars and writers, Dowden readily accepted Whitman as the new poet, the new voice of America. He included in his Studies in Literature, 1789–1877 (1887) a long essay on Whitman, ranking him with other luminaries and praising his poetry's originality and its musical qualities despite the absence of an immediately discernible prosody. Dowden viewed Whitman as the representative of a new democracy in art, noting in particular that his subject matter included such figures as "all who toil upon the sea, the city artisan, the woodsman and the trapper" (Dowden 489).

Bibliography

Dowden, Edward. "The Poetry of Democracy: Walt Whitman." Studies in Literature, 1789–1877. By Dowden. 4th ed. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, 1887. 468–523.

Whitman, Walt. The Poetry and Prose of Walt Whitman. Ed. Louis Untermeyer. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1949.

Susan L. Roberson

Jeannette Gilder, sister of Richard Watson Gilder, was an influential editor, journalist, and literary critic. She began her career as a reporter for the Newark Register, which her brother Richard had helped to found. Soon afterward, she went to work for the New York Herald, writing book reviews in her popular column, "Chats about Books," and eventually became the Herald's review editor. Then in 1881 she and her brother Joseph founded the Critic (1881–1906), a highly influential literary magazine. The Critic is best known for its reviews of literature, music, and drama; its notices, many written by Gilder, were incisive, high-toned, and conservative and demonstrated a bias toward American authors. Indeed, some of the country's best talents were published in the magazine. A popular feature of the magazine was Gilder's "The Lounger," a kind of gossip column about artists and the literati.

As editor of the Critic, Gilder published Whitman's work, wrote articles about the poet, and published parts of his letters to keep the public informed of his activities and health. Moreover, the Critic published his series "How I Get Around at Sixty, and Take Notes" and a few of his poems. Most of Whitman's contributions, however, were in prose and included notes on Ralph Waldo Emerson; Alfred, Lord Tennyson; Edgar Allan Poe; Henry Wadsworth Longfellow; William Shakespeare; the Bible as poetry; and "Walt Whitman in Camden" (signed "George Selwyn").

In addition to her work with the Critic, Gilder was the New York correspondent for several newspapers; edited several books, including Authors at Home (1888); and wrote a novel, a couple of plays, and two volumes of her autobiography. In 1895 she established a literary brokerage, "Miss Gilder's Syndicate," and negotiated publication and dramatization rights for her clients.

Bibliography

Gilder, Jeannette L., and Joseph, eds. Authors at Home: Personal and Biographical Sketches of Well-Known American Writers. New York: Cassell, 1888.

Mott, Frank Luther. A History of American Magazines, 1865–1885. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1938.

Tutwiler, Julia R. "Jeannette L. Gilder." Women Authors of Our Day in Their Homes. Ed. Francis Whiting Halsey. New York: Pott, 1903.

Susan L. Roberson

Richard Watson Gilder was the managing editor and then editor of the Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine. Founded in 1870 as Scribner's Monthly, it was renamed the Century with a change in management in 1881. The Century was one of the nation's most esteemed periodicals, and as its editor Gilder was one of the most influential men in American letters. Indeed, the 1880s were called by his biographer, Herbert Smith, "the Gilder Age" (13).

Gilder began his career in journalism as a reporter for the Newark Advertiser (1868), and by 1870 he was associate editor at Scribner's Monthly and writing an opinion column, "The Old Cabinet," for the magazine. As editor of the Century, Gilder was instrumental in publishing works by some of America's best writers, among them Henry James, Mark Twain, William Dean Howells, and Walt Whitman. He also initiated a series on "Battles and Leaders of the Civil War," for which he asked Whitman to write a piece about his work as a volunteer nurse for the Union armies. "Army Hospitals and Cases" was published by Century four years later; meanwhile two short works, "Father Taylor and Oratory" and "Twilight," appeared in 1887. From 1887 until 1891, Whitman's work appeared once a year in Century, making Gilder the editor most receptive to Whitman.

Gilder first met Whitman in 1877 at a reception hosted by J.H. Johnston and befriended the poet when he had few social connections in New York City. From that time on, Gilder supported Whitman, publishing his work and participating in fund-raising benefits. Gilder started plans, seconded by John Burroughs, in 1878 for Whitman's first Lincoln lecture. With Edmund Clarence Stedman, Gilder insisted on including Whitman in a series on American poets despite the objections of Scribner's editor, Josiah Holland. Gilder admired Whitman's poetry and praised its "magnificent form" and spirit (qtd. in Smith 51).

Gilder was himself a prolific and popular poet, skilled at rhyme and meter and given to writing commemorative pieces. Obsessed with form, his work, as well as his attitude, remained largely genteel and conservative.

Bibliography

Gilder, Richard Watson. Poems of Richard Watson Gilder. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1908.

John, Arthur. The Best Years of the Century: Richard Watson Gilder, Scribner's Monthly, and the Century Magazine, 1870–1909. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1981.

Mott, Frank Luther. A History of American Magazines, 1865–1885. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1938.

Smith, Herbert F. Richard Watson Gilder. New York: Twayne, 1970.

Steven Schroeder

Charles L. Heyde, a French-born landscape painter, married Whitman's sister Hannah in 1852. He achieved local notoriety in Vermont as a poet as well as a landscape painter. Late in her life, Hannah recalled having eloped with Heyde some thirteen years before their marriage. They lived in several Vermont communities before purchasing a house and settling in Burlington in 1865. By all accounts, their life together was stormy, and there are numerous references in the Whitman correspondence to the tensions that existed not only between Heyde and Hannah, but also between Heyde and every other member of the family. Even Walt disliked him, referring to him as "worse than bed bugs" (Whitman 135). The feeling was mutual, as evidenced by later reports that, when Whitman visited Hannah in Burlington in 1872 (when he was selected to deliver a commencement poem at Dartmouth), Heyde moved temporarily to his studio to avoid staying in the same house with him. Though relations thawed slightly toward the end of Whitman's life, Heyde was always more of an aggravation than an inspiration. Referring to Hannah as his "favorite sister" (qtd. in Molinoff 24), Whitman felt the pain of her unhappy relationship with particular intensity. It is likely that he also felt some responsibility for having introduced Heyde to Hannah in the first place, and his correspondence with his mother reflects an added dimension of concern due to the strain Hannah's unhappy marriage put on her. Heyde became increasingly delusional and despondent in his later years and was committed to the Vermont State Hospital at Waterbury in October 1892, one month before his death.

Bibliography

Molinoff, Katherine. Some Notes on Whitman's Family. Brooklyn: Comet, 1941.

Whitman, Walt. The Correspondence. Ed. Edwin Haviland Miller. Vol. 1. New York: New York UP, 1961.

Larry D. Griffin

John Johnston, an English physician, was a Walt Whitman enthusiast; a member of Bolton "College"; a visitor, correspondent, and photographer of Whitman; and coauthor of a book with Bolton College founder James William Wallace (1853–1926) about their separate visits to the poet.

Johnston attended the Monday night meetings at the house of Wallace's father on Eagle Street in Bolton, England. Known locally as the "Eagle Street College" and abroad as Bolton College, this primarily working-class group of men included few educated professionals. The nomenclature "College" shows their humor. Anything but a college, the group held their loosely organized weekly gatherings for discussion of local interest topics, politics, and spiritual matters. In spiritual matters, Bolton College members, several of whom were Whitman students and admirers, followed the ideas of Dr. Richard Maurice Bucke, especially those about cosmic consciousness.

On behalf of Bolton College, Johnston and Wallace started corresponding with Whitman in 1887. Whitman wrote them more than 120 letters and postcards and sent Bolton College books and other gifts. Today the Metropolitan Library in Bolton houses the Whitman gifts.

In 1890 Johnston visited Whitman in Camden, where he photographed the poet and other members of the household. He then visited Andrew H. Rome in New York. Johnston also interviewed John Y. Baulsir, a Fulton Ferry deckhand. On Long Island, he spent the night at Henry Jarvis's home (the Whitman Birthplace), interviewed former Whitman student Sanford Brown, and visited painter Herbert Harlakenden Gilchrist. Johnston then traveled to West Park, New York, where he visited John Burroughs.

Bibliography

Bucke, Richard Maurice. Cosmic Consciousness: A Study in the Evolution of the Human Mind. Philadelphia: Innes, 1901.

———. Walt Whitman. Philadelphia: McKay, 1883.

Hamer, Harold. A Catalogue of Works by and Relating to Whitman in the Reference Library, Bolton. Bolton, England: Libraries Committee, 1955.

Johnston, John, and James William Wallace. Visits to Walt Whitman in 1890–1891 by Two Lancashire Friends. London: Allen and Unwin, 1917.

Salveson, Paul. Loving Comrades: Lancashire's Links to Walt Whitman. Bolton, England: Worker's Educational Association, 1984.

Susan L. Roberson

J.H. Johnston was a New York jeweler who befriended Whitman and provided personal and financial support for the aging poet. Johnston often opened his house to Whitman. During a month-long visit in February 1877, Whitman was introduced to a variety of people, among them Richard Watson Gilder. Whitman's visit was marred, however, by the sudden illness and death of Johnston's first wife on the day he planned to leave. After Johnston's marriage to his second wife, Alma Calder Johnston, Whitman returned in June 1878 to visit the Johnston home, now on upper Fifth Avenue. During August 1881, Whitman stayed with the Johnstons at their summer home at Mott Haven on the Harlem River to finish editing his new Leaves of Grass. Whitman apparently felt at home with the Johnstons, whose children referred to him affectionately as "Uncle Walt."

Johnston was also instrumental in organizing fund raisers for Whitman's benefit. He was the chief organizer of the 1887 benefit for Whitman in conjunction with the Lincoln lecture at Madison Square Theater. In October 1890 Johnston arranged the benefit lecture by Robert G. Ingersoll in Philadelphia, which realized $870. Whitman trusted Johnston's financial acumen, finding him to be acute in business matters.

Alma Calder Johnston's literary endeavors include a recollection of Whitman (1917) and a story, Miriam's Heritage (1878).

J.H. Johnston, the jeweler, is not to be confused with Dr. John Johnston, an English medical doctor and admirer of Whitman.

Bibliography

Johnston, Alma Calder. "Personal Memories of Walt Whitman." Whitman in His Own Time: A Biographical Chronicle of His Life, Drawn from Recollections, Memoirs, and Interviews by Friends and Associates. Ed. Joel Myerson. Detroit: Omnigraphics, 1991. 260–273.

Katherine Reagan

Biographer, editor, and critic, William Sloane Kennedy was one of Whitman's most devoted friends and admirers. Born in Brecksville, Ohio, to Rev. William Sloane Kennedy and the daughter of a minister, Sarah Eliza Woodruff, Kennedy attended Yale, graduating in 1875. He left Harvard Divinity School in 1880 without taking his degree, deciding instead to pursue a literary career. Kennedy first met Whitman in Philadelphia in 1880 while working on the staff of the American. He soon became a frequent correspondent and visitor to Whitman's Camden, New Jersey, home, a constant contributor of small gifts, and the author of several essays and newspaper articles in praise of Whitman. Kennedy also dedicated himself to writing, over a period of many years, a book-length study of the poet. Although Whitman at times expressed reservations about this work-in-progress (see Traubel 165), he appreciated Kennedy's devotion, calling him a "loyal guardsman" (Traubel 382). Whitman moreover supplied much editorial comment to Kennedy's work, which did not appear in print until after the poet's death in 1892. In 1896 Kennedy published Reminiscences of Walt Whitman with Extracts from His Letters and Remarks on His Writings. He then edited Walt Whitman's Diary in Canada (1904) and in 1926 published The Fight of a Book for the World: A Companion Volume to "Leaves of Grass," which he considered to be his most important work. Kennedy drowned while taking his daily swim in Lewis Bay near his home in West Yarmouth, Massachusetts, on 4 August 1929.

Bibliography

Kennedy, William Sloane. The Fight of a Book for the World. West Yarmouth, Mass.: Stonecroft, 1926.

———. Reminiscences of Walt Whitman. London: Alexander Gardner, 1896.

Traubel, Horace. With Walt Whitman in Camden. Vol. 1. 1906. New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 1961.

Whitman, Walt. Walt Whitman's Diary in Canada. Ed. William Sloane Kennedy. Boston: Small, Maynard, 1904.

Walter Grünzweig

Karl Knortz was born in Garbenheim, Germany, and emigrated to the United States in 1863, where he lived in the Midwest and in the New York City area. An educator, editor, and cultural historian, he attempted to interpret American culture for German-speaking Europeans and for German-Americans; he considered both groups backward and unacquainted with the American democratic process.

Whitman's works were a vehicle for Knortz's pedagogical program. In 1882, probably the year he started his correspondence with Whitman, Knortz wrote a lengthy essay on Whitman for a German-American newspaper which later appeared, in an extended version, as a monograph both in the United States (1886) and in Germany (1899). Whereas he celebrates Whitman's ideas—his democratic principles, his championship of science, and his liberal attitude toward sexuality and the human body—Knortz's criticism of Whitman's language as dark and confusing reveals a lack of understanding of Whitman's revolutionary aesthetics.

Together with Thomas William Hazen Rolleston, Knortz was coauthor of the first book-length translation of Whitman's poetry. Although Rolleston contributed the major portion of the translated poetry, it was Knortz who convinced Jakob Schabelitz, his liberal Swiss publisher, to publish Leaves as Grashalme in 1889. Whereas Rolleston wanted the translation to be as shocking to German readers as the original was to Americans, Knortz, in accordance with his enlightened pedagogical principles, wanted the text as smooth and unambiguous as possible. Fortunately for Whitman's reception in German, Rolleston's view prevailed.

Knortz continued to propagate Whitman's work, for example in his excellent history of North American literature published in Germany in 1891. A curious later book with a strongly anticapitalist rhetoric, entitled Walt Whitman und seine Nachahmer: Ein Beitrag zur Literatur der Edelurninge (Walt Whitman and His Imitators: On the Literature of the Noble Urnings, 1911), identified Whitman's works as creations of a sexually inactive ("noble") homosexual and referred to Whitmanites such as Horace Traubel, Edward Carpenter, and Ernest Crosby as Whitman's followers.

Bibliography

Frenz, Horst. "Karl Knortz: Interpreter of American Literature and Culture." American-German Review 13 (1946): 27–30.

———. "Walt Whitman's Letters to Karl Knortz." American Literature 20 (1948): 155–163.

Grünzweig, Walter. Constructing the German Walt Whitman. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 1995.

Knortz, Karl. Walt Whitman und seine Nachahmer: Ein Beitrag zur Literatur der Edelurninge. Leipzig: Heichen, 1911.

———. Walt Whitman: Vortrag gehalten im Deutschen Gesellig-Wissenschaftlichen Verein von New York. New York: Bartsch, 1886.

Whitman, Walt. Grashalme: Gedichte. Trans. Karl Knortz and T.W. Rolleston. Zurich: Schabelitz, 1889.

Lawrence I. Berkove

Sidney Lanier was a poet, musician, and literary theoretician who sought to emphasize the relationship between poetry and music. He is today remembered for a few notable poems which embody the theories he advanced in The Science of English Verse (1880).

Whitman criticized Lanier's poetry primarily for favoring the sound of words rather than the sense. When Lanier first carefully read Leaves of Grass in 1878, he promptly wrote Whitman a letter opposing his views on artistic form but nevertheless praising Leaves for being a strikingly beautiful "modern song" (qtd. in Starke 307). Lanier regarded the poetry of Leaves as being rhythmic, despite Whitman's beliefs. In lectures written in 1881, Lanier continued to take exception to Whitman's artistic principles and also disagreed with him on what constituted true democracy, yet again lauded his poetry for its "bigness and naïvety" and singled out "My Captain, O my Captain" [sic] as "surely one of the most tender and beautiful poems in any language" (Lanier 39).

Both Lanier and Whitman were significant experimenters in poetic technique. Lanier's conception of melody in poetry was conventional, Whitman's revolutionary, but both achieved it on their own terms.

Bibliography

Brooks, Van Wyck. The Times of Melville and Whitman. New York: Dutton, 1947.

Faner, Robert D. Walt Whitman & Opera. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1951.

Lanier, Sidney. The English Novel. Vol. 4 of Centennial Edition of the Works of Sidney Lanier. Ed. Clarence Gohdes and Kemp Malone. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1945.

Starke, Aubrey Harrison. Sidney Lanier: A Biographical and Critical Study. 1933. New York: Russell and Russell, 1964.

William A. Pannapacker

Born in Fryeburg, Maine, James Ripley Osgood graduated from Bowdoin in 1854 and read law briefly in Portland before clerking for the Boston publishers Ticknor and Fields in September 1855. Rising to partner, with James T. Fields he established Fields, Osgood and Company in 1868. By 1871 the firm had become R. Osgood and Company, with Osgood and Benjamin Ticknor as partners. In 1878, the firm merged with H.O. Houghton, to form Houghton, Osgood and Company, which only lasted until 1880, when Osgood left to form James R. Osgood and Company.

In 1881 Osgood offered to publish Leaves of Grass and agreed to let Whitman "retain all the beastliness of the earlier editions" (qtd. in Ballou 282). On 1 October, Whitman finalized a ten-year contract with Osgood, and the seventh edition of Leaves of Grass (1881–1882), significantly revised by Whitman, was published in November at two dollars a copy. Although Whitman had removed some of the sexual content of Leaves, on 1 March 1882, the Boston district attorney, Oliver Stevens, acting under the influence of the New England Society for the Suppression of Vice, classified Leaves as obscene literature. Stevens ordered Osgood to remove several offending poems and passages or cease publication altogether. Although Whitman was willing to make some changes, he refused to completely expurgate Leaves and reached a settlement with Osgood on 17 May 1882: Osgood paid Whitman one hundred dollars in cash and gave him 225 copies of the book along with the stereotype plates.

After the Boston "suppression," Richard Maurice Bucke, John Burroughs, and William O'Connor rallied around Whitman and used the event to promote the poet as a victim of prudishness and comstockery. Using the plates from the Osgood edition, Rees Welsh and Company of Philadelphia sold about six thousand copies of Leaves of Grass (1882). Although not a direct result of the Whitman fiasco, James R. Osgood and Company went out of business in May 1885.

Bibliography

Allen, Gay Wilson. The Solitary Singer: A Critical Biography of Walt Whitman. 1955. Rev. ed. 1967. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985.

Ballou, Ellen B. The Building of the House: Houghton Mifflin's Formative Years. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1970.

Tryon, W.S. Parnassus Corner: A Life of James T. Fields, Publisher to the Victorians. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1963.

Weber, Carl J. The Rise and Fall of James Ripley Osgood. Colby College Monograph 22. Waterville, Me.: Colby College, 1959.

Winship, Michael. American Literary Publishing in the Mid-Nineteenth Century: The Business of Ticknor and Fields. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995.

Joel Myerson

Ernest Percival Rhys, an author and editor, is best known for beginning the Everyman's Library series of inexpensive reprintings of popular works, 983 volumes of which appeared between 1906 and Rhys's death. He went to a private school in Newcastle and later became a mining engineer. In 1886 he moved to London to be a writer. Rhys was a member of the Rhymers' Club, which included Arthur Symons and William Butler Yeats among its members, and contributed poetry and reviews to the magazines. He married in 1891 and had three children.

Rhys was instrumental in securing from Whitman his permission and assistance in publishing three of his volumes in Britain by the firm of Walter Scott. He wrote Whitman in 1885 about a one-shilling edition of Leaves of Grass in Scott's Canterbury Poets series, and when it appeared the following year, it sold eight thousand copies within two months. This edition of Leaves presented many of the poems from the 1881 edition—although about one hundred were omitted—in approximately the same order. Whitman received ten guineas for the book, whose sale was restricted to England. Leaves of Grass remained in print from Scott through at least 1911. In 1886, at Whitman's suggestion, Rhys helped publish Specimen Days in America in Scott's Camelot Series; the following year, he helped with Democratic Vistas in the same series. This was a clever way for Whitman to make two books out of Specimen Days & Collect. Whitman received another ten guineas for each book, and they were both in print through at least 1902. In 1887 Rhys met Whitman during a trip to America, and the two got along famously.

Bibliography

Rhys, Ernest. Everyman Remembers. New York: Cosmopolitan Book Corporation, 1931.

Thomas, M. Wynn. "Walt Whitman's Welsh Connection: Ernest Rhys." Anglo-Welsh Review 82 (1986): 77–85.

Walter Grünzweig

Thomas William Hazen Rolleston's interest in a German translation of Whitman can be attributed to his interest in German literature (which he studied in Germany from 1879–1883) and his Irish nationalism. Educated at Dublin's Trinity College, he came from an intellectual environment which fostered (under the leadership of Edward Dowden) an enthusiasm for Whitman. Germany, as an economic competitor and potential military adversary of England, was considered a natural ally for Irish nationalists and, therefore, what strengthened Germany seemed good for Ireland. German passiveness and dry positivism could be overcome by a hefty dosage of Whitman's poetry.

Together with Karl Knortz, Rolleston was the coauthor of the first book-length translation of Whitman's poetry. He contributed the major portion of the translated poetry, attempting to make the German translation as shocking to German readers as the original had been to Americans. In a letter to Richard Maurice Bucke, he wrote: "A German translation of W. which should never startle the 'ordinary reader' or seem ridiculous or coarse to him, would not be Whitman at all" (qtd. in Grünzweig 27). Whereas Knortz provided an interpretation of Whitman as a political poet, Rolleston stressed Whitman's aesthetic revolution. Both conceptions were important for Whitman's German success in the twentieth century.

Rolleston's close affiliation with Whitman is documented in an extensive correspondence relating to Germany, the Irish question, and Whitman's reception in Europe.

Bibliography

Cotterill, H.B., and T.W. Rolleston. Ueber Wordsworth und Walt Whitman: Zwei Vorträge gehalten vor dem Literarischen Verein zu Dresden. Dresden: C. Tittmann, 1883.

Frenz, Horst, ed. Whitman and Rolleston: A Correspondence. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1951.

Grünzweig, Walter. Constructing the German Walt Whitman. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 1995.

Rolleston, Charles Henry. Portrait of an Irishman: A Biographical Sketch of T.W. Rolleston. London: Methuen, 1939.

Whitman, Walt. Grashalme: Gedichte. Trans. Karl Knortz and T.W. Rolleston. Zurich: Schabelitz, 1889.

Christina Davey

Philadelphia Quaker Robert Pearsall Smith was a map publisher, glass manufacturer, and evangelist popular in the United States and England, and on the European Continent. He fostered the evolution of the map publishing industry in the United States by being one of the first to reproduce maps using the anastatic process of lithography, an easier and less expensive method of reproducing maps (1846). His religious works include Holiness through Faith (1870).

Smith, son of John Jay and Rachel Pearsall Smith, was educated at Haverford College. In 1851, he married Hannah Whitall. Smith and his family befriended Whitman at Christmas time, 1882. The eldest child, Mary Whitall Smith, had wanted to meet Whitman after reading his work, so her father invited the poet to their Germantown home. Robert Pearsall Smith joined Whitman's American supporters. In 1883 he gave Whitman two hundred shares in the Sierra Grande Mines, Lake Valley, New Mexico; however, the mines failed. Moreover, he took Whitman to New York to deliver the Lincoln lecture at the Madison Square Theater on April 14, 1887, and planned Whitman's reception held at the Westminster Hotel. There, the poet enjoyed the attention of two hundred to three hundred admirers.

Both Smith and Whitman valued their relationship. Although Hannah Whitall and Robert Pearsall Smith moved permanently to England in 1888, Whitman's friendship with Smith and his family continued until the poet's death.

Bibliography

Ristow, Walter W. "The Map Publishing Career of Robert Pearsall Smith." Quarterly Journal of the Library of Congress 26 (1969): 170–196.

Strachey, Barbara. Remarkable Relations: The Story of the Pearsall Smith Family. London: Victor Gollancz, 1980. Rpt. as Remarkable Relations: The Story of the Pearsall Smith Women. New York: Universe Books, 1982.

Whitman, Walt. The Correspondence. Ed. Edwin Haviland Miller. 6 vols. New York: New York UP, 1961–1977.

———. Daybooks and Notebooks. Ed. William White. Vol. 2. New York: New York UP, 1978.

Christina Davey

Logan Pearsall Smith was an essayist, literary critic, and writer of aphorisms. In 1913 he helped Robert Bridges establish the Society for Pure English. His works include The Life and Letters of Sir Henry Wotton (1907), The English Language (1912), and Milton and His Modern Critics (1940). Smith is probably best known for All Trivia (1933) and Unforgotten Years (1938).

Smith was born in Millville, New Jersey, son of Quakers Hannah Whitall and Robert Pearsall Smith. He was educated at Haverford, Harvard, and Oxford. In 1888 he made England his permanent residence, and in 1913 he became a British citizen. Smith and his sister Mary Whitall Smith, who had read Leaves of Grass as a student at Smith College, admired Whitman's writing. Invited by their father, Whitman first visited the Smith home in Germantown, Pennsylvania, at Christmas time in 1882. During Whitman's many visits with the Smiths, he participated in family activities—after-dinner conversations, singing, and recitations. Logan Pearsall Smith was strongly influenced by Whitman's "familiar presence" in their home (Smith, "Walt Whitman" 100). The poet provided him with "ideas in solution tho' not yet crystallized," thereby affecting Smith's ways of seeing and thinking (Smith, Chime of Words 41). Smith devoted a chapter of Unforgotten Years to his remembrances of Whitman; however, William White has noted errors in Smith's account of the poet's first visit with the Smiths. Moreover, Barbara Strachey's version of the Smiths' arrangements for this visit differs from accounts found in sources cited by White.

Whitman and Smith's relationship revealed a mutual fondness and caring. They remained friendly until the poet's death.

Bibliography

Smith, Logan Pearsall. A Chime of Words: The Letters of Logan Pearsall Smith. Ed. Edwin Tribble. New York: Ticknor and Fields, 1984.

———. "Walt Whitman." Unforgotten Years. By Smith. Boston: Little, Brown, 1939. 79–108.

Strachey, Barbara. Remarkable Relations: The Story of the Pearsall Smith Family. London: Victor Gollancz, 1980. Rpt. as Remarkable Relations: The Story of the Pearsall Smith Women. New York: Universe Books, 1982.

White, William. "Logan Pearsall Smith on Walt Whitman: A Correction and Some Unpublished Letters." Walt Whitman Newsletter 4 (1958): 87–90.

Whitman, Walt. The Correspondence. Ed. Edwin Haviland Miller. 6 vols. New York: New York UP, 1961–1977.

Donald Yannella

The November 1880 Whitman essay Edmund Clarence Stedman wrote dramatically enhanced the poet's stature among intellectuals as well as the more general audience Scribner's appealed to. Whitman later expressed his appreciation, and they remained friendly over the years. The piece was later included in Poets of America (1885), probably Stedman's finest work. The series of critical essays sought canon reform, and the less recognized Edgar Allan Poe as well as Whitman received extraordinary care. The Whitman piece remains the best in the volume, and he also received more space than any other poet in the ten-volume Library of American Literature.

Stedman began as one of the more genteel Pfaffian Bohemians, helped them materially, and admired and promoted the 1876 Centennial edition of Leaves. He was an esteemed and powerful literary and cultural critic, as well as a poet, but earned his living as a stockbroker in a volatile, unregulated market. A serious intellectual, he struggled as did others in his period with the challenges rapidly maturing scientific thought created for traditional views and institutions. Noting in the essay that Whitman had been rejected or "canonized, not criticized," Stedman wrote "judicially" about the work rather than the man—a cardinal principle embraced by the critical group he was part of—in order to provide a fair introduction and assessment which was in keeping with his non-deterministic Tainean views. The weakest part of his treatment is the judgment that Whitman was insufficiently modest when treating sex, but this is far outweighed by his understanding of the prosody; he pointedly demonstrated that the seemingly innovative poetics was conventional, with roots in English Bible translations and William Blake's experiments, among others. Whitman, a poet of nature, was employing an Emersonian romantic organicism in which function dictated form. Stedman was a committed nationalist in the Emersonian tradition, though not as radical as the midcentury's Young America group, and strongly opposed to Anglophilism. There is irony in the essay's being published first in Scribner's, since the editor, J.G. Holland, was vehemently opposed to Whitman and his work—as well as to that of Poe and Henry David Thoreau; but Stedman gave him the choice of publishing all or none of the essays which eventually composed Poets of America.

Stedman took exception to the fact that the common people Whitman celebrated, at the expense of the conventional, intelligent, and educated middle class, did not and probably would not read him in the future. He was not far off the mark, however, when suggesting that Whitman stood the best chance among his contemporaries of being read by future generations.

Bibliography

Scholnick, Robert J. Edmund Clarence Stedman. Boston: Twayne, 1977.

Stedman, Edmund Clarence. Poets of America. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1895.

———, ed. An American Anthology, 1787–1900. 2 vols. Cambridge, Mass.: Riverside, 1900.

———, ed. A Library of American Literature: From the Earliest Settlement to the Present Time. 10 vols. New York: Webster, 1889.

Philip W. Leon

Talcott Williams was born in Beirut en route to Turkey where his parents were missionaries. He graduated from Phillips Academy and went on to Amherst, graduating in 1873. He learned journalism in New York City at the World and at the Sun. He joined the Philadelphia Press in 1881, remaining there for thirty-one years until he became the first head of the Columbia University School of Journalism. In Philadelphia, Williams was a regular at the literary gatherings on Saturday nights at the home of his neighbor and Whitman patron, Dr. S. Weir Mitchell. Among Williams's friends were the Shakespeare scholar Horace Howard Furness, the artist Thomas Eakins, and Whitman, whose poems he sometimes published. Whitman respected Williams, saying, "The only thing that saves the [Philadelphia] Press from entire damnation is the presence of Talcott Williams" (Traubel 341). He was one of the thirty-six subscribers who gave ten dollars each to buy a horse and buggy for Whitman. In 1887 Williams introduced Eakins to Whitman so that he could paint his portrait. A founder of Philadelphia's Contemporary Club, he arranged for Whitman to speak at one of its first meetings. Williams's biographer credits him with obtaining the revocation of the court order barring Leaves of Grass from the federal mail as pornographic material. As one of the honorary pallbearers at Whitman's funeral he read selections from the Bible, the Greek philosophers, Confucius, and the Koran.

Bibliography

Dunbar, Elizabeth. Talcott Williams: Gentleman of the Fourth Estate. Brooklyn: Robert E. Simpson, 1936.

Paneth, Donald, ed. The Encyclopedia of American Journalism. New York: Facts on File, 1983.

Traubel, Horace. With Walt Whitman in Camden. Vol. 1. 1906. New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 1961.

Williams, Talcott. The Newspaperman. New York: Scribner, 1922.

Karen Wolfe

Walt Whitman's sister-in-law, Louisa, married George Washington Whitman in 1871, and moved with him to Camden in 1872. Whitman moved to Camden to live with the couple in 1873, and remained until 1884, when they bought a farm in Burlington County. Louisa also cared for Mrs. Whitman and Edward Whitman in Camden. Louisa was named executrix to Whitman's will. She also approved the autopsy performed on Whitman, despite the objections of Mrs. Mary Oakes Davis, Whitman's housekeeper.

Whitman appears to have been somewhat ambivalent about Lou, as he addressed her. She is usually mentioned in letters to friends and family as being "well" or "well as usual." As the wife of George, who "believes in pipes, not poems" (Traubel 1:227), Louisa was probably also somewhat business-minded, or if not, at least not poetically inclined. There are seven extant letters from Louisa to Whitman (see index in Correspondence). Louisa appears to be rather plain, though genuine and loving, and above all capable of being entrusted with Whitman's estate.

Whitman wrote to Louisa, mostly in the late 1870s and early 1880s, describing his travels and occasionally containing instructions for her to follow concerning his mail. The tone is one of familiarity, which might be contrasted with his remarks to others of how it was to live with Louisa and George: "[I] have for three years, during my paralysis, been boarding here, with a relative, comfortable . . . but steadily paying just the same as at an inn—and the whole affair in precisely the same business spirit" (Correspondence 3:47), and "My sister-in-law is very kind in all housekeeping things, cooks what I want, has first rate coffee for me & something nice in the morning, & keeps me a good bed and room—all of which is very acceptable—(then, for a fellow of my size, the friendly presence & magnetism needed, somehow, is not here)" (Correspondence 2:245).

Louisa gave birth to "Walter" in 1875, but the child died within the year (Correspondence 3:54). Whitman was evidently very pleased with the child and was distressed at its death: "I am miserable—he knew me so well—we had already had such good times—and I was counting so much" (Correspondence 3:54). She became pregnant again in 1877, this time with "George," but the baby was stillborn. Louisa is buried in Whitman's mausoleum.

Bibliography

Allen, Gay Wilson. The Solitary Singer: A Critical Biography of Walt Whitman. 1955. Rev. ed. 1967. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985.

Traubel, Horace. With Walt Whitman in Camden. Vol. 1. Small, Maynard, 1906; Vol. 4. Ed. Sculley Bradley. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1953.

Whitman, Walt. The Correspondence. Ed. Edwin Haviland Miller. Vols. 2–3. New York: New York UP, 1961–1964.

T. Gregory Garvey

During the 1850s N.P. Willis embodied the magazine editor as man-about-town. Whitman worked under him at the New York Mirror in 1844. Willis gained a reputation as an editor of popular magazines and as a prolific writer of poetry, sketches, and travelogues. Between 1827 and 1860 he published six volumes of poetry, nine books of sketches, and six volumes of travel writing. His prominence was such that Melville included Willis's name in a list of eight leading American authors (which he subsequently deleted) in his essay "Hawthorne and His Mosses." Willis's travel writing had international appeal and won him a following in Great Britain.

But it is as an editor that Willis remains noteworthy. He was a significant advocate of American literary nationalism. In response to Britain's refusal to offer American authors copyright protection, Willis founded the short-lived journal The Corsair (1839–1840), which subsisted by publishing pirated texts of British authors. He achieved his greatest stature between 1846 and 1864 as editor of the New York Home Journal, which still exists as the upscale magazine Town and Country.

Willis's reputation was marred, however, by accusations that he lacked substance. His reputation received a serious blow when Fanny Fern, his sister and author of the novel Ruth Hall, used Willis as the model for the character Hyacinth Ellet, a cold-hearted social climber who abandons his widowed sister.

Bibliography

Auser, Cortland P. Nathaniel Parker Willis. New York: Twayne, 1969.

Rathbun, John W. American Literary Criticism, 1800–1860. Boston: Hall, 1979.

Stovall, Floyd. The Foreground of "Leaves of Grass." Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1974.

Steven Schroeder

Thomas Donaldson was a Philadelphia attorney who authored a number of government documents on American Indians and the law of public domain as it related to the American West. Whitman noted meeting Donaldson, then an agent for the Smithsonian Institute, on 10 October 1882. He characterized him as "my stout, gentlemanly friend, free talker" (356). Whitman met Bram Stoker at Donaldson's house in 1884 and visited with Stoker again in 1885 when Donaldson accompanied Stoker to the poet's residence in Camden. Donaldson secured annual ferry passes for Whitman that made it possible for him to range beyond Camden to Philadelphia in spite of his reduced mobility. After the winter of 1884–1885, when Donaldson realized that Whitman had become almost house-bound, he was instrumental in raising money for a horse and buggy with which he surprised him in 1885. He was a pallbearer at Whitman's funeral in 1892.

Bibliography

Donaldson, Thomas. Walt Whitman the Man. New York: Harper, 1896.

Whitman, Walt. The Correspondence. Ed. Edwin Haviland Miller. Vol. 3. New York: New York UP, 1964.

Jerry F. King

A popular British poet, critic, and literary biographer, Sir Edmund Gosse wrote more than sixty books between 1873 and 1928. He is best remembered for his personal memoir, Father and Son (1908).

In 1873 Gosse had sent Walt Whitman a copy of his own first book of poems, On Viol and Flute (1873), together with an effusive letter in which he declared himself to be "the new person drawn toward you . . . I draw only closer and closer to you" (Traubel 245). It was signed, "your sincere disciple" (246). Some years later, in the 1880s, Gosse was on a lecture tour in the United States and was able to visit with Whitman for several hours in his Camden home. By the time of the interview Gosse had apparently become much less enthusiastic about Whitman's poetry. In his essay about their interview, however, Gosse presented a clear and favorable picture of Whitman. He said that he had gone to see him as a "stiff necked unbeliever" but that he left with "a heart full of affection for the beautiful old man" (Critical 100, 106).

Gosse chose not to reveal much about their conversation. He devoted much of the essay to his theory that Whitman's poetry is "[l]iterature in the condition of protoplasm, an intellectual organism so simple that it takes the instant impression of whatever mood approaches it" (97). Gosse saw this as explaining why some readers liked Whitman while they were young but became less enthusiastic as they aged. The essay was not published during Whitman's lifetime. It first appeared in April of 1894 and was included by Gosse in his Critical Kit-Kats (1896). In a conversation with Horace Traubel in 1888 Whitman included Gosse in a list of several British critics who "seem to understand me" (Traubel 245), but in a letter to Richard Bucke in 1889 he characterized Gosse as "one of the amiable conventional wall-flowers of literature" (Whitman 392).

Gosse's last word on Whitman was not until 1927. In the last of his books, he concluded a review of John Bailey's new Walt Whitman by saying, "that is really the one subject of Walt Whitman, the masculinity of other men. . . . It is best not to inquire too closely about all this, but to accept Walt Whitman for what he gives . . . the undeniable beauty and originality of his strange unshackled rhapsody" (Leaves and Fruit 211).

Bibliography

Bailey, John. Walt Whitman. New York: Macmillan, 1926.

Barrus, Clara. Whitman and Burroughs, Comrades. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1931.

Gosse, Sir Edmund. Critical Kit-Kats. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1896.

———. Leaves and Fruit. London: Heinemann, 1927.

Thwaite, Ann. Edmund Gosse, A Literary Landscape, 1849–1928. London: Seeker and Warburg, 1984.

Traubel, Horace. With Walt Whitman in Camden. Vol. 1. Boston: Small, Maynard, 1906.

Whitman, Walt. The Correspondence. Ed. Edwin Haviland Miller. Vol. 4. New York: New York UP, 1969.

Woolf, James D. Edmund Gosse. New York: Twayne, 1972.

John F. Roche

Like the character he played in the 1924 film The Thief of Bagdad, Whitman enthusiast C. Sadakichi Hartmann played court magician to successive bohemian circles. Hartmann also produced a significant legacy as art historian and pioneer in the field of photographic criticism (sometimes aka Sidney Allan).

Son of a German diplomat and a Japanese woman, Hartmann studied widely in Europe before undertaking a career as an art critic and impresario in the United States. Having visited Whitman in Camden on several occasions beginning in 1884, experiences he would later publish as Conversations with Walt Whitman (1895), Hartmann in 1887 set about creating a Whitman Society in Boston. It collapsed due to Hartmann's high-handed tactics, opposition from Whitman confederates, and the poet's reluctance to be so commemorated. Resentments over his New York Herald account of conversations with Whitman (14 April 1889) further alienated him from the Whitman coterie.

As Greenwich Village's "King of Bohemia" and eventually as a colorful denizen of San Francisco and Hollywood circles, he continued, however, to reminisce about Whitman. Most remembered among his prolific writings are A History of American Art (1902) and essays for Camera Work.

Bibliography

Hartmann, Sadakichi. The Sadakichi Hartmann Papers. Ed. Clifford Wurfel and John Batchelor. Riverside: U of California, Riverside Library, 1980.

———. White Chrysanthemums: Literary Fragments and Pronouncements. Ed. George Knox and Harry Lawton. New York: Herder, 1971.

———. The Whitman-Hartmann Controversy: Including "Conversations with Walt Whitman" and Other Essays. Ed. George Knox and Harry Lawton. Bern: Lang, 1976.

Joseph P. Hammond

Ezra Heywood, a radical proponent and propagandist for social and economic reform, became embroiled in a legal controversy surrounding the 1881 publication of Leaves of Grass. Though Heywood supported Whitman's cause, the poet met his assistance with ambivalence.

Early in 1882 the Boston district attorney, under pressure from Anthony Comstock, advised Whitman's publishers to suspend publication of Leaves of Grass on the grounds that it violated a federal antiobscenity law. Outraged by this attack on Whitman's poetry and the encroachment upon freedom of expression in general, Heywood openly defied legal authority by distributing through the mail two of the objectionable poems, "To a Common Prostitute" and "A Woman Waits for Me." The events surrounding Heywood's subsequent arrest and trial were viewed by Whitman with great interest and some reservation. He was eager to see his poetry stripped of its label as "obscene" literature, but was apprehensive about being associated with Heywood's radical free-love beliefs. Whitman remarked that upon a rare meeting with Heywood, "I treat him politely but that is all" (Whitman 157).

Ultimately, the judge presiding over Heywood's trial dismissed as evidence Whitman's poems and acquitted Heywood of all charges. As a result of Heywood's trial, the stigma of obscenity receded from public perception of Whitman's poetry.

Bibliography

Blatt, Martin H. Free Love and Anarchism: The Biography of Ezra Heywood. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1989.

Whitman, Walt. The Correspondence. Ed. Edwin Haviland Miller. Vol. 4. New York: New York UP, 1969.

Christine Stansell

Journalist, editor, and reformer, Clapp was born in Nantucket, a bastion of Quaker reform sensibility, and entered the abolitionist cause in the 1830s as a lecturer. He continued his reform activities as the editor of a temperance newspaper and subsequently as secretary to the American champion of Fourierist socialism, Albert Brisbane. Although not much is known about Clapp in the 1850s, the decade before he met Whitman, he appears to have developed his reform attachments in relation to free-love doctrine. Free love was a politics associated with Fourierism which upheld the sanctity of sexual love outside marriage and spurned the coerciveness of unions legitimated by church and state. In 1855 Clapp was among those arrested in New York City while attending a meeting of the Free Love League, a discussion group of men and women led by the anarchist and sex radical Stephen Pearl Andrews. In 1858 he appeared at a gathering of prominent reformers in Rutland, Vermont, who met to discuss free love, women's rights, and other reforms. Quite possibly it was Clapp who introduced Whitman to free-love thought.

Whitman probably met Clapp in 1859, when he began to frequent Pfaff's saloon, the bohemian meeting place in Manhattan which Clapp also frequented. The place was a daily rendezvous for journalists of scant means but high literary ambitions. The two were close in age and congenial in their political sympathies. Whitman's career was at a low ebb, and he found in Clapp critical literary support as he prepared the third edition of Leaves of Grass for publication. In 1858 Clapp had founded a literary journal, the Saturday Press, which was dedicated to publishing new and unknown American writers and to flouting convention and the reigning literary establishment. Clapp's chief contribution to Whitman's eventual success lay in his comprehension of how publicity, even scandal, could obviate the need for the critical and moral approval which Whitman had thus far failed to secure, especially from the Boston literati. Clapp encouraged Whitman's own incipient tendencies toward self-promotion, sensing their value in an increasingly commercial literary market. The Saturday Press made it a point to stir up weekly any and all praise or condemnation of the poet. Whitman remembered that "Henry was right: better to have people stirred against you if they can't be stirred for you—better than not to stir them at all" (Traubel 237). Twenty items on Whitman and/or Leaves of Grass appeared throughout 1860, including reviews from other journals, both negative and positive, advertisements and parodies of Whitman's style.

Clapp's journal folded in 1860. He worked as a journalist and theater critic in New York until his death.

Bibliography

Howells, William Dean. Literary Friends and Acquaintance. 1900. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1968.

Lalor, Eugene. "The Literary Bohemians of New York City in the Mid-Nineteenth Century." Diss. St. John's U, 1977.

Parry, Albert. Garrets and Pretenders: A History of Bohemianism in America. New York: Covici, Friede, 1933.

Stansell, Christine. "Whitman at Pfaff's: Commercial Culture, Literary Life and New York Bohemia at Mid-Century." Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 10 (1993): 107–126.

Traubel, Horace. With Walt Whitman in Camden. Vol. 1. Boston: Small, Maynard, 1906.

Winter, William. Old Friends, Being Literary Recollections of Other Days. New York: Moffat, Yard, 1909.

Julie A. Rechel-White

A renowned member of the New England literary caste, Oliver Wendell Holmes—physician, poet, novelist, and essayist—was ambivalent in his attitude toward Walt Whitman and Leaves of Grass.

When Emerson wanted to bring Whitman to a Saturday Club gathering, Holmes claimed to have no interest in meeting the "Brooklyn poet" (Allen 238). And in 1877, when asked about Leaves of Grass by Edward Carpenter, Holmes alluded to the erotica of Whitman's verse, stating, "it won't do" (qtd. in Masters 229–230).

Ironically, many of the characters in Holmes's novels appear to be sexually stimulated, such as Euthymia in A Mortal Antipathy (1885). However, Holmes's erotic fiction is supposedly antiseptic, since characters exemplify patients' neuroses documented from case studies.

Holmes, like Whitman, celebrated the political freedom of the nineteenth-century American who challenged tradition. In "Mechanism in Thought and Morals" (1870), Holmes defines the "moral universe" as that which "includes nothing but the exercise of choice" (qtd. in Small 117).

In his later years, Holmes gained new insight into Leaves. In Over the Teacups (1891) he speaks with great integrity about the aged poet: "[N]o man has ever asserted the surpassing dignity and importance of the American Citizen so boldly and freely as Mr. Whitman" (234).

Bibliography

Allen, Gay Wilson. The Solitary Singer: A Critical Biography of Walt Whitman. 1955. Rev. ed. 1967. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985.

Baker, Liva. The Justice from Beacon Hill: The Life and Times of Oliver Wendell Holmes. New York: HarperCollins, 1991.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell. Over the Teacups. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1891.

Masters, Edgar Lee. Whitman. New York: Biblo and Tannen, 1968.

Small, Miriam Rossiter. Oliver Wendell Holmes. New York: Twayne, 1962.

Jennifer A. Hynes

This Philadelphia physician, neurologist, novelist, and poet assisted Whitman medically and financially from the late 1870s onward. Mitchell was the first to diagnose the psychosomatic nature of Whitman's complaints.

Mitchell published widely on rattlesnake venom, nerve wounds, and nervous diseases, but he is remembered as the inventor of the "rest cure" as a treatment for nervous prostration or neurasthenia. He was also the author of a dozen novels and several volumes of verse.

Whitman consulted Mitchell twice in 1878 with symptoms of rheumatism and prostration, apparently a relapse from the paralytic stroke he sustained in 1873. Mitchell examined Whitman on 13 and 18 April 1878, attributing his earlier paralysis to a ruptured blood vessel in the brain, and finding no heart ailment. He blamed Whitman's spells on "habit," perhaps brought on by the stress of his upcoming Lincoln lecture, and prescribed mountain air and outdoor activity. After the visits, Whitman improved.

Mitchell charged Whitman no fee for his services and those of his son, physician John Kearsley Mitchell, who also treated Whitman. Mitchell donated one hundred dollars for his tickets to Whitman's April 1886 Philadelphia lecture on Lincoln, occupying a box with his wife and several guests. Mitchell also supported Whitman by giving him fifteen dollars a month for over two years.

Bibliography

Allen, Gay Wilson. The Solitary Singer: A Critical Biography of Walt Whitman. 1955. Rev. ed. 1967. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985.

Brown, Charles Reynolds. "Silas Weir Mitchell: Wise and Kind in the Art of Healing." They Were Giants. 1934. Essay Index Reprint Series. Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries, 1968. 129–147.

Burr, Anna Robeson. Weir Mitchell: His Life and Letters. New York: Duffield, 1919.

Earnest, Ernest. S. Weir Mitchell: Novelist and Physician. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1950.

Whitman, Walt. The Correspondence of Walt Whitman. Ed. Edwin Haviland Miller. 6 vols. New York: New York UP, 1961–1977.

Patrick McGuire

This short story, Whitman's first published fiction, appeared in the United States Magazine and Democratic Review, August 1841. Whitman reprinted it more than any other of his stories. For publication information see William White and G.R. Thompson; see also Thomas L. Brasher's edition of The Early Poems and the Fiction.

The story involves Lugare, a sadistic teacher, and sickly Tim Barker, only child of a widow, who is falsely accused of theft. When he begins beating Tim, who is apparently asleep, Lugare learns that he is really beating a corpse. The sentimentality of "Death in the School-Room" underscores Whitman's opposition to corporal punishment. This opposition to violence connects it with his fictional indictments of capital punishment, "One Wicked Impulse!" (1845) and "The Half-Breed: A Tale of the Western Frontier" (1845).

Reynolds observes that the "terrible pain" that "lurks" in some of the poetry first enters Whitman's work in this story (52–53). Along with "Wild Frank's Return" (1841) and "Bervance: or, Father and Son" (1841), the story suggests in Whitman a compulsive interest in cruel authority figures, especially fathers. The beating in this story has been tied to the seaman's forcefulness in "The Child and the Profligate" (1841), both resonating with the homoeroticism in Whitman's personality.

Bibliography

Allen, Gay Wilson. The Solitary Singer: A Critical Biography of Walt Whitman. 1955. Rev. ed. 1967. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985.

Reynolds, David S. Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography. New York: Knopf, 1995.

Thompson, G.R. "An Early Unrecorded Printing of Walt Whitman's 'Death in the School-Room.'" Papers of the Bibliographic Society of America 67 (1973): 64–65.

White, William. "Two Citations: An Early Whitman Article and an Early Reprinting of 'Death in the School-Room.'" Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 5.1 (1987): 36–37.

Whitman, Walt. The Early Poems and the Fiction. Ed. Thomas L. Brasher. New York: New York UP, 1963.

Patrick McGuire

This short story appeared in November 1841 in United States Magazine and Democratic Review. For publication history and revisions, see Brasher's edition of The Early Poems and the Fiction.

This story is Whitman's first use of the theme of two brothers going separate ways. In a dispute between Richard and Wild Frank, the father sides with the older. The second son, Wild Frank, leaves home. After two years of a dissolute life at sea, he reconciles with his brother and begins his journey home on a favored horse, Black Nell. The journey is tiring, so Frank stops to give himself and the horse a little rest. He ties the horse to his wrist and falls asleep. So deep is his sleep that an ensuing storm cannot wake him, but the horse bolts and drags him the several miles home, where his family awaits his return. His mother, whose favorite he was, faints in a deadly swoon.

Reynolds, seeing in the story psychological parallels to its author, asks if Whitman, as prodigal son, projected this story to shock his mother. Kaplan sees it as Whitman's revenge against his own family, but he notes some hidden sexual symbols, such as Black Nell, and a correspondence between an umbilical cord and the cord around Frank's wrist, which correspondence Callow also sees. Allen sees this story, along with "Bervance: or, Father and Son" (1841), as evidence of Whitman's obsession with cruel fathers.

Bibliography

Allen, Gay Wilson. The Solitary Singer: A Critical Biography of Walt Whitman. 1955. Rev. ed. 1967. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985.

Callow, Philip. From Noon to Starry Night: A Life of Walt Whitman. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1992.

Kaplan, Justin. Walt Whitman: A Life. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1980.

Reynolds, David S. Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography. New York: Knopf, 1995.

Whitman, Walt. The Early Poems and the Fiction. Ed. Thomas L. Brasher. New York: New York UP, 1963.

Patrick McGuire

This important short story initially appeared under the title "The Child's Champion" in New World, 20 November 1841. After much revision, the story appeared with its present title in Columbian Magazine, October 1844. See Thomas L. Brasher's edition of The Early Poems and the Fiction for publication particulars and revisions.

Thirteen-year-old Charley, the only child of a poor old widow, works for a greedy farmer. One evening, music lures Charley into a tavern, where a one-eyed seaman brutally tries to force the boy to drink brandy. A wealthy young man, Langton, who has been living a dissolute life, rescues Charley. Charley and his mother give purpose to the profligate's life, and as Langton saves them from their once-inescapable poverty, he is reformed.

The story's obvious didactic purpose is the reformation of a wastrel in contrast to the dissolution of the other characters. The vulnerability of the poor and the greed of Charley's employer are also part of its didacticism. Its temperance theme appears in other stories by Whitman, most notably his novel Franklin Evans; or The Inebriate. A Tale of the Times (1842).

Moon has noted homoeroticism in the interaction between the seaman and young Charley, which Reynolds parallels to the interaction between Tim and Lugare in "Death in the School-Room" (1841). Moreover, Moon connects "Calamus" number 29 (1857) to elements of the story. A more gentle homoeroticism is evident, perhaps, in Charley's relationship with his rescuer, on whose bosom, in the earliest version of the story, Charley rests his cheek as they sleep through the night. But not all critics agree; Callow and Kaplan see the love between the boy and the man as devoid of any sexual content.

Bibliography

Callow, Philip. From Noon to Starry Night: A Life of Walt Whitman. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1992.

Kaplan, Justin. Walt Whitman: A Life. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1980.

Moon, Michael. Disseminating Whitman: Revision and Corporeality in "Leaves of Grass." Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1991.

Reynolds, David S. Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography. New York: Knopf, 1995.

Whitman, Walt. The Early Poems and the Fiction. Ed. Thomas L. Brasher. New York: New York UP, 1963.

Patrick McGuire

"Bervance: or, Father and Son" was published in United States Magazine and Democratic Review in December 1841.

The technique of this story is unusual in Whitman's work in that a first narrator introduces another narrator, Bervance père, who then tells his own tale. The first narrator is presumably Whitman since the introductory paragraph is signed "W.W."

Bervance's tale is in the form of a confession. As in "Wild Frank's Return," the father prefers his older son, and he and the second son have a dispute. Young Luke Bervance is sent to an asylum, where when the father neglects him he becomes wildly deranged. Upon escape, Luke visits Bervance, who is horrified at his son's insanity. After blaming and cursing his father, the madman flees and is never heard from again. But the father, in his soul, sees his maniac son and hears the curse over and over.

Reynolds reads the story as Whitman's attempt to purge his psychological demons, perhaps oedipal in nature. Kaplan sees this story as comparable to the work of Edgar Allan Poe, and Allen sees it as part of Whitman's compulsive interest in cruel fathers. The story also relates to another frequent theme of Whitman's fiction: the separating of two brothers.

Bibliography

Allen, Gay Wilson. The Solitary Singer: A Critical Biography of Walt Whitman. 1955. Rev. ed. 1967. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985.

Kaplan, Justin. Walt Whitman: A Life. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1980.

Reynolds, David S. Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography. New York: Knopf, 1995.

Whitman, Walt. The Early Poems and the Fiction. Ed. Thomas L. Brasher. New York: New York UP, 1963.

Patrick McGuire

This short story appeared first in United States Magazine and Democratic Review, January 1842. For further publication history, see Brasher's edition of The Early Poems and the Fiction.

In this well-balanced story, the frets of city life are opposed to the peacefulness of country living and death itself. The reminiscent narrator recalls something that happened when he lived in a country village. Tired and sullen, he returned home from a short visit to New York City. Next morning, refreshed, he sauntered off for a walk and came upon an old woman tending two graves, old Mrs. Delaree, a widow and inmate of the almshouse. She and her husband were miserably poor and, as foreigners from the West Indies, unwelcome. He died of poverty while she was ill. She tended two graves because no one knew in which one her husband lay. The narrator recognized the grave as a kind of friend. He admits that lately he does not dread dying.

The title is syntactically ambiguous. The blossoms, of course, are the flowers that the woman sets upon the graves; the tomb, as a symbol of death, blossoms into a friend. Kaplan sees the title as one of the central tropes of Whitman's Leaves of Grass, while Callow sees in the story Whitman's compulsive interest in doubles and in death.

Critics consign this tale to Whitman's early "dark" works.

Bibliography

Allen, Gay Wilson. The Solitary Singer: A Critical Biography of Walt Whitman. 1955. Rev. ed. 1967. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985.

Callow, Philip. From Noon to Starry Night: A Life of Walt Whitman. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1992.

Kaplan, Justin. Walt Whitman: A Life. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1980.

Reynolds, David S. Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography. New York: Knopf, 1995.

Whitman, Walt. The Early Poems and the Fiction. Ed. Thomas L. Brasher. New York: New York UP, 1963.

Patrick McGuire

This short story first appeared in United States Magazine and Democratic Review in March 1842. For publication history, see Thomas L. Brasher's edition of The Early Poems and the Fiction. Brasher notes that the dream sequence in chapter 20 of Franklin Evans; or The Inebriate. A Tale of the Times (1842) is an altered version of this story.

The story is a dream narrative in which the narrator watches an old soldier of the Revolutionary War being honored for having been one of Washington's men. Washington is spoken of with a religious awe, and a medallion he had given the old soldier is treated like a holy relic.

Reynolds cites this story as an example of Whitman's jingoism and connects it to Whitman's patriotic poems like "The Centenarian's Story" (1865). But the structural irony of the piece may allow for an alternative reading. Before his dream, the narrator speaks of the coming obsolescence of war; taking hold is a new philosophy, "teaching how evil it is to hew down and slay ranks of fellowmen" (95). What occurs in the dream, however, inculcates the old philosophy that makes heroes, even gods, of warriors.

Robert Abrams, calling this dream narrative a precursor of "The Sleepers" (1855), sees it as an utter failure because Whitman had not yet allowed art to speak honestly. Justin Kaplan sees Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Gray Champion" (1835) as Whitman's original source.

Bibliography

Abrams, Robert E. "An Early Precursor of 'The Sleepers': Whitman's 'The Last of the Sacred Army.'" Walt Whitman Review 22 (1976): 122–125.

Kaplan, Justin. Walt Whitman: A Life. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1980.

Reynolds, David S. Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography. New York: Knopf, 1995.

Whitman, Walt. The Early Poems and the Fiction. Ed. Thomas L. Brasher. New York: New York UP, 1963.

Patrick McGuire

This short story was published on 21 May 1842, in the Washingtonian. For publication information, see Brasher's edition of The Early Poems and the Fiction.

This temperance story is openly didactic. Whitman announces in the first paragraph that the story "may haply teach a moral and plant a seed of wholesome instruction" (110). The story is told by a narrator who heard it directly from Frank Slade at a temperance meeting. This narrative ploy is a compromise between Whitman's usual omniscience and the technique used in "Bervance: or, Father and Son" (1841).

Frank Slade is a good man, but he drinks too much, and his drinking has caused some economic hardship and humiliation for him and his family. Slade's sickly son, Reuben, arranges for his mother to embroider a blue border around an unsigned temperance pledge. As death approaches the boy, he holds out to his father the unsigned pledge and dies pointing to the line his father should sign.

Though the story is sentimental, Whitman's prose has a carefulness perhaps unparalleled in all his fiction. A rhythmic string in one paragraph, for example, may echo a rhythmic string in other paragraphs. In line with the sentimentality, the effect of the prose is almost precious at times.

While not as cruel as the many unhappy fathers in Whitman's stories—"Bervance," for example—Frank Slade regains happiness. Also, this tale is thematically related to "The Child's Champion" (1841) in that a man's love for a boy leads to the man's reformation.

Reynolds reads "Reuben" as a typical example of the sensationalism of temperance writings of the time. Kaplan asserts that Whitman borrowed the child's name from "Roger Malvin's Burial" (1832), by Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Bibliography

Kaplan, Justin. Walt Whitman: A Life. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1980.

Reynolds, David S. Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography. New York: Knopf, 1995.

Whitman, Walt. The Early Poems and the Fiction. Ed. Thomas L. Brasher. New York: New York UP, 1963.

Patrick McGuire

This short story initially appeared in United States Magazine and Democratic Review, July 1842. For publication history and revisions, see Brasher's edition of The Early Poems and the Fiction.

There is a simple message to this story of two brothers, orphans whose last remaining relative, a grandfather, gives them advice on his deathbed. Basically the advice is a statement of pessimism about human beings: avoid love, avoid trust, avoid getting involved. The young men go their own ways. One brother, Mark, follows the advice to the letter; the other, Nathan, does not. After seventy years they meet each other and tell their stories. Hearing of Nathan's wife, children, and grandchildren, Mark realizes, in Nathan's words, "the world has misery—but it is a pleasant world still" (Whitman 119).

Allen sees the grandfather in this story as a variation on the cruel father theme that plays through several of Whitman's short stories. Related to this theme is another motif that figures in much of Whitman's fiction: the separation of brothers. Both themes, for example, appear in "Wild Frank's Return" (1841) and "Bervance: or, Father and Son" (1841).

Bibliography

Allen, Gay Wilson. The Solitary Singer: A Critical Biography of Walt Whitman. 1955. Rev. ed. 1967. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985.

Whitman, Walt. The Early Poems and the Fiction. Ed. Thomas L. Brasher. New York: New York UP, 1963.

Patrick McGuire

This short story appeared first in United States Magazine and Democratic Review in September 1842. Concerning publication and revisions, see Thomas L. Brasher's edition of The Early Poems and the Fiction.

As a story, "The Angel of Tears" is negligible. A fratricide remembers happier times with his brother and is overcome with repentance. God sends Alza, the angel of tears, to the criminal's bedside in prison to soothe the murderer's sleep. The theme of brothers at odds with each other connects "Angel of Tears" to "Wild Frank's Return" (1841) and "Bervance: or, Father and Son" (1841). But the theme is made little of here. When the fratricide remembers pleasant childhood moments with his brother, repentance follows, but no explanation for enmity is given. Only in "Angel of Tears," moreover, has the enmity between brothers led to murder. Asselineau detects in this story the influence of Poe.

Also of interest in this story is Whitman's propensity for capitalized epithets. God, for example, is the Unfathomable, the Master of the Great Laws. Heaven is the Pure Country. God's plan for reckoning good and evil is in the Shrouded Volume (120–122).

Whitman's sympathy for the outcast is prominent. He seems to argue that personal judgment of criminals is inappropriate since their evil acts are as likely the outcome of forces in childhood as are the good acts of people who are not criminals. There is also an implicit criticism, in a veiled reference, to capital punishment, but not as direct or emphatic as Whitman's criticism in other tales, most notably in "Death in the School-Room (a Fact)" (1841).

Bibliography

Asselineau, Roger. The Evolution of Walt Whitman: The Creation of a Personality. Trans. Richard P. Adams and Roger Asselineau. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1960.

Whitman, Walt. The Early Poems and the Fiction. Ed. Thomas L. Brasher. New York: New York UP, 1963.

Patrick McGuire

This fragment of a novel appeared in the Washingtonian and Organ, 28 January 1843. It consists of an unnumbered first chapter and a second chapter which ends with the words "(To be continued)." No other parts of the novel have been uncovered. For further information see Brasher's edition of The Early Poems and the Fiction.

The fragment begins with a description of a crowded dining hall. Emphasis is put on the haste with which people are eating and of the honesty of the diners, who tally their own bills and pay as they leave. This honesty stands in opposition to what "foreign slanderers" have said about "our national integrity" (Whitman 240). Then two characters are introduced. Richard Arden, though poor, is a man of good taste. He eats slowly. He is a philosopher. Pierre Barcoure is a descendant of French radicals. He scorns religious superstitions and abhors religious fanaticism, but allows that each religion holds some excellence. Barcoure is called "an infidel" (243). The fragment draws to its end with Richard and Pierre becoming fast friends.

The final paragraph is an apostrophe against friendships that are "rivetted by intimacy in scenes of dissipation" (243). The intensity of this final paragraph and other references to "ardent liquors" (240) indicate the probable didactic purpose of the novel. Its appearance in a temperance newspaper suggests the same purpose.

Reynolds sees "The Madman" as another attempt by Whitman to appeal to the American masses. Kaplan, following Brasher, suggests that this story undermines Whitman's recollections about abandoning work in the manner of Franklin Evans; or The Inebriate. A Tale of the Times (1842).

Bibliography

Kaplan, Justin. Walt Whitman: A Life. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1980.

Reynolds, David S. Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography. New York: Knopf, 1995.

Whitman, Walt. The Early Poems and the Fiction. Ed. Thomas L. Brasher. New York: New York UP, 1963.

Patrick McGuire

Whitman's incomplete novel "The Fireman's Dream: With the Story of His Strange Companion. A Tale of Fantasie" was first published in Sunday Times & Noah's Weekly Messenger, 31 March 1844. For publication history and text, see Bergman.

Like Whitman's other incomplete novel, "The Madman" (1843), this work appeared in apparently one installment, of two chapters, and ended with the words "To be continued." In chapter 1, a New York fireman, George Willis, spends his day off traveling to Hoboken (New Jersey) and chatting with some Native Americans. One tells George of the life of the forest. When George is injured later while at work, he becomes feverish. In a dream, walking through "unearthly scenes of tumult" (Bergman 10), he kills a fireman. Then in a wilderness of trees, he befriends a male Native American. In chapter 2 the dream continues with the Native American telling George his life story. The Native American was found by white pioneers when he was about seven. The Boanes raised him as their own, taught him English, and sent him to school, where he and Anthony Clark, nephew of the Boanes, excelled. The two boys became fast friends.

Whitman's use of dream narrative is noteworthy. Also noteworthy is his character with an upbringing almost directly opposite that of Natty Bumppo of The Pioneers (1823) and other James Fenimore Cooper novels, who is a white man raised by Native Americans. Whitman makes much of the dual forces at work in this Native American's character, even suggesting that the child, before being found, may have been raised by panthers. The first sentences of chapter 2 establish the duality: "I am white by education and an Indian by birth. Within my bosom reside two opposing elements" (Bergman 11). This duality may foreshadow Whitman's grotesque character Boddo in "The Half-Breed: A Tale of the Western Frontier" (1845).

Little critical attention has been given to "The Fireman's Dream."

Bibliography

Bergman, Herbert, "A Hitherto Unknown Whitman Story and a Possible Early Poem." Walt Whitman Review 28 (1982): 3–15.

Patrick McGuire

This short story, as well as the story "Little Jane" (1842), initially appeared as part of Whitman's novel Franklin Evans (1842). "The Death of Wind-Foot," with slight revisions, appeared in American Review, June 1845. The title was changed to "The Death of Wind-Foot. An Indian Story" when the story was reprinted in Crystal Fount and Rechabite Recorder, 18 October 1845. For publication history and revisions, see Brasher's edition of The Early Poems and the Fiction.

Tribal hatred and revenge are the basic themes of this story about three Native Americans. Unrelenting, chief of a brave tribe, tells his son, Wind-Foot, of the long-standing enmity between them and the Kansi tribe. Unrelenting tells of killing a Kansi while the man's son watched. A guest in Unrelenting's lodge overhears the story and, in a rage, lays plans to kill Wind-Foot. The guest is now the grown son of the dead Kansi. He takes Wind-Foot captive and manages to kill him only after he has been mortally wounded by Unrelenting. Unrelenting is left childless.

Here, as in Whitman's novella "The Half-Breed: A Tale of the Western Frontier" (1845), Native Americans are not mere stock characters. Whitman humanizes the lonesome chief, who, Job-like, has endured the deaths of his wife and all his other children. He is soothing and fatherly and warm to his son. Wind-Foot has the boyish enthusiasm of an adolescent learning to hunt and the disappointment of not hunting well. The unnamed guest, however, is duplicitous and wild and animal-like.

This short story has received little critical attention.

Bibliography

Folsom, Ed. Walt Whitman's Native Representations. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994.

Whitman, Walt. The Early Poems and the Fiction. Ed. Thomas L. Brasher. New York: New York UP, 1963.

Patrick McGuire

First publication data for "Lingave's Temptation" is unknown. A clipping of the tale, obviously from a periodical, is in the Feinberg Collection with Whitman's handwritten revisions. The revised story was printed in Specimen Days & Collect (1882). For publication particulars and revisions, see Brasher's edition of The Early Poems and the Fiction.

This tale is unique in Whitman's fiction; its hero is a poet, "a master of elegant diction, of fine taste, in style passionate yet pure, and of the delicate imagery that belongs to the children of song" (Whitman 333). Lingave's temptation is that, while bitterly unhappy about being poor, he is offered a position using his talents in the cause of some repulsive economic scheme. Lingave overcomes the temptation and plods on in his poverty as before.

The story contains some noteworthy observations about the poet's psyche. Lingave, like Archibald in "The Shadow and the Light of a Young Man's Soul," is given to angry reflection, but the poet is easily drawn from his envy by the simple joys around him.

Parts of the story, written in a kind of editorial "we," are addressed to Lingave: "O, Lingave, be more of a man!" (331). This direct address is followed by a paragraph about us and them. It is "our circle of understanding" versus them, their possessions, and the "lowly flights of their crippled wings" (332).

It is possible to infer that Lingave's rejection of work that would compromise his talent is in effect parallel to Whitman's own dissatisfaction with much of the writing he had done throughout the 1840s.

The story has received little critical attention.

Bibliography

Whitman, Walt. The Early Poems and the Fiction. Ed. Thomas L. Brasher. New York: New York UP, 1963.

Patrick McGuire

This short story was first published in American Review, May 1845. For publication particulars and revisions, see Brasher's edition of The Early Poems and the Fiction.

"The Boy Lover" is a first-person account of a love story. It is unusual in that four young men fall in love with the same girl, the beautiful Ninon. When she dies unexpectedly, the four men grieve, but one of them less violently, less openly than the others. This one, Matthew, maintains an even temper and dies of grief unexpressed: "The shaft, rankling far down and within, wrought a poison too great for show, and the youth died" (308). Matthew's brother is the narrator, now an old man reminiscing. He reminds his readers that they will grow old and have to measure their happiness, and he extols love as "the child-monarch that Death itself cannot conquer" (302–303).

Through his choice of narrator, Whitman is able to characterize the passion of the four boys with the immediacy of a first-person viewpoint, while still allowing for the sentimentality of the ending: death through grief. Grief as a cause of death is a pervasive theme in Whitman's fiction; it is implicit in "Death in the School-Room (a Fact)" (1841) and explicit in "Dumb Kate" (1844) and in number 1 of "Some Fact-Romances" (1845).

Little critical attention has been given to "The Boy Lover."

Bibliography

Whitman, Walt. The Early Poems and the Fiction. Ed. Thomas L. Brasher. New York: New York UP, 1963.

Patrick McGuire

While this sketch first appeared in The Rover, 20 April 1844, biographers suppose that it was written as early as 1835. For publication and biographical comments, see Thomas Brasher's edition of The Early Poems and the Fiction.

This sketch is viewed as a small exercise in autobiography. It is a listing in paragraphs of children that the bachelor-speaker looks upon as his own. He describes the children and their fun, but he also laments their growth into the world of sin and pain. David Reynolds reads the sketch as Whitman's attempt to keep himself and his siblings frozen in childhood.

There is some humorous play in the sketch. Three children, like Whitman's brothers, have the names of United States presidents. "Strange paradox!" (Whitman 248)—Andrew Jackson is considerably older than Thomas Jefferson and George Washington. Other children are referred to by their initials, as if to preserve a secret. Other humor is derived from the idea of a bachelor being a father.

In a notable paragraph, there is some stylistic and thematic foreshadowing of Whitman's later work. Specifically, Whitman lists the world's ills, using the parallelism of much of his later poetry. Also, the description of a child's burial includes the overwhelming scent of apple blossoms, which gives "a deadlier sickness in our souls" (249) and thereby anticipates "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd" (1865). Kaplan ties this paragraph as well to the homoeroticism of "Calamus." Callow sees an anticipation of "There was a Child Went Forth" (1855) in the entire sketch.

Bibliography

Allen, Gay Wilson. The Solitary Singer: A Critical Biography of Walt Whitman. 1955. Rev. ed. 1967. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985.

Callow, Philip. From Noon to Starry Night: A Life of Walt Whitman. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1992.

Kaplan, Justin. Walt Whitman: A Life. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1980.

Reynolds, David S. Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography. New York: Knopf, 1995.

Whitman, Walt. The Early Poems and the Fiction. Ed. Thomas L. Brasher. New York: New York UP, 1963.

Patrick McGuire

This short story first appeared in Columbian Magazine, May 1844, under the title "Dumb Kate.—An Early Death." Revised, it was given its current title in Specimen Days & Collect (1882). For further publication history and revisions, see Brasher's edition of The Early Poems and the Fiction.

"Dumb Kate" is a slight tale. Kate, the beautiful, deaf and dumb daughter of a tavern owner, is seduced by a wealthy young man. The villain moves to New York, where his business prospers. Sick at heart, Kate languishes and dies. A little boy throws a weak but lovely flower on her grave, and she becomes the subject for gossipmongers on their Sunday strolls.

In the original version, Whitman emphasizes the "sweet intoxication, as well as the madness" of love (252, n9). Consequently, Kate is less blameworthy. Originally, Whitman also included a paragraph warning moralists not to judge Kate. Without this didacticism, the story may be viewed as an exercises in irony or ironic endings: villainy prospers while innocence loses both her reputation and her life; gossips say uncharitable things after church service; and the weak but lovely flower tossed so easily into the grave becomes a fitting symbol of Kate herself.

The theme of grief as a cause of death connects this story to other Whitman tales, most notably "The Boy Lover" (1845). Also, Whitman's warning against the judgment of Kate is related to a similar injunction in "The Angel of Tears" (1846).

Very little critical attention has been given to "Dumb Kate."

Bibliography

Whitman, Walt. The Early Poems and the Fiction. Ed. Thomas L. Brasher. New York: New York UP, 1963.

Patrick McGuire

"The Little Sleighers. A Sketch of a Winter Morning on the Battery" first appeared in Columbian Magazine, September 1844. For publication particulars, see Brasher's edition of The Early Poems and the Fiction.

This sketch is ostensibly about that section of Manhattan called the Battery and the bitterly cold wind. But description of these gives way easily to a meditation on the joys of childhood, as manifest in the happy antics of the children on their sleds whom the speaker encounters on a noontime walk through the Battery. Like the bachelor-speaker of "My Boys and Girls," the speaker here knows that the way to keep his heart fresh and outlook young is to mix with those who are "fresh" and "youthful" (255). He comments favorably on the custom of covering the corpses of children with flowers, for flowers, which fade quickly, are fitting emblems of children. Childhood here, as in "My Boys and Girls," calls up other reminders of the sorrows of the world and especially of death. Of these young sleighers, the speaker concludes, "All, all will repose at last" (256).

The speaker undermines the starkness of this vision by accusing himself of having become a "sombre moralist." He calls these dark thoughts his "mottled reveries" and would rather carry home with him the gleeful music of the children's voices (256).

Critical attention to the sketch has been limited to cursory descriptions of the piece.

Bibliography

Allen, Gay Wilson. The Solitary Singer: A Critical Biography of Walt Whitman. 1955. Rev. ed. 1967. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985.

Callow, Philip. From Noon to Starry Night: A Life of Walt Whitman. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1992.

Whitman, Walt. The Early Poems and the Fiction. Ed. Thomas L. Brasher. New York: New York UP, 1963.

Patrick McGuire

Whitman's novella "The Half-Breed: A Tale of the Western Frontier" was first published in The Aristidean, March 1845, as "Arrow-Tip" and reprinted with its current title in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 1–6, 8, 9 June 1846.

"The Half-Breed" is Whitman's second-longest piece of fiction; only the novel Franklin Evans (1842) is longer. Structurally, the novella shows some skill. Its nine chapters quietly build toward the climax, and much of the later action is dependent on character traits established early.

His characters may be improbable, but Whitman strives for some depth, especially in his depictions of Native Americans, whom he seems to take special care in humanizing. Arrow-Tip's teasing sense of humor leads to the confrontation that is his undoing. Accused first of theft and then murder, Arrow-Tip is as silent as Jesus, even as he is hanged. Boddo, the half-breed, is the story's villain, but he is evil because society has made him evil; ostracism has made him antisocial and vengeful. Folsom sees Arrow-Tip as anticipating Whitman's "friendly and flowing savage" in "Song of Myself " (section 39), and William Scheick uses Boddo's physical and moral deformities as evidence of Whitman's strong opposition to miscegenation. In that light, the Native American of "The Fireman's Dream" (1844) may be viewed as Boddo's precursor.

"The Half-Breed," like the original version of "One Wicked Impulse!" (1845) may have been written as an implicit attack on capital punishment, although David Reynolds sees the story merely as sensationalism.

Whitman used the story to inaugurate a regular front-page literary feature in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle.

Bibliography

Brasher, Thomas L. Whitman as Editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1970.

Folsom, Ed. Walt Whitman's Native Representations. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994.

Reynolds, David S. Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography. New York: Knopf, 1995.

Scheik, William J. "Whitman's Grotesque Half-Breed." Walt Whitman Review 23 (1977): 133–136.

Whitman, Walt. The Early Poems and the Fiction. Ed. Thomas L. Brasher. New York: New York UP, 1963.

Patrick McGuire

This short story appeared in The Aristidean, March 1845. Whitman revised the story for Specimen Days & Collect (1882), though he did not use it. For publication details and revisions see Brasher's edition of The Early Poems and the Fiction.

In "Shirval" Whitman retells a story from the New Testament, Luke 7: 11–18. The characters, except for Jesus, are unnamed in Luke, but Whitman gives them names and adds the maiden Zar. Shirval is the young man who is raised from the dead. Unni is the widow and mother of Shirval, and Zar is Shirval's beloved.

Whitman avoids the name Jesus in his telling by using words like Being, Presence, Man of Wo, and Nazarine–the first three printed completely in capitals. Whitman's portrayal of Jesus emphasizes physical manifestations of the spiritual. The hearts of the crowd throb at "the nearness of an UNDEFINABLE PRESENCE, more than mortal" (294).

According to David Reynolds, Whitman's humanizing a tale from the Bible sets Whitman in line with progressive literary practices of his day. Whitman addresses that very issue in the story when he defines a function of literature: "It is the pen's prerogative to roll back the curtains of centuries . . . and make them live in fiction" (292).

Reynolds also notes that "Shirval" is a lighter, happier tale than Whitman's other fiction. However, it involves much of the same thematic interest in death and grief, only here Whitman begins in gloom–"O Earth! huge tomb-yard of humanity" (292)–and ends in awe: widow, son, and maiden "knelt upon the ground and bent their faces on the earth-worn sandals of the MAN OF WO" (295).

Noteworthy also is Whitman's use of parallelism in an emotional apostrophe addressed to the Nazarene. The cadences are biblical and not unlike those of the poetry.

Bibliography

Reynolds, David S. Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography. New York: Knopf, 1995.

Whitman, Walt. The Early Poems and the Fiction. Ed. Thomas L. Brasher. New York: New York UP, 1963.

Patrick McGuire

This short story first appeared in The Aristidean in April 1845. For publication details, see Brasher's edition of The Early Poems and the Fiction.

The story begins with the narrator and his friend on a tour of a London police station. There they see a pitiable woman. The friend supplies the narrator with details of her misfortune. Richard Parker was executed for mutiny. The woman is his widow, and she had tried desperately to get a stay of execution. When that failed, she tried in vain to see her husband before he died. In his last words, he denied his guilt, but accepted his death sentence so that order might be restored among British seamen. After the wife was then denied his remains, she climbed the wall of the cemetery and disinterred her husband's corpse. She kissed and embraced it in her grief; she intended to remove it from London. But the lord mayor learned of her plight and arranged a sage burial in Whitechapel churchyard. Later, she was duped out of a small fortune. Forty years later, when the narrator and his friend see her, she is in the habit of seeking charity.

Critics have noted that Whitman borrowed heavily for this story from the same source regarding the 1797 Nore mutiny that Herman Melville used for Billy Budd, Sailor (1924): Camden Pelham's Chronicles of Crime; or, The New Newgate Calendar (1841). David Reynolds sees the widow's kisses as sensationalism bordering on necrophilia. Justin Kaplan notes that the mutiny, with Parker as leader, parallels Whitman's theme of son versus father: the hangman's noose here paralleling the rope around the rebellious son's wrist in "Wild Frank's Return" (1841). Gay Wilson Allen, however, sees in the story Whitman's ability to share the emotions of women.

Bibliography

Allen, Gay Wilson. The Solitary Singer: A Critical Biography of Walt Whitman. 1955. Rev. ed. 1967. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985.

Kaplan, Justin. Walt Whitman: A Life. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1980.

Reynolds, David S. Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography. New York: Knopf, 1995.

Whitman, Walt. The Early Poems and the Fiction. Ed. Thomas L. Brasher. New York: New York UP, 1963.

Patrick McGuire

This work, a collection of five numbered short tales and an introduction, first appeared in The Aristidean, December 1845. Several of the tales were later published separately: the first as "A Fact-Romance of Long Island," the second as "The Old Black Widow," and the fifth as "An Incident on Long Island Forty Years Ago." For publication history and revisions, see Brasher's edition of The Early Poems and the Fiction.

Whitman's purpose in gathering the tales under one title is obscure. In the introduction, he pledges that the stories are true and, therefore, more charming than fiction. The fifth Fact-Romance involves Whitman's mother and grandparents.

The first Fact-Romance has been singled out by Brasher as, perhaps, Whitman's best effort at fiction writing. After a boat capsizes, a young man, helping his sister to shore, hears his fiancée's call for help. He abandons his sister, who then drowns. Within a year, the couple marries, but the man becomes weaker and weaker and finally sinks into a death caused by grief.

In the second Fact-Romance, a pious old African-American widow saves an innocent deaf-and-dumb girl from the indecency of their Broadway neighborhood. The third tells of an émigré French couple. When the wife becomes ill, they consult several New York physicians. The wife dies on the return trip, and the husband becomes a madman. In the fourth, a villain is captured because he tried to retrieve from a pawnbroker his mother's keepsake instead of trying to escape. In the final Fact-Romance, during a storm, two frightened women mistake the sound of falling peaches for footsteps of a ghost.

Reynolds sees each tale as a variety of sensationalism, though the second seems more sentimental than sensational and the fifth includes humor.

Bibliography

Reynolds, David S. Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography. New York: Knopf, 1995.

Whitman, Walt. The Early Poems and the Fiction. Ed. Thomas L. Brasher. New York: New York UP, 1963.

Patrick McGuire

This autobiographical piece, more exemplum than short story, first appeared in the Union Magazine of Literature and Art, June 1848.

The story is told broadly. The Dean family suffered severe financial loss from the New York fire of 1835. The widow Dean overcomes such hardships and cheerfully raises her two boys, David, who is sickly, and Archibald, who is temperamentally uneven. Like the poet in "Lingave's Temptation," Archie knows his talents, but bristles under the injustice of his poverty. He takes an unwanted position as a teacher in a country school and writes letters of despair to his loving mother. Country living, however, sweetens Archie's disposition; he comes to admire the simplicity of the country folk around him.

Archie hears of an old spinster whose family had long ago lost its wealth. Resolved to regain the family farm, she had worked endlessly and eventually bought back the farm in time for her father to enjoy it in his last years. Archie sees the spinster's story as a rebuke of his own conduct and resolves to be more hard-working and less bitter. When his brother dies, Archie moves back with the widow. The last paragraph extols Archie's changes and warns against "morose habits" that spread bitterness over one's existence (Whitman 330).

The Shadow and the Light" is considered autobiographical for several reasons, chief of which is that Whitman, like Archie, was forced by poverty to take a country-school teaching position. Callow, however, has a different view: Archie's resolve at the making of his manhood parallels Whitman's own task of inventing himself in the years following this story.

Bibliography

Allen, Gay Wilson. The Solitary Singer: A Critical Biography of Walt Whitman. 1955. Rev. ed. 1967. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985.

Callow, Philip. From Noon to Starry Night: A Life of Walt Whitman. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1992.

Whitman, Walt. The Early Poems and the Fiction. Ed. Thomas L. Brasher. New York: New York UP, 1963.

Susan Belasco Smith

The United States Magazine and Democratic Review (October 1837–December 1851), a monthly magazine designed to promote the liberal politics of the Democratic party, as well as to provide a forum for contemporary American literature, was jointly edited by John L. O'Sullivan and Samuel D. Langree. Often called simply the Democratic Review, it was published under that title from January-December 1852, then as the United States Review (January 1853-January 1856), and later as the United States Democratic Review (February 1856-October 1859). Although there were a variety of owners, publishers, and editors throughout the ears of publication, the magazine retained its liberal political orientation and earned, under the sole editorship of John L. O'Sullivan in the 1840s, a reputation for excellence in literature. Nathaniel Hawthorne published twenty-five essays and tales in the magazine, including "Rappaccini's Daughter" and "The Artist of the Beautiful." Other contributors included Ralph Waldo Emerson, Evert Duyckinck, Edgar Allan Poe, James Fenimore Cooper, Horatio Greenough, William Cullen Bryant, James Russell Lowell, William Gilmore Simms, William Ellery Channing, and Henry David Thoreau. Whitman, who was a practicing journalist, largely writing articles and editing newspapers during the decade of the Democratic Review's greatest distinction in literature, was an enthusiastic supporter and saw the magazine under O'Sullivan's leadership as being "of a profounder quality of talent than any since" (Uncollected 2:15).

Eager to find new outlets for his own work, especially in a magazine of such quality, Whitman published ten works in the Review during 1841-1845. Nine of these were undistinguished and melodramatic tales: "Death in the School-Room (a Fact)" (August 1841); "Wild Frank's Return" (November 1841); "Bervance: or, Father and Son" (December 1841); "The Tomb Blossoms" (January 1842); "The Last of the Sacred Army" (March 1842); "The Child-Ghost; a Story of the Last Loyalist" (May 1842); "A Legend of Life and Love" (July 1842); "The Angel of Tears" (September 1842); and "Revenge and Requital: A Tale of a Murderer Escaped" (July-August 1845). Whitman also published "A Dialogue [Against Capital Punishment]" (November 1845), his contribution to the progressive campaign to abolish the death penalty. Later, long after O'Sullivan's years as editor of the Review, Whitman published one of his several self-reviews of Leaves of Grass, "Walt Whitman and His Poems" (September 1855), proclaiming the author of this work as an American bard, "self-reliant, with haughty eyes, assuming to himself all the attributes of his country" (Price 9).

Bibliography

Allen, Gay Wilson. The Solitary Singer: A Critical Biography of Walt Whitman. 1955. Rev. ed. 1967. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985.

Chielens, Edward E., ed. American Literary Magazines: The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries. New York: Greenwood, 1986.

Fishkin, Shelley Fisher. From Fact to Fiction: Journalism and Imaginative Writing in America. New York: Oxford UP, 1985.

Greenspan, Ezra. Walt Whitman and the American Reader. New York: Cambridge UP, 1990.

Mott, Frank Luther. A History of American Magazines. 5 vols. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1938–1968.

Myerson, Joel. Walt Whitman: A Descriptive Bibliography. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1993.

Price, Kenneth M., ed. Walt Whitman: The Contemporary Reviews. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996.

Whitman, Walt. The Early Poems and the Fiction. Ed. Thomas L. Brasher. New York: New York UP, 1963.

–. The Uncollected Poetry and Prose of Walt Whitman. Ed. Emory Holloway. 2 vols. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page, 1921.

Betsy Erkkila svn

The New World (1839–1845) was a popular weekly paper that was founded by Park Benjamin and Rufus Griswold at a time when an increasingly aggressive entrepreneurial press was seeking to create and reach a mass public. Advertised as the "largest and cheapest" newspaper in the world, The New World was also known for publishing the works of famous British authors as "extras." While Whitman worked as a compositor at The New World in 1841, the paper published two of his poems, "Each Has His Grief" and "The Punishment of Pride," as well as "The Child's Champion," Whitman's erotically charged story of the love between an adolescent boy and a young man. In 1842 Benjamin offered Whitman a cash advance to write Franklin Evans; or The Inebriate. A Tale of the Times. Advertised as a temperance novel "By a Popular American Author," issued as an "extra" of The New World and aimed at "the widest circulation possible," Franklin Evans appears to have sold well (possibly twenty thousand copies). Like "The Child's Champion," Franklin Evans draws on the temperance genre to evoke the homoerotic subculture out of which the democratic comrade and lover of Leaves of Grass emerged. Although critics have tended to draw a sharp distinction between early journalist and later poet, Whitman's work for The New World as both printer and author suggest the multivarious sources of his later writing in the world of print journalism and the mass press, popular culture and temperance reform, working class radicalism and an increasingly visible same-sex subculture in the new urban space of the city.

Bibliography

Hoover, Merle M. Park Benjamin, Poet & Editor. New York: Columbia UP, 1948.

Hudson, Frederic. Journalism in the United States from 1690 to 1872. 1875. New York: Harper and Row, 1969.

Mott, Frank Luther. A History of American Magazines, 1741-1850. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1938–1968.

Warner, Michael. "Whitman Drink." Breaking Bounds: Whitman and American Cultural Studies. Ed. Betsy Erkkila and Jay Grossman. New York: Oxford UP, 1996. 30–43.

Dennis K. Renner

For the two years of his Brooklyn Daily Eagle editorship beginning on March of 1846, Walt Whitman's most difficult challenge was reconciling his evolving political convictions with regional and presidential politics. The Eagle was the Democratic party organ in Kings County, which gave Whitman responsibility for leadership in political communication only a river ferry crossing away from New York's diverse journalistic interpretations of important developments in Washington. It was the time of territorial expansion to the Pacific and Gulf coasts, which destabilized sectional coalitions sustaining the Union. Whitman lost the position in January of 1848, when he could not reconcile his editorial devotion to free-soil principles with a Democratic party platform moderate on the slave issue. The last straw was his decision to publish a point-by-point rebuttal of a statement by Lewis Cass, the Democratic candidate, instead of the statement itself.

Thomas Brasher's definitive study of Whitman's Eagle editorials establishes the scope and competence of Whitman's commentary on the political and social developments of the day. Although Whitman was not a distinguished journalist, he was a serious, innovative political communicator who, like Horace Greeley, began to explore the potential of the penny press as an agent of reform. Whitman framed his interpretations of political events from the perspective of working-class interests, as he understood them, in opposition to commercial greed and the political corruption he blamed on the remaining influence of Old World aristocracies. His Eagle editorials display an impressive richness of specific policy analysis and knowledge about everything from local lighting, safety, and health issues to banking, tariffs, and Constitutional theory.

Whereas only a few literary items appeared during Whitman's 1842 Aurora editorship, in the Eagle Whitman displaced advertisements on the front page with two columns of literary coverage. He published more than one hundred small items on fiction alone. These items are not critical of European influence, but other articles in the Eagle display early signs that Whitman was developing a theory of postcolonial literature much like that of the Young America movement advanced by the Democratic Review, which had published Whitman's early fiction.

Brasher finds evidence that despite Whitman's occasional reflection of the negrophobia of his time and his fear that abolitionists were undermining the agreement to leave slavery alone in original Southern states, Whitman was beginning to accept the argument that slavery was incompatible with Christianity and the equalitarian ideals of the revolutionary fathers. Brasher also discerns a surprisingly militaristic expansionism in the early months of Whitman's Eagle editorship. In a detailed allegorical fable, Whitman likens critics of President Polk's military ventures in Texas to children betraying their own mother, even when some of her property has been "stolen by a neighbor" (qtd. in Brasher 90). The allegory is so elaborate that it seems to preview Whitman's analogical imagination in Leaves of Grass.

Although earlier critics expressed puzzlement over the difference between the literary quality of Whitman's journalism and his best poems, some critics now discern important continuities in Whitman's transition from editorialist to poet. In fact, they believe that political embroilments during Whitman's Eagle editorship led directly to the literary intentions of Leaves of Grass.

At first, Whitman's Eagle editorials celebrated party disputes as the lifeblood of self-government and supported the expansionist Democratic presidency of James Polk. By the end of his editorship, however, Whitman was afraid that political parties only heightened prospects for disunion, and he had become so disillusioned by Polk's support for the expansion of slavery that in the first issue of the free-soil newspaper he later started, he asked God to forgive New Yorkers who had helped make Polk president.

By the time he was fired, Whitman's free-soil rhetoric had become strident, and sentences from editorials were being structured in the participial rhythms of free verse. In notebooks from this period, Whitman mentions writing a great book and begins to write lines of experimental poetry on the same subjects that provoked his most impassioned Eagle editorials–poetry about slavery and about the survival of the Union and Republicanism as bastions of free labor.

Eagle editorials display Whitman's thinking about subjects to which he returns in his mature poetry. He celebrates the "communion" between writer and reader (qtd. in Brasher 24), covers the fine arts from sculpture to theater and ballet, denounces nativism, argues that capital punishment is "as clearly contrary to the laws of Christ as was wanton murder" (qtd. in Brasher 151), and decries the low wages for women that seem to contribute to prostitution. Eagle articles about ferries display Whitman's ambivalence toward this profitable form of mechanized transportation, which, like the growing market economy, was transforming American life.

Of more than eight hundred Whitman items that have been identified from the Eagle, some five hundred have been reprinted in modern periodicals or collections of his journalism.

Bibliography

Allen, Gay Wilson. The Solitary Singer: A Critical Biography of Walt Whitman. 1955. Rev. ed. 1967. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985.

Bergman, Herbert. "Walt Whitman as a Journalist, 1831–January, 1848." Journalism Quarterly 48 (1871): 195–204.

Brasher, Thomas L. Whitman as Editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1970.

Erkkila, Betsy. Whitman the Political Poet. New York: Oxford UP, 1989.

Reynolds, David S. Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography. New York: Knopf, 1995.

Rubin, Joseph Jay. The Historic Whitman. University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 1973.

Thomas, M. Wynn. The Lunar Light of Whitman's Poetry. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1987.

Stephen Rachman

When Whitman contributed his early story "The Boy Lover" in May 1845, this New York monthly was called The American Review: A Whig Journal of Politics, Literature, Art and Science (1845–1847). The Review was the organ of the embattled Whig party until both party and magazine collapsed after the presidential election of 1852. George H. Colton edited the Review in the hopes of selling a profitable mixture of politics and literature which would rival the Democratic Review. The magazine gained immediate notice by publishing Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven" in its February 1845 number. In light of Whitman's previous associations with the Democratic Review and his anti-Whig campaigning, the publication of his slight tale and a few other pieces, as Perry Miller observed, gives some indication of Colton's willingness to print the writings of those Democrats who conformed to his conservative style. It also indicates the wide political and literary range of Walt Whitman's search for a literary identity in the 1840s. Whitman continued to read the Review through the 1850s, clipping articles on literature which interested him.

Bibliography

Allen, Gay Wilson. The Solitary Singer: A Critical Biography of Walt Whitman. 1955. Rev. ed. 1967. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985.

Miller, Perry. The Raven and the Whale: The War of Words and Wits in the Era of Poe and Melville. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1956.

Mott, Frank Luther. A History of American Magazines, 1741–1850. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard UP, 1939.

Reynolds, David S. Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography. New York: Knopf, 1995.

Whitman, Walt. The Early Poems and the Fiction. Ed. Thomas L. Brasher. New York: New York UP, 1963.

Patrick McGuire

This short story was first published as "The Child-Ghost; a Story of the Last Loyalist" in United States Magazine and Democratic Review, May 1842. After revisions—mostly cutting—it appeared as "The Last Loyalist" in Specimen Days & Collect (1882). For publication details and revisions, see Thomas L. Brasher's edition of The Early Poems and the Fiction.

This ghost story has a historical setting. The evil Vanhome is a loyalist during the American Revolutionary War. Before the war, his brother's orphan becomes his ward and dies within two years. During the war, Vanhome joins the British military and earns a reputation for cruelty to enemy soldiers and civilians alike. Near the war's end, he visits the family estate, which is soon to be confiscated by the new American government. While there, he encounters the Gills, an old poverty-stricken couple who have become tenants on the estate. Unaware who his visitor is, old man Gills talks about the previous owner—Vanhome himself, a man who beat to death the little boy under his care. Vanhome is given for the night the very room the boy died in. The ghost of the boy comes and terrifies him so that he flees to the last British ship embarking from America.

Like Lugare in "Death in the School-Room (a Fact)" (1841), Vanhome is a sadistic man, and he is like Adam Covert in "One Wicked Impulse!" (1845) in that he allows his own greed to interfere with his duties to his ward. But "The Last Loyalist" seems to offer a compromise to the solutions of those two stories. Lugare is meted no punishment, and Covert is killed. Vanhome lives, having been terrified, humiliated, and exiled.

This work has received little critical attention.

Bibliography

Whitman, Walt The Early Poems and the Fiction. 1963. Ed. Thomas L. Brasher. New York: New York UP, 1963.

Patrick McGuire

This short story and "The Death of Wind-Foot" initially appeared as embedded tales in Whitman's temperance novel, Franklin Evans (1842). It appeared separately with its title in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 7 December 1846. For publication history and revisions, see Brasher's edition of The Early Poems and the Fiction.

A young fellow, Mike, is riotously drinking with his friends. An elder brother comes to warn him that their little sister, Jane, is nearing death. Mike scoffs that for three years now such warnings have taken him from his partying, and she is still alive. The elder brother goes home alone, and Mike returns to the tavern, but his heart is laden with guilt. At home, little Jane dispenses keepsakes to her parents and siblings. The last one is reserved for Mike; it is a religious story for children, which Jane's mother had given her. Finally, Mike comes home and the children's stern father wishes him barred from Jane's sickbed. But the little girl summons Mike and, with her dying breath, gives him the religious storybook. Mike thereafter is a reformed man.

This temperance tale easily parallels "Reuben's Last Wish" (1842), in which an intemperate father reforms when he is given an embroidered pledge as the last act of his dying son.

As a story, "Little Jane" is slight, but it contains some typical themes of Whitman's fiction: tension between father and son, enmity between brothers, reformation of a drunkard through a child's act. Also, Whitman quite openly expresses some interesting ideas about death and children. For example, "Children . . . increase in beauty as their illness deepens" and "a solemn kind of loveliness . . . surrounds a sick child" (198).

The story has received little critical attention.

Bibliography

Whitman, Walt The Early Poems and the Fiction. 1963. Ed. Thomas L. Brasher. New York: New York UP, 1963.

Patrick McGuire

"The Love of Eris: A Spirit Record" first appeared in Columbian Magazine, March 1844, under the title "Eris: A Spirit Record." It was reprinted with the current title and other slight revisions in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 18 August 1846. For publication history and revisions, see Brasher's edition of The Early Poems and the Fiction.

The story is slight. A guardian angel, Dai, falls in love with his charge, Eris. She is betrothed. When the angel reveals himself to Eris, she dies. For being false to his mission, the angel is blinded and made to wander through heaven, calling out the name of his beloved. Eris's fiancé, meanwhile, languishes and longs for death.

The story contains an avowal of belief in angels and invisible spirits, but the moral at the end implicitly establishes a priority about such things. "The pure love of two human beings is a sacred thing, which the immortal themselves must dare not to cross" (Whitman 247).

Justin Kaplan, placing this story in line with those about sons and fathers, notes that Eris, spelled backwards, is "sire." Gay Wilson Allen notes that this story is in the manner of Edgar Allan Poe, but further sees the cosmic loneliness of Eris as a foreshadowing of elements in lines from Whitman's hospital notebook (1862–1863) which are the germ of the 1868 poem "A Noiseless Patient Spider."

Bibliography

Allen, Gay Wilson. The Solitary Singer: A Critical Biography of Walt Whitman. 1955. Rev. ed. 1967. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985.

Kaplan, Justin. Walt Whitman: A Life. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1980.

Whitman, Walt. The Early Poems and the Fiction. 1963. Ed. Thomas L. Brasher. New York: New York UP, 1963.

Patrick McGuire

This short story was initially published in United States Magazine and Democratic Review, July–August 1845, as "Revenge and Requital: A Tale of a Murderer Escaped." It was given its current title in Specimen Days & Collect (1882). For publication particulars and Whitman's extensive revisions, see Brasher's edition of The Early Poems and the Fiction.

This Dickens-like story involves a corrupt lawyer, Adam Covert, guardian to brother and sister orphans. He dupes them out of their money, and he insults the young woman. Her brother, Philip, vows vengeance. While waiting out a storm, the two men fight and the young man kills Covert. Philip's psychology is noteworthy; the storm's wind, thunder, and rain kindle "a strange sympathetic fury" in Philip's mind (Whitman 312). The one witness, an African-American man, mercifully chooses not to testify against Philip, and Philip goes free.

In the original version, Philip finds peace after the murder from working with cholera victims in New York and in saving one of Covert's orphaned children. Philip eventually succumbs to cholera himself. In the final version, Philip finds peace in recognizing that his bloody hands will not wither roses, which smell as fragrant as ever: no cholera, no death for Philip.

Critics have preferred to comment on the first version. Thomas Brasher notes that the revisions weaken the story's original opposition to capital punishment. David Reynolds also sees the original version as sensationalism, mixing violence with criticism of the wealthy. Philip Callow reads the first version as a temperance tract, while Justin Kaplan sees elements that parallel Edgar Allan Poe's "Masque of the Red Death" (1842).

Bibliography

Callow, Philip. From Noon to Starry Night: A Life of Walt Whitman. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1992

Kaplan, Justin. Walt Whitman: A Life. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1980.

Reynolds, David S. Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography. New York: Knopf, 1995.

Whitman, Walt The Early Poems and the Fiction. 1963. Ed. Thomas L. Brasher. New York: New York UP, 1963.

Jennifer A. Hynes

Whitman's journalism and early fiction exhibit his changing stand on this social-reform movement, which rivaled the abolition of slavery in its intensity and political force in antebellum America.

Temperance reform responded to a history of heavy alcohol consumption in America beginning in colonial times. As late as the 1820s alcohol was served at nearly all social functions and drunkenness was common in all classes. In 1830 per capita consumption of absolute alcohol in the United States was 3.9 gallons; by 1845, at the height of the temperance crusade, this figure had dropped to one gallon. The temperance movement apparently was successful. By mid-century, drinking had ceased to be respectable and alcohol was outlawed in many states.

The first phase of temperance reform, beginning in about 1825, relied on moral suasion and spread with the rise of the Whig party. Evangelical preachers like Lyman Beecher warned against the evils of drink and urged signing a pledge of partial abstinence (swearing off hard liquor only). Temperance reformers urged their cause both as a religious imperative and as a way of combatting social problems arising in a rapidly industrializing society: crime, immorality, poverty, and insanity. And during this early period the backers of temperance included many of those who would gain from a sober, industrious work force: the owners of industry. By 1830 temperance crusaders claimed that about ten percent of the population abstained from alcohol; this figure was higher in the Northeastern states and much lower in the South.

By the 1830s the standard pledge of partial abstinence, which allowed signers to partake of moderate amounts of beer and wine, was largely replaced by a pledge of total abstinence. With the rise of the Washingtonians, a group with working-class origins, which began in April of 1840 in Baltimore and which focused on reforming drunkards, temperance became a way of life. Washingtonian societies, named for the nation's first president, saw their membership grow to about a hundred thousand by 1841 and nearly a half million by 1843. Temperance saloons, hotels, theaters, festivals, steamboats, and boarding houses offered an alternative lifestyle that would provide support to the reformed. Junior temperance groups were organized for children, warning them to "beware of the first glass." Another group, the Sons of Temperance, urged respectable dress, language, and behavior as the means to avoid backsliding.

Whitman's attitude toward alcohol and temperance apparently relaxed over time. Gay Wilson Allen claims that Whitman took a pledge of total abstinence while an apprentice in Brooklyn in the 1820s and that he was a prohibitionist while a schoolmaster on Long Island. Whitman had seen the evils of alcohol; his father, brother-in-law Ansel Van Nostrand, and brother Andrew suffered bouts with drink. But Whitman was a moderate drinker. He took part in both the libations and the conversation when he joined his friends of the Bohemian crowd at Pfaff's Broadway restaurant before the Civil War. In Whitman's old age, Thomas Harned frequently sent the poet a bottle of champagne, although he recalled that the bottle would last a long while. Indeed, Whitman was apt to condemn extremism of any kind—whether overindulgence or puritanism.

But Allen argues that Whitman most likely was "an ardent prohibitionist" (58) when he wrote the temperance novel Franklin Evans; or, the Inebriate (1842), although later in life he was embarrassed by the book. In Whitman's various accounts of its writing he claims that he did so only for money, and wrote under the influence of alcohol (variously reported as port, gin, or whiskey). But Whitman appears sincere in the novel's introduction, in which he warns readers of the dangers of overindulgence in drink and praises sober, virtuous habits.

Whitman's journalism shows a distinct leaning toward the Washingtonian brand of temperance. This style of reform, which targeted the working class and appealed to the masses by acting out the miseries of drunkenness as warnings, appealed to Whitman's democratic sensibilities. (Indeed, Franklin Evans relies on drama and moralistic sensationalism to make its appeal.) David Reynolds argues that Whitman enjoyed the dramatic speeches of the day's greatest temperance orator, John Bartholomew Gough. After this former actor and reformed drunk was found in an alcohol-induced stupor in a whorehouse, Whitman defended the temperance cause—apart from its fallen leader—in a series of articles for the Brooklyn Star. In an article that appeared in the New York Aurora in 1842, "Temperance Among the Firemen!," Whitman describes a day of temperance rallies, processions, and orations. Although the article focuses in part on the physical and moral attributes of the young men who take part in the procession, he also praises this kind of popular activity as an effective weapon against "the enemy."

In the 1840s and 1850s the temperance fight had evolved into a political battle for prohibition. By 1855 Maine Laws (so named because the first prohibition law was passed in that state) were enacted in thirteen states and territories. Reynolds argues that Whitman was opposed to prohibition, and insisted that reform could only be achieved by persuasion and appeals to common sense, not by legal action. Indeed, in articles published for the Brooklyn Daily Times during the late 1850s Whitman seems to counsel individual restraint rather than any kind of group effort at reform. In his article "Liquor Legislation," he admonishes the "impracticable . . . ultraists" who push for Maine Laws, urging instead a kind of community action to punish those who sell liquor to known problem drinkers (48). And in his article "The Temperance Movement" Whitman sharply criticizes the impracticality of "over-zealous" reformers who disdain "half-way measures" and have thus actually brought on a rise in alcohol consumption (49). As was characteristic of Whitman's opinion on many subjects, he called for moderation both in liquor consumption and in reform.

Bibliography

Allen, Gay Wilson. The Solitary Singer: A Critical Biography of Walt Whitman. 1955. Rev. ed. 1967. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985.

Blocker, Jack S., Jr., ed. Alcohol, Reform and Society: The Liquor Issue in Social Context. Contributions in American History 83. Wesport, Conn: Greenwood, 1979.

Holloway, Emory. "Editor's Introduction." Franklin Evans; or, The Inebriate. By Walt Whitman. New York: Random House, 1929. v–xxiv.

Reynolds, David S. Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography. New York: Knopf, 1995.

Rorabaugh, W.J. The Alcoholic Republic: An American Tradition. New York: Oxford UP; 1979.

Tyrrell, Ian R. Sobering Up: From Temperance to Prohibition in Antebellum America, 1800–1860. Contributions in American History 82. Wesport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1979.

Whitman, Walt. "Liquor Legislation." Brookyln Daily Times 23 Jan. 1858. Rpt. in I Sit and Look Out: Editorials from the Brooklyn Daily Times. 1932. Ed. Emory Holloway and Vernolian Schwarz. New York: AMS, 1966. 47–49.

—. "Temperance Among the Firemen!" New York Aurora 30 Mar. 1842. Rpt. in Walt Whitman of the New York Aurora. State College, Pa.: Bald Eagle, 1950. 35–36.

—. "The Temperance Movement." Brookyln Daily Times 10 March 1858. Rpt. in I Sit and Look Out: Editorials from the Brooklyn Daily Times. 1932. Ed. Emory Holloway and Vernolian Schwarz. New York: AMS, 1966. 49.

Rosemary Gates Winslow

During the years Leaves of Grass was first being composed, Walt Whitman passed many afternoons in conversation with Dr. Henry Abbott at Abbott's Egyptian Museum on Broadway. In a catalogue published to promote the exhibit, Abbott describes himself as "merely an amateur of antiquity as appeared to me illustrative of the religious and other customs of the ancient Egyptians, in whose country I have passed the last twenty years of my life" (Abbott 3).

An Englishman, Dr. Abbott departed on an expedition to Egypt when his family moved to America upon completion of the education of the children. He stayed in Egypt, practicing medicine, marrying an Armenian, and settling in Cairo. He amassed a collection of over one thousand ancient artifacts, often going into tombs himself for objects and spending by his account $100,000. He brought them to New York to find a buyer, but failing that, he opened the museum in 1853. He returned to Cairo in 1855, and the New-York Historical Society purchased the collection for $34,000 in 1859, a few months before his death.

In an essay written for Life Illustrated in 1855, Whitman praises the Egyptians' habit of living in daily awareness of a spirituality made keen by constant reminders of death. Reaching back past Greece and Rome to praise the life and religion of their forerunner, Whitman saw Egypt as alive, energetic, freedom-loving, and great—an older kindred of the American people. This sense of a culture teeming with life was captured by Dr. Abbott's talks of his life in Egypt and the vivid relics Whitman saw. Whitman also read books recommended in Abbott's Catalogue, chiefly the first on the list, by Sir John Gardner Wilkinson.

Bibliography

Abbott, Henry. Catalogue of a Collection of Egyptian Antiquities, the Property of Henry Abbott, M.D., Now Exhibiting at the Stuyvesant Institute. New York: J.W. Watson, 1853.

New-York Historical Society. Catalogue of the Museum and Gallery of Art of the New-York Historical Society. New York: New York Historical Society, 1893.

Whitman, Walt. "One of the Lessons Bordering Broadway: The Egyptian Museum." New York Dissected. 1936. Ed. Emory Holloway and Ralph Adimari. Folcroft, Pa.: Folcroft Library Editions, 1972. 30–40.

Amy M. Bawcom

Lawyer, government official, and professor at Georgetown University, J[oseph] Hubley Ashton was one of the founders of the American Bar Association and a long-time friend of William Douglas O'Connor, who was among Whitman's closest associates and most fervent admirers.

In January 1865, in his capacity as Assistant Attorney General of the United States, Ashton played a key role in finding Whitman a full-time government clerkship in the Bureau of Indian Affairs within the Department of the Interior. Something of a sinecure, this job enabled Whitman to write his poetry and, at the same time, perform his ministrations as a nurse in the Civil War hospitals in and around Washington, D.C. In June, however, Whitman was dismissed from this position by Secretary of the Interior James W. Harlan because Harlan had discovered, on or in Whitman's desk, Whitman's personal, marked copy of the 1860 Leaves of Grass (the so-called Blue Book) and had found in it passages of poetry he deemed offensive and immoral. Ashton attempted to intervene with Harlan on Whitman's behalf, but to no avail. However, Ashton again made a signal contribution, this time by finding a clerkship for Whitman in the office of the Attorney General, a position he would occupy for the next eight years.

Although he would eventually claim that his interventions on Whitman's behalf were all due to the promptings of the poet's devoted friend William O'Connor, Ashton nevertheless demonstrated his own active interest in Whitman's affairs in Washington.

Bibliography

Allen, Gay Wilson. The Solitary Singer: A Critical Biography of Walt Whitman. 1955. Rev. ed. 1967. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985.

Loving, Jerome. Walt Whitman's Champion: William Douglas O'Connor. College Station: Texas A&M UP, 1978.

Traubel, Horace. With Walt Whitman in Camden. Vol. 3. 1914. New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 1961.

Scott L. Newstrom

Great-grandson of President John Adams and grandson of President John Quincy Adams, Henry Adams was a historian known for his dynamic theory of history and his idea of historical force. He is remembered for his autobiographical The Education of Henry Adams, which maintains that his conventional education was incomplete and had to be supplemented by his own experience and study.

Though Adams infrequently mentioned Whitman in his published writing and correspondence, he clearly admired Whitman's poetry and compared other poets to Whitman. More importantly, in The Education he praised the "power of sex" evident in Whitman's poetry, which he thought other American authors lacked. The force of procreation found throughout Whitman mirrors Adams's own admiration for the force abundant in the thirteenth-century Virgin figure, which he opposed to the destructive power of the twentieth-century dynamo. In this way, Adams shared with Whitman an anxiety about modern technological culture. While both Whitman and Adams attempted to understand America in terms of historical and cosmic forces, Adams was more elegiac, while Whitman was more progressive and optimistic. Both authors wrote autobiographically, but Whitman's first-person voice contrasts with Adams's writing his Education in a third-person omniscient voice.

Bibliography

Adams, Henry. The Education of Henry Adams. 1906. New York: Modern Library, 1931.

Aspiz, Harold. Walt Whitman and the Body Beautiful. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1980.

Jordy, William H. "Henry Adams and Walt Whitman." South Atlantic Quarterly 40 (1941): 132–145.

Miller, Edwin Haviland. Walt Whitman's Poetry: A Psychological Journey. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1968.

Amy M. Bawcom

As Sherry Ceniza has revealed, Whitman's biographers (Allen, Kaplan, Reynolds, and others) have often mistakenly referred to George B. Arnold as John Arnold; the latter was actually a son of the former. In any event, George B. Arnold was a retired Unitarian minister and a lodger for a number of years in the Brooklyn home of Mrs. Abby Price, one of Whitman's best friends. Helen Price, Abby's daughter, described Arnold as "a Swedenborgian, not formally belonging to the church of that name, but accepting in the main the doctrines of the Swedish seer as revealed in his works" (qtd. in Bucke 27). When Whitman visited the Price household, he often engaged Arnold in intense but friendly arguments, discussing such matters as politics, democracy, spiritualism, Harmonialism, and, most often, Swedenborgianism. According to Justin Kaplan, Arnold inspired Whitman to attend Swedenborgian meetings and to study the Swedish mystic's life and writings. Arnold may also have influenced Whitman to write "Who Was Swedenborg?"—an article published on 15 May 1858 in the Brooklyn Daily Times.

Bibliography

Bucke, Richard Maurice. Walt Whitman. Philadelphia: McKay, 1883.

Ceniza, Sherry. "Walt Whitman and Abby Price." Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 7 (1989): 49–67.

Kaplan, Justin. Walt Whitman: A Life. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1980.

Alan E. Kozlowski

Despite certain thematic affinities between the work of Whitman and the British Victorian poet and critic Matthew Arnold, including a belief in literature as a criticism of life, each had little to say about the other. What remains of their mutual comments, preserved in letters and conversations, is rather critical, stemming from the clash of Whitman's inclusiveness and originality against Arnold's advocacy of high culture and tradition.

Most characteristic of Arnold's attitude toward Whitman is his letter to W.D. O'Connor (1866) acknowledging receipt of O'Connor's The Good Gray Poet, written to defend Whitman after his dismissal as a clerk in the Indian Affairs Office. In the letter, Arnold states his doubt that the intervention of "foreign expostulators" will be able to effect Whitman's reinstatement. Arnold also states his belief that any public servant in a similar predicament in western Europe would meet a similar fate. Continuing as an advocate of high culture, he comments on the merits and demerits of Whitman's poetry as representative of American literature in general. While many in England found Whitman's poetical worth in his originality, Arnold finds Whitman in particular and American literature in general "displaying an eccentric and violent originality." Whitman and American literature must come "into the European movement," which will not impede America from being "an independent intellectual power" rather than "an intellectual colony of Europe" (qtd. in Perry 177–179). Mentioning Whitman in his article "Theodore Parker" (1867), Arnold believes each has "a genuine American voice, not an echo of English poetry," but that too much is made of this native strain (Arnold 12).

Whitman is similarly cool toward Arnold, comparing their antipathy to oil and water, saying "Arnold is inveterately one thing as I am another" (With Walt Whitman 4:37).

Bibliography

[Arnold, Matthew]. "Theodore Parker." Pall Mall Gazette 24 Aug. 1867: 12.

Blodgett, Harold W. Walt Whitman in England. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell UP, 1934.

Perry, Bliss. Walt Whitman: His Life and Work. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1906.

Traubel, Horace. "Whitman on His Contemporaries." American Mercury 2 (1924): 328–332.

———. With Walt Whitman in Camden. Vol. 1. Boston: Small, Maynard, 1906; Vol. 2. New York: Appleton, 1908; Vol. 3. New York: Mitchell Kennerley, 1914; Vol. 4. Ed. Sculley Bradley. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1953.

Robert K. Martin

One of the most important American literary critics on the left, an exponent of biographical criticism, Newton Arvin spent virtually all of his career as a professor of English at Smith College. A homosexual, Arvin was forced to retire from Smith in 1960 after a scandal in which he was convicted of the possession of gay male pornography. His death came just after the publication of his last book, a biography of Longfellow.

Widely published as a critic and reviewer, Arvin wrote two major essays on Whitman prior to the publication of his book Whitman in 1938. "Whitman's Individualism" (1932) is a critique of "pastel" portraits of the poet that make him appear to be a liberal democrat. Against such views, Arvin insists on Whitman's interest in the masses, the working people of America. Although Arvin grants that Whitman was an individualist in the American tradition, he sees this individualism profoundly modified by Whitman's concept of comradeship.

Whitman carries the argument further; it begins dramatically by evoking a conversation between Whitman and Horace Traubel in which Whitman asserts his fundamental socialism. Arvin addresses the question of Whitman's politics by insisting on his own critical method, that of reading the author in the context of his or her time and place. Arvin stresses the republican enthusiasms of Whitman's youth, with its idealization of Thomas Paine and Frances Wright, as well as his attraction to Quakerism, embodied in the Quaker reformer Elias Hicks. He traces the decline of Whitman's faith in a strong executive and shows Whitman's disgust at post-Civil War politics of greed and corruption.

Arvin's mode of intellectual biography passed out of favor in the years of the New Critics, who saw little merit in Whitman's work other than in some of his lyrics. Because Arvin rarely practiced explication de texte, few if any of his readings have passed into the body of accepted Whitman criticism. His significance lies in his identification of a radical Whitman whose work emerged directly from the reform movements of the second quarter of the nineteenth century.

Bibliography

Arvin, Newton. Whitman. New York: Macmillan, 1938.

———. "Whitman as He Was Not." The New Republic 14 April 1937: 301–302.

———. "Whitman's Individualism." The New Republic 6 July 1932: 212–213. Rpt. in American Pantheon. Ed. Daniel Aaron and Sylvan Schendler. New York: Delacorte, 1966. 43–50.

Martin Bidney

Of Sherwood Anderson's twenty-three books the finest contain his shorter works of fiction: Winesburg, Ohio (1919), The Triumph of the Egg (1921), Horses and Men (1923), and Death in the Woods (1933). Anderson's style influenced the minimalism of Hemingway, while his psychoanalytical sophistication impressed Faulkner.

A New Testament (1927) shows Anderson trying to imitate Whitman's quasi-scriptural ambitions, his long-lined free verse, and his concept of an androgynous universal "self." But Anderson only succeeds as a Whitmanesque visionary in "Out of Nowhere into Nothing," the longest tale in The Triumph of the Egg. The protagonist Rosalind Wescott is attracted equally to contrasting older men: Walter Sayers and Melville Stoner. Eventually Rosalind transcends both of her male friends, but she learns the most from Walt(er). Her dung-beetle reverie recalls section 24 of "Song of Myself"; Walter's advice to give herself to the night, his praise of Native Americans, and his love of humble weeds and grasses recall sections 21, 39, and 5. Walter teaches Rosalind to be a seer of grasses, and she in effect rewrites "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" in her epiphany of seagulls. But finally she leaves Walter and Melville both, afoot with her own vision like Whitman in section 33 of "Song of Myself."

In Tar (1926) Anderson notes that Dr. Reefy, "[l]ike Walt Whitman," was a nurse in the Civil War (330). Anderson was akin to Hamlin Garland in that both of these regional writers found in Whitman a sense of the depth of ordinary people.

Bibliography

Anderson, Sherwood. A New Testament. New York: Boni and Liveright, 1927.

———. Tar: A Midwest Childhood. New York: Boni and Liveright, 1926.

———. The Triumph of the Egg. New York: B.W. Huebsch, 1921.

Bidney, Martin. "Thinking about Walt and Melville in a Sherwood Anderson Tale: An Independent Woman's Transcendental Quest." Studies in Short Fiction 29 (1992): 517–530.

Bunge, Nancy L. "The Midwestern Novel: Walt Whitman Transplanted." The Old Northwest 3 (1977): 275–287.

Roger Asselineau

Guillaume Apollinaire's real name was Wilhelm Apollinaris de Kostrowitsky. He belonged to a cosmopolitan family and received a cosmopolitan education. He was a protean writer—in turn a futurist, a cubist, and a surrealist—a modernist in short. He was a friend of Picasso and like him an admirer of African art. Apollinaire became famous above all as an avant-garde poet with Alcools (1913), made up of both traditional and experimental poems deprived of punctuation, and Calligrammes (1918), also called "idéogrammes lyriques," which belonged to his cubist period. He thought poetry should enjoy the same liberty as journalism, but considered free verse only one of many possible innovations. He could turn any object, any topic, into something rich and strange.

The poems of Apollinaire are both serious and whimsical, and he was fond of hoaxes, one of which he perpetrated in the Mercure de France (to which he was a regular contributor) in the 1 April 1913 (April Fools' Day) issue. Although Apollinaire was neither a disciple of Whitman nor a homosexual, he pretended to quote an anonymous witness of Whitman's funeral in Camden, according to whom "pederasts came in crowds" and indulged in all kinds of rowdy activities to celebrate the death of their fellow homosexual. This pseudo-report was taken seriously by readers, and a controversy followed, which lasted for ten months in the pages of the Mercure de France as well as in other journals, until 1 February 1914. Stuart Merrill and Léon Bazalgette, the author of a romanticized biography of Whitman, denied the American poet's homosexuality, whereas Harrison Reeves and the German Eduard Bertz confirmed it. The whole controversy has been described by Henry Saunders and Betsy Erkkila. Federico García Lorca may have had Apollinaire's description of Whitman's funeral in mind when he composed his "Oda a Walt Whitman" in 1929–1930 during his stay in New York. (This poem is part of his Poeta en Nueva York.)

Despite his indebtedness to Whitman for some of his own innovations, Apollinaire joined the futurists in their Manifestes Futuristes (Milan, 1913) in saying "merde" ("shit") to him as well as to Poe and Baudelaire.

Bibliography

Billy, André, and Henri Parisot. Guillaume Apollinaire. Paris: éditions Seghers, 1947.

Erkkila, Betsy. Walt Whitman Among the French: Poet and Myth. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1980.

Lorca, Federico García. The Poet in New York and Other Poems. New York: Norton, 1940.

Saunders, Henry S. A Whitman Controversy—Being Letters Published in the Mercure de France 1913–1914. Toronto: Henry S. Saunders, 1921.

Donald D. Kummings

For his monumental The Solitary Singer: A Critical Biography of Walt Whitman (1955; rev. ed. 1967), for his highly acclaimed and widely consulted guides, the Walt Whitman Handbook (1946) and The New Walt Whitman Handbook (1975; rpt., with a new introduction and selected bibliography, 1986), for his work (with Sculley Bradley) as General Editor of the 22-volume Collected Writings of Walt Whitman (1961–1984), and for his many other monographs, editions, and articles on America's foremost poet, Gay Wilson Allen became internationally known as the dean of Whitman scholars. His first publication on the poet was an article entitled "Biblical Analogies for Walt Whitman's Prosody," which appeared in Revue Anglo-Américaine in 1933; his last was Walt Whitman and the World (coedited with Ed Folsom), a collection of foreign criticism published in 1995, a few months after his death on August 6.

Born in Lake Junaluska, North Carolina, and educated at Duke University (A.B., 1926; A.M., 1929) and the University of Wisconsin (Ph.D., 1934), Allen was a dedicated teacher at both Bowling Green State University (1935–1946) and New York University (1946–1969). He stated in 1991 that he "had not planned an academic career as a Whitman scholar, or even as a teacher of American literature" (Allen 92). Had opportunities presented themselves, he likely would have pursued a career in Middle English. However, certain serendipitous occurrences led him into Whitman studies—a fascination with prosody, an interest in connections between Whitman and French historian Jules Michelet, and, most important, his discovery of a Danish biography, Frederik Schyberg's Walt Whitman (1933; translated into English by Allen's wife, Evie Allison Allen, 1951). Allen was profoundly influenced by Schyberg's analysis of the successive editions of Leaves of Grass and by his discussion of "Whitman in World Literature." In the end, Schyberg inspired Allen to write his own biography of Whitman.

Hailed by critics as perceptive, thorough, and objective, The Solitary Singer has been touted for many years as the definitive biography of Whitman. Allen's genius seems to have resided in the artful rendering of lives, for he also wrote major biographies of William James and Ralph Waldo Emerson, as well as biographical studies of Herman Melville, Carl Sandburg, and (with Roger Asselineau) Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur. His life of Whitman prompted the U.S. State Department to send Allen, along with William Faulkner, on a 1955 tour of Japan. It also had much to do with his receipt, in 1977, of the Jay B. Hubbell Medallion for contributions to American literature.

Bibliography

Allen, Gay Wilson. "History of My Whitman Studies." Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 9 (1991): 91–100.

Blair, Stanley S. "The Gay Wilson Allen Papers." Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 12 (1994): 106–108.

Christie, N. Bradley. "Gay Wilson Allen." American Literary Biographers: First Series. Ed. Steven Serafín. Vol. 103 of Dictionary of Literary Biography. Detroit: Gale Research, 1991. 3–12.

Susan M. Meyer

The American theater and its actors were an important cultural influence on Walt Whitman. He attended the theater most regularly as a teenager from 1832–1836 and as a journalist from 1841–1849, and he wrote often about the early American theater in his waning years (1885–1890). During his theater-going years, Whitman attended productions featuring such favorites as Junius Brutus Booth, Charlotte Cushman, Edwin Forrest, Thomas Hamblin, Fanny Kemble, and William Charles Macready as well as lesser-known actors and actresses such as James H. Hackett, Henry Placide, T.D. Rice, Ada Webb, Adah Isaacs Menken, and Clara Fisher. Specimen Days (1882), November Boughs (1888), and Good-Bye My Fancy (1891) are important Whitman sources for the names of plays, theaters, and actors. They may also be found in his early newspaper articles.

Whitman was most impressed by Junius Brutus Booth (1796–1852), the leading tragedian of antebellum America, who was best known for his Shakespearean villain and mad-man roles: Richard III, Iago, Lear, and Othello. Whitman often commented upon the genius of Booth and called him "one of the grandest revelations of my life, a lesson of artistic expression" (Prose Works 2:597). Booth was born in England and in his teen years became the recognized rival of Edmund Kean as a tragedian. He was married twice and came to America in 1821, where he lived a traumatic life. He was most likely a manic-depressive with a serious alcohol problem that finally contributed to the eclipse of his artistic reputation. Booth was the father of the acclaimed tragedian Edwin Booth and the infamous John Wilkes Booth. The elder Booth is a key figure in the development of an American style of acting as was a precursor to Edwin Forrest. Booth was a fiery performer who could scare both audiences and other actors by the vehemence of his acting, and Whitman was impressed by the power of Booth's acting and his ability to totally immerse himself in a role. When acting Iago or Richard, he became those figures in much the same way that Whitman would "become" any number of personae in "Song of Myself."

Another important artistic influence on Whitman was Charlotte Cushman (1816–1876), the first American actress of note. Cushman began her career in Boston and New Orleans before moving to the New York stage. Her most famous roles were as Charles Dickens's Nancy Sykes ("the most intense acting ever felt on the Park boards" [Gathering 2:326]), Meg Merrilies in Scott's Guy Mannering, and Lady Macbeth. Cushman was equally famous for her portrayal of men: Hamlet, Romeo, and Oberon of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Whitman called Cushman the greatest performer he had seen and admired her for playing any role that would further her career.

America's first native-born star was Edwin Forrest (1806–1872), a committed Jacksonian Democrat and patriot who was best known for his muscular, booming style in such roles as Othello, Lear, Shylock, and Spartacus. Forrest was at the forefront of an international dispute over British vs. American styles of acting. The British style was best exemplified by William Charles Macready, subdued and rather tame, as opposed to the American style of Forrest, which was much more aggressive and sought to dominate audiences by the sheer force of voice and physique. This dispute came to a head in the infamous Astor Place Riot in 1849. Whitman initially favored the acting style of Forrest and claimed that the actor's performances strongly affected him and "permanently filter'd into [his] whole nature" (Prose Works 2:593). He ultimately cooled toward Forrest, however, and barely mentions Macready in his articles.

Thomas Hamblin (1800–1853) played Hamlet in 1825 but was best known for his management of the Bowery Theater. Whitman considered Hamblin great in his role as Arbaces, the Egyptian in The Last Days of Pompeii, and called his portrayal of Faulconbridge in King John the best performed on the stage. Whitman found Hamblin's comparatively small role superior to that of Charles Kean's King John, but it seems probable that Whitman confused Hamblin's role with that of Booth as King John in 1834. Because Whitman occasionally confused performances, biographical work concerning his interactions with the theater is difficult.

The English actress Fanny Kemble (1809–1893) impressed Whitman in his early days; he claims to have seen her every night she played the Park Theater. Kemble is best remembered by Whitman for her portrayal of Bianca in H.H. Milman's Fazio, Lady Townly in Colley Ciber's The Provoked Husband, and Marianna in Sheridan Knowles's The Wife. Whitman wrote that Kemble's performances "entranced us, and knock'd us about" (Prose Works 2:695).

Although Whitman commented upon performances, actors, and the theater in his essays, it is difficult to find instances of their direct influence on his poetry. On the other hand, critics have noted the multiple roles, or personae, assumed by the speaker in "Song of Myself" and throughout Leaves of Grass. In his notebooks, Whitman makes the connection, likening his poetic self to an actor and his literary audience to the audience of the theater. The immediate concern of the nineteenth-century American theater and its actors was to develop a style of drama and acting that was specifically American, a concern which Whitman shared, not only for the theater, but also for American literature in general.

Bibliography

Bogard, Travis, Richard Moody, and Walter J. Meserve. American Drama. Vol. 8 of The Revels History of Drama in English. London: Methuen, 1977.

Odell, George C.D. Annuals of the New York Stage. 15 vols. New York: Columbia UP, 1927–1938.

Reynolds, David S. Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography. New York: Knopf, 1995.

Stovall, Floyd. The Foreground of "Leaves of Grass." Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1974.

Whitman, Walt. The Gathering of the Forces. Ed. Cleveland Rodgers and John Black. 2 vols. New York: Putnam, 1920.

____. Prose Works 1892. Ed. Floyd Stovall. 2 vols. New York: New York UP, 1963-1964.

Roger Asselineau

Print Source: J.R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings, eds., Walt Whitman: An Encyclopedia (New York: Garland Publishing, 1998), reproduced by permission.

It is extremely difficult to assess and describe the impact of Walt Whitman in Africa. In the countries where Arabic is spoken, there is not even any translation of Leaves of Grass. There exists one only in the Middle East, which seems to be unknown in Africa. In Black Africa, where the original animism is still so strongly alive under the veneer of Islam or Christianity, there should be a public for a poet who believed in "[l]iving beings, identities now doubtless near us in the air that we know not of" ("Starting from Paumanok," section 10), for a poet who exclaimed, "Surely there is something more in each of the trees, some loving soul... O spirituality of things!" ("Song of Sunset"). There seems, however, to have been no echo to Whitman's poetry in any of the innumerable vernacular tongues and dialects. The oral poetry of the "griots" is still very much alive, but it remains profoundly traditional and impervious to outside influences. It is only in the literatures written in the former colonizers' tongues (English or French) that it is impossible to encounter the influence of Whitman in the works of writers who have had access to French translations of Leaves of Grass or to the text itself. Walt Whitman thus appealed above all to highly literate readers.

Such was the case of Léopold Sédar Senghor (b. 1906), the first African to obtain the agrégation in French, Latin, and Greek and teach French and Latin in French lycées; he was later to become the first president of the Republic of Senegal. Despite his sound classical education, Senghor heard Whitman's yawp over the roofs of the world. Leaves of Grass gave him a greater shock and consequently influenced him more deeply than any other poem he had ever read. Romantic poetry, he said, "was always channelled between the mighty banks of Christianity... [w]hereas with Whitman it is truly primeval man and natura naturans which get expressed to the rhythm of days and nights, of ebb and flow, a rhythm which, for all its freedom, is strongly stressed" (Senghor 33). Although he treated almost exclusively African themes in his own poetry—Chants d'Ombre (Songs of Darkness), Hosties noires (Black Hosts), Éthiopiques, Nocturnes, etc.—Senghor was encouraged by Whitman's example to reject the constraints of French prosody and express himself in free verse—a medium which also enabled him to preserve the cadences of the oral poetry chanted by the griots in the native tongues he spoke himself, Sérère and Peul. Senghor, however, was an exception. It is symptomatic that Leaves of Grass is not taught in the University of Dakar because, as the professor in charge of American Literature there points out, "the very elusive unity of design of Leaves of Grass... would evade the students' reflections"; it is preferable to teach "full-length novels of quality" (qtd. in Pollet 27).

In South Africa the same phenomenon occurred as in Senegal. A distinguished intellectual, a philosopher this time rather than a poet—Jan Christian Smuts (1870–1950)—came under the spell of Leaves of Grass and wrote an important bio-critical essay on Whitman. Smuts was of Boer descent and even fought on the side of the Boers during the Boer War, but he wrote in English and eventually championed the reconciliation of the Boer and British settlers and became prime minister of the Union of South Africa. In his youth, he was firmly rooted in Christianity (Lutheran), classical studies, and German philosophy. During the Boer War, he carried two books in his saddlebags; a Greek New Testament and Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, but during his law studies in London he underwent a kind of conversion; he read "everything there was on Whitman in the British Museum." "Whitman did a great service to me," Smuts said, "in making me appreciate the natural Man and freeing me from much [sic] theological or conventional preconceptions due to my very early pious upbringing. It was a sort of liberation... Sin ceased to dominate my view of life..." (qtd. in Hancock 48). He felt there was a pre-established harmony between him and Whitman, since they both had Dutch blood and shared the same convictions regarding the world and democracy. Carried away by his enthusiasm, he wrote in the early 1890s Walt Whitman: A Study in the Evolution of Personality, which helped him to crystallize the ideas he developed later in two philosophical treatises: Inquiry into the Whole (1911) and Holism and Evolution (1926). ("Holism" comes from the Greek word which means "whole.") Like Whitman, he believed that the world is a whole made up of dynamic wholes which are more than the sums of their component parts and tend to absorb more parts, for they obey a creative or emergent evolution inconsistent with bare mechanism. Thus, in his eyes, matter is alive, and the highest whole is Personality, which is characterized b the greatest freedom and creative power, as Whitman's personality showed, passing from a "period of Naturalism" to one of "Emotionalism" and one of "Applied Spiritualism," finally to reach a "Period of Pure or Religious Spiritualism," a harmonious self-realization tending toward the eventual realization of Truth, Beauty, and Goodness in the world. This dynamic optimism plunged its roots into Leaves of Grass: "The Lord advances and ever advances, / Always the shadows in front, / Always the outstretched Hand / Helping up the laggards" (Smut's paraphrase of section 4 of "Faces," Smuts 18). Unfortunately, Smuts found no English publisher for his essay on Whitman, and it remained unpublished in his lifetime. It appeared only in 1973 in Detroit and thus had no impact in Africa.

Though Whitman saluted the "divine-souled African... superbly destin'd, on equal terms with me" ("Salut au Monde!," section 11), the climate has not been favorable to the growth of Leaves of Grass on African soil. However, Leaves of Grass has contributed to the growth of a great poet, Léopold Sédar Senghor, and to the foundation of the Union of South Africa and the league of nations, which were both energetically championed by Jan Christian Smuts.

Bibliography

Allen, Gay Wilson. The New Walt Whitman Handbook. 1975. New York: New York UP, 1986.

Asselineau, Roger, and William White, eds. Walt Whitman in Europe Today. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1972.

Hancock, W.K. Smuts: The Sanguine Years, 1870–1919. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1962.

Pollet, Maurice. "Whitman in Dakar." The Bicentennial Walt Whitman: Essays from "The Long-Islander." Ed. William White. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1976. 27.

Senhor, Léopold Sédar. "The Shock of Leaves of Grass." Walt Whitman in Europe Today. Ed. Roger Asselineau and William White. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1972. 33.

Smuts, Jan Christian. Walt Whitman: A Study in the Evolution of Personality. Ed. Alan L. McLeod. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1973.

Whitman, Walt. Chants de la Terre qui Tourne. Ed. and trans. Roger Asselineau. Paris: Nouveaux Horizons (Éditinos Seghers), 1966.

Zell, Hans M., Carol Bundy, and Virginia Coulon, eds. New Reader's Guide to African Literature. 2nd ed. New York: Africana Publishing, 1983.

David B. Baldwin

Print Source: J.R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings, eds., Walt Whitman: An Encyclopedia (New York: Garland Publishing, 1998), reproduced by permission.

This poem was first published in Lippincott's Magazine, November 1887, and included as the last poem in the First Annex, "Sands at Seventy," 1891–1892 edition. Its earlier title, "So Loth to Depart," was more appropriate, if less euphonious.

In a dozen lines, this lyric describes the pain of a final parting from friends. The first lines suggest little more than a warm departure after a pleasant dinner, but lines 4–6, in parentheses, widen the implications. The leave-taker, never identified, is going on a journey, never to return, and will be present "[n]o more for communion of sorrow and joy." While he is leaving his friends, the darkness deepens and the figure of the departing one grows dimmer. Since Whitman regularly used the journey motif symbolically, the journey may be journey into death. It may also be associated with Whitman himself, for he often addressed the themes of death and dying in poems written during his final years.

The structure of "After the Supper and Talk" is periodic, a favorite rhetorical device of the poet. Since the poem's strength derives from the reluctance of the departing one to leave his friends, a common human experience, the holding off of the main clause till the end is especially effective. The final line, "Garrulous to the very last," may best be read as abruptly shifting the mood from the somber and melancholy to the playful and teasing. The fact that Whitman knew himself to be loquacious increases the likelihood of his being the central figure. The hesitant, interrupting rhythm well suits the circumstance of the reluctant farewell.

"After the Supper and Talk" can be compared to two other farewell poems, "Good-Bye my Fancy!," the last poem in the Second Annex to the 1891–1892 edition of Leaves of Grass, and the longer and more personal "So Long!," which Whitman used as the closing poem of Leaves from the 1860 edition on.

Bibliography

Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass: Comprehensive Reader's Edition. Ed. Harold W. Blodgett and Sculley Bradley. New York: New York UP, 1965.

Donald Barlow Stauffer

In January 1888 Whitman published in the New York Herald a highly romanticized and sentimentalized poem about the experience of aging which he called "Halcyon Days." In light of the strokes and other illnesses he had suffered during the fifteen years prior to the composition of this poem, it would seem that his depiction of a serene and untroubled old age facing the sunset years with equanimity is not based upon his own experience but is merely a literary or artistic conception, written in the affirmative tone of his early poems. Possibly it is not so much deception, or self-deception, as it is a way of continuing and sustaining the themes and attitudes of his life's work. As he often said in his later years, he was determined to keep as much as possible his own sickness and pain out of his poems; at the same time, however, he wanted to be honest and to put as much of his own personal experiences into them as he could. These contradictory aims account for the conflicting attitudes toward his own aging that appear in his later poems. In the context of Leaves of Grass the poems about old age are part of Whitman's philosophy of contraries; he could claim that his loss of energy, weakening mental powers, and even his fears of senility were not to be resisted but were to be thought of as a part of the life cycle and part of a greater spiritual totality.

Only two days after the three strokes that came close to killing him in June 1888, Whitman had a remarkable conversation with Horace Traubel in which he examined his current condition in the context of his life, his beliefs, and what he had recently described in "A Backward Glance O'er Travel'd Roads" as his program to "exploit [my own] Personality, identified with place and date, in a far more candid and comprehensive sense than any hitherto poem or book" (Whitman 714).

"As long as I live the Leaves must go on," he said. "The Sands have to be taken as the utterances of an old man—a very old man. I desire that they may be interpreted as confirmations, not denials, of the work that has preceded.... I am not to be known as a piece of something but as a totality" (With Walt Whitman 1:271–272). "The Sands" he refers to is the "Sands at Seventy" collection, first published in 1888 in the November Boughs volume. The poems of his later years are clearly not the work of a poet in fullest command of his powers, but we find occasional flashes that recall his younger self. The dominant themes in the two annexes, "Sands and Seventy" and Good-Bye my Fancy," as well as in "Old Age Echoes," are old age and death. Speaking to Horace Traubel about their subject matter, Whitman said, "Of my personal ailments, of sickness as an element, I never spoke a word until the first of the poems I call Sands at Seventy were written, and then some expression of invalidism seemed to be called for" (With Walt Whitman 2:234). He realized that, if he were to be true to his own stated goal of reflecting the life of an old man in his poems, he had to include references to his sickness and invalidism, since they had become so much a part of his life.

Some of the same painful self-awareness that formerly centered on sexual questions in the "Calamus" poems and elsewhere was in later life directed toward another personal experience: growing old. This questioning mood may be found in "Queries to my Seventieth Year," published about a month before Whitman's sixty-ninth birthday in 1888. It had become clear to him by that time that he would never achieve that national fame and recognition he had hoped for, and after his first stroke he necessarily became more aware of his vulnerability, his oncoming old age, and his mortality. The passages in which he describes the aging Columbus, the "batter'd, wreck'd old man" who ended his life despised and defeated, quite clearly refer to himself as well.

Three poems in the "Sands at Seventy" collection are similarly indirect in their treatment of old age. In one of these, "The Dismantled Ship," he describes an "old dismasted, gray and batter'd ship, disabled, done." "After free voyages to all the seas of the earth," Whitman writes, the ship is "haul'd up at last and hawser'd tight, / Lies rusting, mouldering." Another is "Twilight" (1887), which shows that Whitman was thinking more and more about death—not death in an abstract philosophical way, but his own death, including the death of consciousness.

The contradiction between his own feelings and the posture he wanted to maintain as a poet often gave Whitman trouble. In the fall of 1888, when his immobility forced him to sell his horse and carriage, he remarked to Traubel, "It marks a new epoch in my life: another stage on the down-hill rad." Traubel replied, "I shouldn't think with your idea of death that you would speak of it as a down road." And Whitman answered, "Sure enough—the word was false: up road: up—up: another stage on the up-hill road: that certainly seems more like me and I want to be like myself" (With Walt Whitman 2:273).

Less direct than some others in its use of imagery suggestive of old age is "You Lingering Sparse Leaves of Me." In this poem Whitman compared himself to a tree in autumn, whose "Leaves" are "tokens diminute and lorn—(not now the flush of May, of July clover-bloom— no grain of August now)." Still the lingering sparse leaves are, he says, "my soul-dearest leaves confirming all the rest, / The faithfulest— hardiest—last." Once again we hear a note of insistence—he protests too much in his claims that these last leaves are his best.

"Old Age's Lambent Peaks," Whitman told Traubel, was "an essential poem—it needed to be made" (With Walt Whitman 2:289). It characterizes old age as a time to look at the world and at life "in falling twilight." This poem also seems an effort to justify this stage of life, stated in Whitman's characteristic affirmative tone. While the poem stands in opposition to much of what he said as a young man celebrating manly vigor, it is consistent with the attitude in "Song of Myself" and repeated throughout his life that whatever he is experiencing at the moment is for the best.

Bibliography

Fillard, Claudette. "Le Vannier de Camden: Vieillesse, Poésie, et les Annexes de Leaves of Grass." Études Anglaises 45 (1992): 311–323.

Stauffer, Donald Barlow. "Walt Whitman and Old Age." Walt Whitman Review 24 (1978): 142–148.

Traubel, Horace. With Walt Whitman in Camden. Vol. 1. Boston: Small, Maynard, 1906; Vol. 2. New York: Appleton, 1908.

Trent, Josiah C. "Walt Whitman: A Case History." Surgery, Gynecology and Obstetrics 87 (1948): 113–121.

Whitman, Walt. Prose Works 1892. Ed. Floyd Stovall. Vol. 2. New York: New York UP, 1964.

George Klawitter

"Ages and Ages Returning at Intervals" first appears in the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass, where it is twelfth among the cluster of "Enfans d'Adam." Its position, however, in the final edition (1881) is eighth. Minor variants for the various editions, mostly of punctuation marks, are noted in the Variorum (2:362-363). In his emendations of the 1860 edition, Whitman added a new opening line, "With the old, the potent original loins," words he lifted and canceled from line 3 of the poem. In a second review, he restored line 3 to its earlier reading, except for the word "original." However, the poem appeared in subsequent editions with the word restored to line 3 and the new first line of the poem canceled.

Aspiz feels that the poem blends lust and transcendence in the Adamic narrator furthering the Whitmanesque notion that sexuality is basically spiritual, a notion that Allen also finds in the poem, in the form of Whitman's belief that the soul identifies itself through sex. Miller sees in the poem an attempt to show that Adam's innocence did not die in Eden but rather returns from time to time, significantly here in the "Children of Adam" cluster.

Bibliography

Allen, Gay Wilson. Walt Whitman Handbook. 1946. New York: Hendricks House, 1962.

Aspiz, Harold. "Sexuality and the Language of Transcendence." Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 5.2 (1987): 1–7.

Killingsworth, M. Jimmie. Whitman's Poetry of the Body: Sexuality, Politics, and the Text. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1989.

Miller, James E., Jr. A Critical Guide to Leaves of "Grass." Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1957.

Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass: A Textual Variorum of the Printed Poems. Ed. Sculley Bradley, Harold W. Blodgett, Arthur Golden, and William White. 3 vols. New York: New York UP, 1980.

____. Walt Whitman's Blue Book. Ed. Arthur Golden. 2 vols. New York: New York Public Library, 1968.

Larry D. Griffin

"America" first appeared in the New York Herald (11 February 1888) and then in the "Sands at Seventy" annex to Leaves of Grass in 1891–1892. Whitman, as he had done in 1872 in "As a Strong Bird on Pinions Free" ("Thou Mother with Thy Equal Brood" [1881]), addresses "America" as "Mother." The poem, like many from the "Sands at Seventy" annex, is one sentence. In that single sentence, Whitman displays several oral tendencies, including the catalogue of the country's components, clear parallel structure, and the homeostasis suggested by "the adamant of Time."

Whitman's "America" equalizes both the sons and daughters for whom the "seated Mother" is the "[c]entre." Whitman thus provides another early statement of the equality of the sexes, extending such equality despite age— "all alike endear'd, grown, ungrown, young or old." The sons and daughters make up an admirable family whose members are characteristically "[s]trong, ample, fair, endurable," and "rich." As with the "Earth," "Freedom," "Law," and "Love"—anything that is constant, that is persistent, and that continues uninterrupted— "America" is "[p]erennial." "Chair'd in the adamant of Time" further emphasizes the constancy of Whitman's "Mother."

Whitman's feminine, matriarchal America provides an opposite alternative to the masculine, patriarchal, capitalist America of the late nineteenth century. Like Liberty, the Statue in New York Harbor, and the figures on the obverses of numerous nineteenth- and twentieth-century American coins, Whitman's "Mother" provides readers with powerful associations, including the unlimited potential for revolutionary change in a feminine country where one enjoys the rights of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."

"America" may be the only poem Whitman ever recorded. Originally recoded in 1890, the cylinder, which contains Whitman reading the first four lines of "America," purportedly was once in the collection of Roscoe Haley (1889–1982). On 5 August 1951, Leon Pearson broadcast Whitman reading "America" on his NBC radio program Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow. Audio-Text Cassettes in the 1970s included the recording in a cassette tape series for classroom use. The Belfer Audio Lab and Archives at Syracuse University holds a similar recording on an acetate disk. How appropriate that Whitman, in the only recording of his voice, should speak out about such an America.

Bibliography

Folsom, Ed. "The Whitman Recording." Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 9 (1992): 214–216.

Whitman, Walt. "America." 1890. Voices of the Poets: Readings by Great American Poets from Walt Whitman to Robert Frost. America Literary Voices Audiotape. 14026. Center for Cassette Studies, 1974.

____. Leaves of Grass: Comprehensive Reader's Edition. Ed. Harold W. Blodgett and Sculley Bradley. New York: New York UP, 1965.

____. Leaves of Grass: A Textual Variorum of the Printed Poems. Ed. Sculley Bradley, Harold W. Blodgett, Arthur Golden, and William White. Vol. 3. New York: New York UP, 1980.

Deborah Dietrich

Leaves of Grass dramatizes Whitman's attempt to reestablish the Adamic man of the Western world. The Leaves of Grass persona projects a world of order and meaning into a sheer vacuum. Companionless, he finds himself in an Adamic condition, in a "vacant, vast surrounding" ("A Noiseless Patient Spider"), and his only recourse is to create a world of splendor and variety for himself.

In the opening lines of "Starting from Paumanok," Whitman provides a description of the genesis of the poetic self. Whitman has his poetic self start from Paumanok; the Native American place name emphasizes America's beginnings and symbolically associates America's and the poet's origins with the creation of the world itself. He concludes section 1 with a metaphor of the solitary singer: "Solitary, singing in the West, I strike up for a New World." In the first two sections of the poem, Whitman places the poetic self in the central procession, developing both his mythic and personal portrait. In section 17 Whitman's Adamic man of the Western world announces a "new race, dominating previous ones and grander far."

In The American Adam, R.W.B. Lewis discusses Whitman's persona as an extreme example of the Adamic type: an individual undefiled by inheritance, an innocent. Opening lines like "Out of the cradle endlessly rocking" and "Unfolded out of the folds of the woman, the man comes unfolded" emphasize his newness. Whitman's natural unfallen man is truly awake, like "Adam early in the morning, / Walking forth from the bower refresh'd with sleep" ("As Adam Early in the Morning"). "[H]ankering, gross, mystical, nude," this new Adam makes holy whatever he touches ("Song of Myself," section 20).

Whitman' Adamic hero is a creator and a namer. He gives birth to the human race out of his love affair with himself. "If I worship one thing more than another," he proclaims, "it shall be the spread of my own body" ("Song of Myself," section 24). Whitman realizes that love originates in self-love, that narcissism is an important stage of the growth process. This love is for the whole being: the inseparable body and soul. Like the "noiseless, patient spider [who] launch'd forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself," the New Adam spins his own conditions. He projects his own reality onto the emptiness. In so doing, he creates an image of America in all its diversity, promise, and confusion. Lewis has suggested that Adam integrates the idea of Eve into the concept of himself and the result of his self-love is the conception of the human race. Moreover, playing both Adam and Eve, Whitman's persona gives birth to himself as a poet as well.

The things that Whitman's Adam names come into being because the name is the soul of the concrete reality it represents. In section 16 of "Starting from Paumanok," Whitman focuses on the organic connection between the names of places and their spirits: "Okonee, Koosa, Ottawa, Monongahela, Sauk, Natchez, Chattahoochee, Kaqueta, Oronoco, / Wabash, Miami, Saginaw, Chippewa, Oshkosh, Walla-Walla / Leaving such to the States they melt, they depart, charging the water and the land with names." The words enable the Adamic hero to become one with all the things he names, and through them he is able to connect mystically to the universe. With words, he creates an imagined world and, with his words, he connects to it. The Adamic hero incorporates everything, and this expansive self Whitman called "cosmos."

Whitman's connection of the self to the universe is paradoxical: man is unitary, integral to himself, and, at the same time, he is equal to everything else. "I celebrate myself and sing myself, / and what I assume you shall assume / For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you" ("Song of Myself, section 1). He celebrates himself as an enlightened Everyman—the representative man who will attempt to call forth the heroism in his readers.

The powers of genesis are his because he is the poet. In "Song of the Broad-Axe," Whitman's persona first comes before us as a blacksmith, manufacturer of the symbolic ax which creates an American panorama, artifacts shaped from the American forests. This is similar to the poet who with his pen shapes his poems out of the fiber of the United States. The ax and the pen are tools for harmoniously unifying America's schisms. In "Song of the Redwood-Tree," the sequoia becomes a symbol of the material wealth, willing to be felled for the "superber race" of Americans. In contrast to the emphasis on man's creativity and control over nature in "Song of the Broad-Axe," Song of the Redwood-Tree" focuses on the moral influence of the environment on man.

Consisting of sixteen poems, "Children of Adam" is set in the Garden of Eden. Although beautiful and peaceful, Whitman's Eden is not the Garden of Genesis. Instead, it is an earthly Eden of Delight, the site of bodily joy and sexual fulfillment. When Whitman declares in "Starting from Paumanok" "a world primal again" (section 17), he connects it with newness, expansion, and turbulence. Similarly, Whitman's Adam is strong, vigorous, and sexual, with limbs quivering with the fire "that ever plays through them" ("To the Garden of the World"). Celebrating the physical act of procreation, Whitman proclaims sex to be as fundamental in the physical world as love in the spiritual world. Adam is not debased, he does not carry the burden of original sin, and his body is as sacred as his soul. In Whitman's Eden, all gender differences disappear, and Eve's body and soul are equally perfect.

Critics Thomas Crawley and Harold Bloom assert that Whitman's persona is more like the second Adam than the first. Whitman's New Adam is "well-begotten and raised by a perfect mother" ("Starting from Paumanok," section 1). He reaches out Christlike and offers aid and encouragement to his fellow man. Dispensing biscuits and milk, he offers the bread of life. He identifies with all experience: "All sorrow, labor, suffering, I, tallying it, absorb in myself" ("Chanting the Square Deific," section 2). He walks the hills of Judea with God by his side. He knows that he is deathless and that nothing is final. Crawley argues that the Christ symbol is the most important symbol in Leaves of Grass and that the "climactic" passage of "Song of Myself" occurs when Whitman's persona identifies himself and all humans with the crucified Christ. The "friendly and flowing savage" is absorbed into the Christ figure, the symbol of the divinity that lies dormant in civilized man.

In "Passage to India," Whitman proclaims the poet to be the true son of God. Unlike Christ, the poet does not advocate sacrifice. Embracing atheist and skeptics, he accepts all. For Whitman, the material is as important and as divine as the spiritual. "And nothing, not God, is greater to one than one's self is" ("Song of Myself," section 48).

Bibliography

Bloom, Harold. "Whitman's Image of Voice: To the Tally of my Soul." Walt Whitman. Modern Critical Views. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House, 1985. 127–147.

Crawley, Thomas Edward. The Structure of "Leaves of Grass." Austin: U of Texas P, 1970.

Hoffman, Daniel. "'Hankering, Gross, Mystical, Nude': Whitman's 'Self' and the American Tradition." Walt Whitman of Mickle Street. Ed. Geoffrey M. Sill. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1994. 1–17.

Lewis, R.W.B. The American Adam. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1955.

Miller, James E., Jr. "America's Epic." Whitman: A Collection of Critical Essays. Twentieth Century Views. Ed. Roy Harvey Pearce. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1962. 60–65.

Pearce, Roy Harvey. The Continuity of American Poetry. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1961.

Kirsten Silva Gruesz

As the self-proclaimed "bard of Democracy," Whitman set out both to portray the national character and to reshape it according to his own convictions. The 1855 Preface proclaims that the "genius of the United States" is expressed "most in the common people" (Whitman 5–6): the working men, artisans, farmers, housewives, and "roughs" who populated the panoramic canvases of the poems. In choosing such figures to represent the "splendid average" of the American, Whitman forged a new poetic practice from the principles of self-determination and equality set forth in the Declaration of Independence; Leaves of Grass was to be its literary equivalent, a radical statement of separation from European models. Moreover, by depicting women, blacks, and native peoples in the poems, Whitman revised the original revolutionary compact to include those whom it had left out. Although disease, death, and injustice lurk in the poet's field of vision, his catalogue of American attributes—the wholehearted embrace of modernity and progress, a rejection of social hierarchies, frankness of manners, Emersonian self-reliance—is essentially optimistic.

While Whitman was not the first to call for an indigenous American literature, he went beyond native subject matter to democratize poetic language itself: borrowing words from everyday speech, addressing the reader boldly and familiarly. More radically, the very structure of Leaves was designed to reflect the national principle of equality. "The United States themselves are essentially the greatest Poem," he writes in the Preface (5), and the book, similarly, is an aggregate of diverse parts, of interconnected responses to the same central theme. The poems together suggest the pluralistic nature of life in the United States, which is "not merely a nation but a teeming nation of nations" (5). As it accumulated more and more "leaves" over the years, the work approached a massive, epic scale appropriate to the rapidly expanding country.

The exuberance of Whitman's early vision reflects a general antebellum faith in America's destined greatness. Whitman was fascinated by advances in natural science and medicine, and particularly by phrenology, the "science of character," with its tantalizing claim to reveal the hidden origins of human behavior. Improving the individual could potentially create a perfect society: "Produce great Persons, the rest follows" ("By Blue Ontario's Shore," section 3). "Song of Myself" relies on the idea that the poet's own character is representative of the nation's: "Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos" (1885 Leaves) embodies all aspects of American reality. Whitman often fictionalizes details of his life as he creates this idealized poetic persona. In Specimen Days (1882), for example, he describes his hereditary background as a healthy amalgam of different nationalities, much like the "[g]rand, common stock" of the well-bred, robust race of Americans he praises in Democratic Vistas (946). In doing so, he glosses over the actual history of mental and physical illnesses in the family. This discrepancy underscores the strength of Whitman's belief in a fundamental correspondence between the body an the inner character and in well-directed procreative energy as a means to perfect both.

The healthy surge of this new breed could not, however, overcome the most pressing social and political problem of the day, the racial division between black and white. Whitman was aware that the existence of slavery exposed an underlying paradox in his identification of individual freedom as the most basic component of American character. Although hesitant to endorse abolitionism, he opposed the extension of slavery into the Western territories and, in his journalistic writings, excoriated the weakness of compromise-seeking politicians whom he saw as alienated from the will of the people. The increasingly fractious national debates that culminated in the Civil War threatened to undermine the foundations of a poetic and personal philosophy built around the concept of union, contributing to Whitman's artistic crisis of the late 1850s.

Like most of his contemporaries, Whitman saw the war as a struggle to maintain the Union rather than to abolish slavery. Paradoxically, his firsthand experience with wartime devastation provided him with a renewed sense of mission. The task of national healing, as he proposes in Democratic Vistas (1871), must begin with a spiritual regeneration. He diagnoses the national body as "canker'd, crude, superstitious, and rotten" (937). Having survived the sectional crisis, postwar America is endangered by soulless mercantilism; the gap between rich and poor is growing, along with the social distinctions that Leaves had hoped to erase. His faith in political leaders at an ebb, Whitman insinuates that American poets alone can redeem the nation from the moral corruption and degradation into which it has fallen. Under their guidance, he predicts, humankind will evolve spiritually so as to spread the idea of democracy over the globe. Through this prophetic turn, the later Whitman thus recovers some of his initial optimism.

Readers abroad received Leaves of Grass as a major statement on the American character long before most of Whitman's countrymen were willing to do so. Foreign audiences have tended to be both more lavish in their praise and more vocal in their skepticism. D.H. Lawrence, for instance, vividly describes Whitman's all-embracing Self as a careening automobile heedless of what it crushes, and Cuban revolutionary poet José Martí notes uncomfortably that Whitman's image of an America extending from Canada to the Caribbean casts an imperial net over the hemisphere. Many commentators in the United States prefer to separate Whitman's nationalistic claims from his stylistic innovations and his pioneering treatment of sexuality; however, critics such as Betsy Erkkila and Kerry Larson insist that the same principle motivates both his politics and his poetics. Although Leaves may not provide a final answer to the challenge of pluralism that is built into the American constitution, its textual design, unifying the many into one, offers an implicit response.

Bibliography

Erkkila, Betsy. Whitman the Political Poet. New York: Oxford UP, 1989.

Kaplan, Justin. Walt Whitman: A Life. New York: Bantam, 1982.

Larson, Kerry C. Whitman's Drama of Consensus. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1988.

Reynolds, David S. Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography. New York: Knopf, 1995.

Whitman, Walt. Complete Poetry and Collected Prose. Ed. Justin Kaplan. New York: Library of America, 1982.

William A. Pannapacker

Published in New York by Fowler and Wells from January 1851 to April 1861, the American Phrenological Journal and Repository of Science, Literature and General Intelligence continued the American Phrenological Journal and Miscellany, which was published in Philadelphia by Adam Waldie from October 1838 to December 1850. In May 1861 it merged with Life Illustrated, another Fowler and Wells periodical, to form the American Phrenological Journal and Life Illustrated, which ran from May of 1861 to December of 1869.

In the late 1840s Whitman developed a professional relationship with phrenologists Lorenzo and Orson Fowler and their partner, Samuel R. Wells. Fowler and Wells sold the first edition of Leaves of Grass (1855) in their shop at 308 Broadway, and they permitted Whitman to use the American Phrenological Journal to advertise his book and to write his own review, "An English and an American Poet" (October 1855). The review contrasts Alfred, Lord Tennyson's Maud, and Other Poems (1855) with Leaves of Grass (1855). A statement of literary nationalism, Whitman's review describes Tennyson's poetry as a product of aristocratic decadence, while Whitman's poems are an outgrowth of democratic vitality. Whitman concludes that he will prove "either the most lamentable of failures or the most glorious of triumphs, in the known history of literature" (45).

The similarity in style between Whitman's review in the American Phrenological Journal and his 1855 Preface resulted in a controversy. It was not uncommon for writers in this period to review their own books: nevertheless, in an unsigned review in the New York Daily Times (13 November 1855) William Swinton accuses Whitman of dishonesty and egotism inconsistent with his poetic ideals.

Bibliography

Erkkila, Betsy. Whitman the Political Poet. New York: Oxford UP, 1989.

Kaplan, Justin. Walt Whitman: A Life. New York: Bantam, 1982.

Larson, Kerry C. Whitman's Drama of Consensus. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1988.

Reynolds, David S. Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography. New York: Knopf, 1995.

Whitman, Walt. Complete Poetry and Collected Prose. Ed. Justin Kaplan. New York: Library of America, 1982.

Michael R. Dressman

This is a small book of Walt Whitman's general thoughts and speculations on language, especially American English. Horace Traubel compiled and edited a sheaf of Whitman's hand-written notes to form the book, which he published in 1904 under the title An American Primer. The volume contains a short foreword by Traubel that includes the famous quotation of Whitman calling Leaves of Grass "only a language experiment." An alternative title for the notes, found on one slip of paper, is "The Primer of Words: For American Young Men and Women, For Literati, Orators, Teachers, Musicians, Judges, Presidents, &c."

The text of the Primer is based on 110 manuscript pages that are part of the Feinberg Collection in the Library of Congress. Most of the small sheets of paper on which Whitman wrote these language notes are of various pastel colors, and Traubel identifies them as scraps coming from the paper covers of the unbound copies of the first edition of Leaves. The notes date from the mid- to late-1850s, around the time that Whitman published his article on language, "America's Mightiest Inheritance," in Life Illustrated (1856). However, Traubel says that some of the notes show "later paper and later handwriting." In addition to the thirty-five pages of Whitman's text in the Primer and the five pages of Traubel's foreword, there are three pages of facsimiles of the original manuscript. The Primer has been reprinted by City Lights Books, San Francisco (1970), and by others.

Traubel says that Whitman had considered delivering a lecture based on the notes, but nothing ever came of those plans. Although the notes are in no way a finished product, their having been assembled as a unit has increased their prominence among the many collections of Whitman's manuscript jottings. Biographers, critics, and students of Whitman's poetry have used the contents of the Primer to gain insights into his theory of language and his notions on such topics as pronunciation, spelling, dialects, naming, and the difference between oral and written English.

The Primer contains a series of philosophic pronouncements on the English language in America, along with observations on the history of human language and the relation of that history to American English. Whitman refers to Noah Webster and makes indirect references to other research that he had done as part of his collecting of facts and information about language and its growth.

Whitman says, "Names are magic," and spends several pages offering examples of names, especially American place names that he judges most appropriate. He establishes two basic principles for geographic naming. The first is that all aboriginal names "sound good." Thus, if there is an Indian name for a place, such as "Ohio, Connecticut, Ottawa, Monongahela," let it stand. The second principle is that a name fits if it grows out of some feature, person, or historical occurrence associated with a place. He especially approves of slang terms and analogies that the common people so often make. He disapproves of borrowed, European names for American cities, states, rivers, or mountains, and he rejects Spanish saints' names in the West and Southwest. But he allows for the power of certain historical names, including Socrates, Christ, Alfred the Great, and George Washington.

Whitman speaks favorably of the English of African Americans, which he calls the "nigger dialect," and credits it with enriching the American vocabulary and pointing to the future development of American pronunciation for musical purposes, perhaps giving rise to an American grand opera. He expresses distaste for "Yankee" pronunciation, calling it nasal and flat.

The Primer has several lists of examples, reinforcing Whitman's various points. The longest list is of twenty-seven different types of vocabularies, arranged much like one of the catalogues in "Song of Myself" or other poems in Leaves. A series of commodities listed in the Primer (coal, iron, gold, hemp, wool) appear to be the rough material for section 14 of "Starting from Paumanok." There are, also, such characteristic Whitman predilections as his special spelling for "kosmos" and transcendental proverbs such as "All lies folded in names." The Primer repeats some of the same observations on the aptness of certain newspaper names and nicknames that Whitman made in his article "Slang in America" (1885). He registers his objection to naming months and days of the week for European mythological deities. Acting on such feelings in Leaves, he resorts to the Quaker usage of "First-Day" for Sunday and "Fourth-Month" for April.

As one who had experienced the disapproval of others, Whitman associates censorship with the deficient and unnatural elements of society and asserts that "the use of strong, cutting, beautiful, rude words" would be forever welcome to the common people. He asserts that the "Real Dictionary" of American English, when it is written, will include all words—the bad as well as the good. And the "Real Grammar" will be liberating rather than restrictive.

Whitman saw a firm connection between his stance as the poet who spoke for all and his encompassing interest in expression through language. Words grow from life. New developments, occupations, and scientific breakthroughs call for new words. The new continent and the new society forming on that continent call for fresh and accurate expression. Although it appeared after the poet's death, An American Primer is evidence of his habits of mind early in his poetic career and give us a glimpse of a portion of that "long foreground" that went into the intellectual and motivational formation of Walt Whitman.

Bibliography

Bauerlein, Mark. Whitman and the American Idiom. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1991.

Dressman, Michael R. "'Names are Magic': Walt Whitman's Laws of Geographic Nomenclature." Names 26 (1978): 68–79.

Kramer, Michael P. "'A Tongue According': Whitman and the Literature of Language Study." Imagining Language in America: From the Revolution to the Civil War. By Kramer. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992. 90–115.

Warren, James Perrin. "Dating Whitman's Language Studies." Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 1 (1983) 1–7.

____. Walt Whitman's Language Experiment. University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 1990.

Whitman, Walt. An American Primer. Ed. Horace Traubel. Boston: Small, Maynard, 1904.

____. "The Primer of Words." Diary in Canada, Notebooks, Index. Vol. 3 of Daybooks and Notebooks. Ed. William White. New York: New York UP, 1978. 728–757.

David Haven Blake

Whitman hinged his claim to the title of national bard on his being the natural aesthetic outgrowth of the American Revolution's political ideals. Like many of his contemporaries, the poet regarded the revolution as not simply the heroic birth of his country, but as a perpetual mandate for democratic change. Whitman saw in the "haughty defiance of '76" the triumph and promise of New World democracy, and in both his poetry and prose he measured the reality of antebellum America against the founders' generative vision (1855 Preface 7). As the prospect of civil war intensified debates over the nation's civil ideals, Whitman deployed the revolution as a means of expressing his genuine political concerns and demonstrating the value of his literary translations of them.

The event's most significant influence on Whitman may have been in his remarkably civic ambitions for Leaves of Grass. Framed by the adoption of two national "compacts," the Declaration of Independence and the Federal Constitution, the American Revolution offered a compelling precedent for how literary performance could announce and effect cultural change. Both texts came under increasing scrutiny when conflicts over states' rights and slavery erupted in the 1850s, and as Kerry Larson has argued, it was during this historical crisis that Whitman's admiration for the Constitution evolved into a literary rivalry. If the Constitution strained under the burden of keeping the nation together, if it struggled to balance individual rights with civic unity, then the "great psalm of the republic" would emerge to create a more stable, comprehensive Union (1855 Preface 8). As Whitman suggests in section 9 of "By Blue Ontario's Shores" (1856), the poet alone could fuse the states into "the compact Organism of a nation." To the government's effort to "hold men together by paper and seal or by compulsion," Whitman promoted a more cohesive "living principle," a force akin to "the hold of the limbs of the body or the fibres of plants." Leaves of Grass promised to create the necessary adhesiveness.

Along with these effusive gestures toward the country's most sacred texts, Whitman's interest in the revolution centered on episodes of heroism and camaraderie. The poet, in this respect, appealed to the reverence many Americans felt toward the founding fathers. Sections 35 and 36 of "Song of Myself" (1855), for instance, incorporate the story of John Paul Jones's capture of the British warship Serapis. While the poem dramatically recounts Jones's resilience in winning the battle from his sinking ship, it also highlights the suffering neglected by most myths of national heroism. The reader learns that "stacks of bodies and bodies" line the decks; the masts and spars are spotted with "dabs of flesh"; beside the captain's feet lies the cabin boy's corpse (section 36). Whitman not only declines to identify the celebrated battle by name, but he concludes the scene with a chilling description of a surgeon amputating a sailor's limb. The images of "gnawing teeth" and the "swash of falling blood" suggest the body politic's basic vulnerability to its own heroic stands.

Whitman's ambivalence toward the war surfaces again in section 5 of "The Sleepers," another poem included in the 1855 Leaves. The section couples accounts of Washington's loss at the battle of Brooklyn (1776) with his emotional farewell to his officers at the war's end (1783). Both scenes emphasize the general's attachment to his men, and the tears he sheds for his "southern braves" as they lie slaughtered on the ground become tears of affection wetting the soldiers' faces as they receive his embraces and kisses. Whitman's juxtaposition of these historical events has aroused divergent critical responses. James Miller suggests that both stories depict the spiritual affection binding democratic men, and in Washington's departing embrace he sees an early version of the "Calamus" poet professing comradeship and love. Larson argues that Washington's anguish in Brooklyn overshadows his triumphant farewell. The general emerges from the poem as a representative mourner, a patriarch stricken with grief as he watches his children die. In Larson's analysis, Whitman's use of Washington foreshadows the mood of "Drum–Taps" more than that of "Calamus." The great father warns his descendants against the horrors of internal conflict.

Before writing "The Sleepers," Whitman had used the revolution for a similar admonitory effect in the satire "A Boston Ballad (1854)." One of the earliest works included in Leaves of Grass, the poem responds to the 1854 capture and trial of a fugitive slave in Boston and his subsequent return to the South. Whitman mockingly contrasts the revolution's moral and political idealism with the orderly compliance of antebellum Boston. While "the president's marshal" clears the streets for an invading government cannon, the dead rise from their graves and weep at the city's submissiveness. The satire's political force, as Betsy Erkkila has commented, depends on the ironic equation of the federal government with the British crown. The poem's speaker ridicules the heroic phantoms, and as he commands them to return to their graves, he summons from across the ocean the corpse of King George. The ironic voice of "A Boston Ballad (1854)" sharply contrasts with the sensual dreamer of "The Sleepers," but both poems use the revolution to chide the American people for abandoning their republican heritage.

Like Abraham Lincoln, Whitman was keenly aware of the American Revolution's rhetorical power, and he returned to the figure of Washington in the Civil War poem "The Centenarian's Story" (1865). The poem describes the interchange between a revolutionary war veteran and a "Volunteer of 1861–2." Watching a group of Union recruits drilling in front of a cheering crowd, the feeble veteran recalls the battle of Long Island (1776) and the terrible defeat Washington suffered only weeks after reading the Declaration of Independence to his troops. The veteran recalls the general's confidence even in retreat, and the volunteer pledges to spread the story across the land, calling himself a "chansonnier of a great future." As M. Wynn Thomas observes, it is the poet who ultimately assumes responsibility for the volunteer's oath. In connecting the past with the present, however, the poet also aims to preserve Washington's resolute vision that the veteran witnessed at sunrise.

The poem's effort to turn the revolution into a source of national strength remains inextricable from its description of Washington weeping at the massacre of his Maryland and Virginia brigade. "The Centenarian's Story" is typical of Whitman's treatment of the American Revolution in emphasizing the interplay between democratic heroism and an awareness of human sacrifice. Whitman's portraits of an affective, highly sensitive Washington distinguish the martial patriarch as a man of feeling as well as the leader of a revolutionary cause. Whitman admired the spirit of rebellion, and like Thomas Jefferson, he considered it to be a necessary, universal force. However, while that respect surfaces throughout the poet's rhetoric about American independence, it is significant that even before he adopted the role himself, Whitman was as attracted to the wound-dresser as he was to the defiant founder.

Bibliography

Erkkila, Betsy. Whitman the Political Poet. New York: Oxford UP, 1989.

Larson, Kerry C. Whitman's Drama of Consensus. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1988.

Miller, James E., Jr. A Critical Guide to "Leaves of Grass." Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1957.

Reynolds, David S. Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography. New York: Knopf, 1995.

Rule, Henry B. "Walt Whitman's 'Sad and Noble Scene.'" Walt Whitman Review 27 (1981): 165–170.

Thomas, M. Wynn. The Lunar Light of Whitman's Poetry. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1987.

Whitman, Walt. 1855 Preface. Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass": The First (1855) Edition. Ed. Malcolm Cowley. New York: Viking, 1959.

____. Leaves of Grass: Comprehensive Reader's Edition. Ed. Harold W. Blodgett and Sculley Bradley. New York: New York UP, 1965.

Donald D. Kummings

Written near the beginning of Whitman's career, this article on the English language first appeared in the 12 April 1856 issue of Life Illustrated, a weekly magazine published by Fowler and Wells. For reasons unknown, Whitman chose not to include "America's Mightiest Inheritance" in the collections of prose he later assembled. His decision not to preserve it in book form perhaps explains why it did not end up in the New York University Press edition of The Collected Writings of Walt Whitman (1961–1984). Nevertheless, the article remains accessible, having been reprinted in 1936 in New York Dissected, a selection of Whitman's periodical publications.

"Inheritance" is a pastiche. It consists of a set of notes that appear to have been hastily arranged in what is, at best, a rough order. Even if disjointed, however, the essay is provocative. Its thesis is that the English language is the greatest of all the things that have been bequeathed to America by the past. Exhibiting something approaching linguistic chauvinism, Whitman claims that "the English language is by far the noblest now spoken—probably ever spoken—upon this earth. It is the speech for orators and poets, the speech for the household, for business, for liberty, and for common sense. It is a language for great individuals as well as great nations" (55).

In addition to such grandiose claims, Whitman devotes several pages to a history of English, emphasizing the many "tongues" that have contributed to that history. He argues that language is the most enduring of human creations and warns against elegant, artificial, and showy uses of language. He praises lexicographers such as Joseph Worcester but maintains that a "perfect" English dictionary has yet to be compiled. He offers advice on pronunciation, and finally, he appends a list of foreign words, mostly French, that are "much needed in English" (61).

Though uneven in quality, "Inheritance" remains one of Whitman's key statements on the subject of language. It represents early evidence of his lifelong preoccupation with the subject. Whitman's other important writings on language include a notebook entitled Words, passages scattered throughout the poetry of Leaves of Grass and the prose of the prefaces and of Democratic Vistas, contributions to William Swinton's Rambles Among Words (1859; rev. ed. 1872), an essay called "Slang in America" (1885), and An American Primer (1904), a series of notes edited and published by Horace Traubel.

Bibliography

Folsom, Ed. Walt Whitman's Native Representations. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994.

Hollis, C. Carroll. Language and Style in "Leaves of Grass." Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1983.

Warren, James Perrin. Walt Whitman's Language Experiment. University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 1990.

Whitman, Walt. "America's Mightiest Inheritance." New York Dissected. Ed. Emory Holloway and Ralph Adimari. New York: Rufus Rockwell Wilson, 1936. 55–65.

John F. Roche

Whitman appears to have acquired only limited experience with the building arts while doing house carpentry in the early 1850s. But architecture was to become a favorite trope in his poetry. Moreover, some of America's most innovative architects took particular inspiration from Whitman.

Whitman was undoubtedly familiar with the sculptor Horatio Greenough, a friend of Ralph Waldo Emerson who wrote books and magazine articles on architectural theory. His essay "Form and Function" is a key text in the development of modern architecture. In addition, Henry David Thoreau's discussion of shelter in the "Economy" section of Walden could not have escaped Whitman's notice. Also consonant with Whitman's love of simplicity were the "democratic" cottages widely promoted by Andrew Jackson Downing in the 1840s and 1850s.

In his career as a journalist, Whitman wrote an occasional architectural critique, particularly of churches and public buildings, though buildings appear most often in word sketches of city environs. Similarly, in the prose pieces of Specimen Days, architecture serves to evoke a theme or mood, as in "The White House by Moonlight" or, perhaps the most haunting example, the "Patent Office Hospital." An exception is the essay "Wicked Architecture," published in Life Illustrated in 1856, where Whitman indicts tenement builders.

Although Whitman often remarked that America's true monuments would be its people, his poetic catalogues contain numerous references to buildings and city sights. In his poetry, architecture usually serves as a symbol for the building of the American commonwealth and for the fulfillment of its destiny, as in "Song of the Broad-Axe," "A Song for Occupations," "By Blue Ontario's Shore," or "Song of the Exposition." Sometimes, as in "A Song of the Rolling Earth," he draws an implicit correlation between the architect and the long-awaited "American bard": "Delve! mould! pile the words of the earth! / Work on, age after age, nothing is to be lost, / It may have to wait long, but it will certainly come in use, / When the materials are all prepared and ready, the architects shall appear. / I swear to you the architects shall appear without fail" (section 4).

Architectural or engineering images may also serve to represent spiritual perfection or the unfolding of a cosmic drama, as in the Pythagorean symbolism of "Chanting the Square Deific" or in "Passage to India," where the narrator exclaims, "Lo, soul, seest thou not God's purpose from the first? / The earth to be spann'd, connected by network" (section 2).

Many of Whitman's friends and followers wrote on architecture, often for arts and crafts movement magazines. These include Edward Carpenter, William Sloane Kennedy, John Burroughs, and Elbert Hubbard. Near Philadelphia, architect William L. (Will) Price founded the Rose Valley Association in 1901, a crafts community. Whitman confidant Horace Traubel edited Rose Valley's magazine, The Artsman, subtitled The Art That Is Life, promoting an arts and crafts philosophy with Whitman as a leading prophet. The magazine contained articles on various arts, including architecture.

The turn-of-the-century Chicago School architects were enthusiastic readers of Whitman, whom they found sympathetic to their own attempts to create an indigenous American architecture based on organic functionalist principles. Louis Sullivan wrote Whitman in 1887 to acknowledge his debt to the poet. Traubel reports that Whitman cherished the letter and told him to "keep it near you" (3:26). Sullivan himself wrote Whitman-inspired verse, in addition to prose works like The Autobiography of an Idea, Kindergarten Chats, and Democracy: A Man-Search.

Before coming to Chicago, Sullivan worked for the important Philadelphia architect Frank Furness, who was the son of the Reverend William Henry Furness, a close friend of Emerson and a Unitarian minister who contributed to Traubel's The Conservator. Another son, Professor Horace Howard Furness, Sr., the noted Shakespearean scholar, befriended Whitman, and served as a pallbearer at the poet's funeral.

Sullivan and his one-time employee Frank Lloyd Wright both appear to have been influenced by Whitman scholar Oscar Lovell Triggs, whose Chicago arts and crafts organizations they supported. Wright left Sullivan's employ, coincidentally, the year after Whitman died. Wright would continue throughout a career that spanned six decades to claim Whitman and Sullivan as his two primary models. In a special issue of The Architectural Forum (January 1938), Wright combined drawings and photos of his works with quotes from a number of Whitman poems. Near the end of his life he wrote the following: "Walt Whitman, seer of our Democracy! He uttered primitive truths lying at the base of our new life, the inspirations we needed to go on spiritually with the brave 'sovereignty of the individual'" (59).

Lewis Mumford, perhaps the twentieth century's most influential city historian and urban planning critic, wrote about Whitman, Sullivan, and Wright with equal fervor while promoting his own version of an "organic architecture."

If the "proof of a poet is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it" (Whitman 26), then Whitman has at very least been absorbed into America's architectural tradition. He continues to be invoked by architects, as in a quotation from "City of Ships" inscribed on the ornamental fence of Cesar Pelli's World Financial Center complex, built in the 1980s in lower Manhattan: "City of tall facades of marble and iron! / Proud and passionate city—mettlesome, mad, extravagant city!"

Bibliography

Adams, Richard P. "Architecture and the Romantic Tradition: Coleridge to Wright." American Quarterly 9 (1957): 46–62.

Egbert, Donald Drew. "The Idea of Organic Expression and American Architecture." Evolutionary Thought in America. Ed. Stow Persons. New Haven: Yale UP, 1950. 336–396.

Greenough, Horatio. "Form and Function." The Roots of Contemporary American Architecture Ed. Lewis Mumford. New York: Reinhold, 1952. 32–56.

Mathiessen, F.O. American Renaissance. London: Oxford UP, 1941.

Metzger, Charles R. Emerson and Greenough: Transcendental Pioneers of an American Esthetic. Berkeley: U of California P, 1954.

Murphy, Kevin. "Walt Whitman and Louis Sullivan: The Aesthetics of Egalitarianism." Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 6 (1988): 1–15.

Paul, Sherman. Louis Sullivan: An Architect in American Thought. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1962.

Roche, John F. "Democratic Space: The Ecstatic Geography of Walt Whitman and Frank Lloyd Wright." Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 6 (1988): 16–32.

Sullivan, Louis. Democracy: A Man-Search. 1850. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1961.

Twombly, Robert. Frank Lloyd Wright: His Life and Architecture. New York: Wiley, 1979.

Weingarden, Lauren S. "Naturalized Technology: Louis H. Sullivan's Whitmanesque Skyscrapers." Centennial Review 30 (1986): 480–495.

Whitman, Walt. 1855 Preface. Complete Poetry and Collected Prose. Ed. Justin Kaplan. New York: Library of America, 1982. 5–26.

Wortman, Marc. "Battery Park City: Utopian Poetics in the Urban Greenhouse." Yale Review 79 (1990): 501–508.

Wright, Frank Lloyd. A Testament. New York: Horizon, 1957.

Frederick J. Butler

Entitled "To a new personal admirer" in an early manuscript, this poem first appeared in the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass as number 12 of the "Calamus" cluster. It appeared under its present title in the 1867 edition.

In this as in other poems, most notably "Whoever You are Holding Me Now in Hand," Whitman employs the technique of addressing the poem to another person, presumably the reader. In both poems, Whitman immediately warns that he is "far different" from what might be supposed. In a number of the "Calamus" poems, including this one, James E. Miller, Jr., suggests the poet is proclaiming his difference—that his outer appearance is by no means an indication of the depth of his "spiritual attachment to others" (65). Such a difference is at the heart of this poem, which asserts an essential duality. Whitman asks if the potential new friend will find in him an ideal, a lover. Will the poet's friendship provide "unalloy'd satisfaction?" Is Whitman "trusty and faithful... a real heroic man?" These are lofty qualities many admirers hope to find in great artists. But Whitman then suggests an opposing reality by asking if it "may be all maya, illusion?" He proposes that there is a distinction between the reality of himself and his image in the mind of the potential admirer.

The Upanishads, part of Vedic literature, also discriminate between the real world, Brahman, and the world of illusion, maya. In his commentary on the Brahma-Sutras, Sri Sankaracarya discusses the difference between the one who experiences and the thing experienced. Furthermore, he elaborates by pointing out that in reality such a difference does not exist.

In this poem and throughout much of his poetry, Whitman advances the person addressed toward a higher level of understanding of the difference between the illusion of what is experienced and the reality of it.

Bibliography

Miller, James E., Jr. A Critical Guide to "Leaves of Grass." Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1957.

Radhakrishnan, S., ed. The Principal Upanishads. Delhi: Oxford UP, 1989.

Sankaracarya, Sri. Brahma-Sutra-Bhasya of Sri Sankaracarya. Trans. Swami Gambhirananda. Calcutta: Advaita Ashrama, 1983.

Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass: Comprehensive Reader's Edition. Ed. Harold W. Blodgett and Sculley Bradley. New York: New York UP, 1965.

William G. Lulloff

The poem "An Army Corps on the March" originally appeared in Walt Whitman's Sequel to Drum-Taps (1865–1866). Its original title was "An Army on the March." In 1865 Whitman engaged Peter Eckler to print the first issue of Drum-Taps but after Abraham Lincoln's death withdrew the book. In the autumn of 1865 he added the Sequel, which included this poem along with seventeen other new poems. Still later, in 1867, the poem became a part of the Drum-Taps annex to Leaves of Grass, in which both Drum-Taps and the Sequel appeared with separate title pages and pagination. In 1871 Whitman selected the present title, "An Army Corps on the March," and he also changed the last line of the poem from the original "As the army resistless advances" to "As the army corps advances." The edited poem became a permanent part of the "Drum-Taps" cluster of Leaves of Grass and appeared in all future editions.

Determining the exact date of composition is not possible; however, since it was not included in the initial issue of Drum-Taps, May 1865, Whitman may have composed it between May and October of that year, when Drum-Taps was republished with the Sequel.

Like several short poems in "Drum-Taps," "An Army Corps on the March" sketches a realistic free-verse portrait of a Civil War scene including images of "dust cover'd men," horses sweating, wheels rumbling, and first the sound of a single shot "snapping like a whip' and later an "irregular volley" of shots. Whitman probably had witnessed scenes like the one described in the poem when he went south in 1863 in the company of Major Lyman Hapgood. James E. Miller, Jr., cites this poem along with other short poems in this part of the cluster as being "among the best in "Drum-Taps" (221).

Bibliography

Allen, Gay Wilson. The New Walt Whitman Handbook. 1975. New York: New York UP, 1986.

Miller, James E., Jr. A Critical Guide to "Leaves of Grass." Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1957.

Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass. Ed. Sculley Bradley and Harold W. Blodgett. Norton Critical Edition. New York: Norton, 1973.

____. Walt Whitman's "Drum-Taps" (1865) and "Sequel to Drum-Taps" (1865–6): A Facsimile Reproduction. Ed. F. DeWolfe Miller. Gainesville, Fla.: Scholars' Facsimiles and Reprints, 1959.

James Dougherty

In antebellum America the public display of art was mostly confined to galleries connected with the production and the commerce of art. Early in the century, associations of artists began providing casts of European sculpture for classes and exhibiting their own work; art suppliers offered a few canvases attributed to the masters; and traveler-artists like George Catlin showed, for a fee, their views of the exotic. By the 1840s, Whitman could see European paintings at such dealers as Goupil, Vibert, and the Düsseldorf gallery, or contemporary American work at the annual exhibitions of three New York art associations—the National Academy of Design, the American Art-Union, and the Brooklyn Art Union. The Art-Union showed such artists as Thomas Cole, John F. Kensett, William Sidney Mount, and George Caleb Bingham prior to its yearly lottery of paintings. Landscapes and still lifes were the galleries' favored genres. In the display style of the time, hundreds of paintings crowded the gallery walls, closely spaced from floor to high ceiling. (See Samuel F.B. Morse's painting The Louvre.)

As the daguerreotype became fashionable, it proved to be an art more profitable than painting. By 1843 daguerreotypists were expanding their studios into galleries displaying duplicates of their portraits, not just as samples of their art but as advertisements that prominent citizens were among their clientele. People often came not to be photographed, but to see the pictures, mounted in salons as sumptuous as the photographer could afford. In the Brooklyn Daily Eagle (2 July 1846) Whitman described a visit to John Plumbe's Manhattan gallery. Besides noting the decor, the crowd, and the hundreds of portraits arrayed from floor to ceiling, he wrote of feeling an "electric chain" passing between homself and the depicted faces: "Time, space, both are annihilated, and we identify the semblance with the reality" (Gathering 2:117).

Always the connoisseur of his city's shows, Whitman often reviewed art exhibitions for the Eagle in the late 1840s. In 1849–1851 he wrote about art and artists in several New York newspapers and addressed the Brooklyn Art Union. Identifying the hero with the artist, he spoke of the "sublime moral beauty" of rebels and innovators, whether in deeds or in works of art (Uncollected 1:246.) In section 15 of "Song of Myself" we glimpse the connoisseur in the exhibition gallery and the lady sitting for her daguerreotype; in section 41 Whitman represents himself as a collector bidding for portraits of God. (Like most Americans he gained much of his art experience from the printed engraving and the lithograph.) Whitman's early poem "Pictures" exhibits a gallery of pictures within the poet's skull; Ed Folsom, Miles Orvell, and Richard Rudisill think them daguerreotypes, but Ruth Bohan explains that they must be engravings and lithographs. All find the picture gallery, with its crowded, intense, and various displays, a prototype of the pictorial catalogues in "Song of Myself" and many later poems.

Bibliography

Bode, Carl. Antebellum Culture. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1970.

Bohan, Ruth L. "'The Gathering of the Forces': Walt Whitman and the Visual Arts in Brooklyn in the 1850s." Walt Whitman and the Visual Arts. Ed. Geoffrey M. Sill and Roberta K. Tarbell. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers UP, 1992. 1–27.

Folsom, Ed. Walt Whitman's Native Representations. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994.

Orvell, Miles. The Real Thing: Imitation and Authenticity in American Culture, 1880–1940. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1989.

Rubin, Joseph Jay. The Historic Whitman. University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 1973.

Rudisill, Richard. Mirror Image: The Influence of the Daguerreotype on American Society. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 1971.

Whitman, Walt. The Gathering of the Forces. Ed. Cleveland Rodgers and John Black. 2 vols. New York: Putnam, 1920.

____. The Uncollected Poetry and Prose of Walt Whitman. 1921. Ed. Emory Holloway. 2 vols. New York: Peter Smith, 1932.

Julian B. Freund

An entry in the Civil War collection entitled Drum-Taps, this poem was written in 1865, underwent its final revision in 1881, and is included in the "Drum-Taps" cluster of Leaves of Grass. As with other "Drum-Taps" poems, Whitman is portraying scenes from the Civil War. Presented as a dream or a vision, this particular poem represents the horrors of war (like those depicted by World War I poets Wilfred Owen, Rupert Brooke, and Siegfried Sassoon) which the twentieth-century reader associates with the flashbacks of men suffering shell-shock after Vietnam or World Wars I and II.

Whitman's artilleryman describes himself as lying alongside his slumbering wife in a midnight stillness at home, punctuated only by the breath of the couple's infant. As the speaker wakes from sleep, a vision "presses upon me." Then, as he has done in earlier writings on the Civil War, Whitman graphically describes recollected horrors of past battles in a "fantasy unreal," complete with sound effects of rifles discharging, shells exploding, and pistols crackling. The nightmare quality of the poem is replete with images of troops crawling, shells shrieking and exploding, and grape shot humming and whirring like wind as it twists its way toward human flesh. Unique to the artilleryman is the somewhat impersonal nature of his contribution to the event. He fires his cannon and then leans to the side in order to evaluate the carnage he has caused. But this impersonality is soon replaced by a "devilish exultation" and "old man's joy," which rises from the depths of his soul as he then averts his eyes from the bloodshed he has just caused.

This poem reveals Whitman's fascination with photography. The Civil War was the first photographed war, and Whitman includes many comparable word pictures, not only of battle scenes, but also of soldiers at rest in camp. His lament at the conclusion of the war that "the real war" will never get into books (Whitman 778) is readily countered by his Civil War portraits such as this poem and others in the "Drum-Taps" cluster.

Bibliography

Folsom, Ed. Introduction. "This Heart's Geography's Map": The Photographs of Walt Whitman. Special issue of Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 4.2–3 (1986–1987): 1–5.

Fussell, Paul. The Great War and Modern Memory. New York: Oxford UP, 1975.

Whitman, Walt. Complete Poetry and Collected Prose. Ed. Justin Kaplan. New York: Library of America, 1982.

John F Roche

Although Whitman was not part of any arts and crafts organization and had little to say on the subject proper, a number of his friends and supporters in England and America were leaders of that movement and saw their poet as embodying its vision of a society based on pride in workmanship rather than on greed. In the years between his death and World War I, Whitman came to be seen as the American Morris by many, especially by leaders of influential arts and crafts societies in Philadelphia and Chicago.

In England, where the movement started under the aegis of John Ruskin and William Morris, a few significant activists had links to Whitman. Chief among these was Edward Carpenter, frequent correspondent and visitor to Camden, as well as an ally of Morris in crafts and socialist organizations. Morris himself was publicly cordial, but remained cool to Whitman's verse.

In 1901 Whitman confidant Horace Traubel, along with the architect Will Price, helped to found the Rose Valley association of craftsmen near Philadelphia. Traubel edited the crafts periodical The Artsman; a regular feature, "Rose Valley Scriptures," presented quotations by Whitman, Morris, Carpenter, and others. Whitmanites also took leading roles in the Morris Society branch in Philadelphia, in Charles Godfrey Leland's Industrial Art School, and in Pennsylvania Academy art circles around Whitman's friend Thomas Eakins.

The Chicago Society of Arts and Crafts was founded in 1897 at Hull House. Key to the Chicago crafts movement was University of Chicago instructor Oscar Lovell Triggs. A Whitman scholar and editor, he also authored A History of the Arts and Crafts Movement (1902). Triggs founded the Industrial Art League in 1899, the Morris Society of Chicago in 1903, and the Whitman Fellowship, Western Branch, in 1904. He also started the free-thought magazine To-Morrow, with the aid of Parker Sercombe, who replaced Triggs as editor shortly after the magazine's appearance in 1905. Sercombe was also the founder of the curiously title Walt Whitman–Herbert Spencer Center. Young Carl Sandburg lived at the center while an assistant editor at the magazine in 1906, in between lecture tours on Whitman or socialism. Architects Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright, both avid Whitman admirers, were also active in Chicago crafts societies.

Whitman was less admired in Boston, home of the conservative Boston Society of Arts and Crafts, founded in 1897, and its journal Handicraft. BSAC founder Charles Eliot Norton had written an early and reasonably favorable review of the 1855 Leaves of Grass, the same year Norton met John Ruskin, yet Norton steered the society in an Anglophilic direction contrary to Whitman's. Only one Whitman confederate was active in the BSAC, Boston art critic Sylvester Baxter, who helped organize and publicize the 1897 exhibition that initiated that society and wrote occasional pieces for its journal. Whitman publisher Thomas B. Mosher was based in Maine but was active in Boston arts circles.

Elbert Hubbard, leader of the Roycroft colony at East Aurora, New York, frequently invoked Whitman. Whitman proselytizer Sadakichi Hartmann ghost-wrote for Hubbard in the latter's magazine, The Philistine. Ralph Radcliffe-Whitehead, founder of the Byrdcliffe crafts colony near Woodstock, New York, called Whitman's poetry "the one supreme expression of American life in art" (59). Radical crafts advocates like Leonard Abbott and J. William Lloyd also spoke highly of Whitman.

The arts and crafts movement subsided after 1917, though its effects on crafts education and design have persisted. The movement's synthesis of romantic nature aesthetics with utopian politics continued to inform countercultural poets like Kenneth Rexroth, Gary Snyder, Robert Duncan, and Allen Ginsberg.

Bibliography

Boris, Eileen. Art and Labor: Ruskin, Morris, and the Craftsman Ideal in America. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1986.

Clark, Robert Judson, ed. The Arts and Crafts Movement in America 1876–1916. 1972. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992.

Kahler, Bruce Robert. "Art and Life: the Arts and Crafts Movement in Chicago, 1897–1910." Diss. Purdue U, 1986.

Kaplan, Wendy. "The Art That Is Life": The Arts & Crafts Movement in America 1875–1920. Boston: Little, Brown, 1987.

Lears, T.J. Jackson. No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture 1880–1920. New York: Pantheon, 1981.

Radcliffe-Whitehead, Ralph. "A Plea For Manual Work." Handicraft April 1903: 58–73.

Roche, John F. "The Culture of Pre-Modernism: Whitman, Morris & the American Arts and Crafts Movement." ATQ 9.2 (1995): 103–118.

Walter Grünzweig

The main claim to fame of Eduard Bertz, novelist, philologist, and self-declared sexual researcher, is his friendship and long-term correspondence with British novelist George Gissing, whom he came to know after he was forced to emigrate from Germany to England for political reasons. In 1881 he moved to Rugby, Tennessee, where he lived in Thomas Hughes's utopian community until 1883.

After he returned to Germany, his new project became Walt Whitman, whose writings he had come to know in the United States. In a letter congratulating Whitman on his seventieth birthday, he vowed that "[i]f life and strength lasts, this pen of mine shall help to reveal you to the German people" (qtd. in Grünzweig, "Adulation" 7). However, this project had already been entrusted to Johannes Schlaf, a naturalist German author. Since Schlaf had the support of Horace Traubel and other Whitmanites on both sides of the Atlantic, Bertz, feeling rejected, shifted the nature of his interest in Whitman.

In 1897 Bertz signed a petition to liberalize German laws regulating homosexuality, and in 1905 he published a book-length article on Whitman in the yearbook of the Wissenschaftlich-Humanitäre Komitee (Scientific-Humanitarian Committee), which supported homosexuals scientifically, medically, and legally. Bertz's thesis that Whitman was a (sexually inactive) homosexual was in line with the committee's attempts to create a more favorable public attitude by demonstrating the "social usefulness" of homosexuals.

Schlaf, although himself a signer of the petition, felt that this revelation would hurt his own Whitman project and the rapidly growing popularity of Whitman in Germany. Supported by Traubel and other Whitmanites, he wrote a pamphlet contesting Bertz's claim. Bertz, in turn, now considering himself a victim of a homosexual conspiracy and coverup, wrote two vicious monographs attacking Schlaf and Whitman. Although he claimed that by exposing or revealing Whitman he had sought only to break the hostile public silence regarding homosexuality, the paranoiac discourse of parts of these books reveals clearly homophobic attitudes.

The debate resurfaced eight years later in France. When French Whitmanite Léon Bazalgette disputed the truth of Guillaume Apollinaire's hoax regarding orgiastic events at Whitman's funeral, Bertz intervened by taking Apollinaire's side and again attempted to prove Whitman's homosexuality.

The narrowness of the views expressed in this debate should not obscure its significance. The German battle surrounding Whitman's homosexuality was, internationally, one of the earliest public discussions of an author's gayness and also forms a chapter in the legal and human emancipation of homosexuals in Germany.

Bibliography

Bertz, Eduard. Der Yankee-Heiland: Ein Beitrag zur modernen Religionsgeschichte. Dresden: Reissner, 1906.

———. "Walt Whitman: Ein Charakterbild." Jahrbuch fur sexuelle Zwischenstufen 7 (1905): 153–287.

———. Whitman-Mysterien: Eine Abrechnung mit Johannes Schlaf. Berlin: Gose and Tetzlaff, 1907.

Grünzweig, Walter. "Adulation and Paranoia: Eduard Bertz's Whitman Correspondence (1889–1914)." Gissing Journal 27.3 (1991): 1–20 and 27.4 (1991): 16–35.

———. Constructing the German Walt Whitman. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 1995.

Lang, Hans-Joachim. "Eduard Bertz vs. Johannes Schlaf: The Debate on Whitman's Homosexuality in Germany." A Conversation in the Life of Leland R. Phelps. America and Germany: Literature, Art and Music. Ed. Frank L. Borchardt and Marion C. Salinger. Durham, N.C.: Duke UP, 1987. 49–86.

Schlaf, Johannes. Walt Whitman Homosexueller? Minden: Bruns, 1907.

Arnie Kantrowitz

Lewis (aka Lew or Lewy) K. Brown left his family's farm near Elkton, Maryland, to join the Union army. Walt Whitman met him in February 1863 in the Armory Square Hospital in Washington, D.C., where Brown was recovering from a wound in the left leg, which he had received in a battle near Rappahannock Station in August 1862.

His affectionate nature made him receptive to Whitman's nurturing ministrations, and it was through Brown that Whitman formed close attachments to several other wounded soldiers. Whitman reported in letters to Brown's friend Sergeant Thomas P. Sawyer that Brown gave him a kiss "half a minute long" (Whitman 91) and that he hoped to live with both Sawyer and Brown after the war was over, suggesting that his interest in the two young soldiers (among others) may have been more than paternal. Although his feelings for Sawyer may have been even stronger than those he felt for Brown, Whitman's letters to Brown say the sight of Brown's face was "welcomer than all," and he refers to Brown as "my darling" (Whitman 119).

On 5 January 1864 Brown's leg was amputated five inches below the knee, and Whitman spent two nights on a cot near his bed to see him through the painful experience. Brown left the army in August 1864, and a year later he was employed as a clerk in the Treasury Department. As late as 1867, Whitman wrote to Hiram Sholes that Brown was well and that he saw him often. In 1880 Brown became Chief of the Paymaster's Division and remained in that position until his retirement in 1915.

Bibliography

Allen, Gay Wilson. The Solitary Singer: A Critical Biography of Walt Whitman. 1955. Rev. ed. 1967. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985.

Shively, Charley, ed. Calamus Lovers: Walt Whitman's Working Class Camerados. San Francisco: Gay Sunshine, 1987.

Whitman, Walt. The Correspondence. Ed. Edwin Haviland Miller. Vol. 1. New York: New York UP, 1961.

Andrew C. Higgins

William Cullen Bryant was perhaps the most famous American poet in the first half of the nineteenth century, and, as editor of the New York Evening Post for almost fifty years, one of America's leading newspaper editors. Bryant was an accomplished poet at an early age, publishing his first poems at age thirteen and writing his important poems "To a Waterfowl" and "Thanatopsis" by age twenty-one. But poetry would always be an avocation for Bryant. He spent the first part of his professional life as a lawyer, until he became the editor of the New York Review in 1825. Two years later he began working for the Evening Post and in 1829 became its editor-in-chief.

During this time, Bryant had been steadily establishing himself as America's premier poet, publishing his first book, Poems, in 1821, and writing a series of influential essays on American poetry. Though Bryant's overall output is not large, he continued to write poems for the rest of his life, publishing his last book of poems at age seventy and a translation of the Iliad and Odyssey in his late seventies.

As editor of the Evening Post, Bryant's consistent editorial policies and his refusal to take sensational positions helped to forge a long-lived and widely respected newspaper in a time when the average newspaper specialized in the sensational and lasted less than a year. Under Bryant, the Post became a strong supporter of the abolitionist movement and of the fledgling Republican party.

Bryant was important to the young Whitman because of his dual position as leading poet and leading newspaper editor of New York. While writing for the Brooklyn Eagle in 1847, Whitman called Bryant "one of the best poets in the world!" (qtd. in Brown 325). Many of Whitman's early poems echo Bryant's best work, and while Whitman and Bryant would part stylistically, some of the older poet's themes, particularly his notion of the democracy of the dead articulated in "Thanatopsis," would become important focal points for the younger poet.

But as important as Bryant was as a role model for Whitman, he was more important as a figure with whom Whitman could contrast himself. Bryant's editorial voice was reasoned and restrained, while the young newspaper editor Walter Whitman often wrote fiery diatribes, designed to stir up his readers. Years later, the image-conscious Whitman would point to two pictures, one of the solid, well-dressed Bryant and the other of the casual loafer Whitman, and offer them as a study in contrast.

Bibliography

Brown, Charles H. William Cullen Bryant. New York: Scribner's, 1971.

Bryant, William Cullen. The Letters of William Cullen Bryant. Ed. William Cullen Bryant II and Thomas G. Voss. 2 vols. New York: Fordham UP, 1975.

———. The Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant. Ed. Parke Godwin. 2 vols. New York: Appleton, 1883.

———. The Prose Writings of William Cullen Bryant. Ed. Parke Godwin. 2 vols. New York: Appleton, 1884.

McLean, Albert F. William Cullen Bryant. Updated ed. Boston: Twayne, 1989.

Price, Kenneth M. Whitman and Tradition: The Poet in His Century. New Haven: Yale UP, 1990.

Ringe, Donald A. "Bryant and Whitman: A Study in Artistic Affinities." Boston University Studies in English 2 (1956): 85–94.

Matthew C. Altman

Thomas Carlyle was a controversial but highly influential Victorian social critic, philosopher, historian, biographer, and translator. He fused elements of his Calvinist upbringing—an insistence on duty and the primacy of an elite caste—with German romanticism, gleaned especially from the writings of Schiller and Goethe.

Born in Ecclefechan, Scotland, in 1795, Carlyle attended Edinburgh University, which he left before receiving a degree. After his marriage to Jane Baillie Welsh in 1826, Carlyle moved to Craigenputtock, where he wrote numerous essays that were collected in Critical and Miscellaneous Essays (1838). He also wrote Sartor Resartus (1833–1834), in which a fictional philosopher, Diogenes Teufelsdröckh, resolves a crisis of belief. Although the book was initially criticized by a number of confused readers, Sartor eventually drew praise from figures such as Ralph Waldo Emerson.

In 1834, Carlyle and his wife moved to Chelsea, where he completed The French Revolution (1837). Carlyle also began to lecture; his May 1840 lectures were published in On Heroes, Hero Worship & the Heroic in History (1841), a characteristic insistence that great individuals must exert their powerful influence to provide coherence in desperate times. Carlyle's tenets were further outlined in works such as Chartism (1839) and Past and Present (1843). While in Chelsea, the Carlyles entertained a circle of admirers that included such figures as John Stuart Mill; Charles Dickens; John Forster; Robert Browning; Alfred, Lord Tennyson; Harriet Martineau; and Carlyle's biographer, James Anthony Froude. Carlyle became known as the "Sage of Chelsea."

Carlyle's later writings were increasingly conservative and antidemocratic, as evidenced in Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850), Occasional Discourse on the Nigger Question (1853), History of Friedrich II of Prussia, Called Frederick the Great (1858–1865), and Shooting Niagara: and After? (1867). Carlyle condemned overly liberal views on such issues as human rights and prison reform, and opposed emancipating American and West Indian slaves. His more stringent conservatism alienated many of his followers, most notably Mill. The death of his wife in 1866 devastated Carlyle, who spent most of his final years completing the autobiographical Reminiscences (1887). When he died in 1881, Carlyle was buried, as he wished, at Ecclefechan rather than Westminster Abbey.

Walt Whitman was very familiar with Carlyle's writings, as evidenced by the Carlylean images that appear in his poetry and his notes on German philosophy, which seem to come directly from Carlyle. Whitman reviewed several of Carlyle's books while he was a journalist with the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, and he claimed that Democratic Vistas (1871) was written in response to Shooting Niagara. Horace Traubel notes that during his time at Camden Whitman read many books by and about Carlyle.

Despite Whitman's interest in Carlyle, Carlyle was much less attentive to Whitman. In 1856 Emerson sent a copy of Leaves of Grass (1855) to Carlyle, which prompted him to say: "'It is as though the town-bull had learned to hold a pen'" (qtd. in Wilson 6:926). Whitman wrote to Carlyle and even sent him a copy of Vistas, but apparently Carlyle never responded.

Whitman disagreed with a number of Carlyle's beliefs. Carlyle insists in his Occasional Discourse that blacks are naturally inferior to whites, and although Whitman was no abolitionist, he treated the black race more sympathetically. In addition, the strict political and social aristocracy that Carlyle endorsed clashed with Whitman's ideal democracy. As he states in his essays on Carlyle, it was not Carlyle's specific pronouncements that Whitman admired but his outspoken voice of protest. Whitman recognized Carlyle's conservatism and distaste for democracy (especially American democracy) but praised his overpowering individualism, his honesty, and his attempts to reform the age. Whitman considered Carlyle a powerful and necessary literary voice of his time: "[W]ithout Carlyle there would be no literature" (Traubel 478).

Bibliography

Carlyle, Thomas. The Works of Thomas Carlyle. Ed. H.D. Traill. Centenary ed. 30 vols. London: Chapman and Hall, 1896–1899.

Cumming, Mark. "Carlyle, Whitman, and the Disimprisonment of Epic." Victorian Studies 29 (1986): 207–226.

Froude, James Anthony. Thomas Carlyle: A History of His Life in London 1834–1881. 2 vols. London: Longmans, Green, 1884.

———. Thomas Carlyle: A History of the First Forty Years of His Life, 1795–1835. 4 vols. London: Longmans, Green, 1882.

Paine, Gregory. "The Literary Relations of Whitman and Carlyle with Especial Reference to Their Contrasting Views on Democracy." Studies in Philology 36 (1939): 550–563.

Smith, Fred Manning. "Whitman's Debt to Carlyle's Sartor Resartus." Modern Language Quarterly 3 (1942): 51–65.

———. "Whitman's Poet-Prophet and Carlyle's Hero." PMLA 55 (1940): 1146–1164.

Traubel, Horace. With Walt Whitman in Camden. Ed. Gertrude Traubel. Vol. 5. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1964.

Whitman, Walt. "Carlyle from American Points of View." Prose Works 1892. Ed. Floyd Stovall. Vol. 1. New York: New York UP, 1963. 254–262.

———. "Death of Thomas Carlyle." Prose Works 1892. Ed. Floyd Stovall. Vol. 1. New York: New York UP, 1963. 248–253.

Wilson, David Alec. Life of Thomas Carlyle. 6 vols. London: Kegan Paul, 1929–1934.

Joseph Andriano

Professor of rhetoric and literature, first at Harvard (1888–1890), then at MIT (1890–1893), and finally at Columbia University (until his death), where he made significant contributions to its character and growth, Carpenter wrote many rhetoric textbooks and literary histories. He was best known for Episode of the Donna Pietosa (1888), which won him accolades from the Dante Society; sketches of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1901) and John Greenleaf Whittier (1903); and his biography of Walt Whitman (1909), part of the English Men of Letters Series.

Although now superseded by more recent and more thoroughly researched biographies, Carpenter's Walt Whitman was well received, especially by reviewers unaware that much of the information came (unacknowledged) from Bliss Perry's earlier biography of Whitman (rev. ed., 1908). Carpenter also relied on Richard Maurice Bucke (1883), whom he quotes several times; he shares Bucke's vision of Whitman as mystic, but tones down Bucke's ecstatic rhetoric.

Carpenter's biography—often reviewed favorably by his contemporaries as an objective and fair treatment of Whitman—certainly contributed to the more widespread acceptance of the poet in the early twentieth century. His view of Whitman primarily as a religious seer (whom he likens in his conclusion to St. Francis of Assisi) and his vision of Leaves of Grass as revealing the mystic unity of all things, however, seem now somewhat archaic and quaint.

Bibliography

Carpenter, George Rice. Walt Whitman. 1909. New York: Macmillan, 1924.

Wright, Ernest Hunter. "Carpenter, George Rice." Dictionary of American Biography. Ed. Allen Johnson. Vol. 3. New York: Scribner's, 1946. 511–512.

Frederick Hatch

Born in New Hampshire, Chase grew up in Ohio, establishing a legal practice in Cincinnati in 1830. An early and ardent crusader against slavery, in 1840 Chase left the Democrats to join the Liberal party and later the Free Soil party, serving as chairman of the convention in Buffalo (1848) to which Whitman was a delegate. U.S. senator (1849–1855) and governor of Ohio (1856–1860), Chase was a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination (1860). As Secretary of the Treasury (1861–1864) he ably performed the difficult task of financing the Civil War, and as Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court (1864–1873), he presided over the impeachment trial of President Johnson (1868).

Having heard that Whitman's writings "have given him a bad repute" (qtd. in Allen 311), as Secretary of the Treasury Chase would not offer Whitman a position in the Treasury Department and even kept Emerson's letter of recommendation. In The Solitary Singer, Gay Wilson Allen suggests that Chase was being cautious because of his political ambitions, though noting that Chase was religious and conservative in social matters and may therefore have acted upon his beliefs. Efforts by Chase to achieve the presidency in 1868 and 1872 were greeted with scorn by Whitman, who called Chase "the meanest and biggest kind of a shyster" (Whitman 35).

Bibliography

Allen, Gay Wilson. The Solitary Singer: A Critical Biography of Walt Whitman. 1955. Rev. ed. 1967. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985.

Belden, Thomas G. and Marva R. So Fell the Angels. Boston: Little, Brown, 1956.

Blue, Frederick J. Salmon P. Chase: A Life in Politics. Kent, Ohio: Kent State UP, 1987.

Myerson, Joel, ed. Whitman in His Own Time. Detroit: Omnigraphics, 1991.

Vexler, Robert I. The Vice-Presidents and Cabinet Members. Dobbs Ferry, N.Y.: Oceana, 1975.

Whitman, Walt. The Correspondence. Ed. Edwin Haviland Miller. Vol. 2. New York: New York UP, 1961.

Philip W. Leon

Born in slave-holding Virginia, Moncure D. Conway belonged to a distinguished family and was a direct descendant of a signer of the Declaration of Independence. After graduating from Dickinson College (B.A., 1849; M.A., 1852) he practiced law in Virginia, but shortly thereafter abandoned the law and turned to the ministry. He began to read Emerson, with whom he corresponded, and in 1852 entered the Unitarian Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. From 1854–1857 he was a minister of the Unitarian church in Washington, D.C., where he earned a reputation as an abolitionist. At the urging of Emerson, Conway visited Whitman in New York in 1855 shortly after publication of the first edition of Leaves of Grass.

Conway left Washington for Boston in 1863, becoming the editor of Commonwealth. That same year he visited England to deliver speeches and sermons on slavery, and he accepted an offer to become the minister at South Place Chapel in London, where he remained until 1884. In 1867 Whitman and Conway corresponded concerning an edition of Whitman's poems which William M. Rossetti wanted to bring out in England. In a letter to Conway, Whitman seemed to allow Rossetti to substitute words for "onanist" and "father-stuff." He also explains that "'Calamus' is a common word here" in America and that its use should not offend an English audience (Whitman 941). But a later letter to Rossetti recanted this position: "I cannot and will not consent, of my own volition, to countenance an expurgated edition of my pieces" (Whitman 942). Rossetti ultimately published a selected edition of Whitman's poems, changing no words, but omitting poems he thought might be offensive.

Upon his return to America in 1885, Conway settled in New York City, where he published treatises and discourses in newspapers and magazines. Conway published several biographies, among them works on Thomas Carlyle (1881), Edmund Randolph (1888), George Washington (1889), Nathaniel Hawthorne (1890), and Thomas Paine (1892).

Bibliography

Conway, Moncure D. Autobiography. Vol. 1. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1904.

D'Entremont, John. Southern Emancipator: Moncure Conway, the American Years, 1832–1865. New York: Oxford UP, 1987.

Ridgely, J.V. "Whitman, Emerson and Friend." Columbia Library Columns 10 (1960): 15–19.

Whitman, Walt. The Poetry and Prose of Walt Whitman. Ed. Louis Untermeyer. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1949.

T. Gregory Garvey

As United States senator from Illinois and chairman of the Committee on Territories between 1847 and 1859, Stephen Douglas is important for his role in debates concerning the expansion of slavery. During the late 1840s he articulated the doctrine of "popular sovereignty," which asserted that the federal government should leave legislation regarding slavery to the discretion of individual states. Douglas sought to institute this doctrine through the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which he pushed through Congress in 1854. Douglas's bill was perceived as a threat by Northern abolitionists and working class whites because it implied a repeal of the Missouri Compromise (1820).

Debate over the Kansas-Nebraska bill preoccupied the nation as Whitman composed the first edition of Leaves of Grass, but he did not explicitly mention Douglas until four years later, during the Lincoln-Douglas debates. Writing for the Brooklyn Daily Times in 1858, Whitman editorialized that "of the two, Mr. Lincoln seems to have had the advantage thus far in the war of words" (Whitman 96). Nonetheless, Douglas won re-election to the Senate and earned a place in Whitman's esteem. Whitman wrote that Douglas's election represented "a victory of the independent representative over the party dictator" (98). This remark is less a jibe at Lincoln's position in the Republican party than an expression of respect for Douglas, who had become a maverick within the Democratic party. Whitman's appreciation of Douglas's victory reflects a transitional phase in his own political loyalties. Like Douglas's, Whitman's lifelong loyalty to the Democratic party was being tested by the Democrats' strong proslavery stance. Though both men opposed slavery, they also yearned for a compromise that might preserve the Union. In this respect, Douglas's advocacy of popular sovereignty is analogous to Whitman's free-soilism. When national unity proved impossible to maintain, Douglas advised a vigorous prosecution of war and supported his rival from Illinois, Abraham Lincoln.

Bibliography

Erkkila, Betsy. Whitman the Political Poet. New York: Oxford UP, 1989.

Johannsen, Robert W. Stephen A. Douglas. New York: Oxford UP, 1973.

Reynolds, David S. Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography. New York: Knopf, 1995.

Whitman, Walt. I Sit and Look Out: Editorials from the Brooklyn Daily Times. Ed. Emory Holloway and Vernolian Schwarz. New York: Columbia UP, 1932.

Philip W. Leon

Thomas Eakins is now regarded as the greatest practitioner of realism in nineteenth-century American art. With the exception of his studies in France and Spain (1866–1870), Eakins spent his entire life in Philadelphia.

A controversial figure, Eakins was fired from his teaching position at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts for removing the loincloth from a male model during an anatomy class with female students present. He shocked the art world with The Gross Clinic (1875), showing the surgeon Dr. Samuel D. Gross with his blood-covered scalpel in hand. (Gross's widowed daughter-in-law married Whitman's doctor, William Osler.) His equally sanguinary portrait of Dr. D.H. Agnew, The Agnew Clinic (1889), shows among the students in the gallery of the operating theater Dr. Nathan M. Baker, Whitman's nurse for two years and a witness to Whitman's will of 29 June 1888.

Eakins asked Whitman's permission to paint his portrait in 1887 (the date appears in the painting) but did not complete it until 1888. Eakins donated the portrait to Whitman, and upon Whitman's death it passed to Dr. Richard Maurice Bucke, whose heirs later sold it to its present owner, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, which had censured Eakins.

Whitman admired Eakins's inclination to unorthodox behavior and a willingness to shock established authority. Both were outside the mainstream of their artistic endeavors, and both saw in the human form an inherent beauty not requiring enhancement with a sympathetic brush, pen, or lens. Evidence exists suggesting that Eakins, a pioneer in photographic art, took multiple photographs of Whitman posing nude.

Bibliography

Folsom, Ed. "Whitman Naked?" Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 11 (1994): 200–202 and back cover.

Johns, Elizabeth. Thomas Eakins: The Heroism of Modern Life. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1983.

Leon, Philip W. Walt Whitman and Sir William Osler: A Poet and His Physician. Toronto: ECW, 1995.

Rule, Henry B. "Walt Whitman and Thomas Eakins: Variations on Some Common Themes." Texas Quarterly 17 (1974): 7–57.

Wilmerding, John, ed. Thomas Eakins (1844–1916) and the Heart of American Life. London: National Portrait Gallery, 1993.

Martha A. Kalnin

On 25 March 1862 Ellen Eyre wrote Walt Whitman a love letter referring to pleasures experienced the evening before, but indicating that she wanted to conceal her identity. Though he kept her letter, Whitman writes little else about her. In the summer of 1862, Whitman records telling Frank Sweezey "the whole story . . . about Ellen Eyre" (Notebooks 2:488). Also, a photograph Whitman kept at Camden of a young, dark-haired woman, identified as a sweetheart and an actress, might represent her. However, beyond such references, Whitman gives little hint as to the nature or the duration of the relationship.

Because Eyre's letter suggests that Whitman had an affair with a woman, critical efforts focus primarily on identifying Eyre. Most likely, Ellen Grey, an actress, wrote to Whitman as Eyre. In a notebook entry for 1856–1857, Whitman refers to Grey and notes her address, but furnishes no other information. Someone else inscribed "Mrs. Ellen Eyre's" address in Whitman's notebooks; Whitman noted another address underneath it. But no Eyres appear in New York directories between 1859 and 1865. Scholars connect the two mysterious women in light of their similar names. Unfortunately, only conjecture supports assertions that Grey and Eyre are the same woman.

Critics have suggested other identities for Eyre, but unhappily for contemporary scholars, no new evidence clarifies Eyre's identity, and any attempts to do so depend on meager evidence.

Given the contents of Eyre's letter, critics must recognize the possibility of Whitman's bisexuality. However, because of the lack of information Eyre's impact on Whitman's life is uncertain. Since Whitman respected her pseudonym, one cannot conclusively determine the extent of her influence or ascertain more specific details about their relationship.

Bibliography

Allen, Gay Wilson. The Solitary Singer: A Critical Biography of Walt Whitman. 1955. Rev. ed. 1967. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985.

Hollis, C. Carroll. "Whitman's 'Ellen Eyre.'" Walt Whitman Newsletter 2 (1956): 24–26.

Holloway, Emory. "Whitman Pursued." American Literature 27 (1955): 1–11.

Kaplan, Justin. Walt Whitman: A Life. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1980.

Miller, Edwin Haviland. "Walt Whitman and Ellen Eyre." American Literature 32 (1962): 64–68.

Traubel, Horace. With Walt Whitman in Camden. Vol. 1. New York: Appleton, 1906.

Whitman, Walt. Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts. Ed. Edward F. Grier. 6 vols. New York: New York UP, 1984.

Sherry Ceniza

Helen Price wrote in Richard Maurice Bucke's biography of Whitman that Whitman and Eliza Farnham met at a gathering in the Price home. Farnham, like Helen Price's mother, Abby, was actively engaged in reform movements of the day. She served as matron of Sing Sing prison for four years (1844–1848), worked at the Perkins Institution, nursed the Civil War wounded for a time, lived and worked in California, and perhaps most importantly, wrote and published.

Historically, Farnham belongs to a wide and divergent group of women who agitated for women's rights in the antebellum period, though she was not active in the drive for suffrage. In fact, it was not until 1858 that she addressed a National Woman's Rights Convention. Her two-volume work, Woman and Her Era (1864), contains passages from Leaves of Grass which support a "new woman" image. Harold Aspiz's 1979 article "An Early Feminist Tribute to Whitman" discusses the Farnham-Whitman connection.

In Woman and Her Era Farnham argues for female superiority, believing that biologically speaking, due to their childbearing organs, women were more fully evolved than men and likewise were morally superior. Though Farnham's call for moral superiority was rejected by female activists like Ernestine L. Rose, whose call for reform is grounded in what we now call the social construction argument, Farnham's views offer a window into an aspect of Whitman's thought, historically speaking, specifically his representation of the strong mother.

Bibliography

Aspiz, Harold. "An Early Feminist Tribute to Whitman." American Literature 51 (1979): 404–409.

———. "Walt Whitman, Feminist." Walt Whitman: Here and Now. Ed. Joann P. Krieg. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1985. 79–88.

Farnham, Eliza W. Woman and Her Era. 2 vols. New York: A.J. Davis, 1864.

Walter Grünzweig

Whitman's first German translator encountered Whitman's poetry in English exile. A revolutionary poet and personal friend of Karl Marx, Ferdinand Freiligrath was well known internationally as a translator of first-rate authors. He translated just ten poems from William M. Rossetti's Poems by Walt Whitman (1868), and his selection reflected German interest in the recently concluded Civil War. The poems appeared in the special weekly edition of the Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung, one of Germany's leading dailies. None of the poems would have been particularly shocking to German readers, either aesthetically or thematically, because his translation smoothed Whitman's formal edges, thus adapting his poetry to conventional standards.

Freiligrath's introduction to Whitman is of greater significance because it was frequently reprinted. He emphasizes Whitman's formal experiments: "Are we really come to the point, when life, even in poetry, calls imperatively for new forms of expression? Has the age so much and such serious matter to say, that the old vessels no longer suffice for the new contents?" (qtd. in Grünzweig 14–15).

For the Whitman community and especially William O'Connor, Freiligrath's interest in Whitman was a source of great satisfaction. The article was translated and published in several American magazines. In a letter to Freiligrath, O'Connor recommended that he ignore Rossetti's incomplete edition and use the original which would enable him "to estimate the Poem in totality" (qtd. in Grünzweig 16). Although there are several incomplete translations of Whitman poems among Freiligrath's manuscripts, no more translations appeared in print.

Freiligrath is at the beginning of a long canon of leftist German admirers of Whitman. His brief interest in Whitman has had lasting effects by contributing to Whitman's construction as a political poet.

Bibliography

Freiligrath, Ferdinand. "Walt Whitman." Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung (Wochenausgabe) 17 (1868): 257–259. Translations in 24 (1868): 369–371 and 25 (1868): 385ff.

Grünzweig, Walter. Constructing the German Walt Whitman. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 1995.

Springer, Otto. "Walt Whitman and Ferdinand Freiligrath." American-German Review 11:2 (1944): 22–26, 38.

William A. Pannapacker

Born on 30 April in Sheridan, Indiana, Clifton Joseph Furness received a B.A. from Northwestern University and attended Harvard University's Graduate School of Arts and Sciences from 1927 to 1932, earning an A.M. in education in 1928. He joined the faculty of the New England Conservatory of Music in 1929 and was Supervisor of Academic Studies at the time of his death.

Furness made significant contributions to Whitman studies. Walt Whitman's Workshop (1928) presented previously unpublished materials by Whitman on lecturing and oratory, antislavery notes, "The Eighteenth Presidency!," and intended introductions to American and English editions of Leaves of Grass. Furness also contributed to Clara Barrus's Whitman and Burroughs, Comrades (1931), and he wrote the introduction to the 1939 publication of Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman: Reproduced from the First Edition (1855). In a review of Frances Winwar's American Giant (1941), Furness faulted Winwar for overemphasizing Whitman's alleged affair in New Orleans and for sentimentalizing Whitman's family life. Prompted by his dissatisfaction with this and other biographies, Furness began his own "definitive" Whitman biography. He completed a manuscript, but it was rejected by at least a dozen publishers. After Furness's premature death, Gay Wilson Allen acquired the manuscript and notebooks of the biography and used them in writing The Solitary Singer (1955). Furness's unpublished biography of Whitman is now in the Fales Collection of the Bobst Library, New York University.

Bibliography

Allen, Gay Wilson. The New Walt Whitman Handbook. 1975. New York: New York UP, 1986.

Furness, Clifton J. Introduction. Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman: Reproduced from the First Edition (1855). New York: Columbia UP, 1939. v–xviii.

———. Rev. of American Giant: Walt Whitman and His Times, by Frances Winwar. American Literature 13 (1942): 423–432.

———, ed. Walt Whitman's Workshop: A Collection of Unpublished Manuscripts. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1928.

Donald Yannella

One of the Bohemian regulars at Pfaff's, Gray lent the Fred Gray Association his name, although it remains unclear what purposes it might have had. Whitman and the good-humored, jolly Gray were close from before the Civil War; their principal connection seems to have been life at Pfaff's. The poet wrote Gray and Nathaniel Bloom an important and touching letter on 19 March 1863, in which he described the work he was doing in the hospitals, the suffering and loss he witnessed, and talked of life in Washington, including observations on Lincoln.

Son of the homeopathic physician John F. Gray, who lived opposite Madison Square, a few blocks west of the Herman Melvilles on East 26th Street, Fred Gray saw battle at Antietam and reported his experiences to Whitman in 1862. Gray rose to the rank of major and resigned the year the war ended. Following his father into medicine, he practiced in New York and Europe. Whitman had affection for the Gray family and visited them, but the connection apparently dissolved in the 1870s.

Bibliography

Howells, William Dean. Literary Friends and Acquaintance. New York: Harper, 1900.

Hyman, Martin D. "'Where the Drinkers and Laughers Meet': Pfaff's: Whitman's Literary Lair." Seaport 26 (1992): 56–61.

Lalor, Gene. "Whitman among the New York Literary Bohemians: 1859–1862." Walt Whitman Review 25 (1979): 131–145.

Parry, Albert. Garrets and Pretenders: A History of Bohemianism in America. 1933. New York: Dover, 1960.

Stansell, Christine. "Whitman at Pfaff's: Commercial Culture, Literary Life and New York Bohemia at Mid-Century." Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 10 (1993): 107–126.

Thomas K. Dean

Best known for his realistic prose portrayals of the hardships of midwestern farm life, Hamlin Garland also is an important figure in the theory of American realism. His best-known works include Main-Travelled Roads (1891), Crumbling Idols (1894), Rose of Dutcher's Coolly (1895), and Boy Life on the Prairie (1899).

Garland's thoughts on the relationships between place, culture, democracy, and literature, dubbed "veritism" and summarized in his essay collection entitled Crumbling Idols, show signs of Whitman's influence. While developing his beliefs and talents, Garland championed Whitman in lectures and essays and planned to write a survey of American literature depicting Whitman as the fountainhead of future American writing. Garland wrote to Whitman in 1886, beginning a regular correspondence that led to a visit to Mickle Street in the autumn of 1888 and a tribute at the poet's seventieth birthday commemoration in 1889.

Whitman expressed interest in Garland's first letter, remarking to Horace Traubel upon the young writer's political vision and enthusiasm, but mostly his status as a Midwesterner. Both Whitman and Garland believed that a "true" American literary voice, free of eastern affectation, would emerge from the western states. Garland's enthusiasm for Whitman centered on the poet's patriotism, sympathy with working men and women, and faith in the destiny of the States. Although the two disagreed slightly on the frankness of late-century American literature, they agreed on the importance of the common person in literature. Garland was optimistic about the culture's possibilities, as was Whitman, though he saw himself more as a reporter than a prophet like Whitman.

In later years, Garland expressed some weariness with Whitman's optimistic and bombastic posture, but his enthusiasm for Whitman's ideas characterized much of his early work and led him to dub Whitman "the genius of democracy" (qtd. in Price 7).

Bibliography

Becknell, Thomas. "Hamlin Garland's Response to Whitman." The Old Northwest 7 (1981): 217–235.

Garland, Hamlin. Hamlin Garland's Diaries. Ed. Donald Pizer. San Marino, Calif.: The Huntington Library, 1968.

———. "'Let the Sunshine In.'" The Rotarian 55 (1939): 8–11.

Price, Kenneth M. "Hamlin Garland's 'The Evolution of American Thought': A Missing Link in the History of Whitman Criticism." Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 3.2 (1985): 1–20.

Price, Kenneth M., and Robert C. Leitz III. "The Uncollected Letters of Hamlin Garland to Walt Whitman." Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 5.3 (1988): 1–13.

Traubel, Horace. With Walt Whitman in Camden. 1908. Vol. 2. New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 1961.

Dena Mattausch

One of Whitman's three literary executors, Thomas Biggs Harned was a prosperous Philadelphia lawyer and a brother-in-law of Horace Traubel. His twenty-year acquaintance with Whitman involved nearly daily contact during the poet's final years. Harned's well-furnished Camden home was a social center where Whitman dined and drank richly, amused Harned's three children, and met prominent religious and political men. Harned funded the construction of Whitman's mausoleum and co-arranged his funeral, at which he participated as speaker and pallbearer. Later, Harned wrote the introduction to the definitive ten-volume Camden Edition of Whitman's works (1902). Some thought Harned's decision to publish The Letters of Anne Gilchrist and Walt Whitman (1918) in dubious taste.

Son of a Philadelphia wood carver, Harned quit school at age twelve to earn wages. After attending University of Pennsylvania Law School he practiced criminal law in Camden, then civil law in Philadelphia. At age twenty-two Harned met Whitman, and the two occasionally discussed news and the Shakespeare controversy, agreeing that the Stratford actor was not the author of the plays. In 1877 Harned married Augusta Anna Traubel, another Whitman admiree; her brother Horace's relationship with the poet developed at the Harned home, a frequent setting for Traubel's With Walt Whitman in Camden.

Harned's Memoirs (1920) document a quest for relevance, religious certainty, and social justice. A former Republican who ran unsuccessfully for the New Jersey state senate as an independent (1890), Harned was well read and interested in art and oratory. An abolitionist and Unitarian, Harned was greatly influenced by Rev. W.H. Furness. Whitman often cited Harned's honesty and directness, recognizing the heart of gold beneath his gruff exterior.

Bibliography

Harned, Thomas Biggs. Memoirs of Thomas B. Harned, Walt Whitman's Friend and Literary Executor. Ed. Peter Van Egmond. Hartford: Transcendental Books, 1972.

Traubel, Horace. With Walt Whitman in Camden. 9 vols. Vol. 1. Boston: Small, Maynard, 1906; Vol. 2. New York: Appleton, 1908; Vol. 3. New York: Mitchell Kennerley, 1914; Vol. 4. Ed. Sculley Bradley. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1953; Vol. 5. Ed. Gertrude Traubel. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1964; Vol. 6. Ed. Gertrude Traubel and William White. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1982; Vol. 7. Ed. Jeanne Chapman and Robert Maclssac. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1992; Vols. 8–9. Ed. Jeanne Chapman and Robert Maclssac. Oregon House, Calif.: W.L. Bentley, 1996.

Christina Davey

Elias Hicks was a popular and influential liberal Quaker minister. His followers became known as Hicksites during the 1827–1829 separation of Quakers into liberal and orthodox branches. Hicks explained his religious views and recorded his experiences as a minister in his Journal (1832).

Hicks, son of John and Martha Smith Hicks, was born in Hempstead, Long Island, New York. He educated himself by reading the Bible, Quaker journals and histories, and borrowed books, having received little formal education as a child. In 1771, Hicks married Jemima Seaman; soon thereafter, they made their permanent home in Jericho, Long Island.

From 1779 through 1829, the Quaker minister journeyed more than forty thousand miles to locations primarily in the Northeast; but he also made trips to Virginia (1797, 1801, 1819, 1828), to the northern shore of Lake Ontario, Canada (1803, 1810), and to Richmond, Indiana (1828). Hicks spoke outdoors and in meeting houses, barns, schools, homes, and taverns to overflowing crowds of Quakers and non-Quakers. He preached that people could experience salvation without the aid of ordained clergy. God dwells within every person, he explained, and reveals truths to each one by means of the Inner Light. Employing their free will, people could choose salvation by submitting to the will of God revealed to them, or they could choose sin by rejecting God's will to follow their "independent will" (Hicks 336).

Whitman believed in the Inner Light. In 1890, he told Horace Traubel, who recorded Whitman's conversations from 1888 until the poet's death, that he subscribed to Hicks's views of spirituality. Neither Whitman nor his parents were Quaker. However, Whitman's mother, Louisa Van Velsor Whitman, had often spoken to him about Hicks, and Whitman's father, Walter Whitman, admired Hicks. Moreover, Whitman's paternal grandfather, Jesse Whitman, and Hicks had been friendly as youths, and his maternal grandmother, Naomi Williams Van Velsor, had been born into a Quaker family and followed Quaker traditions. In November 1829, Whitman, at his father's invitation, went with his parents to Morrison's Hotel Ballroom in Brooklyn, where they heard Hicks speak about the Inner Light. Whitman was so impressed with Hicks's ideas and speaking ability that for decades he vowed to write about Hicks. He finally fulfilled this commitment with the publication of his November Boughs essay "Elias Hicks" (1888); he used Hicks's Journal as one source for the essay.

Bibliography

Allen, Gay Wilson. The Solitary Singer: A Critical Biography of Walt Whitman. 1955. Rev. ed. 1967. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985.

Forbush, Bliss. Elias Hicks: Quaker Liberal. New York: Columbia UP, 1956.

Hicks, Elias. Journal of the Life and Religious Labours of Elias Hicks. Written by Himself. 1832. 5th ed. New York: Arno, 1969.

Templin, Lawrence. "The Quaker Influence on Walt Whitman." American Literature 42 (1970): 165–180.

Traubel, Horace. With Walt Whitman in Camden. Vol. 7. Ed. Jeanne Chapman and Robert MacIsaac. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1992.

Whitman, Walt. "Elias Hicks." Prose Works 1892. Ed. Floyd Stovall. Vol. 2. New York: New York UP, 1964. 626–653.

W. Edward Harris

Thomas Wentworth Higginson was an unremitting critic of Whitman and Leaves of Grass, which he first read when he was on an ocean voyage—he attributed his seasickness to the poem. He wrote unfavorable reviews of every subsequent edition of the book.

Higginson is best known in American literary history for his relationship with Emily Dickinson and his editing of the only poems she published in her lifetime.

An antislavery reformer, advocate of women's rights, and radical Unitarian, Higginson was a Boston Brahmin who did not appreciate the merit of Whitman's book. A colonel in the Civil War commanding a South Carolina black regiment, Higginson later wrote extensively of the Harvard graduates who gave their lives in the war. He was critical of Whitman for not joining the Union Army while encouraging others to do so.

When, in 1886, a private relief bill was introduced in the Congress to give Whitman a twenty-five-dollar a month pension for his work nursing the wounded, Higginson opposed it and the matter was dropped. A physical culturist, Higginson also wrote of Whitman's depraved living as a reason for his failing health. Higginson's attitude was representative of Boston literary opinion on the undisciplined character of Leaves of Grass. The week after Whitman's funeral Higginson published anonymously in The Nation (7 April 1892) all of his old criticism of the poet as a depraved malingerer and author of a book Whitman should have burned.

Bibliography

Barrus, Clara. Whitman and Burroughs, Comrades. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1931.

Burroughs, John. "Walt Whitman and His Recent Critics." In Re Walt Whitman. Ed Horace L. Traubel, Richard M. Bucke, and Thomas B. Harned. Philadelphia: McKay, 1893.

Erkkila, Betsy. Whitman the Political Poet. New York: Oxford UP, 1989.

Higginson, Thomas Wentworth. Army Life in a Black Regiment. 1869. East Lansing: Michigan State UP, 1960.

———. Cheerful Yesterdays. 1898. New York: Arno, 1968.

Richard Raleigh

An innovative English poet who has had great influence on twentieth-century poetry, Gerard Manley Hopkins was born in Stratford, near London. In 1866, while studying at Oxford, he became a convert to Roman Catholicism, and two years later entered the Jesuit order. His "terrible sonnets," begun in 1885 while a professor of Greek at University College, Dublin, reflect his unhappy stay in Ireland and his disappointment with himself as a priest and as a poet.

Attempts to show that Hopkins's poetry was influenced by Walt Whitman have as their source this passage from a letter Hopkins wrote to his friend Robert Bridges in 1882: "But first I may as well say what I should not otherwise have said, that I always knew in my heart Walt Whitman's mind to be more like my own than any other man's living. As he is a very great scoundrel this is not a pleasant confession" (qtd. in Hazen 41).

Hopkins read George Saintsbury's review of Leaves of Grass in 1874, and remembered it so well that he referred to it accurately in a letter to Bridges some eight years later. Hopkins also recalled reading Whitman in Bridges's library when he stayed with him in the summer of 1877 or 1878. Reacting to Bridges's suggestion that "The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo" resembled Whitman, Hopkins protested in 1882 that he had not read more than "half a dozen" Whitman poems, yet went on to admit that that might be enough "to influence another's style" (qtd. in Hazen 45). James Hazen contends that the "wilder beast from West" in Hopkins's sonnet "Andromeda" (1879) is a direct reference to Whitman, and William Darby Templeman finds echoes of Whitman in Hopkins's rhythm, alliteration, and diction. Indeed, in a letter to Bridges in 1887, Hopkins, who had just reworked an old sonnet called "Harry Ploughman" in which he celebrated the male form, wondered "if there is anything like it in Walt Whitman" (qtd. in Hazen 47).

Bibliography

Hazen, James. "Whitman and Hopkins." American Transcendental Quarterly 12 (1971): 41–48.

Mariani, Paul L. A Commentary on the Complete Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell UP, 1970.

Martin, Robert Bernard. Gerard Manley Hopkins. New York: Putnam, 1991.

Olney, James. The Language(s) of Poetry: Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Gerard Manley Hopkins. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1993.

Simkin, Stephen J. "'Extremes Meet': Hopkins and Walt Whitman." Forum for Modern Language Studies 30 (1994): 1–17.

Templeman, William Darby. "Hopkins and Whitman: Evidence of Influence and Echoes." Philological Quarterly 33 (1954): 48–65.

Joel Myerson

John Camden Hotten was born John William Hotten in London, the son of a carpenter. He was apprenticed to a bookseller at age fourteen and showed an aptitude for the business. In 1848 he went to America, where he stayed until 1856. Upon his return, Hotten went into the bookselling and publishing business. One of his specialties was American authors, and he published editions of Ambrose Bierce, Bret Harte, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Oliver Wendell Holmes, James Russell Lowell, and Artemus Ward, and he tried unsuccessfully to collect an edition of Ralph Waldo Emerson's writings. Hotten was also accustomed to controversial authors: he took over as publisher of A.C. Swinburne's Poems and Ballads after the original publisher withdrew following charges of obscenity. His fellow booksellers held him in low regard because of his personality, his many piracies and spurious "editions," and his connection to what was then considered pornographic literature.

Hotten published two books by Whitman—a selection from and a complete edition of Leaves of Grass. In 1867 he engaged William Michael Rossetti to edit a selection of Whitman's writings for twenty-five pounds, and the resulting Poems by Walt Whitman was published the following year. This 403-page selection from the 1867 Leaves was expurgated with Whitman's permission and assistance. Whitman had originally balked at a selected edition of Leaves, but faced with a choice between that or no edition at all, he chose the former. Moncure Daniel Conway, who was in London at the time, acted as Whitman's unofficial agent in dealing with Hotten and Rossetti. Hotten printed one thousand copies of the book, and when after his death his firm was taken over by Chatto and Windus, it was brought out in a new edition in 1886 and reprinted in 1901, 1910, 1926, and 1945.

In 1873, Hotten brought out five hundred copies of an unauthorized edition of the 1872 Leaves of Grass, which, technically, is the sixth edition of the title. It was a very accurate type-facsimile of Whitman's book, even down to the "Washington, D.C., 1872" imprint on the title page. Indeed, Hotten's name was nowhere to be found in the book. Hotten's anonymous piracy was no doubt due to British censorship laws, which held the publisher and not the distributor at fault in cases of selling obscene material, and which he probably thought he could avoid more easily by posing as the distributor of the book rather than as the publisher of it. As in the case of his earlier edition of Whitman's poems, Hotten paid Whitman no royalties for using his work.

Bibliography

Paley, Morton D. "John Camden Hotten and the First British Editions of Walt Whitman—'A Nice Milky Cocoa-Nut.'" Publishing History 6 (1979): 5–35.

Welland, Dennis. "John Camden Hotten and Emerson's Uncollected Essays." Yearbook of English Studies 6 (1976): 156–175.

W. Edward Harris

Robert Green Ingersoll was a colonel in the Civil War, Attorney General of Illinois (1867–1869), and best known as a public speaker. A remarkable orator, Ingersoll could command the attention of audiences who basically opposed his political and social views. He was a leading spokesman for the Republican party in the elections of 1876, 1880, and 1884. In spite of his services to the party he was, because of his religious views, never promoted to national office.

Enormously popular as a lecturer, commanding huge fees (up to thirty-five hundred dollars), he spoke on topics critical of the Bible and the Christian religion. He exposed the orthodox superstitions of the time and can be said to have introduced and popularized German "higher criticism" in the United States. Among his speeches, Some Mistakes of Moses was given hundreds of times to enthusiastic audiences.

Ingersoll was a great supporter of Whitman and recognized in him an affinity for humanistic philosophy centered on life in this world, saying, "He was, above all I have known, the poet of humanity, or sympathy" ("Spoken" 159). He gave the eulogy at Whitman's funeral in Harleigh Cemetery in Camden on 30 March 1892, saying, "He was the poet of that divine democracy which gives equal rights to all the sons and daughters of men" ("Spoken" 159) and that he preached "the gospel of humanity—the greatest gospel which can be preached" ("Spoken" 161).

Bibliography

Ingersoll, Robert Green. The Letters of Robert G. Ingersoll. Ed. Eva Ingersoll Wakefield. New York: Philosophical Library, 1951.

———. Liberty in Literature: Testimonial to Walt Whitman. New York: Truth Seeker, 1892.

———. The Philosophy of Ingersoll. San Francisco: P. Elder, 1906.

———. Some Mistakes of Moses. New York: Truth Seeker, 1882.

———. "[Spoken at Whitman's Funeral]." Critical Essays on Walt Whitman. Ed. James Woodress. Boston: Hall, 1983. 159–161.

Larson, Orvin Prentiss. American Infidel: Robert Green Ingersoll. New York: Citadel, 1962.

Julie A. Rechel-White

Author of "Evangeline" (1847) and "Hiawatha" (1855), Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, one of the most well-received poets of his time, was publicly challenged by Walt Whitman for the title "excelsior" (more lofty; higher) poet of America.

On 12 October 1846, in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Whitman reviewed The Poems of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1846), in which Longfellow's poem "Excelsior" appeared. Whitman wrote, "this Handsome fifty cent edition" contained "beautiful thoughts in beautiful words," and equated Longfellow with the pinnacle of romantic poetry. However, Whitman's estimation of Longfellow plummeted in the 1860s; while Whitman was in Washington writing about the sacrificial deaths of American soldiers, Longfellow continued with sentimental verse, as found in "Excelsior." Longfellow's book Ballads and Other Poems, in which "Excelsior" appeared, had been reprinted nine times since 1842. Consequently, in 1867 Whitman invoked Longfellow's work by selecting "Excelsior" as the permanent title for one of his poems in Leaves of Grass.

Enraged by Longfellow's "beautiful words" that ignored the war, Whitman, with his new title "Excelsior," indicted Longfellow as the "him" in the following line which first appeared in the 1856 edition of Leaves of Grass and was not removed until 1882: "And who has projected beautiful words through the longest time? By God! I will outvie him! I will say such words, they shall stretch through longer time!" (1856 Leaves).

By 1876, Whitman's attitude toward Longfellow softened with their first recorded personal encounter. Although Whitman's reputation was growing, Longfellow was still publicly known as the greater of the two poets. Recognizing that the famous poet's visit was an important acknowledgment of his work, Whitman in turn publicly acknowledged Longfellow in "My Tribute to Four Poets," as well as documenting their second meeting, which took place on 16 April 1881. However, it was their third meeting, which Whitman speaks of in his letters to John Burroughs and Alma Calder Johnston (both 24 September 1881), that marked a complete reconciliation on the part of Whitman. After meeting with Longfellow for the third and final time, Whitman deleted from his "Excelsior" at the last moment—while the 1881 edition of Leaves was being plate-cast—the antagonistic line that indicted Longfellow and his "beautiful" words.

Whitman, who at first idolized Longfellow and then publicly swore to "outvie" his idol, later, in his maturation, reconciled with Longfellow and his work.

Bibliography

Arvin, Newton. Longfellow: His Life and Work. Boston: Little, Brown, 1963.

Fletcher, Angus. "Whitman and Longfellow: Two Types of the American Poet." Raritan 10 (1991): 131–145.

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth. Ballads and Other Poems. Cambridge, Mass.: J. Owen, 1842.

———. The Poems of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. New York: Harper, 1846.

Price, Kenneth M. Whitman and Tradition: The Poet in His Century. New Haven: Yale UP, 1990.

Rechel-White, Julie A. "Longfellow's Influence on Whitman's 'Rise' from Manhattan Island." ATQ 6 (1992): 121–129.

Whitman, Walt. The Correspondence. Ed. Edwin Haviland Miller. Vol. 3. New York: New York UP, 1964.

———. "The Literary World." Brooklyn Daily Eagle 12 Oct. 1846.

William A. Pannapacker

Poet, editor, educator, and diplomat, Lowell was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and graduated from Harvard University (1838, LL.B. 1840, M.A. 1841). He was editor of The Pioneer (1843), the Atlantic Monthly (1857–1861), coeditor with Charles Eliot Norton of the North American Review (1864–1872), Smith Professor of Modern Languages, Harvard (1855–1886), U.S. minister to Spain (1877–1880) and to England (1880–1885). Lowell's literary works include A Year's Life (1841), The Biglow Papers (1848, 1867), The Vision of Sir Launfal (1848), A Fable for Critics (1848), and "Ode Recited at the Harvard Commemoration" (1865). Walt Whitman told his biographer, Horace Traubel, that James Russell Lowell was his bitterest enemy: "'Lowell never even tolerated me as a man: he not only objected to my book: he objected to me'" (With Walt Whitman 4:74).

Lowell's letters and reported conversations suggest that he helped to block Whitman's acceptance by the New England literary establishment. Although Norton admired the first Leaves of Grass in 1855, Lowell disapproved of it: "When a man aims at originality he acknowledges himself consciously unoriginal" (Letters 1:242). In 1863 Lowell pronounced Leaves "a solemn humbug" and promised to "keep it out of the way of the students" (New Letters 115–116). Lowell was also among those who persuaded Ralph Waldo Emerson not to invite Whitman to Boston's Saturday Club in 1860, and, in later years, Lowell may have discouraged foreign guests from visiting Whitman in Camden. On the other hand, Lowell published an edited version of Whitman's "Bardic Symbols" in the Atlantic in April 1860, and he insisted on contributing to a Whitman benefit at the Madison Square Theater in 1887. At the end of Whitman's performance at this benefit Lowell is said to have exclaimed, "This has been one of the most impressive hours of my life!" (Johnston 157).

A Brahmin, a maker of rhymed verse, a professor, a politician—Lowell seemed the antithesis of everything Whitman claimed to represent: "Lowell is one kind: I'm another," he said (With Walt Whitman 4:74). They were also nearly exact contemporaries, and Whitman's "O Captain! My Captain!" rivaled Lowell's "Commemoration Ode" as a tribute to Abraham Lincoln. This often caused their juxtapositioning in literary histories, anthologies, and college courses. Efforts to commemorate one competed with efforts to commemorate the other. In 1892 Traubel presented Lowell as a foil for Whitman: "One man contributes preservation; another movement. One is conservative; another dynamic" ("Lowell—Whitman" 22). Despite Lowell's complexities, subsequent comparisons have often promoted Whitman as a neglected genius struggling against the genteel conservatism Lowell came to embody.

Bibliography

Duberman, Martin. James Russell Lowell. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1966.

Johnston, J.H. "In Re Walt Whitman." Walt Whitman as Man, Poet and Friend. Ed. Charles N. Elliot. Boston: Richard G. Badger, 1915. 147–174.

Lowell, James Russell. Letters of James Russell Lowell. Ed. Charles Eliot Norton. 2 vols. New York: Harper, 1894.

———. New Letters of James Russell Lowell. Ed. M.A. De Wolfe Howe. New York: Harper, 1932.

———. The Writings of James Russell Lowell. 10 vols. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1890.

Traubel, Horace. "Lowell—Whitman: A Contrast." Poet-Lore 4 (1892): 22–31.

———. With Walt Whitman in Camden. Ed. Sculley Bradley. Vol. 4. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1953.

Lawrence I. Berkove

Joaquin Miller is the pseudonym of Cincinnatus Hiner. He was a minor but colorful poet whose romantic verse, plays, and prose mainly glorified the West. His most important works are Songs of the Sierras (1871) and Life Amongst the Modocs (1873).

Although Miller and Whitman were personally acquainted, read each other's works, and briefly corresponded, they were both on the peripheries of the other's circle. There appears to be no influence of Miller on Whitman and only superficial influence in the other direction. Miller wrote "To Walt Whitman" (1877) and included him in the elegy "The Passing of Tennyson" (1896) as one in a procession of recently deceased great poets.

The bulk of Miller's poetry was written in tetrameter, an indication of how little impact Whitman's style had on him. The sweep and grandeur of Whitman's subject matter, his romantic idealism, and his personal example of standing out as an individual were likely the qualities which appealed to Miller. The mild interest that the two poets had in each other derived more from their professional relationship than from a sharing of principles.

Bibliography

Brooks, Van Wyck. The Times of Melville and Whitman. New York: Dutton, 1947.

Frost, O.W. Joaquin Miller. New York: Twayne, 1967.

Miller, Joaquin. The Poetical Works of Joaquin Miller. Ed. Stuart P. Sherman. New York: Putnam, 1923.

Willis J. Buckingham

The prominence of Charles Eliot Norton among the New England cultural elite at mid-century gives special interest to his early review of Leaves of Grass. Still in his twenties in 1855, when he reviewed the book for Putnam's Monthly Magazine, Norton would have a lengthy, widely influential career at Harvard as a scholar, critic, and teacher. More reverent toward the literary past than Whitman, Norton shared with the new poet a humanist view of the power of art—and the moral example of the artist—to lift a nation out of mediocrity and materialism. Yet it is primarily the language of Leaves, its rough, slangy colloquialism, that most excited—and affronted—Norton. The poems seem to him "gross yet elevated," a "mixture of Yankee transcendentalism and New York rowdyism" ("Walt Whitman's" 15). These opposites perfectly combine, he writes, carrying with them "an original perception of nature, a manly brawn, and an epic directness . . . which belong to no other adept of the transcendental school" ("Walt Whitman's" 15).

Concurrently with his review, Norton expressed the same guarded enthusiasm about Whitman in a letter to his friend James Russell Lowell. He even composed a poem of his own in the manner of Whitman, titling it "A Leaf of Grass." Norton did not make known his authorship of the Putnam's review, nor did he publicly discuss Whitman again, though his attendance at a Whitman lecture and contribution to a fund for the poet (both in 1887) suggest that Norton remained at least distantly friendly. For his part, Whitman is silent on Norton, except for a comment to Horace Traubel in 1888 that Norton seems the sort of traditional moralist and scholar who "is bound to distrust a man like me" (Traubel 353).

Bibliography

Hall, David D. "The Victorian Connection." American Quarterly 27 (1975): 561–574.

Norton, Charles Eliot. A Leaf of Grass from Shady Hill. Ed. Kenneth B. Murdock. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1928.

———. "Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass." 1855. Rpt. in Walt Whitman: The Contemporary Reviews. Ed. Kenneth M. Price. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996. 14–18.

Norton, Sara, and M.A. DeWolfe Howe, eds. Letters of Charles Eliot Norton. Vol. 1. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1913.

Rubin, Joan Shelley. The Making of Middle/Brow Culture. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1992.

Traubel, Horace. With Walt Whitman in Camden. Vol. 1. Boston: Small, Maynard, 1906.

Vanderbilt, Kermit. Charles Eliot Norton: Apostle of Culture in a Democracy. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1959.

Deshae E. Lott

Walt Whitman met Ellen O'Connor (later Calder) on 28 December 1862, in Washington, D.C. Calder's first husband, William Douglas O'Connor (married 22 October 1856), invited Whitman to live with them after his trip to the site of the battle of Fredericksburg, where Whitman had visited his brother George, who had been wounded. Whitman's stay at the O'Connor flat lasted over five months, and his stay in Washington lasted ten years, a time in which he regularly visited the O'Connors and the Union and Confederate soldiers hospitalized with war injuries and illnesses. After Whitman's first stroke in 1873, Calder visited the bedridden poet almost daily. Even after distance kept her away, she corresponded with the poet and with Anne and Horace Traubel, who sent her updated bulletins on Whitman's health. Whitman died four days after her second marriage on 22 March 1892 to a Providence businessman named Albert Calder.

As a teenager Calder worked in the Lowell, Massachusetts, mills and attended the Normal School in Newton. In her twenties, she first worked as a governess to the six children of abolitionists Dr. Gamaliel Bailey and Margaret Lucy Shands Bailey and then worked for two newspapers: William Lloyd Garrison's antislavery paper the Liberator and Una, a Providence paper dedicated to women's rights. Both prior to her first marriage and after raising her daughter Jean, Calder actively participated in the woman's rights and abolitionist movements. She was the secretary for the New England Woman's Rights Convention in 1855, and in 1879 she was vice president of the Woman's Rights Washington branch and attended the national convention in Buffalo. After the Emancipation Proclamation, Calder devoted her abolitionist energy to educating the poor. She worked with Myrtilla Miner in her school for free Negro girls, about which she wrote in Myrtilla Miner: A Memoir (1885).

Calder was instrumental in encouraging her first husband's initial interest in and, perhaps, later displeasure with Whitman. Shortly after meeting O'Connor, she introduced him to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, which William Henry Channing had loaned to Calder's sister Mary Jane ("Jeannie"). Years later, after Whitman walked out of one of his and O'Connor's many fervent debates concerning literature, politics, and social issues, Calder defended Whitman. Indignant with them both, O'Connor moved out of the house. He continued to visit his wife and their daughter, Jean, and sent them his paychecks, but kept a separate residence until shortly before his death.

Bibliography

Calder, Ellen M. Tarr O'Connor. Introduction. The Good Gray Poet. By William Douglas O'Connor. Toronto: Henry S. Saunders, 1927. i–ix.

———. Myrtilla Miner: A Memoir. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1885.

———. "Personal Recollections of Walt Whitman." Atlantic Monthly 99 (1907): 825–834.

———. "William O'Connor and Walt Whitman." The Conservator 17 (1906): 42.

Freedman, Florence Bernstein. William Douglas O'Connor: Walt Whitman's Chosen Knight. Athens: Ohio UP, 1985.

Philip W. Leon

Born in Bond Head, Ontario, Canada, Osler graduated from the McGill University medical school in 1872. In 1884, shortly after joining the University of Pennsylvania, he became Walt Whitman's physician at the request of Dr. Richard Maurice Bucke. For the next five years Osler treated without charge the ailing Whitman, seeing him through several crises but never joining the inner circle of worshipers such as Bucke, Thomas B. Harned, Thomas Donaldson, Horace Traubel, and others.

Though Whitman valued Osler's medical skills, he sometimes complained of the doctor's optimism, a characteristic for which generations of medical students idolized him as he transformed the coldly analytical method of making hospital rounds. Osler dispelled gloom and radiated cheer, listening attentively to each patient's complaints as an essential part of the clinical evaluation. In 1888, Whitman said Osler "is a great man—one of the rare men: I should be much surprised if he did n't soar way way up—get very famous at his trade—some day: he has the air of the thing about him—of achievement" (Traubel 391). Whitman's prediction proved accurate: Osler became the most beloved and famous medical doctor in the English-speaking world.

In late 1889 Osler left Philadelphia to help establish the Johns Hopkins medical school in Baltimore. There he completed his pathbreaking medical treatise The Principles and Practice of Medicine, published in 1892, the year of Whitman's death. By 1930 the book had gone into its eleventh edition and had been translated into four languages. Shortly after the publication of his book, Osler married a widow, Grace Revere Gross, a direct descendant of Paul Revere. In 1904 Osler accepted the chair of Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford University, further ensuring his place as an icon of his profession. He was made a baronet by King George V in 1911.

Bibliography

Cushing, Harvey. The Life of Sir William Osler. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon, 1925.

Leon, Philip W. Walt Whitman and Sir William Osler: A Poet and His Physician. Toronto: ECW, 1995.

Traubel, Horace. With Walt Whitman in Camden. Vol. 3. 1914. New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 1961.

Paula K. Garrett

Joseph Pennell and Elizabeth Robins were friends of Whitman in Camden, New Jersey. Pennell was an etcher who illustrated and/or wrote more than one hundred books. Robins was a writer and collaborator with Pennell who had met Whitman in her youth in Camden.

Pennell was born in Philadelphia, and he attended Quaker schools. By 1880 he opened his own art studio. Pennell did illustrations for many well-known writers, including George Washington Cable, William Dean Howells, Washington Irving, and Henry James. Pennell and Robins were married in 1884, and the following year they produced A Canterbury Pilgrimage (1885), a collection of his sketches and her annotations. Pennell started an art criticism column for the London Star. Robins, however, soon began writing for the column and for the London Daily Chronicle as well.

Pennell's style was clearly influenced by Whistler, while his technique was influenced by Charles S. Reinhart. Together, Pennell and Robins published The Life of James McNeill Whistler (1908). Pennell later published The Whistler Journal (1921). After Pennell and Robins died, the Library of Congress acquired their estate and founded the Chalcographic Museum, which contained both the Whistler and Pennell collections.

Pennell and Robins were contemporaries of Whitman, and their work was published extensively in his lifetime. Pennell's illustrations were in many works Whitman would have read, and Whitman knew them both from contacts in the bohemian artist area of Camden in which Robins had lived and which all three artists often visited.

Bibliography

Allen, Gay Wilson. The Solitary Singer: A Critical Biography of Walt Whitman. 1955. Rev. ed. 1967. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985.

Baigell, Matthew. Dictionary of American Art. New York: Harper and Row, 1979.

Traubel, Horace. With Walt Whitman in Camden. Vol. 1. Boston: Small, Maynard, 1906.

Amy E. Earhart

Whitman's appreciation of Edgar Allan Poe's work as author and editor is barely a footnote in the larger studies of Walt Whitman. Though scholars have argued that Whitman's early work was thematically and lyrically influenced by Poe and that Whitman was well aware of Poe and his work, in his final discussion of Poe in Specimen Days (1882) he remains undecided and ambiguous about its quality.

An essay by Whitman entitled "Heart-Music and Art-Music" was reprinted as "Art-Singing and Heart-Singing" in the Broadway Journal, which was edited by Poe at the time, on 29 November 1845. The essay responded to the American music Whitman had heard in New York. Poe's editorial footnote acknowledged Whitman's lack of "scientific knowledge of music" yet noted that he agreed "with our correspondent throughout." Shortly after the article was published, Poe and Whitman met for the first and only time, during which meeting Whitman collected his fee for the article. In Specimen Days Whitman notes that he had "a distinct and pleasing remembrance" of Poe as a kind but jaded man (Whitman 17).

Several references to Poe and his work were included by Whitman in the Daily Eagle. Not only did he reprint Poe's "A Tale of the Ragged Mountains" in the paper, but satires of Poe's work as well, including the unsigned "A Jig in Prose," a parody of "The Raven." Whitman also included notices on Poe's death, his wife's sickness, and her subsequent death.

Whitman attended Poe's reburial and monument dedication, the ceremony of which was held in Baltimore in 1875. Though Whitman sat on the platform during the ceremony, he refused to speak publicly on Poe's work or life. Later commenting in Specimen Days, Whitman expressed his divided sentiments on Poe, citing "an indescribable magnetism" about Poe, but concluding that while the excessive rhyming and "demoniac undertone" of his work dazzled, they provided "no heat" (Whitman 231). However, in a 16 November 1875 Washington Star article, Whitman recognizes Poe's status in literary history.

Bibliography

Allen, Gay Wilson. The Solitary Singer: A Critical Biography of Walt Whitman. 1955. Rev. ed. 1967. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985.

Fussell, Paul. "The Persistent Itchings of Poe and Whitman." Southern Review ns 3 (1967): 235–247.

Price, Kenneth M. Whitman and Tradition: The Poet in His Century. New Haven: Yale UP, 1990.

Thomas, Dwight. The Poe Log: A Documentary Life of Edgar Allan Poe, 1809–1849. Boston: Hall, 1987.

Whitman, Walt. Prose Works 1892. Ed. Floyd Stovall. Vol. 1. New York: New York UP, 1963.

Sherry Ceniza

Helen Price, daughter of Abby and Edmund Price, did not take the active public role in women's rights that her mother did, but that is not to say that she was a passive observer of her culture. She comes alive, historically, through her two articles on Whitman and her mother and through the detailed letters she wrote to Whitman's mother. We also know her through the letters she wrote to Horace Traubel, and to Richard Maurice Bucke in answer to his requests for information on Whitman and for copies of her and Louisa's letters.

Price was an infant when her parents moved to Hopedale, Massachusetts, the community Adin Ballou founded in 1841. She went with her parents to the Raritan Bay Union in 1853, outside of Perth Amboy, New Jersey, and then to Brooklyn, where she lived with them until they moved to Red Bank, where her mother Abby died in 1878. Helen lived in Woodside, New Jersey, following her mother's death.

Fortunately for Whitman scholarship, she wrote a chapter in Bucke's biography of Whitman, as well as a 1919 newspaper article. Both contain background information on Whitman in the 1850s and early 1860s, as well as on the Price family. In her personal letters, Helen Price mentions numerous names of people who came to the Price home to visit and she also mentions events she and her mother attended, thus providing readers with a sense of the Price home and the Prices' mindset. The close friendship Whitman shared with the Price family and the culturally significant nature of the Price household provide valuable insights into the life and interests of Whitman.

Bibliography

Bucke, Richard Maurice. Walt Whitman. Philadelphia: McKay, 1883.

Price, Helen. "Reminiscences of Walt Whitman." New York Evening Post Book Review 31 May 1919.

Linda K. Walker

An 1855 Harvard graduate, Frank Sanborn—unreliable biographer of Henry David Thoreau, John Brown, and Bronson Alcott—boarded with the Thoreaus for several years while he taught school in Concord, Massachusetts. An active supporter of John Brown, Sanborn was the person who introduced Brown to Thoreau and one of the Secret Six who conspired to help Brown by acquiring money and arms for Brown's violent antislavery activities in Kansas and at Harper's Ferry.

Sanborn first encountered Walt Whitman on 4 April 1860 in a courtroom in Boston, where Sanborn had been brought (after a foiled arrest attempt in Concord, Massachusetts) to testify as to his involvement with John Brown's 16 October 1859 raid on Harper's Ferry; Sanborn looked out over the packed courtroom and saw, sitting at the rear of the courtroom, Walt Whitman, who had come to Boston to supervise the printing of the third edition of Leaves of Grass. Whitman would later say that he came to make sure that, if Sanborn were convicted, he—Whitman—might take part in an attempt to free him. Sanborn was not convicted. (See Jeffrey Rossbach's excellent documentation of this complex sequence of events in Ambivalent Conspirators.)

In his poem "Year of Meteors (1859–60)," Whitman devoted a few lines to John Brown, who had been executed in 1859. Years later, Sanborn corresponded with Whitman, gave a favorable review of Whitman's Drum-Taps, became editor of the Springfield Republican, and in 1881 took Whitman to his own home in Concord where he hosted the poet. Whitman once told Horace Traubel, "I always hold Sanborn, Frank Sanborn, to be a true friend—to stand with those who wish me well" (Traubel 285).

Bibliography

Reynolds, David S. Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography. New York: Knopf, 1995.

Rossbach, Jeffrey. Ambivalent Conspirators: John Brown, The Secret Six, and a Theory of Slave Violence. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1982.

Traubel, Horace. With Walt Whitman in Camden. Vol. 1. 1906. New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 1961.

Andy J. Moore

Author of more than fifty novels, George Sand (Amandine Lucile Aurore Dudevant) was perhaps the most famous woman writer in nineteenth-century France, certainly the most prolific. Her first novel, Indiana (1832), prepared the stage for much of her later work in its unconventional portrait of an unhappy wife who tries to free herself from the prison of marriage and a society that emphasized male dominance. Her subsequent novels shocked her nineteenth-century readers with frank studies of women's sexual feelings and the promotion of women's rights. Her iconoclastic themes in her novels were only enhanced by her unconventional behavior: leaving her husband and living with other men, occasionally dressing in men's clothing, smoking cigars. Her literary reputation was worldwide in the 1840s, and this seems to have been the time when Whitman first read her Consuelo (1842). Whitman had a profound interest in French romantic novelists, and as editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, he especially reviewed the current French writers such as Sand.

In 1842, at age twenty-three, Whitman came across Consuelo in his mother's library, and he read and reread this novel in various translations. He thought it "truly a masterpiece . . . the noblest in many respects, on its own field, in all literature" (Traubel 423). According to the critics, this work was seminal for Whitman, perhaps the work that inspired his democratic view of men and women, and his vision of the poet as spokesman for all mankind. Whitman thought Consuelo superior to all of Shakespeare's women. In this Sand novel and its sequel, La Comtesse de Rudolstadt (1844), Whitman was to find soul nourishment for much of the political, religious, and artistic vision that he would employ in Leaves of Grass just a decade later. Whitman might have been led to employ specific seminal images such as the carpenter poet and the pure contralto from Sand. It was particularly in Sand that Whitman's liberated perspective toward sex, the body, spirituality, and equality for women took shape. Whitman possibly took from her novels not only some ideas that inspired Leaves of Grass but also his dress, his role, and his pose as the poet of democracy.

Sand's international influence upon other novelists, musicians, and poets is staggering: Honoré de Balzac, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Ivan Turgenev, William Makepeace Thackeray, George Eliot, Gustave Flaubert, Henry James, Frédéric Chopin, Thomas Carlyle, Karl Marx, Margaret Fuller, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning, Matthew Arnold, and preeminently, Walt Whitman. Whitman was a fervent reader of George Sand all of his adult life, and she remained a vibrant force in his democratic inspiration and outlook.

Bibliography

Asselineau, Roger. The Evolution of Walt Whitman: The Creation of a Personality. Trans. Richard P. Adams and Roger Asselineau. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1960.

Erkkila, Betsy. Walt Whitman Among the French: Poet and Myth. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1980.

Roy, G.R. "Walt Whitman, George Sand and Certain French Socialists." Revue de Littérature Comparée 29 (1955): 550–561.

Shephard, Esther. Walt Whitman's Pose. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1938.

Traubel, Horace. With Walt Whitman in Camden. Vol. 3. 1914. New York: Rowan and Littlefield, 1961.

Zweig, Paul. Walt Whitman: The Making of the Poet. New York: Basic Books, 1984.

Carmine Sarracino

Born in Laval, France, Gabriel Sarrazin first encountered Whitman's work while in England researching a book on the English romantic poets, La Renaissance de la Poésie Anglaise, 1778–1889. Sarrazin, deeply impressed, inserted a chapter called "Walt Whitman," which was published separately in La Nouvelle Revue on 1 May 1888. In January 1889, Sarrazin sent Whitman a copy of the well-received article.

Horace Traubel reports that Whitman asked two friends, William Sloane Kennedy and Dr. Richard Maurice Bucke, each to translate the Sarrazin article. Whitman then had two versions to compare, and he was well pleased with Sarrazin's work, pronouncing it to be among the "strongest pieces of work which Leaves of Grass has drawn out" (Traubel 109). Whitman wrote to Sarrazin, and the two continued to correspond until almost the very end of Whitman's life.

After a brief introduction, the essay is divided into four parts: Pantheism, The New World, Leaves of Grass, and Walt Whitman. The first section is the most striking, for Sarrazin connects Whitman with the Oriental mystics and, further, compares him with the ancient prophets.

Bibliography

Asselineau, Roger. "Walt Whitman to Gabriel Sarrazin: Four Unpublished Pieces." Walt Whitman Review 1 (1959): 8–11.

Sarrazin, Gabriel. "Walt Whitman." In Re Walt Whitman. Ed. Horace Traubel, Richard Maurice Bucke, and Thomas Harned. Philadelphia: McKay, 1893. 159–194.

Traubel, Horace. With Walt Whitman in Camden. Ed. Sculley Bradley. Vol. 4. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1953.

Vickie L. Taft

Sir Walter Scott was one of the most influential and prolific literary figures of the early nineteenth century. Scott achieved fame primarily as a writer of narrative poems, which include The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805), Marmion (1808), and The Lady of the Lake (1810). After George Gordon, Lord Byron displaced Scott as Britain's most popular poet, Scott turned to novel writing. As a novelist, Scott is best remembered for his Waverley Novels, which include Waverley (1814) and The Heart of Midlothian (1818). Also a talented scholar and editor, Scott compiled traditional Scottish ballads into a three-volume text entitled Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1802–1803), and he edited the works of John Dryden and Jonathan Swift.

First introduced to Scott's writing as a child, Whitman describes himself to Horace Traubel in the 1880s as a passionate reader of Scott's work, insisting, for instance, that Scott "does not stale for me" (With Walt Whitman 2:243) and even that Scott's novels are his "chief pleasure nowadays" (2:251). Whitman also tells Traubel that Scott had greatly influenced his own writing, particularly Leaves of Grass, though Whitman's description of the nature of this influence is vague—Scott, he says, as well as James Fenimore Cooper, taught him to "look for the things that take life forward" (1:97).

Though Whitman admired Scott's artistic talents, he censured his Tory political beliefs. In two articles he wrote which appeared in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle in 1846 and 1847, Whitman includes Scott among British Tory authors who glorified the aristocracy in their writings and whose works posed a potential threat to the extension of democracy in America. Whitman repeats his assertion that Scott's antidemocratic sentiment made the political message of his writing unfit for an American audience in his essay "Poetry To-Day—Shakspere—the Future": "Walter Scott and Tennyson, like Shakspere, exhale that principle of caste which we have come on earth to destroy" (Prose Works 2:476). Whitman, however, does not state that Scott's works should be dismissed because of their elitist overtones. In the same essay, Whitman insists that he, as well as every American, owes a "debt of thanks" to Scott for being the "noblest, healthiest, cheeriest romancer that ever lived" (2:477).

Bibliography

Traubel, Horace. With Walt Whitman in Camden. Vol. 1. Boston: Small, Maynard, 1906; Vol. 2. New York: Mitchell Kennerley, 1915.

Whitman, Walt. The Gathering of the Forces. Ed. Cleveland Rodgers and John Black. 2 vols. New York: Putnam, 1920.

———. Prose Works 1892. Ed. Floyd Stovall. 2 vols. New York: New York UP, 1963–1964.

Frederick Hatch

Born in Kentucky, James Speed received his education there, began his law practice in Louisville (1833), and served in the Kentucky legislature (1847), although his opposition to slavery hampered his political career. Speed taught law at the University of Louisville (1856–1858), then served in the Kentucky State Senate (1861–1863). He was appointed U.S. Attorney General by President Lincoln (1864). When Whitman was fired from the Interior Department (1865), friends recommended him to Speed, who was not offended by Whitman's poetry, as Secretary James Harlan had been. Referring to Speed and his successors, Whitman said, "I couldn't wish to have better bosses" (Whitman 26).

When Lincoln was assassinated, Speed soon found himself in disagreement with President Johnson's reconstruction policies and resigned (1866). Returning to Kentucky, Speed ran unsuccessfully for the U.S. Senate (1867) and for the House of Representatives (1870), and again taught law (1872–1879).

Whitman remained friendly with Speed, writing to keep him up to date on affairs at the office, and, in applying for pardon clerk (1871), gave Speed's name as a reference. In 1868 he recalled Speed's having treated him with "distinguished consideration" (Whitman 26). When Speed was asked to speak at the unveiling of a bust of Lincoln in Louisville, he asked Whitman to polish the speech for him, saying, "[H]e can do it better than any man I know" (qtd. in Allen 377).

Bibliography

Allen, Gay Wilson. The Solitary Singer: A Critical Biography of Walt Whitman. 1955. Rev. ed. 1967. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985.

Collins, Margaret B. "Walt Whitman: Ghost Writer for James Speed? or 'None Goes His Way Alone.'" Filson Club History Quarterly 37 (1963): 305–324.

Reynolds, David S. Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography. New York: Knopf, 1995.

Speed, James. James Speed: A Personality. Louisville: J.P. Morton, 1914.

Speed, Thomas. Records and Memorials of the Speed Family. Louisville: Courier-Journal Job Printing, 1892.

Whitman, Walt. The Correspondence. Ed. Edwin Haviland Miller. Vol. 2. New York: New York UP, 1961.

Joseph P. Hammond

In a letter dated 1 March 1882 Boston District Attorney Oliver Stevens advised James R. Osgood and Company to cease publication of Leaves of Grass on the grounds that it violated anti-obscenity laws. When Stevens, under pressure from State Attorney General George Marston and Anthony Comstock, threatened legal action if specific passages were not deleted, he ignited a public controversy that launched Whitman's poetry into the center of a national debate over First Amendment rights.

Initially, Whitman received Stevens's threat lightly and agreed to self-censure, thinking the objections applied to only "half a dozen words and phrases." When he learned that three whole poems, "A Woman Waits for Me," "To a Common Prostitute," and "The Dalliance of the Eagles," required deletion, Whitman became obdurate, refusing to make even the slightest revision. Osgood subsequently declined to challenge Stevens's legal authority in the matter, forcing Whitman to secure publication elsewhere.

Whitman, recognizing that Marston and Comstock were the prime movers in the affair, expressed no significant degree of animosity toward Stevens. Little is known about Stevens, a native of Massachusetts who briefly studied law at Harvard, but his apparent silence in the face of abusive attacks in the press by Whitman's defender, William Douglas O'Connor, indicates that he was at least in partial agreement with the morally conservative views of Marston and Comstock.

Bibliography

Freedman, Florence Bernstein. William Douglas O'Connor: Walt Whitman's Chosen Knight. Athens: Ohio UP, 1985.

Loving, Jerome. Walt Whitman's Champion: William Douglas O'Connor. College Station: Texas A&M UP, 1978.

Whitman, Walt. The Correspondence. Ed. Edwin Haviland Miller. Vol. 3. New York: New York UP, 1964.

Sherwood Smith

Scottish novelist, essayist, poet, Stevenson became acquainted with Leaves of Grass while a student in his native Edinburgh. He was soon reading, reciting, and preaching Whitman to his friends, and in 1871 began an essay which appeared as "The Gospel According to Walt Whitman" in the New Quarterly Magazine, London, October 1878, and as "Walt Whitman" in Familiar Studies of Men and Books, 1882. Stevenson presented a curious mixture of praise and censure, toning down much of his rapturous early drafts. In his preface to Familiar Studies, he half apologized for his essay as an effort to explain Whitman "credibly to Mrs. Grundy" (xvii). Though the essay received favorable critical comment, Whitman did not care for it or for Stevenson's public image or his writings. Stevenson, however, remained an ardent admirer of Whitman, praising him in an article, "Books Which Have Influenced Me," as of critical importance in his life and work (The British Weekly, 13 May 1887). He took Leaves of Grass with him to Samoa, where he often read aloud "Song of the Open Road." Stevenson was among the contributors to the fund raised for Whitman by W.M. Rossetti in 1885.

Bibliography

Caldwell, Elsie Nobel. Last Witness for Robert Louis Stevenson. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1960.

Maxiner, Paul, ed. Robert Louis Stevenson: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981.

Stevenson, Robert Louis. Familiar Studies of Men and Books. 1882. London: Chatto and Windus, 1924.

Swearingen, Roger G. The Prose Writings of Robert Louis Stevenson: A Guide. Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1980.

Jennifer A. Hynes

Whitman endured a tempestuous relationship with this New York poet, critic, and editor. Throughout his lengthy career, and especially after 1870 when he had established a reputation, Stoddard formed a link between older, well-established writers and the younger New York crowd.

Born in Hingham, Massachusetts, Stoddard was raised in poverty after his sea-captain father was lost at sea. Stoddard went to work at eleven at various odd jobs before being apprenticed to an iron foundry. After marrying Elizabeth Drew Barstow, writer of fiction and poetry, Stoddard received Nathaniel Hawthorne's help in obtaining a New York Custom House post, a position he held for seventeen years.

Reports vary concerning Stoddard's connection to Whitman via the crowd of literary Bohemians that frequented Pfaff's Broadway restaurant. Gay Wilson Allen and Edwin Haviland Miller include Stoddard, along with his friends Edmund Clarence Stedman and Thomas Bailey Aldrich, with Whitman in the group that occupied a reserved table at the pub. But Stoddard was critical of the Bohemian crowd, and claimed in his Recollections that he had never entered Pfaff's but only once looked in the window.

Stoddard, whose poetry is compared with that of John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley, may not have understood Whitman's style. In Poets' Homes, Stoddard refers to "Song of Myself" as the piece that Whitman "oddly enough named for himself" (2:41), and most strongly praises one of Whitman's most conventional lyrics, "O Captain! My Captain!"

Stoddard's published criticism of Whitman widened the gap between the two. In his satirical review of William Douglas O'Connor's The Good Gray Poet in the Round Table, Stoddard criticized both the poet and O'Connor. Whitman speculated that Stoddard and New York Tribune drama critic William Winter had collaborated on negative reviews of Leaves of Grass in 1882. Most importantly, Whitman believed that a scathing letter on obscenity in Leaves of Grass, published under the pseudonym "Sigma" in the New York Tribune in 1882, was Stoddard's.

Bibliography

Allen, Gay Wilson. The Solitary Singer: A Critical Biography of Walt Whitman. 1955. Rev. ed. 1967. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985.

Macdonough, A.R. "Richard Henry Stoddard." Scribner's Monthly 20(Sept. 1880): 686–694.

O'Connor, William. The Good Gray Poet: A Vindication. New York: Bunce and Huntington, 1866.

Stedman, Edmund Clarence. Genius and Other Essays. New York: Moffat, Yard, 1911.

Stoddard, Richard Henry, et al. Poets' Homes: Pen and Pencil Sketches of American Poets and Their Homes. 2 vols, in one. Boston: D. Lothrop, 1879.

———. Recollections, Personal and Literary. Ed. Ripley Hitchcock. New York: A.S. Barnes, 1903.

———. Rev. of The Good Gray Poet, by William Douglas O'Connor. Round Table 3 (1866): 37.

Whitman, Walt. The Correspondence. Ed. Edwin Haviland Miller. 6 vols. New York: New York UP, 1961–1977.

Andrew Ladd

It is not clear whether Whitman read Swedenborg or simply was acquainted with him through other sources, most notably William Fishbough and Andrew Jackson Davis. Whatever the case, however, the Swedish scientist, philosopher, and mystic intrigued Whitman, who considered Swedenborg one of the great prophets. "He is a precursor," wrote Whitman, "in some sort of great differences between past thousands of years, and future thousands" (Notebooks 6:2034). Whitman also mentions Swedenborg in a footnote in Democratic Vistas in a list of thinkers whose thoughts are, for Whitman, rightfully fueled by the religious impulse (Prose Works 2:417). Such an opinion accords with the growing popularity of Swedenborgian thought in Whitman's own day. In theories such as the doctrine of correspondence, Swedenborg demonstrated a genius for connecting science and religion, for seeing the material and spiritual worlds as an intricately connected system, a vision which appealed to many transcendentalists and mystics of the nineteenth century, particularly Emerson who, in Representative Men, made Swedenborg the prime example of "The Mystic."

Bibliography

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Ed. Joseph Slater. Vol. 4. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1987.

Reynolds, David S. Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography. New York: Knopf, 1995.

Whitman, Walt. Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts. Ed. Edward F. Grier. 6 vols. New York: New York UP, 1984.

———. Prose Works 1892. Ed. Floyd Stovall. 2 vols. New York: New York UP, 1963–1964.

Alan E. Kozlowski

Swinburne, British Victorian poet and critic, may own the second most notorious repudiation of Whitman, behind Ralph Waldo Emerson; however, Swinburne's retraction is more vehement. Yet Swinburne does not entirely deserve his disgrace in Whitman studies, for, despite enthusiasm, his early writings on Whitman are tempered with careful criticism and his late "attack" on Whitman was as much an attack on the excesses of Whitman's devotees as it was criticism of Whitman's poetry.

Swinburne borrowed Whitman's 1855 Leaves of Grass and in 1862 bought a copy of the 1860 edition, finding himself especially taken with "A Word Out of the Sea," later titled "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking." His William Blake (1868) includes a favorable comparison of Blake and Whitman, noting their identical "passionate" advocacy of "sexual [and] political freedom," the similarity of their poetry to "the Pantheistic poetry of the East," and their prophetic stature. Noting that they both have flaws, Swinburne calls William Blake's work more profound but finds Whitman's "fresh and frank," praising "Out of the Cradle" and "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd" (William Blake 300–304). Swinburne, inspired by political reform in Italy and France, dedicated his collection of poetry Songs Before Sunrise (1871) to Mazzini and included "To Walt Whitman in America," addressing Whitman and the United States as symbols of freedom. Less flattering is Under the Microscope (1872), in which Swinburne complains that the poet and the formalist clash in Whitman, who would better advance the cause of democracy by abandoning his catalogues for his more lyrical expressions. Published in 1887, "Whitmania" is a far cry from the admiration expressed in William Blake. Denying that Whitman is much of a poet, Swinburne criticizes the latest wave of his admirers who would attempt to rank him in the literary "pantheon." Swinburne accords Whitman some praise, granting him enthusiasm, love of nature, faith in freedom, and a dignified attitude toward death, but holds Whitman's work to be underdeveloped rhetoric rather than poetry. Whitman never publicly responded to Swinburne's attack, though the controversy from this famous disavowal kept Whitman in the public eye, ensuring his fame.

Bibliography

Blodgett, Harold. Walt Whitman in England. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell UP, 1934.

Gosse, Edmund. The Life of Algernon Charles Swinburne. New York: Macmillan, 1917.

Swinburne, Algernon Charles. The Letters of Algernon Charles Swinburne. London: Heinemann, 1918.

———. Songs Before Sunrise. London: Ellis, 1871.

———. Under the Microscope. London: White, 1872.

———. "Whitmania." Fortnightly Review ns 42 (1887): 170–176. Rpt. in Walt Whitman: The Critical Heritage. Ed. Milton Hindus. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1971. 199–209.

———. William Blake: A Critical Essay. London: Hotten, 1868. Rpt. in Walt Whitman: The Critical Heritage. Ed. Milton Hindus. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1971. 134–136.

Donald Yannella

A respected journalist, reformer, and labor activist, John Swinton knew Whitman and admired the man and his work from their first meeting, probably between 1855 and 1857. He was one of the regular Bohemian crowd that gathered at Pfaff's, an enthusiast about Leaves of Grass—he apparently read the first edition right after publication—and was instrumental in arranging the prisoner exchange which freed Whitman's brother George by contacting General Grant. Swinton was usually well connected.

Born in Scotland, as was his brother William, he resided there until the family's migration to Canada in 1843; like Whitman, he learned the journalism trade from the ground up, beginning as an apprentice printer in Montreal, then working as a journeyman in New York. He took courses in the classics, studied medicine, worked in South Carolina as a compositor, and went to Kansas when matters were heating up, though he arrived too late to witness John Brown's engagement with the Border Ruffians. He became a major figure on the editorial staff of Henry J. Raymond's New York Times through most of the 1860s, having started there around 1858. Not a socialist, but an acquaintance and admirer of Karl Marx, Swinton espoused radical social views, and the devout Scottish Calvinist worked for numerous papers including the more conservative Sun, edited by Charles A. Dana, which is probably a testament to an integrity uncompromised by radical views. He ran a controversial labor weekly, John Swinton's Paper, from 1883 to 1887, and wrote a few short books. He remained loyal and close to Whitman until the end.

Bibliography

Hollis, C. Carroll. "Whitman and William Swinton." American Literature 30 (1959): 425–449.

Hyman, Martin D. "'Where the Drinkers and Laughers Meet': Pfaff's: Whitman's Literary Lair." Seaport 26 (1992): 56–61.

Lalor, Gene. "Whitman among the New York Literary Bohemians: 1859–1862." Walt Whitman Review 25 (1979): 131–145.

Parry, Albert. Garretts and Pretenders: A History of Bohemianism in America. 1933. New York: Dover, 1960.

Waters, Robert. Career and Conversation of John Swinton. Chicago: Stokes, 1902.

White, William. "Whitman and John Swinton: Some Unpublished Correspondence." American Literature 39 (1968): 547–553.

Mitch Gould

Whitman once suggested to Traubel that several of the least effectual allies in his campaign for free speech were eventually turned into adversaries by professional jealousy and an "awful belief in respectability" (With Walt Whitman 6:62). A.C. Swinburne and Bayard Taylor were at the top of this list. Taylor was a prolific Philadelphia travel writer, novelist, and poet. His poetic style, rooted in the classics and Victorian sentiment, brought him so little acclaim that he began to resent the mass appeal of his travel writing. Only his Faust translation is well known today.

In John Godfrey's Fortunes (1864), Taylor portrays Whitman as the Bohemian poet Mr. Smithers, who prefers "the fireman, in his red flannel shirt, with the sleeves rolled up to his shoulders" over fools with "the morbid sensitiveness which follows culture" (278). Taylor's "Echo Club" parodies, published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1872, called Leaves of Grass a "modern, half-Bowery-boy, half-Emersonian apprehension of the old Greek idea of physical life . . . A truer sense of art would have prevented . . . offensive frankness" (Echo Club 179–180).

Whitman noted that Taylor's Poems of the Orient (1854) "indirectly has a meaning" (Notebooks 5:1771), which, according to Byrne Fone, was Whitman's way of indicating a homosexual discourse. Thus Whitman was hardly surprised when Taylor confided that he found in his own nature both Whitman's "physical attraction" and "tender and noble love of man for man" (qtd. in Correspondence 1:295). Taylor offered his suspicious Quaker neighbors The Story of Kennett (1866) as an alternative to the fad of "exceptional or morbid" kinds of "psychological problems" (Kennett, Prologue ix), and his two male characters avoided a tender embrace because that "was the custom of the neighborhood" (Kennett 237). However, his odd novel Joseph and His Friend (1870) showed heroes holding hands and kissing, as dictated by "a loftier faith, a juster law," and "instincts, needs, knowledge, and rights—ay, rights! of their own" (214).

In 1856, George Boker, who was married, wrote Taylor, who was widowed, that he had "never loved anything human as I love you. It is a joy and a pride to my heart to know that this feeling is truly returned" (qtd. in Evans 115). In the years after 1874, Whitman may have intruded upon their Philadelphia turf, when the "florid, almost effusive" Boker (With Walt Whitman 6:226) invited him to dine "two or three times" (With Walt Whitman 6:234). By 1876, Taylor was blasting Whitman in the New York Tribune, and after that, the two never reconciled.

Bibliography

Beatty, Richmond. Bayard Taylor, Laureate of the Gilded Age. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1936.

Evans, Oliver H. George Henry Boker. Boston: Twayne, 1984.

Fone, Byrne. Masculine Landscapes: Walt Whitman and the Homoerotic Text. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1992.

Taylor, Bayard. The Echo Club and Other Literary Diversions. Boston: Osgood, 1876.

———. John Godfrey's Fortunes. New York: Putnam, 1864.

———. Joseph and His Friend. New York: Putnam, 1870.

———. Poems of the Orient. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1854.

———. The Story of Kennett. New York: Putnam, 1866.

Traubel, Horace. With Walt Whitman in Camden. Vol. 2. New York: Appleton, 1908; Vol. 6. Ed. Gertrude Traubel and William White. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1982.

Whitman, Walt. The Correspondence. Ed. Edwin Haviland Miller. 6 vols. New York: New York UP, 1961–1977.

———. Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts. Ed. Edward F. Grier. 6 vols. New York: New York UP, 1984.

John Lee Jellicorse

Born in Richmond, Virginia, on 25 December 1793, Edward Thompson Taylor was orphaned as an infant and went to sea as a cabin boy at the age of seven. Upon conversion to Methodism in 1811, he aspired to preach. He began as lay chaplain to fellow prisoners while held by the British during the War of 1812, was licensed in 1814, and ordained in 1819. He traveled extensively as a missionary, including duty in 1827 as chaplain aboard the Macedonian, but after 1830 he primarily served the Methodist Seamen's Bethel in Boston. There, in a chapel noted for its resemblance to a timbered ship, he paced his quarterdeck pulpit, exhorting in a sincere, joyous, spontaneous, colorful, idiomatic manner that enthralled all who heard him. For literati no trip to Boston was complete without taking in the hallelujah drama of Father Taylor and his congregation of rough-and-ready sea dogs grappling to rescue impenitent sinners from storm-tossed brine and rock-bound coasts. Ralph Waldo Emerson exalted Taylor as the near perfect master of oratory. William Ellery Channing, Charles Dickens, Jenny Lind, Harriet Martineau, and countless others chorused similar paeans, while Herman Melville immortalized Father Taylor by transforming him into Father Mapple of Moby-Dick. During his visit to Boston in 1860, Walt Whitman, too, pilgrimaged to experience Taylor's struggle for sailors' souls. Father Taylor died on 6 April 1871, but Whitman's memory of him remained vivid. In 1884, a brief "reminiscence" of Father Taylor fetched Whitman fifty dollars from Century magazine. Echoing Emerson, Whitman characterized Taylor as the "one essentially perfect" practitioner of oratory, "the rarest and most profound of humanity's arts" (Whitman 549). The article was published in Century in 1887 and was included, with minor editorial changes, as "Father Taylor (and Oratory.)" in November Boughs (1888).

Bibliography

Oliver, Egbert S. "Emerson's Almost Perfect Orator: Edward Taylor." Today's Speech 8 (1960): 20–22.

"Taylor, Edward Thompson." The Columbia Encyclopedia. 5th ed. New York: Columbia UP, 1993. 2700.

"Taylor, Edward Thompson." The National Cyclopaedia of American Biography. Vol. 8. New York: J.T. White, 1906. 464.

Whitman, Walt. Prose Works 1892. Ed. Floyd Stovall. Vol. 2. New York: New York UP, 1964.

Thomas Sanfilip

Walt Whitman's relationship to Tennyson divides into two phases: first, rejection of his work as affected and overstylized, and later, acceptance in old age with much the same reservation. Whitman highly respected Tennyson as a man, defending his character as warm and "worthy of any man's regard and respect" (qtd. in Ditsky 76), and valuing his letters so much that he carried them in the inside pocket of his gray coat. Nevertheless, in spite of Tennyson's admiration, the poets' friendly, twenty-year correspondence, their habit of exchanging gifts via intermediaries throughout the latter half of Whitman's life, and an invitation by Tennyson for Whitman to visit him, their views on poetry differed dramatically.

Whitman's criticism of Tennyson began almost immediately after publication of the first edition of Leaves of Grass in 1855 with a combined review of Tennyson's Maud and Other Poems and Leaves of Grass, published by the American Phrenological Journal in October of that year and penned anonymously by Whitman. In the review, he casts himself as the spokesman of a newer, more dynamic civilization that questions the validity of following the old models of poetic form represented by Tennyson. He linked Tennyson with Shakespeare as a poet of the old school, describing him as a "bard of ennui and of the aristocracy" ("An English" 39), a writer strictly for the English upper class and not America's democratized common man.

Arthur Briggs sees Whitman's easing of criticism of Tennyson in his later years as a possible result of his susceptibility to Tennyson's expressed admiration for his work and acknowledgment of him as an equal more than any change in his opinion of his work. In 1888, near the end of his life, Whitman expressed his final public assessment of Tennyson in an essay entitled "A Word about Tennyson." He considered his character vital and genuine, but still immersed in the sensibilities of the upper class, "a little queer and affected," admiring what he called his "verbalism" and "cunning collocations" ("A Word" 570–571). In his later years, Whitman believed that, although Tennyson had accepted him as an equal, he may not have really understood his character or the intentions of Leaves of Grass—that Tennyson still considered his work decadent, but only as a result of the literary tastes and inclinations of his time.

Bibliography

Allen, Gay Wilson. The Solitary Singer: A Critical Biography of Walt Whitman. 1955. Rev. ed. 1967. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985.

Briggs, Arthur E. Walt Whitman: Thinker and Artist. 1952. New York: Greenwood, 1968.

Ditsky, John M. "Whitman-Tennyson Correspondence: A Summary and Commentary." Walt Whitman Review 18 (1972): 75–82.

Traubel, Horace. With Walt Whitman in Camden. Ed. Gertrude Traubel and Willam White. Vol. 6. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1982.

Whitman, Walt. "An English and American Poet." Walt Whitman: A Critical Anthology. Ed. Francis Murphy. Baltimore: Penguin, 1969. 37–42.

———. "A Word about Tennyson." Prose Works 1892. Ed. Floyd Stovall. Vol. 2. New York: New York UP, 1964. 568–572.

Martin G. Murray

The sixth of Walter and Louisa Whitman's nine children, Andrew Jackson Whitman was born in Brooklyn, New York, on 9 April 1827. Andrew was one of three Whitman sons named after an American hero, a reflection of the patriotic ardor imbued in the Whitman children by their parents.

Andrew appears in an early Whitman prose work, "My Boys and Girls," published in The Rover (20 April 1844). The piece celebrates the high spirits and wrestling skills of Walt's younger brother.

As an adult, Andrew took up his father's trade of carpenter, and worked at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. He took Nancy McClure as his wife. They had three children: James Cornwell (also spelled Cornell), named after the Brooklyn police justice who was featured in an early Whitman newspaper sketch; George; and Andrew, Jr.

References to Andrew in family correspondence indicate that he was often sickly, and that he may have been an alcoholic. Perhaps the family's nickname for Andrew—"Bunkum"—was an ironic tribute to one who must have often complained, "I don't feel so bunkum." Despite his chronic health problems, Andrew joined the Union Army, enlisting as a "three-months' man" during the summer of 1862. He served as a private in Company H of the Thirteenth Regiment, New York State Militia—the same regiment that his brother, George, had served with in the spring of 1861.

Upon returning to Brooklyn, Andrew began a decline that ended in his death on 3 December 1863, at the age of thirty-six. His doctor listed the cause of death as laryngitis, an indication that Andrew had tuberculosis. Carriages provided by Andrew's friend Cornwell took the family to Evergreens' Cemetery, where Andrew was buried. Whitman had said his goodbyes in a visit he made to Brooklyn shortly before his brother's death, but he was back in Washington nursing the war wounded when his brother died, and did not attend the funeral.

Andrew's estate was limited to the contents of his carpenter's tool box, which were auctioned off by his navy yard comrades. The proceeds were given to his widow, pregnant with their third son, Andrew, Jr. This youngest child was killed by an errant brewer's wagon in 1868, but at least one of Andrew's boys, James, lived to adulthood and was named in Walt Whitman's last will.

Bibliography

Loving, Jerome M., ed. Civil War Letters of George Washington Whitman. Durham, N.C.: Duke UP, 1975.

Molinoff, Katherine. Some Notes on Whitman's Family. Brooklyn: Comet, 1941.

Murray, Martin G. "Bunkum Did Go Sogering." Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 10 (1993): 142–148.

Randall Waldron

Though there is some uncertainty about details, virtually all the evidence indicates that this youngest of Walt Whitman's siblings was from early childhood, if not indeed from birth, significantly retarded mentally, epileptic, and physically handicapped. Consequently, Whitman's relationship with "Eddy" was a special one. These two matters—the fact of Edward's disabilities, complicated by questions about their nature and extent; and the poet's responding attachment to the afflicted brother—are of continuing interest to Whitman studies.

Clara Barrus reports that Walt Whitman, attributing his brother's condition to their father's alcoholism, declared that Edward had been stunted almost from the first and had virtually no mental life. Persons who knew Edward in middle age described him as severely retarded, crippled in one hand and leg, and racked by frequent violent seizures. However, references in various Whitman family letters make clear that during much of his life he was capable of being out in the city streets unattended, of doing simple errands, and of attending church with interest. In 1939, Whitman's niece, Jessie Louisa Whitman—vehemently denying any insanity in the family—insisted that Edward had been normal until his mind was affected by scarlet fever at age three and his limbs by infantile paralysis a few years later. She also maintained that he had been trusted to take her and her sister out for pushcart excursions in Brooklyn when they were little girls in the 1860s. Such long-distance memories, however, from a woman determined to put the family in the best light, must be viewed with caution.

While the specifics of Edward's incapacities are thus somewhat blurred, there is little question regarding the closeness of the relationship between him and his brother Walt. In the mid-1850s the two shared a bed in the attic of their mother's house in Brooklyn. Referring to entries in the poet's notebooks of that time, Paul Zweig suggests that Whitman's feelings for Edward may have been complicated by guilt-producing eroticism. Such is not unlikely but remains unverifiable; what appears certain is the bond of affection that lasted throughout their lives. In 1888, days after Walt Whitman had suffered a series of debilitating strokes, Eddy, on the way to enter the asylum at Blackwood, New Jersey, where he would spend his last four years, was brought to see the aging poet. According to Horace Traubel, the two exchanged a few words, then sat for a long time in silence, Walt holding Eddy's hand. In the intervening decades Whitman had not only contributed generously to Eddy's support and seen to it that he was well cared for, but had treated him with a humane respect and brotherly affection not forthcoming from the other Whitman brothers. He made Edward the principal beneficiary of his will, though the largesse was unnecessary, for Eddy lived only eight months longer than Walt.

Along with the oldest Whitman brother, Jesse (who also died in an asylum), Edward raises questions about the issue of mental aberration in the troubled family that produced perhaps America's greatest poet. Further, he illuminates in a unique way those qualities of tender affection, compassion, and comradely brotherhood—perhaps never quite separable from homoeroticism—that are so central to Walt Whitman's character and work.

Bibliography

Allen, Gay Wilson. The Solitary Singer: A Critical Biography of Walt Whitman. 1955. Rev. ed. 1967. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985.

Barrus, Clara. Whitman and Burroughs, Comrades. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1931.

Molinoff, Katherine. Some Notes on Whitman's Family. Brooklyn: Comet, 1941.

Traubel, Horace. With Walt Whitman in Camden. Vol. 2. New York: Appleton, 1908.

Waldron, Randall. "Jessie Louisa Whitman: Memories of Uncle Walt, et al., 1939–1943." Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 7 (1989): 15–27.

Whitman, Walt. The Correspondence. Ed. Edwin Haviland Miller. 6 Vols. New York: New York UP, 1961–1977 (with a Second Supplement published by the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, 1991).

Zweig, Paul. Walt Whitman: The Making of the Poet. New York: Basic Books, 1984.

Denise Kohn

Hannah Brush Whitman, married to Jesse Whitman, was Walt Whitman's paternal grandmother. She worked as a schoolteacher and was skilled in needlework.

She impressed the young Walt with her stories of the family's patriotism during the Revolutionary War and their prosperous past as landholders on Long Island. She told Walt about his unconventional great-grandmother, Sarah White Whitman, who chewed tobacco and rode like a man out into the fields to oversee the slaves. Hannah and Jesse Whitman were the last in the family to own a substantial tract of land.

Walt Whitman warmly admired his grandmother. Jesse Whitman died before he was born, so Hannah Whitman was an important source of information to him about his family's past.

Bibliography

Allen, Gay Wilson. The Solitary Singer: A Critical Biography of Walt Whitman. 1955. Rev. ed. 1967. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985.

Kaplan, Justin. Walt Whitman: A Life. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1980.

Reynolds, David S. Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography. New York: Knopf, 1995.

John Rietz

The oldest of Whitman's eight siblings, Jesse Whitman was born on 2 April 1818 and died, unmarried and childless, on 21 March 1870. Named for his paternal grandfather, Jesse seems to have inherited elements of his father's moody, unstable temperament, as well. Less is known about Jesse than any of the other Whitman children who lived to adulthood—virtually nothing, in fact, aside from a few uncertain details about his troubled personality and its effects on the family.

As a young man Jesse went to sea on a merchant vessel, and by 1861 he was working in the Brooklyn Navy Yard preparing provisions for Union ships while living in his mother's house (along with his brothers Walt and Jeff and Jeff's family). About this time, his fragile disposition began to deteriorate; he became given to violent outbursts, particularly upon waking in the night, and he often vomited his meals. These problems were so severe that he was no longer able to hold a job, and the family began to fear for their safety, particularly that of Jeff's wife and children, at whom Jesse frequently raged. Jeff and Walt (who for part of the time was living in Washington and keeping abreast of the situation through the mail) favored hospitalizing him, but their mother resisted. When Jesse threatened to strike her with a chair, however, Walt committed him to the Kings County Lunatic Asylum on 5 December 1864; he died there of a burst aneurysm in 1870 and was buried, without family present, on the hospital grounds.

The cause of Jesse's problem is obscure. His mother claimed that he had always been "passionate almost to frenzy" (qtd. in Allen 308); the record of his admission to the asylum notes that he had injured his head in a fall about sixteen years earlier; and his niece reported that he had been "attacked by thugs and hit on the head with brass knuckles . . . he was considered to have the best mind of any of the children, until this happened" (Molinoff 19). All of that may be true, but Jeff's explanation seems best to fit Jesse's symptoms and course of deterioration: he had contracted syphilis from an "Irish whore" with whom he had lived (Whitman, Thomas Jefferson 85).

Horace Traubel notes that Whitman never discussed Jesse and even deflected a natural opportunity to do so. To varying degrees, he seems to have suppressed (or even repressed) the stories of the family's darker, more troubled members—Jesse, Andrew, Edward, their father—perhaps fearing that part of his own psychic inheritance. Certainly Jesse's story is the darkest and most thoroughly suppressed, and it helped to form the fearful background of mental and physical decay from which Whitman asserted the perfect health and equanimity of his poetic persona.

Bibliography

Allen, Gay Wilson. The Solitary Singer: A Critical Biography of Walt Whitman. 1955. Rev. ed. 1967. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985.

Gohdes, Clarence, and Rollo Silver, eds. Faint Clews & Indirections: Manuscripts of Whitman and His Family. Durham, N.C.: Duke UP, 1949.

Molinoff, Katherine. Some Notes on Whitman's Family. Brooklyn: Comet, 1941.

Traubel, Horace. With Walt Whitman in Camden. Vol. 1. Boston: Small, Maynard, 1906.

Whitman, Martha Mitchell. Mattie: The Letters of Martha Mitchell Whitman. Ed. Randall H. Waldron. New York: New York UP, 1977.

Whitman, Thomas Jefferson. Dear Brother Walt: The Letters of Thomas Jefferson Whitman. Ed. Dennis Berthold and Kenneth M. Price. Kent, Ohio: Kent State UP, 1984.

David G. Miller

Walt Whitman never knew his paternal grandfather Jesse W. Whitman directly, but he certainly heard of him through family stories, particularly the stories of his paternal grandmother, Hannah Brush Whitman. Jesse Whitman was the son of Nehemiah and Phoebe (Sarah White) Whitman; he inherited the family farm on Long Island from his parents. There he raised three sons, Jesse, Walter, and Treadwell, and one daughter, Sarah. The farm and homestead in West Hills amounted to nearly five hundred acres of land and became an important part of Walt Whitman's sense of home. The character of his mother undoubtedly contributed to Jesse Whitman's character. Phoebe Whitman was portrayed in family legend as a hardworking, tobacco-chewing, cursing woman who was able to oversee the farm single-handedly.

Bibliography

Reynolds, David S. Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography. New York: Knopf, 1995.

Randall Waldron

Next to his mother, whom Walt Whitman loved above all other persons, the woman for whom he appears to have had the deepest affection was his "Sister Matty," wife of his favorite brother, Thomas Jefferson. The poet had more in common with Mattie (as her familiar name was spelled by all but himself) than with his two natural sisters, and apparently felt more deeply about her as well. She and his mother, he wrote, were "the two best and sweetest women I have ever seen or known" (Correspondence 2:240).

Very little is known of Martha Mitchell's life before she married into the Whitman family. Her death certificate indicates she was born in New York (no city or town is given), and her daughter Jessie reported that she was an orphan whose stepmother had vanished with Martha's money upon learning of her intention to marry Jeff Whitman. When the newly married couple moved into the Whitman household, Mattie became an integral part of the family. She was industrious (making shirt-fronts at home for a local manufacturer) and energetic, and got along well with everyone except the emotionally unstable and sometimes violent oldest brother, Jesse. Mattie and her mother-in-law, Louisa Van Velsor Whitman, formed an unusually close bond, though occasional tensions did arise between the two strong-willed women. George Whitman believed, no doubt rightly, that Walt was drawn to Mattie because she was so good to his mother, but there were other reasons as well. Like him, she was gregarious, affectionate, sociable, and they shared interests in common, most notably music. Addressing her in a letter to his mother from Washington, Walt fondly remembered their going together to hear Guerrabella and having an oyster supper afterwards.

Only one of Walt Whitman's letters to Mattie survives, but hers to him and to his mother indicate that he wrote her a number of others, mostly after 1868, when she and her two daughters joined Jeff in St. Louis, where he had recently become superintendent of water works. By that time Mattie had begun to suffer acutely from the throat and respiratory disease (probably cancer) that would cause her death five years later. As her letters show, she endured her long and finally agonizing illness with a courage and cheerfulness that undoubtedly further endeared her to Walt. She was evidently much on his mind in her final months, for her last letter to him, in October 1872, acknowledges "a good many letters and books" he had sent her (Whitman, Martha 83).

The early months of 1873 were devastating ones for Walt Whitman. In late January he suffered a stroke that left him permanently weakened and disabled. The paralyzing early effects of that stroke prevented him from traveling to see his dear Sister Matty before she died in mid-February. Three months later, his beloved mother was also dead. In swift succession he had lost the bodily health and vitality he so much prized, and "the two best and sweetest women" he had ever known.

Bibliography

Allen, Gay Wilson. The Solitary Singer: A Critical Biography of Walt Whitman. 1955. Rev. ed. 1967. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985.

Whitman, Martha Mitchell. Mattie: The Letters of Martha Mitchell Whitman. Ed. Randall H. Waldron. New York: New York UP, 1977.

Whitman, Thomas Jefferson. Dear Brother Walt: The Letters of Thomas Jefferson Whitman. Ed. Dennis Berthold and Kenneth M. Price. Kent, Ohio: Kent State UP, 1984.

Whitman, Walt. The Correspondence. Ed. Edwin Haviland Miller. 6 vols. New York: New York UP, 1961–1977 (with A Second Supplement published by Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, 1991).

Paula K. Garrett

Mary Elizabeth Whitman, the younger sister of Walt Whitman, separated herself from much of the Whitman family decline. In 1840, at the age of nineteen, she married a shipbuilder, Ansel Van Nostrand, and moved to Greenport on the north fork of Long Island. There Mary led a conventional life; her husband was hardworking and successful at shipbuilding, and the Van Nostrands raised five children.

Mary Elizabeth appears in several of Walt Whitman's stories, and she often seems to be the subject of Whitman's inquiries about loss of innocence. She is an unnamed fourteen-year-old in his story "My Boys and Girls" (1844) and is presented as the sweet Sister Mary in his children's story "The Half-Breed: A Tale of the Western Frontier" (1845).

Whitman often visited Mary and Ansel in Greenport, and he delighted in the comfortable life that Mary lived despite her husband's heavy drinking. Their home, a small white house in a small town, represented for Whitman idyllic hearth-and-home living. Mary, unlike many of her siblings, enjoyed an average, normal existence, and she separated herself from the eccentricities of the Whitman family. For Whitman, time spent with Mary in Greenport was peaceful and contented. In his first will, Whitman had arranged to leave a gold ring for Mary, but in his final will he left her two hundred dollars.

Mary Elizabeth was an important influence on Walt Whitman because she represented for him ideals he wanted to believe in. She read about him in newspapers, but she did not follow his literary career carefully. Instead, she seems to have provided a haven for him where he could visit for rest and where he could rediscover his dream for the Whitman family.

Bibliography

Allen, Gay Wilson. The Solitary Singer: A Critical Biography of Walt Whitman. 1955. Rev. ed. 1967. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985.

Kaplan, Justin. Walt Whitman: A Life. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1980.

Molinoff, Katherine. Some Notes on Whitman's Family. Brooklyn: Comet, 1941.

Reynolds, David S. Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography. New York: Knopf, 1995.

Jan Whitt

Criticized both for her financial irresponsibility and her neglect of her children, Nancy Whitman was married to the poet's brother, Andrew Jackson Whitman. The couple had two children. On 3 December 1863 Andrew Whitman died of alcoholism and tuberculosis of the throat. According to the Whitman family, his wife was drunk at the time of his death. Furthermore, hours before Andrew died, his siblings had tried to take him to his mother's home (at his request), but his wife had prevented it.

Nancy is called a "streetwalker" and "prostitute" by Walt Whitman's biographers, and little is known about her life. An alcoholic, she is alleged to have been a poor mother, sending her children out onto city streets to beg. In 1868 her five-year-old son was run over by a brewery wagon and killed.

Martha Mitchell Whitman, wife of the poet's brother Thomas Jefferson ("Jeff") Whitman, told Walt on 21 December 1863 that when she saw Nancy earlier that month, Nancy had only a crust of bread. Martha gave her a dollar, explaining that it was all she had at the time. Jeff then wrote on 28 December that Andrew's death had left Nancy destitute. He said that, as usual, she "seems to have no idea of getting along" (91).

While married to Nancy, Andrew visited his mother often, taking food home for his wife and children. Although Walt's mother, Louisa Van Velsor Whitman, wrote Walt regularly complaining about his sister-in-law's lack of personal hygiene and parenting skills, the poet remained generous, often sending her kind greetings. Louisa, however, blamed Nancy for the couple's quarrels and for her son's drinking and early death.

The dates of Nancy Whitman's birth and death are not known, although she was still alive in 1888 when Whitman apportioned her fifty dollars in his will.

Bibliography

Allen, Gay Wilson. The Solitary Singer: A Critical Biography of Walt Whitman. 1955. Rev. ed. 1967. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985.

Whitman, Martha Mitchell. Mattie: The Letters of Martha Mitchell Whitman. Ed. Randall H. Waldron. New York: New York UP, 1977.

Whitman, Thomas Jefferson. Dear Brother Walt: The Letters of Thomas Jefferson Whitman. Ed. Dennis Berthold and Kenneth M. Price. Kent, Ohio: Kent State UP, 1984.

Julie A. Rechel-White

John Greenleaf Whittier—poet, essayist, hymn writer, journalist, and editor—was, like Whitman, born of Quaker parentage and was best-loved for "Barbara Frietchie" (1863) and "Snow-Bound: A Winter Idyl" (1866). Whittier was initially averse to Whitman, throwing his complimentary copy of Leaves of Grass into the fire; in later years, however, he became more cordial to Whitman.

It was Whittier who first celebrated the common man in six "Songs of Labor"—"The Shoemakers," "The Fishermen," "The Lumbermen," "The Ship-Builders," "The Drovers," and "The Huskers"—which he contributed to the Democratic Review and the National Era in 1845–1847. Whittier engaged the attention of Whitman with his stern editorial pronouncements in the Haverhill Gazette rejecting war, imprisonment for debt, capital punishment, and the denial of voting rights for women. Despite Whitman's moving descriptions of the wounded in Washington hospitals in Leaves, Whittier, having published a collection of war songs, National Lyrics (1865), still refused to acknowledge the merit of Whitman's work.

However, in August of 1885, along with a ten-dollar contribution toward a horse and buggy for the lame gray poet, Whittier included a warm note to Thomas Donaldson about Whitman, stating, "I am sorry to hear of the physical disabilities of the man who tenderly nursed the wounded Union soldiers and as tenderly sung the dirge of their great captain" (qtd. in Allen 523).

Bibliography

Allen, Gay Wilson. The Solitary Singer: A Critical Biography of Walt Whitman. 1955. Rev. ed. 1967. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985.

Pollard, John A. John Greenleaf Whittier, Friend of Man. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1949.

David G. Miller

Richard Worthington was a printer in New York who published unauthorized editions of Leaves of Grass in the 1860s. For two hundred dollars, Worthington purchased the publishers' plates for the 1860 edition of the book at the bankruptcy auction of Thayer and Eldridge. He then proceeded to print and sell copies without Whitman's permission.

Whitman was outraged by the piracy and railed against "Holy Dick," as he ironically nicknamed Worthington. Although as many as ten thousand spurious copies may have been sold, Whitman never took Worthington to court because he felt it was too much trouble. Biographers, however, also point out that Whitman was willing to receive royalties from the pirated editions, which may have kept him from pursuing legal action.

Bibliography

Allen, Gay Wilson. The New Walt Whitman Handbook. 1975. New York: New York UP, 1986.

Reynolds, David S. Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography. New York: Knopf, 1995.

Mitch Gould

George Henry Boker, a wealthy Philadelphian, served as ambassador to Turkey (1871–1875) and Russia (1875) and is best known for Francesca da Rimini (staged 1855), a popular play about adultery among the Italian nobility. Boker was dissatisfied with his theatrical career and desperately wanted a following for his Plays and Poems (1856). Boker's suppressed Sonnets: A Sequence on Profane Love (1929) are thought to be inspired by his wife, Julia, and a mistress, Angie King Hicks.

Whitman had the "kindliest" thoughts of Boker (With Walt Whitman 6:266) and spontaneously referred to him during a discussion with Horace Traubel: "He is pretty genuine, after all: the fellows say he holds off . . . but I don't know. Boker is genuine, has quality" (With Walt Whitman 2:476–477). In contrast to Whitman's concept of manly love, Boker's conception of comradeship was feminine rather than masculine, as indicated by his letter to his friend Bayard Taylor: "We have both . . . an almost feminine tenderness for those we love . . . are you laughing at me for making love to you, as if you were a green girl?" (qtd. in Evans 115).

Bibliography

Evans, Oliver H. George Henry Boker. Boston: Twayne, 1984.

Traubel, Horace. With Walt Whitman in Camden. Vol. 2. New York: Appleton, 1908; Vol. 6. Ed. Gertrude Traubel and William White. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1982.

Danielle L. and Donald C. Irving Baker

An industrialist and philanthropist, Carnegie gave small sums to subscriptions for Whitman in 1887 and in 1888, reportedly because he felt "triumphant democracy disgraced" upon hearing that British, not Americans, were raising money for the destitute poet (Whitman 85, nl). It is unlikely that the two ever met, but a literary exchange occurred when Carnegie sent his books with a "friendly inscription" and Whitman sent a copy of Leaves of Grass in return (Whitman 146–147).

Some friends criticized Whitman's association with Carnegie because of his exploitation of the working class, but Whitman defended Carnegie's generosity to him (Traubel 254). Reynolds draws several connections between the two, especially their praise of American technology as in Carnegie's Triumphant Democracy (1886) and Whitman's "Song of the Exposition" (1871).

Bibliography

Carnegie, Andrew. Triumphant Democracy. 1886. New York: Doubleday, 1933.

Reynolds, David S. Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography. New York: Knopf, 1995.

Traubel, Horace. With Walt Whitman in Camden. Ed. Sculley Bradley. Vol. 4. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1953.

Wall, Joseph F. Andrew Carnegie. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1989.

Whitman, Walt. The Correspondence. Ed. Edwin Haviland Miller. Vol. 4. New York: New York UP, 1969.

Jennifer J. Stein

Influenced by Long Island, as was Walt Whitman, James Fenimore Cooper was an American prose writer best known for The Last of the Mohicans (1826) and The Deerslayer (1841). Although Whitman did not consider Cooper an influence, he did read many of Cooper's works, admiring in particular The Red Rover (1827), a swashbuckling romance.

Cooper, like Whitman, used the sea as an image throughout his work. However, Cooper differed from Whitman in his treatment of nature. Cooper regarded nature as a fixed object to be observed (see Peck 28), while Whitman viewed it as a mutable entity to be experienced. Cooper's largely conservative social and political views also contrasted sharply with Whitman's. Nevertheless, in the writing of fiction, Whitman at times revealed an indebtedness to Cooper, in both "theme and manner" (Kaplan 117).

Bibliography

Berbrich, Joan D. Three Voices from Paumanok: The Influence of Long Island on James Fenimore Cooper, William Cullen Bryant, and Walt Whitman. Port Washington, N.Y.: Friedman, 1969.

Kaplan, Justin. Walt Whitman: A Life. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1980.

Peck, H. Daniel. A World by Itself: The Pastoral Moment in Cooper's Fiction. New Haven: Yale UP, 1977.

Martha A. Kalnin

In his notebooks for 1856, Whitman mentions Ellen Grey, an actress for the Bowery Theater from approximately 1853–1854 and 1857–1860; she re-appeared in 1865. She married during her five-year absence from the stage, but other than her theater roles, little is known about her life.

In 1862, Whitman received a love letter from "Ellen Eyre," thought to be Grey's pseudonym. Scholars connect Grey to Eyre because of their similar names and Whitman's cryptic notations or conversational references to them. Since Whitman mentions Grey once and the connection to Eyre is slight, scholars cannot determine her impact on Whitman.

Bibliography

Hollis, C. Carroll. "Whitman's 'Ellen Eyre.'" Walt Whitman Newsletter 2 (1956): 24–26.

Miller, Edwin Haviland. "Walt Whitman and Ellen Eyre." American Literature 33 (1961): 64–68.

Odell, George C.D. Annals of the New York Stage. 15 vols. New York: Columbia UP, 1927–1938.

Whitman, Walt. Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts. Ed. Edward F. Grier. 6 vols. New York: New York UP, 1984.

Zweig, Paul. Walt Whitman: The Making of the Poet. New York: Basic Books, 1984.

Willis J. Buckingham

When asked her view of Whitman, Emily Dickinson famously replied that she had been told "he was disgraceful" (qtd. in Kaplan 26). The term is too pale to describe Rufus W. Griswold's anonymous estimate of the 1855 Leaves for the Criterion, a highly respectable—though short-lived—New York opinion weekly (1855–1856). Griswold had achieved fame as a literary anthologist (beginning with his 1842 compilation, The Poets and Poetry of America) and as Edgar Allan Poe's literary executor and biographer.

Griswold's training as an orthodox Baptist minister may explain why he begins his review by using Leaves to warn against New England liberal intellectuals. Its poems exemplify for him the despicable result to which Emersonian transcendentalism eventually leads. Claiming that even a single extract from the new book would spread contagion, Griswold goes on to indicate that his concern is not only with the poems' "reeking" ideas and the "obscenity" of their expression (27). More worrisome, more simply unacceptable, is their unrestrained eroticism, their "beastly sensuality that is fast rotting the healthy core of all the social virtues" (27). Griswold makes this allusion to prostitution fully explicit: the author, he writes, should be "placed in the same category" as a woman who "skulks along in the shadows of byways," the "slave of poverty, ignorance, and passion" (27).

Bibliography

Bayless, Joy. Rufus Wilmot Griswold: Poe's Literary Executor. Nashville: Vanderbilt UP, 1943.

Griswold, Rufus W. Rev. of Leaves of Grass, 1855 Edition. Walt Whitman: The Contemporary Reviews. Ed. Kenneth M. Price. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996. 26–27.

Kaplan, Justin. Walt Whitman: A Life. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1980.

Willis J. Buckingham

About Whitman's age and, according to William James, like him in his inborn spiritual and personal optimism, Edward Everett Hale wrote one of the first unqualified appreciations of Leaves of Grass. Already prominent in New England as an essayist and Unitarian minister, Hale would become nationally known as a clergyman, magazine editor, and prolific author. His works include fiction, sermons, travel writings, biography, and autobiography, chief among them a hugely popular patriotic short story, "The Man Without a Country" (1863).

Reviewing Leaves of Grass anonymously for the North American Review, Hale admires most its fresh and direct poetic voice. Its author, he writes admiringly, "has a horror of conventional language of any kind" (34). Most early commentators on Leaves find it too original, but for Hale the book's power inheres in its "simplicity," its absolute freedom from traditional, "strained," literary speech (35). Its second accomplishment lies in its vivid description: "sketches of life . . . so real that we wonder how they came on paper" (36). He concludes by observing that the poems' occasional "indelicacies" (36) are no more worrisome than those of Homer. His portrayal of Whitman as founder-poet and "American Homer" would become, as Timothy Morris points out, the dominant critical strategy leading to the poet's eventual canonization.

Bibliography

Adams, John R. Edward Everett Hale. Boston: Twayne, 1977.

Hale, Edward Everett. Rev. of Leaves of Grass, 1855 Edition. Walt Whitman: The Contemporary Reviews. Ed. Kenneth M. Price. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996. 34–36.

Holloway, Jean. Edward Everett Hale: A Biography. Austin: U of Texas P, 1956.

James, William. The Varieties of Religious Experience. 1902. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1985.

Morris, Timothy. Becoming Canonical in American Poetry. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1995.

Patricia J. Tyrer

A professional nurse, Keller was employed to care for Whitman (1892), along with his personal nurse, Warren Fritzinger, during the last months of his life.

Born in Buffalo, New York, she married William Keller in 1858 and was widowed seven years later. She was educated at the Women's Hospital in Philadelphia.

Keller's book Walt Whitman in Mickle Street, ostensibly based on her observations of the poet's home life, is primarily a vindication of Whitman's housekeeper, Mary O. Davis, and her claim against Whitman's estate for services rendered from 1885 to his death. Keller testified for Davis in a suit tried in April 1894, which Davis won. Keller also wrote an article for Putnam's Monthly, "Walt Whitman: The Last Phase" (1909), most of which came from her book.

Bibliography

Keller, Elizabeth Leavitt. Walt Whitman in Mickle Street. New York: Mitchell Kennerley, 1921.

Ted Widmer

William Leggett, poet and journalist, stirred the hearts of many New Yorkers during his mercurial career. After a United States Navy court-martial in 1825, he began writing verse and fiction. But his most important work was his journalism, particularly at the New York Evening Post, where he worked from 1829 to 1836 under William Cullen Bryant. While Bryant was in Europe in 1834 and 1835, Leggett poured out vitriol against the political chicanery he saw about him, saving most of his abuse for champions of banks and corporations. Instead, he advocated free trade, increased suffrage, and the general principles of Jacksonian democracy, although in 1835 he led the Locofoco revolt from the local Democrats. He also aroused controversy for supporting the rights of abolitionists. From 1836 to 1837, Leggett edited his own paper, the Plaindealer, but his health failed, and he died in 1839. Many considered him a Democratic martyr, and Bryant and John Greenleaf Whittier paid eloquent homage to him.

It is likely Leggett influenced Whitman profoundly, both for his fusion of literature and public life and his relentless individualism. Whitman called him "the glorious Leggett" (Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 3 November 1847), and remembered seeing him at the theater in "The Old Bowery." Even at the end of his life, Whitman remembered the old radical fondly, remarking to Horace Traubel that Leggett was "one of the best of 'em" (Traubel 191) at penetrating the legal sophistry of political writing.

Bibliography

[Bryant, William Cullen.] "William Leggett." United States Magazine and Democratic Review 6 (1839): 17–28.

Leggett, William. A Collection of the Political Writings of William Leggett. Ed. Theodore Sedgwick, Jr. New York: Taylor and Dodd, 1840.

———. Democratick Editorials: Essays in Jacksonian Political Economy. Ed. Lawrence H. White. Indianapolis: Liberty, 1984.

Meyers, Marvin. The Jacksonian Persuasion: Politics and Belief. 1957. New York: Vintage, 1960.

Traubel, Horace. With Walt Whitman in Camden. Vol. 2. 1908. New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 1961.

Carol J. Singley

Philadelphia physician Daniel Longaker treated Whitman during his final illness. He, as well as Dr. Alexander McAlister of Camden, were Whitman's main doctors. Neither presented bills for his services. Longaker earned his medical degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1881 and was a pioneer in obstetrics; he is credited with being one of the first in Philadelphia to perform a caesarean section in a patient's home. He served on the staff of Lying-in Hospital and Jewish Maternity Hospital and for several years was Chief of Obstetrics at Kensington Hospital for Women.

Early in 1891, Whitman's friend Horace Traubel asked Longaker to serve as Whitman's doctor. He and Whitman were most likely drawn to Longaker's liberal sympathies. After Longaker's death, for example, a newspaper revealed that his daughter had had him institutionalized because he gave money to leftist groups such as the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee. Longaker attributed Whitman's illness to the emotional strain of Civil War hospital work and to blood poisoning acquired from gangrenous wounds of patients Whitman had nursed. Longaker paid frequent visits and provided various medications, which Whitman's nurse, Elizabeth Leavitt Keller, describes as minimal, designed to alleviate acute or persistent pain. Whitman assisted in his own treatment by detailing his condition to Longaker orally and in letters. Longaker enjoyed talking with Whitman about human nature and reflects that Whitman responded as well to their conversations as he did to medical remedies. Whitman's condition worsened on 17 December 1891, when a fever, accompanied by chills and respiratory problems, incapacitated him. He partially recovered but died on 26 March 1892, too suddenly for Longaker to be called. He was attended by Dr. McAlister, his housekeeper Mary Oakes Davis, nurse Warren Fritzinger, and friends Thomas B. Harned and Horace Traubel.

Longaker and Whitman's other doctors vastly underestimated their patient's condition, perhaps because Whitman complained relatively little and seemed to accept his imminent death. An autopsy, performed by Professor Henry W. Cattell, demonstrator of Gross Morbid Anatomy at the University of Pennsylvania, which Longaker attended, revealed serious maladies—abscesses, tubercles, a large gallstone, deteriorated lungs and liver, and an enlarged prostate. Gay Wilson Allen and David Reynolds provide useful summaries of Longaker's treatment of Whitman, but Emory Holloway misspells Longaker's and McAlister's names.

Bibliography

Allen, Gay Wilson. The Solitary Singer: A Critical Biography of Walt Whitman. 1955. Rev. ed. 1967. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985.

Holloway, Emory. Whitman: An Interpretation in Narrative. New York: Knopf, 1926.

Keller, Elizabeth Leavitt. Walt Whitman in Mickle Street. New York: Kennerley, 1921.

"Longaker, Daniel." Alumni Records File. University of Pennsylvania Archives. Philadelphia, Pa.

Longaker, Daniel. "The Last Sickness and the Death of Walt Whitman." In Re Walt Whitman. Ed. Horace L. Traubel, Richard Maurice Bucke, and Thomas B. Harned. Philadelphia: David McKay, 1893. 393–411. Rpt. in Whitman in His Own Time: A Biographical Chronicle of His Life, Drawn from Recollections, Memoirs, and Interviews by Friends and Associates. Ed. Joel Myerson. Detroit: Omnigraphics, 1991. 90–108.

Reynolds, David S. Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography. New York: Knopf, 1995.

Whitman, Walt. The Correspondence. Ed. Edwin Haviland Miller. Vol. 5. New York: New York UP, 1969.

Donald Yannella

One of the most visible and contentious members of New York's Young America nationalist movement, Cornelius Mathews was, like Whitman, an active journalist during the early 1840s and through the early 1850s. Mathews was a journalistic writer and periodical editor throughout his long career and wrote across the genres: fiction, sketches, poetry, and plays. He was near the center of the Duyckinck Circle, which helped create Young America, and with Whitman contributed to the movement's most noted outlet, the United States Magazine and Democratic Review, edited by John L. O'Sullivan. They were dedicated to Locofoco political radicalism and literary nationalism.

There is good reason to believe that Whitman and Mathews were acquainted both because of their ideological sympathies and because, as active journalists, they would have frequented and at times occupied office space in New York's printing, publishing, and book-selling district on Nassau Street north of Wall. Mathews was a serious author trying to reach a mass audience created by the advances in printing technology beginning in the 1830s and encouraged by Jacksonian democracy's promotion of the common man. He became active in the Know-Nothing party, which assaulted recently arrived Irish Catholics, among other groups, as Whitman himself had in his 1842 Aurora pieces. Mathews addressed New York City Nativists—he was vice president of the organization, according to the 5 June 1855 Tribune—a month before the first appearance of Leaves. But while Whitman might have flirted with Nativism even earlier than the high point of its popularity, he was ultimately inclusive in his democratic sympathies while Mathews was exclusive, holding, it appears, a jingoistic version of democracy, though not as conservative as depicted by his biographer Stein. Pritchard is perhaps right in suggesting that Mathews's Poems on Man (1842)—one of his many celebrations of American Republicanism—anticipates Leaves in purpose and spirit, but it is far inferior in vision and execution.

Bibliography

Chielens, Edward E., ed. American Literary Magazines: The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries. New York: Greenwood, 1986.

Pritchard, John Paul. Criticism in America. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1956.

Stafford, John. The Literary Criticism of "Young America": A Study in the Relationship of Politics and Literature. Berkeley: U of California P, 1952.

Stein, Allen F. Cornelius Mathews. New York: Twayne, 1974.

Yannella, Donald. "Cornelius Mathews." American Literary Critics and Scholars, 1850–1880. Vol. 64 of Dictionary of Literary Biography. Ed. John W. Rathbun and Monica M. Grecu. Detroit: Gale, 1988. 178–182.

Timothy Stifel

After employment as a professor of mathematics and a lawyer, O.M. Mitchel found his calling when he was appointed professor of mathematics, philosophy, and astronomy at Cincinnati College (1836). Astronomy became Mitchel's central field of inquiry, and he helped found the Cincinnati Astronomical Society in 1842. Two years later, this society erected an observatory partly funded by donations from the audiences of Mitchel's public lectures on astronomy. Mitchel functioned as director of the observatory, and to gain financial support he published Sidereal Messenger (1846–1848), the first magazine on astronomy directed toward a popular audience. Mitchel worked to create public interest in the astronomical discoveries of his day until his participation in the Civil War brought him a fatal case of yellow fever in 1861.

Walt Whitman may have attended Mitchel's lectures at the Brooklyn Tabernacle in December of 1847. If not present at the lectures, Whitman was certainly familiar with the published transcripts of the lectures, A Course of Six Lectures on Astronomy (1848). Whitman was impressed by Mitchel and published an editorial in the 20 March 1847 Brooklyn Daily Eagle commending Mitchel's work on establishing observatories. Mitchel's lectures are a probable source not only for many of the astronomical details in Whitman's writings, but also for the imagery Whitman uses to describe the solar system.

Bibliography

Beaver, Joseph. Walt Whitman: Poet of Science. Morningside Heights, N.Y.: King's Crown, 1951.

Whitman, Walt. The Gathering of the Forces. Ed. Cleveland Rodgers and John Black. 2 vols. New York: Putnam, 1920.

T. Gregory Garvey

Before establishing himself as a popular biographer in the 1850s, James Parton worked as a writer and editor for N.P. Willis's popular magazine The New York Home Journal. Parton chose to leave journalism in 1854 when he signed a contract to write The Life of Horace Greeley. The research and narrative methods that Parton subsequently developed earned him the epithet "father of modern biography." Parton's biography of Andrew Jackson (1860) is considered a classic of nineteenth-century historical writing. In reviewing Jackson's many biographers Robert V. Remini concludes that Parton "cut deeply into his subject . . . striking the hard bone of Jackson's personality" (xxx).

Parton and Whitman knew each other as members of New York's journalistic and literary community. Shortly after Parton's 1854 marriage to the newspaper columnist Fanny Fern (Sara Willis), Whitman became a frequent visitor in the Parton-Fern household. This friendship turned sour over a two-hundred-dollar loan which Parton made to Whitman in 1857. Whitman's failure to repay the loan led to a lawsuit in which some of his personal property was seized. This scandal embarrassed Whitman and, apparently, he blamed Parton's wife for the lawsuit and its outcome. When queried about the incident late in life, Whitman held that Fanny Fern "kept alive what . . . James Parton would have let die" (Traubel 236). Following Fern's death in 1872 Parton continued to write productively, focusing especially on historically important women, but never rekindled his friendship with Whitman.

Bibliography

Flower, Milton E. James Parton, The Father of Modern Biography. Durham: Duke UP, 1951.

Remini, Robert V. Introduction. The Presidency of Andrew Jackson. By James Parton. New York: Harper and Row, 1967. vii–xxx.

Reynolds, David S. Walt Whitman's America. New York: Knopf, 1995.

Traubel, Horace. With Walt Whitman in Camden. Vol. 3. New York: Mitchell Kennerley, 1914.

Susan Belasco Smith

Sara Payson Willis Parton took the pseudonym "Fanny Fern" in 1851 while she was writing several articles a week for two Boston newspapers, the Olive Branch and the True Flag. By 1856, the year her husband, James Parton, introduced her to his friend Walt Whitman, Fanny Fern had become a famous woman. The author of four books, including a best-selling novel, Ruth Hall, Fern was also the celebrated author of weekly articles for the New York Ledger and the first woman in America to be a professional newspaper columnist. Although Fern wrote about many social issues, especially the status of women and women's rights, she was also interested in the place of literature and the arts in American life.

Impressed by Whitman's originality, Fern published first a brief comment on Whitman's fine speaking voice in an article on New York celebrities for the Ledger on 19 April 1856 and then a laudatory review of Leaves of Grass on 10 May 1856. She was the first woman to praise Whitman's generally unnoticed book. Calling attention to the contrast between Whitman's "fresh, hardy" poems and "forced, stiff, Parnassian exotics," Fern applauded the "unmingled delight" of Leaves of Grass and defended Whitman against charges of coarseness and sensuality ("Fresh Fern" 4). The emerging friendship between Fern and Whitman was short-lived, for reasons that have been a subject of some highly charged speculation among Whitman biographers. But recent studies of Fern's life suggest a fairly straightforward story. Accepting a loan of two hundred dollars from James Parton as an advance against payment he was to receive for a "literary project" (Warren, "Subversion" 60), Whitman was unable to pay his debt when it was due in February 1857. The unpaid loan, as well as the Partons' feeling that they had been ill used by a friend, ended the relationship.

Bibliography

Coad, Oral S. "Whitman vs. Parton." The Journal of the Rutgers University Library 4 (1940): 1–8.

Fern, Fanny. "Fresh Fern Leaves: Leaves of Grass." New York Ledger 10 May 1856: 4.

———. Ruth Hall and Other Writings. Ed. Joyce W. Warren. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers UP, 1986.

Kaplan, Justin. Walt Whitman: A Life. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1980.

Warren, Joyce W. Fanny Fern: An Independent Woman. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers UP, 1992.

———. "Subversion versus Celebration: The Aborted Friendship of Fanny Fern and Walt Whitman." Patrons and Protegees: Gender, Friendship, and Writing in Nineteenth-Century America. Ed. Shirley Marchalonis. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers UP, 1988. 59–93.

Patricia J. Tyrer

A journalist and writer of books, pamphlets, and journal articles, under the pseudonym January Searle, Phillips was an early supporter of Whitman. He was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he received an A.B., although his name does not appear on the list of graduates. After immigrating to America, he was associated with the New York World, the Herald, and the Chicago Tribune, before becoming literary editor of the New York Sun.

Phillips wrote a favorable review of Leaves of Grass for the New York Illustrated News (26 May 1860), reprinted in the Saturday Press (30 June 1860). His laudatory poem, "Letter Impromptu" (1857), written in hexameters, appeared in Leaves of Grass Imprints (1860).

Bibliography

"Phillips, George Searle." The Dictionary of National Biography. 1897. Ed. Leslie Stephen and Sidney Lee. Vol. 15. London: Oxford UP, 1937–1938. 1087.

Glicksberg, Charles I. "Walt Whitman and 'January Searle.'" American Notes and Queries 6 (1946): 51–53.

Whitman, Walt. Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts. Ed. Edward F. Grier. Vol. 1. New York: New York UP, 1984.

Arnie Kantrowitz

Although Walt Whitman was attracted to many of the young men he met in the Civil War hospital wards, his feelings for Sergeant Thomas P. Sawyer might best be described as an infatuation. The two men met early in 1863 while Whitman was nursing Sawyer's friend Lewy Brown, and soon Whitman was in full pursuit.

Whitman's letters to Sawyer were full of ardor, declaring that no other comrade but Sawyer suited him "to a dot" (Whitman 92). He proposed that after the war he and Sawyer and Brown might all live together, declaring that Sawyer had his love "in life and death forever" and assuring the young soldier that "my soul could never be entirely happy, even in the world to come, without you, dear comrade" (93). He made a point of mentioning that Brown had given him long kisses, implying that Sawyer might wish to do the same, but cautiously declaring: "I do not expect you to return for me the same degree of love I have for you" (107).

Sawyer was a soapmaker from Cambridge, Massachusetts, whose reserved Yankee manner and near illiteracy would not have permitted him to respond in kind, even had he been so disposed. More likely, he was bemused by the passionate attentions of this older man, whose interests he did not share.

Before Sawyer left for his military post, Whitman prepared a package with a shirt and a pair of drawers, hoping that Sawyer would "be wearing around his body something from me" (Whitman 93) which would contribute to his comfort, but Sawyer never came by to pick up the package. In a letter to Brown, who had evidently written to him of Whitman's disappointment, Sawyer apologized for not having had the time to get the clothes, and he sent along his thanks to Whitman for a book (possibly Leaves of Grass). Eventually, in January 1864, Sawyer wrote directly to Whitman, stiltedly addressing him as "Brother," and assuring him of his friendship in less than passionate terms (Whitman 90, n86). Their correspondence faded after that, doubtless to Whitman's sad dismay.

Bibliography

Allen, Gay Wilson. The Solitary Singer: A Critical Biography of Walt Whitman. 1955. Rev. ed. 1967. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985.

Shively, Charley. Calamus Lovers: Walt Whitman's Working Class Camerados. San Francisco: Gay Sunshine, 1987.

Whitman, Walt. The Correspondence. Ed. Edwin Haviland Miller. Vol. 1. New York: New York UP, 1961.

Stephen A. Cooper

A minor Scottish poet, essayist, and lace-pattern designer (a profession learned from his father), Alexander Smith received little formal education. Born in Kilmarnock, Smith mainly educated himself by reading Sir Walter Scott, James Fenimore Cooper, William Wordsworth, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, and Alfred, Lord Tennyson.

In 1850 Smith published in the "Poet's Corner" of the Glasgow Evening Citizen. These short poems received little notice, but his A Life Drama and Other Poems (1853) attracted enough attention by 1855 to have run through several editions. Whitman took notice of A Life Drama in 1854, and while he was largely unmoved by the work, he nevertheless was excited by a passage announcing the advent of "a mighty poet whom this age shall choose / To be its spokesman to all coming times" (qtd. in Zweig 149). For the most part, Whitman learned from Smith and other nineteenth-century poets how not to write.

Critics dubbed Smith a "spasmodic" poet and attacked him throughout his career for producing ineffectively organized long poems and essays plagued by overwrought images, feverish emotions, and obscure meanings—labels Smith never overcame. Whitman learned from Smith's dubious example—he wished to write clearly and simply.

Bibliography

Kaplan, Justin. Walt Whitman: A Life. 1980. New York: Bantam Books, 1982.

Scott, Mary Jane W. "Alexander Smith: Poet of Victorian Scotland." Studies in Scottish Literature 14 (1979): 98–111.

Smith, Alexander. The Poetical Works of Alexander Smith. Ed. William Sinclair. Edinburgh: Nimmo, 1909.

Zweig, Paul. Walt Whitman: The Making of the Poet. New York: Basic Books, 1984.

Joseph Andriano

A minor literary figure in his own day, and until recently all but forgotten, Stoddard was a journalist, poetaster, and essayist who exchanged a few letters with Walt Whitman (from 1867 to 1870). Stoddard is also known for his brief stint as Mark Twain's secretary and companion in London in 1873. Whitman read Stoddard's charming sketches about Hawaiian natives in The Overland Monthly (1869–1870) that would be collected as South Sea Idylls (1873), his most popular book. It may be compared favorably with Herman Melville's Typee (1846) and the early chapters of Moby-Dick (1851) in its provocative—and humorous—tribute to the sensuous lifestyle of "barbarism." Like Melville, Stoddard focused on homoerotic affection between the Christian and the barbarian.

It is not surprising, then, that he would react so enthusiastically to Whitman's "Calamus" poems. His letter of 2 April 1870 opens, "In the name of CALAMUS listen to me!" (Traubel 444) and proceeds to sing the joys of barbarism as opposed to the hypocrisy and "frigid manners of the Christians" (445). Whitman's response was guardedly sympathetic: he "warmly approve[d]" of Stoddard's "adhesive nature," but felt compelled to remind him of the virtues of "American practical life" (Whitman 97).

Although Stoddard was vastly inferior to Whitman as a poet, they were kindred spirits in their need for discreet homoerotic attachments, though Whitman preferred his in civilized society. And though Whitman in the two surviving letters to Stoddard sincerely hoped they would some day meet, they apparently never did.

Bibliography

Austen, Roger. Genteel Pagan: The Double Life of Charles Warren Stoddard. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1991.

Katz, Jonathan, ed. Gay American History: Lesbians and Gay Men in the U.S.A. New York: Crowell, 1976.

Traubel, Horace. With Walt Whitman in Camden. Vol. 3. 1914. New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 1961.

Whitman, Walt. The Correspondence. Ed. Edwin Haviland Miller. Vol. 2. New York: New York UP, 1961.

Sherry and Sharron Sims Southard

Although William Swinton held many titles during the course of his life (war correspondent, author, philological expert, professor, and translator), he is best remembered as one of Walt Whitman's friends. William and his older brother, John, became intimates of Whitman in the mid-1850s. The intense, yet short-lived friendship which formed between Whitman and Swinton was based on a common interest in philology. Fluent in several languages, Swinton indulged Whitman's fascination with the French language by becoming his tutor and translator, and stimulated his interest in language studies by introducing him to philological texts.

In 1855, Swinton accepted a job with the New York Times as a book reviewer, a position which enabled him to affect Whitman's literary career. He is believed to be the author of the unsigned review of Leaves of Grass (1856), which appeared in the Times on 13 November 1856. The review was strangely ambivalent; Swinton praised Whitman's skill as a poet, but viciously attacked his character, labeling him arrogant and indecent. Swinton also accused Whitman of manufacturing and publishing favorable reviews of the collection and exposed the fact that he published a private letter of praise from Emerson without the author's permission. Some believe that Whitman himself informed Swinton of these improprieties because he welcomed the attention a scandal would generate, an idea which would be consistent with the fact that the review seemed not to have affected the friendship in any negative way.

Of particular interest to Whitman scholars is Swinton's Rambles Among Words (1859), a collection of loosely connected etymological essays. Although the book is signed only by Swinton, some believe that the eleventh and twelfth chapters, as well as other sections of the book, were actually written by Whitman. These passages provide important insights into Whitman's theories of language, particularly concerning its evolution (nonstatic nature) and power.

Bibliography

Hollis, C. Carroll. "Whitman and William Swinton: A Cooperative Friendship." American Literature 30 (1959): 425–449.

"Swinton, William." Dictionary of American Biography. Vol. 18. New York: Scribner's, 1936. 252–253.

Warren, James Perrin. "Whitman as Ghostwriter: The Case of Rambles Among Words." Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 2.2 (1984): 22–30.

Jennifer A. Hynes

Whitman was aware of this radical reformer, writer, and lecturer from his childhood; his father subscribed to the Free Inquirer (1829–1832), which was edited by Wright and Robert Dale Owen, and agreed with some of the ideas of the working class activist.

Born of a well-to-do Scottish family, Frances (Fanny) Wright was orphaned at the age of two and reared by relatives in England. She was attracted by the liberal ideas of the French Revolution and saw the United States as a place where her notions of social justice and equality might be carried out. Wright's writings and lectures in America on labor reform, women's education, class, free thinking, and free love—along with the fact that, in 1828, she was the first woman to make a lengthy political speech in America—caused the press to label her an atheist, fanatic, lewd woman, the "whore of Babylon," and the "great Red Harlot of Infidelity." Wright's antislavery experiment, the founding of Nashoba, a colony in Tennessee that offered slaves the chance to work to buy their freedom, was an economic and ideological failure.

Gay Wilson Allen argues that Whitman read his father's copies of the Free Inquirer and Wright's book on Epicurean philosophy, A Few Days in Athens (1822), and that he may have accompanied his father to hear some of Wright's New York lectures in the 1820s. In any case, Whitman was fascinated by the attractive, outspoken intellectual who brought such censure on herself by her radical ideas of democracy. Whitman once told Horace Traubel: "I never felt so glowingly toward any other woman. . . . [S]he possessed herself of my body and soul" (Traubel 500).

Whitman was drawn by Wright's stance for the workingman, by her active work for rational thought and education among all classes, and by her deism. The Free Inquirer, which beginning in April 1829 was published in the basement of her New York Hall of Science, argued theology and the gradual end of capital punishment, political equality for women, civil rights for all, universal and nonsectarian education, and gradual abolition, and aimed to be a forum for the exchange of ideas. The journal also supported a variety of programs aimed at helping the workingman, or mechanic, intending to bring about a more equitable distribution of wealth and a state-supported health-care system.

Reynolds claims that reading A Few Days in Athens taught Whitman how progressive ideas could be circulated by way of imaginative literature. Largely a dialogue between the ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus and some of his followers, this never popular novel provided Whitman with a model of deistic materialism.

The novel's notions of the interchangeability of all matter prefigure Whitman's organic view of death and belief in literal cycles of life; thus Wright's conception that all things in the natural world represent only "the different disposition of these eternal and unchangeable atoms" (qtd. in Allen 139) is echoed by Whitman's "every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you" in "Song of Myself" (section 1).

Bibliography

Allen, Gay Wilson. The Solitary Singer: A Critical Biography of Walt Whitman. 1955. Rev. ed. 1967. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985.

Eckhardt, Celia Morris. Fanny Wright: Rebel in America. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1984.

Lane, Margaret. Frances Wright and the "Great Experiment." Manchester, N.J.: Manchester UP, 1972.

Reynolds, David S. Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography. New York: Knopf, 1995.

Traubel, Horace. With Walt Whitman in Camden. Vol. 2. 1908. New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 1961.

Wright, Frances. A Few Days in Athens—Being the Translation of a Greek Manuscript Discovered in Herculaneum. 1822. New York: Bliss and White, 1825.

———. Life, Letters, and Lectures, 1834–1844. New York: Arno, 1972.

Maire Mullins

Journalist, editor (1869–1871), and owner (1868–1900) of the Orleans Republican, a newspaper published in Albion, New York, Beach also wrote and published prose and poetry in magazines and newspapers. Her patriotic verse was widely circulated during the Civil War. She married Calvin Beach (1830–1868) in 1850; at his death Juliette became owner, manager, and editor of the newspaper, unusual for a woman in the nineteenth century.

Beach and her husband occasionally visited New York City, and they knew Henry Clapp, editor of the Saturday Press. Clapp advised Whitman to send a copy of the 1860 Leaves of Grass to Juliette Beach for review. On 2 June 1860 a review was published in the Saturday Press. It was unfavorable, calling the "Children of Adam" poems "disgusting," describing Whitman as a poet who possessed "strength and beauty—but . . . no soul" (qtd. in Giantvalley 13), and advising Whitman to "drown himself" (qtd. in Furness 425). Calvin Beach, who had intercepted Leaves of Grass and read it, apparently wrote this first review himself and submitted it to the Saturday Press unsigned. Clapp mistakenly appended Juliette's initials to it, and a week later had to print a retraction.

On 23 June a second review of Leaves of Grass appeared in the Saturday Press. This time the review, written by Juliette Beach and signed "A Woman," described Leaves of Grass as "the standard book of poems in the future of America" and Whitman as "an embodiment of the new 'National Genius'" (qtd. in Giantvalley 14).

According to Ellen O'Connor, this incident sparked a correspondence between Whitman and Beach which went on for many years (although no letters have been found), and it was for Beach that Whitman wrote "Out of the Rolling Ocean the Crowd" (1865).

Bibliography

Allen, Gay Wilson. The Solitary Singer: A Critical Biography of Walt Whitman. 1955. Rev. ed. 1967. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985.

Callow, Phillip. From Noon to Starry Night: A Life of Walt Whitman. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1992.

"Death of Mrs. C.G. Beach." Obituary. Orleans Republican 20 June 1900.

Furness, Clifton Joseph. Rev. of American Giant: Walt Whitman and His Times, by Frances Winwar. American Literature 13 (1942): 423–432.

Giantvalley, Scott. Walt Whitman, 1838–1939: A Reference Guide. Boston: Hall, 1981.

"History of 'Republican' Written by Fred G. Beach." Orleans Republican 24 July 1928.

Holloway, Emory. "Washington (1863–1873)." The Uncollected Poetry and Prose of Walt Whitman. 1921. Ed. Holloway. Vol. 1. Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1972. lviii–lix n15.

Kaplan, Justin. Walt Whitman: A Life. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1980.

Linda K. Walker

Anthony Burns was a runaway slave who escaped from his owner in Virginia, fled to Boston, and found employment. His previous owner, upon learning of Burns's new life, had Burns arrested and jailed in Boston on 24 May 1854 under the auspices of the Fugitive Slave Law. Massachusetts abolitionists were enraged, and Thomas Wentworth Higginson even tried to break Burns out of the Boston jail. The rescue attempt failed, and a thousand federal troops conducted Burns in chains through the streets of Boston to the ship which took him back to slavery in Virginia. Two years later Northern sympathizers purchased and freed him; they then sent him to Oberlin College to study for the ministry, after which he became a Baptist minister in Canada. His health had been bad for years, and he died at the age of only twenty-eight.

The government's handling of the Burns incident motivated Whitman to write "A Boston Ballad (1854)" and to include it the next year in the first edition of Leaves of Grass. Although he does not mention Burns by name in the poem, Whitman focuses on the government's violation of individual liberty.

Bibliography

Campbell, Stanley W. The Slave Catchers: Enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law, 1850–1860. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1970.

Reynolds, David S. Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography. New York: Knopf, 1995.

Rossbach, Jeffrey. Ambivalent Conspirators: John Brown, The Secret Six, and a Theory of Slave Violence. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1982.

John T. Matteson

McDonald Clarke, the so-called Mad Poet of Broadway, was a street drifter and poet who influenced Whitman early in the latter's career. A familiar figure in lower Manhattan from his arrival in 1819 until his death, Clarke suffered intermittent attacks of insanity and spent time in the asylum on Blackwell's Island, now Roosevelt Island. When lucid, he spent much of his time wandering up and down Broadway and scribbling verse. His poems, which filled several published volumes, ranged in mood from social satire to the desolate, brooding romanticism that characterized his best work. On 5 March 1842, while in jail for vagrancy, Clarke was found dead, having drowned in water flowing from an open faucet. The young Whitman was captivated both by Clarke's writings and his eccentric career. In the Aurora, Whitman described Clarke as possessing "all the requisites of a great poet" and hailed him as "a true son of song" (Aurora 106). Whitman imitated Clarke's unconventional dress, as well as his techniques of varying the lengths of lines and mixing slang with high poetic diction. In the 18 March 1842 Aurora, two weeks after Clarke's death, Whitman published his own tribute to Clarke, "The Death and Burial of McDonald Clarke." The poem, which laments the failure of the public to embrace and honor the poet during his lifetime, concludes: "Darkly and sadly his spirit has fled, / But his name will long linger in story; / He needs not a stone to hallow his bed; / He's in Heaven, encircled with glory" (Early 26).

Bibliography

Jillson, Clark. Sketch of M'Donald Clarke. Worcester, Mass.: n.p., 1878.

Reynolds, David S. Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography. New York: Knopf, 1995.

Whitman, Walt. The Early Poems and the Fiction. Ed. Thomas L. Brasher. New York: New York UP, 1963.

———. Walt Whitman of the New York Aurora. Ed. Joseph Jay Rubin and Charles H. Brown. State College, Pa.: Bald Eagle, 1950.

Wesley A. Britton

Clemens, popular for his fiction written under the pseudonym "Mark Twain," and Whitman are often compared as vernacular writers of nineteenth-century American democracy. Clemens's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) is often considered the literary companion piece to Leaves of Grass, both works subjects of book bannings that were eventually hailed as turning points in American literature.

Comparisons include the authors' similar backgrounds, time spent as apprentice printers, their personae as self-made, rough-hewn artists, and their sympathy with downtrodden peoples. Both championed American idioms and speech and the individual against conformist society.

Yet the two showed only perfunctory interest in each other. Whitman said Twain "might have been something. He comes near being something: but he never arrives" (qtd. in Kaplan 339). In turn, Twain noted, "If I've become a Whitmanite I'm sorry—I never read 40 lines of him in my life" (qtd. in Gribben 2:764). This claim is probably an exaggeration; Clemens's personal copy of Leaves of Grass contains many of his marginal comments, and in 1892 Clemens-owned Charles L. Webster and Company published Selected Poems, by Walt Whitman with Whitman's special permission.

Clemens provided financial support for Whitman on several occasions, including one hundred dollars for a horse and buggy and two hundred dollars for a cottage to "make the splendid old soul comfortable" (qtd. in Bergman 3). In 1889 Clemens sent Whitman a complimentary copy of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court.

In 1884 Clemens grouped Whitman with other writers in an anecdote, and he attended Whitman's 1887 eulogy for Lincoln at Madison Square Theater in New York. His ambivalent feelings about Whitman were reflected on Whitman's seventieth birthday, when Clemens sent an impersonal, ambiguous telegram, and in an unfinished essay, "The Walt Whitman Controversy," in which Clemens worried about the sexual frankness in Leaves of Grass, saying the book should not be read by children.

Bibliography

Bergman, Herbert. "The Whitman-Twain Enigma Again." Mark Twain Journal 10.3 (1957): 3–9.

Gribben, Alan. Mark Twain's Library: A Reconstruction. 2 vols. Boston: Hall, 1980.

Kaplan, Justin. "Starting from Paumanok . . . and from Hannibal: Whitman and Mark Twain." Confrontation 27–28 (1984): 338–347.

Walter Graffin

English critic and biographer, De Selincourt wrote on Blake and Meredith, as well as Whitman. His 1914 critical biography of Whitman was one of the first to focus mainly on Whitman's style and techniques, perceptively noting that his poetic unit was the line and that the line was determined not by meter but by the thought contained therein. De Selincourt also praised the musical qualities in Whitman's writing, saying that he used words as though they were notes. According to Gay Wilson Allen, he was also the first to assert Whitman's organizational deficiencies, especially in Leaves of Grass, which, according to De Selincourt, had so misleading an arrangement that it somewhat compromised the work's greatness. De Selincourt concluded his evaluation of Whitman by labeling him a spokesman not just for America, but for the ever-changing, life-enhancing spirit of mankind.

Bibliography

Allen, Gay Wilson. The New Walt Whitman Handbook. 1975. New York: New York UP, 1986.

De Selincourt, Basil. Walt Whitman: A Critical Study. 1914. New York: Russell and Russell, 1965.

Martha A. Kalnin

Flora Merrill grew up in rural Canada, and in 1892 she married Howard Denison. She worked as a businesswoman, a journalist, and a suffragist. Though Denison is best known for her efforts in the women's suffrage movement, she also established a Whitman club and edited The Sunset of Bon Echo, the club's journal.

Denison was profoundly influenced by Whitman's poetry. She saw Whitman as a self-expressive, democratic poet who wanted to destroy systems based on the inequality of men (and women). Her position as a regular columnist ("Flora MacDonald") for the Toronto Sunday World provided her the opportunity to disseminate Whitman's ideals and to speak for women and labor groups. After her term as president of the Canadian Suffrage Association (1911–1914), Denison founded Bon Echo, a resort for Whitman enthusiasts, on her own land as a Canadian monument to Whitman, believing that "Canada needs Whitman" (Denison, "Whitman" 4). She also edited Sunset, occasionally contributing articles about Whitman which reflect Whitman's stylistic influence. By founding a society for Whitman, providing a meeting place for it, and producing a journal, Denison helped to increase the popularity of Whitman's poetry.

Bibliography

Denison, Flora MacDonald. "Flora MacDonald." The Sunset of Bon Echo 1.1 (1916): 7–9.

———. "Whitman." The Sunset of Bon Echo 1.1 (1916): 3–4.

Denison, Merrill. "Flora MacDonald Denison, Bon Echo, and Whitman." Walt Whitman Birthplace Bulletin 1 (1957): 17–19.

"Denison, Mrs. Flora MacDonald." The Macmillan Dictionary of Canadian Biography. Ed. W.A. McKay. 4th ed. Toronto: Macmillan, 1978. 206–207.

Stafford, Albert Ernest. "Crusts and Crumbs." The Sunset of Bon Echo 1.1 (1916): 12–15.

Vickie L. Taft

Author of such classic novels as Oliver Twist (1838), Bleak House (1853), and Great Expectations (1861), Charles Dickens, like Whitman, was a journalist as well as a creative writer. Because in both his fiction and nonfiction Dickens advocates social reform, Whitman declared Dickens to be a democratic writer.

Whitman makes this declaration in a February 1842 Brother Jonathan article entitled "Boz and Democracy." Whitman responds to critics of Dickens who argued that the novelist's portrayal of wicked, lower-class characters undermined the cause of democracy. Whitman counters: "'A democratic writer,' I take it, is one, the tendency of whose passages is, to destroy those old land-marks which pride and fashion have set up . . . one whose lines are imbued, from preface to finis, with that philosophy which teaches to pull down the high and bring up the low. I consider Mr. Dickens to be a democratic writer" ("Boz" 243).

Whitman continues his defense of Dickens's portrayal of wicked characters in an April 1842 New York Aurora article attributed to him entitled "Dickens and Democracy." Here, the author insists that Dickens is a lover of humanity and a believer in human virtue, and only portrays vice in order to thwart it by negative example. Whitman makes his final assertion of Dickens's democratic sentiments in an 1846 Brooklyn Daily Eagle article entitled "Boz and His New Paper" in which Whitman claims Dickens is "staunch for the Democratic movement" (Gathering 2:257).

Except for these newspaper pieces, Whitman's writings contain few references to Dickens. Whitman does, however, summarize his attitude toward Dickens in an 1888 conversation with Horace Traubel. In response to Traubel's query about Whitman's "general feeling towards Dickens," Whitman responds that it is one "of great admiration" (Traubel 553).

Bibliography

Traubel, Horace. With Walt Whitman in Camden. Vol. 2. New York: Appleton, 1908.

Whitman, Walt. "Boz and Democracy." Brother Jonathan 26 February 1842: 243–244.

———. The Gathering of the Forces. Ed. Cleveland Rodgers and John Black. 2 vols. New York: Putnam, 1920.

———. Walt Whitman of the New York Aurora. Ed. Joseph Jay Rubin and Charles H. Brown. State College, Pa.: Bald Eagle, 1950.

Donald Yannella

Whitman and Evert Augustus Duyckinck, near contemporaries, nationalistic Young Americans, and contributors to the movement's main periodical outlet, John L. O'Sullivan's United States Magazine and Democratic Review, labored as journalists in New York during the 1840s and early 1850s. Duyckinck probably served as the Review's literary editor and was coeditor and part owner of other radically nationalistic journals such as Arcturus (1840–1842) and the early Literary World (1847–1853). Aside from ideological sympathies, however, Duyckinck—son of a New York publisher, Columbia educated, and an attorney—had little in common with the poet, and Whitman received virtually no acknowledgment from the man who promoted Melville and Poe.

The reasons for Duyckinck's virtually ignoring Whitman are perhaps self-evident. Duyckinck was a complex man; an intellectual and littérateur committed to the democratic principles and social change of Jacksonian America, he was also profoundly religious, an active participant in the hierarchical and conservative Protestant Episcopal Church. Though he was not a reactionary, Duyckinck's deep religious faith would probably have been the principal barrier to a full appreciation of and taste for Whitman's subjects and prosody, and possibly even the man himself. It is true that Duyckinck and his brother's most enduring work, the Cyclopaedia of American Literature (1855), the place where an entry on Whitman would have been most appropriate, was well along in production in 1855 when the first edition of Leaves appeared, and the same plates were used for the 1856 and 1863 printings. However, the latter did not even include Whitman in its Supplement, nor was he acknowledged in the 1875 revised and reset printing. Whitman himself was not surprised to have been omitted from the Ducykincks' Cyclopaedia. He commented to Traubel in 1888 that he was "not even today accepted in New York by the great bogums—much less then." Whitman recalled having met Evert Duyckinck and his brother, George: "they were both 'gentlemanly men' . . . both very clerical looking—thin—wanting in body: men of true proper style, God help 'em!" (Traubel 139).

Duyckinck, however, is associated with the reprinting of one Whitman poem in an 1857 collaborative anthology with Robert Aris Wilmot, The Poets of the Nineteenth Century. In addition, in the early 1850s Duyckinck and his brother-in-law gained control of Justus Redfield's publishing house and thus may have had a financial interest in the firm in 1871 when it published Whitman.

Bibliography

Chielens, Edward E., ed. American Literary Magazines: The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries. New York: Greenwood, 1986.

Pritchard, John Paul. Criticism in America. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1956.

Stafford, John. The Literary Criticism of "Young America": A Study in the Relationship of Politics and Literature. Berkeley: U of California P, 1952.

Traubel, Horace. With Walt Whitman in Camden. Vol. 1. 1906. New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 1961.

Yannella, Donald. "Evert Augustus Duyckinck." Antebellum Writers in New York and the South. Vol. 3 of Dictionary of Literary Biography. Ed Joel Myerson. Detroit: Gale, 1978. 101–109.

———. "Writing the 'Other Way': Melville, the Duyckinck Crowd, and Literature for the Masses." A Companion to Melville Studies. Ed. John Bryant. New York: Greenwood, 1986. 63–81.