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Such approaches to American literature were necessary to offset the earlier perception ofthe nation's

I wish it were not so.

And these names were not said; they were sung in a surge of enthusiasm and adoration.

Americanism.

Many important American poets were completely unknown in Slovenia, but this was not the case with Whitman

C.D.Albin"Promise to California, A" (1860)"Promise to California, A" (1860)Whitman's "A Promise to California

" originally appeared as number 30 in the "Calamus" cluster of the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass and

promises to travel west and teach his fellow citizens about the vigorous camaraderie necessary for American

"Promise to California, A" (1860)

with which he regarded the western landscape and the men and women who erected homes, towns, and cities

is not so much a hymn to beauty, innocence, or creative fertility as it is a hymn in praise of population

C.D.AlbinWest, The AmericanWest, The AmericanFor Walt Whitman, the American West represented a point

who would become the collective progenitors of his golden American future.

Frontier: American Literature and the American West. By Fussell.

Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth. By Smith.

West, The American

Anne Gilchrist is best known in American literature as the Englishwoman who fell passionately in love

Hers were frequent and ardent, his less frequent and friendly.

Anne and Walt met in the hotel where the Gilchrists were staying until they found a house.

almost daily visitor at their house on North 22nd Street, entertaining his friends as freely as if it were

Her letters—no longer passionate but reflecting a loving companionship—were frequent, and she worked

majority of his poems: he praises both heterosexual and homosexual love in the "Children of Adam" (1860

) and the "Calamus" (1860) poems, and the narrator of "Song of Myself" (1855) empathizes with blacks

Epicurus.Epicurus's notion of prudence may have influenced Whitman's writing, including his definition of the American

American Literature 10 (1938): 202–213.Jones, W.T.

Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page, 1921.Wright, Frances.

returned to France and became acquainted with the dadaists, several French writers, and a number of Americans

In 1923, Cowley returned to New York City, where he published Exile's Return (1934), a literary history

and 1947, Cowley insisted that the early versions of Whitman's poems are his most powerful, for they were

Cowley's opinions on Whitman thus represent a modern and considered evaluation of a poetic forebear to American

to Jane Baillie Welsh in 1826, Carlyle moved to Craigenputtock, where he wrote numerous essays that were

Carlyle also began to lecture; his May 1840 lectures were published in On Heroes, Hero Worship & the

Carlyle's tenets were further outlined in works such as Chartism (1839) and Past and Present (1843).

Carlyle's later writings were increasingly conservative and antidemocratic, as evidenced in Latter-Day

"Carlyle from American Points of View." Prose Works 1892. Ed. Floyd Stovall. Vol. 1.

emigrating to America in numbers exceeded only by the Irish.

Swedes and Danes were also emigrating but in smaller proportions.

Concurrently, industry and commerce were transforming the Scandinavian countries.

Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 1995. 357–362.Anderson, Carl L. "Whitman in Sweden."

Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 1995. 339–351.Naess, Harald. Knut Hamsun og Amerika.

Hamilton included him in the fifth and last volume of his vast collection of parodies of English and American

Hamilton pointed out that most of the parodies of Whitman were unfair because so few people had actually

American Literature in Parody. New York: Twayne, 1955.Hamilton, Walter, ed.

Parodies of the Works of English and American Authors. 1888. Vol. 5.

New York: American Library Service, 1923.Wells, Carolyn, ed. A Parody Anthology.

ViceSociety for the Suppression of ViceVice societies flourished in the late nineteenth century in many American

cities.

Funded by the wealthy, these watchdog groups were powerful lobbies for anti-obscenity and anticontraception

Although they eventually earned the ridicule and contempt of a majority of thinking people, they were

O'Connor) were convinced that the Boston district attorney had merely been his tool.

American Quarterly 17 (1965): 92–103.Faner, Robert. Walt Whitman & Opera.

approve[d]" of Stoddard's "adhesive nature," but felt compelled to remind him of the virtues of "American

Although Stoddard was vastly inferior to Whitman as a poet, they were kindred spirits in their need for

Gay American History: Lesbians and Gay Men in the U.S.A. New York: Crowell, 1976. Traubel, Horace.

Of the 1,300 items included, about half were not previously published, but even the ones that can be

Furness, ed., Walt Whitman's Workshop [1928]) were never before edited so meticulously or presented so

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).

American Literary Realism, 1870-1910 18 (1985): 271-277. Whitman, Walt. Daybooks and Notebooks. Ed.

Dictionary of American Biography. Ed. Allen Johnson. Vol. 3. New York: Scribner's, 1946. 511–512.

"Poem of The Road," the poem received its present imaginative title in 1867; in 1881 its 224 lines were

gospel of hope, and by its stirring musicality.During the 1850s the open road was a distinctively American

proposed limitless journey, the persona reflects Whitman's known doubts about transforming the flawed American

Wheat," this exquisite lyric meditation on death was number 4 in the "Leaves of Grass" cluster in the 1860

metamorphosis" suggests a dynamic metaphor for the transformative powers of nature, for what Whitman called American

published as "Poem of Women," its original placement immediately following "Poem of Walt Whitman, An American

In 1860 and 1867, the poem was included, untitled, in the "Leaves of Grass" cluster; it acquired its

As in Whitman's self-portraits, Goethe, Schiller, and Burns were said to be descended from perfect mothers.BibliographyAspiz

As his Memoranda During the War and Specimen Days volumes attest, he felt that deaths and agonies were

cleans and dresses amputations and wounds with "putrid gangrene" (section 3) and blood infections that were

infections, the poem's wounded more poignantly represent the agonies of the armies and the wounded American

His postwar poems, singularly free from dramatizing the deaths of others, were largely concerned with

human consciousness "does not believe in its own death," says Sigmund Freud, "it behaves as if it were

section 2)—the continuity of the spirit through life and death.The introductory poem of the third (1860

New York: American Art Association, Anderson Galleries, 1936.Stovall, Floyd. Introduction.

New York: American Book, 1939. xi–lii.Tillich, Paul. "The Eternal Now." The Meaning of Death. Ed.

Titled "Poem of Faces" in 1856 and "A Leaf of Faces" in 1860 and 1867, it acquired its present title

Underlying both pseudosciences were sexual/evolutionary assumptions.

Trall, a hydropathic physician, established the first water-cure establishment in New York City (1844

Dictionary of American Medical Biography. Ed. Martin Kaufman et al.

Its factual but unacknowledged publishers were Fowler and Wells, distributors of books and periodicals

these thirty-two Poems I stereotype to print several thousand copies of" (Comprehensive 730), sales were

Readers were embarrassed by such overtly sexual poems as "Spontaneous Me" and "A Woman Waits for Me,"

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

and Always Goes Forth, Forever and Forever" in 1856, and grouped in the "Leaves of Grass" cluster in 1860

The statement that "all the changes of city and country" became "part of him" signals his growing powers

His questionings are not resolved, but his departure from home, through the bustling city, affords him

American Quarterly 18 (1966): 655-666. ____. Walt Whitman and the Body Beautiful.

There were a few courses in American literature, but they were optional and did not count toward a degree

Whitman was already the "lover of populous pavements, dweller in Mannahatta my city,"84 as he proclaimed

His American friends were also active.

In his papers were found many clippings from the American Phrenological Journal; see CW, X, 75, 86, 89

These accusations were taken up by Frances Winwar in American Giant: Walt Whitman and His Times, but

Whitman was not a transcendentalist, since transcendentalism was a New England phenomenon affecting American

The catalogues he so frequently inserted in his poems were catalogues of miracles.

In his eyes, all things were both physical and spiritual presences.

The Grounding of American Poetry: Charles Olson and the Emersonian Tradition.

American Renaissance. London: Oxford UP, 1941.Thoreau, Henry David.

Constance Rourke included him in her inventory of American Humor (1931), but Jesse Bier in The Rise and

Fall of American Humor (1968) made a case for his humorlessness and protested against Richard Chase's

American Transcendental Quarterly 22 (1974): 86–91.Breton, André. Preface.

Studies in American Humor ns 5 (1986): 62–71.Thackeray, W.M.

God Be With the Clown: Humor in American Poetry. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1984. Humor

In 1860 he kept repeating: "I announce uncompromising liberty and equality" ("So Long!")

; "Of Equality—As if it harmed me, giving others the same chances and rights as myself—As if it were

Besides, he knew from his own experience that education and social origin were of little importance and

So by 1860 Whitman had quite naturally arrived at the notions of "average man" and "divine average,"

which from that time on were everywhere present in Leaves of Grass: "O such themes—equalities!

The word "soirée" appears in "City of Orgies" and "aplomb" in "Song at Sunset" and "Me Imperturbe."

Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd," "Spain 1873–74," "Ashes of Soldiers," "A Voice from Death," and the 1860

This includes in particular a list of French words, most of which were used in Leaves of Grass.

American Renaissance. London: Oxford UP, 1941.Pound, Louise. Selected Writings.

American Speech 1 (1926): 421–430.Whitman, Walt. An American Primer. Ed. Horace Traubel.

to understand the violence of the French Revolution, caused by the "abject poverty" to which they were

His two dissertations were published.

His poems surged out of his unconscious, liberating his homosexual eroticism and everything American

They were the expression of his autoeroticism and enabled him to build up his "identity," his soul, free

Stuart Merrill and Léon Bazalgette, the author of a romanticized biography of Whitman, denied the American

Leaves of Grass is not taught in the University of Dakar because, as the professor in charge of American

Sédar Senghor, and to the foundation of the Union of South Africa and the league of nations, which were

Emerson and Higginson—Waldo and Wentworth, as they were known to their friends—were two of the most formidable

In the turn the American Puritans then gave to it, these correlations were extended further from innerselftoouterself

When read in relation to their pre-1860 versions, the poet’s later revi- sions of the 1860 poems, in

Press, 1962); Stephen John Mack, PragmaticWhitman: Reimagining American Democ- racy (Iowa City: University

Tompkins, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790–1860 (NewYork: Oxford University

IrvingBakerRoughsRoughsAspiring to produce the first distinctly American poetry, Whitman modeled Leaves

bold announcement of himself in the first three editions of Leaves of Grass as "Walt Whitman, an American

disturbed by the violent tendencies of the roughs, claims that Whitman places the term between "American

and, in general, the rejection of the persona was a reaction to criticism from his reviewers, who were

Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 1989.Reynolds, David. Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography.

1888, reportedly because he felt "triumphant democracy disgraced" upon hearing that British, not Americans

, were raising money for the destitute poet (Whitman 85, nl).

Reynolds draws several connections between the two, especially their praise of American technology as

naming items seriatim, not all of which need be of the same class, as with "passion" in line two: "O'er city

(1881)"Thou Orb Aloft Full-Dazzling" (1881)Published with the title "A Summer Invocation" in The American

the sun, addressing it by an ancient rhetorical device—the apostrophe, which he often used—as if it were

But always more important were the resources of men and women, and of himself, as objects to treasure

American Literature 27 (1955): 56–61.Kalita, Dwight. "Whitman and the Correspondent Breeze."

The American Renaissance: The History and Literature of an Era. Ed.

"The American Epic." Southern Humanities Review 5 (1971): 265–280.McWilliams, John P., Jr.

The American Epic: Transforming a Genre, 1770–1860.

The American Quest for a Supreme Fiction: Whitman's Legacy in the Personal Epic.

The Continuity of American Poetry. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1961.Traubel, Horace.

David B.Baldwin"I Sit and Look Out" (1860)"I Sit and Look Out" (1860)First published in the 1860 edition

"I Sit and Look Out" (1860)

halcyon," well chosen for his purposes in meaning, sound, and rhythm.Not all of Whitman's latter days were

These were the sorts of men and women whose fragmentary biographies are scattered liberally throughout

Even the public figures were treated in a way to stress their modest human traits.Of the two genders,

Song of Myself" roams freely among Americans, their occupations, activities, relations, natures.

Now the soldiers become, as it were, the readers, as Whitman is able in fact to reach out and touch those

His three years nursing in the Washington hospitals were surely heroic in humanitarian terms.

," which Whitman used as the closing poem of Leaves from the 1860 edition on.Bibliography Whitman, Walt

Review, TheWestminster Review, TheAmong the powerful arbiters of taste in nineteenth-century England were

These popular British magazines were often pirated in American editions.

periodicals in his editorial pages reveals that ideas which some have thought he picked up from American

Whitman's enthusiasm for the Westminster Review during the 1850s, the attack on his poems in the October 1860

A defense of Leaves of Grass in the Brooklyn City News on 10 October was almost certainly written by

America's neglect of Whitman, concluding that Whitman was "one of the greatest natural forces in American

"Years of Ferment: American Literary Criticism Enters the Twentieth Century."

American Studies International 20.4 (1982): 31–45. Schwab, Arnold T.

American Literature 38 (1966): 208–218. ———. "James Huneker's Criticism of American Literature."

American Literature 29 (1957): 64–78. Huneker, James Gibbons (1857–1921)

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.

Robert Burns, however, speaks to the American spirit, for he loved the plough and knew the working man

In "The Bible as Poetry," Whitman finds the roots of American democracy in the Old and New Testament.

American and the importance of the overlooked Spanish influence.

evolution of poetry in America, was written in 1881 and published in the February issue of the North American

process—present its own great literatures (476).Whitman's praise for Shakespeare's profound influence on American

Only then would the universal appeal of American literature rise above the great works of John Milton

"Walt Whitman: Poet of the American Culture-Soul."

W.BarnettLiteratureLiteratureWalt Whitman's conception of literature grew, in part, from his larger theory of American

He was the great savior, come to grant salvation to the American common man: "The priest departs, the

literature is surely to become the justification and reliance, (in some respects the sole reliance,) of American

It seems as if, so far, there were some natural repugnance between a literary and professional life,

And in "American National Literature," he pleaded with the reader to see the simplicity of his argument