WALT WHITMAN
Walt Whitman (1819-1892) and Mark Twain are the two authors whom the
rest of the world have chosen to regard as distinctively American. They
are in fact more strikingly different from European writers than any
other two in their outer and inner reaction against cultural tradition,
though it is an error to regard Americanism as an utterly new thing
instead of a compound of new and old elements. Whitman was born on Long
Island in 1819:
My tongue, every atom of my blood, form'd from this soil, this air,
Born here of parents born here, from parents the same, and their
parents the same.
They were simple, natural, country people,--the mother, mild-mannered
and competent, and the father, "strong, self-sufficient, manly, mean,
anger'd, unjust,"--people with the kind of stalwart naïveté who would
christen three of their sons Andrew Jackson, George Washington, and
Thomas Jefferson. Walt was the second of nine children. From boyhood
he was quite able to take care of himself--amiable, slow-going, fond
of chatting with the common folk of his own kind, and happy out of
doors, whether on the beach or among the Long Island hills. At twelve
he began to work for his living--in a lawyer's office and a doctor's,
in printing shops and small newspaper offices, and in more than one
school. Newspaper work included writing as well as typesetting and
everything between, and writing resulted in his sending accepted
contributions to such respected publications as the _Democratic Review_
and George P. Morris's popular _Mirror_.
From 1841 to 1850 he was more steadily using his pen. He wrote some
eighteen stories for the periodicals and, though he worked in defiance
of the usual schedule, made his way in journalism to the point of
becoming editor of the _Brooklyn Daily Eagle_. In 1848 he moved in a
wider orbit, going down to New Orleans through the Ohio valley to work
on the new _Crescent_, and coming back by way of the Mississippi and
the Great Lakes. In 1850 he was living with his family in Brooklyn.
By this time he had done a great deal of reading, starting with "The
Arabian Nights" and Scott, and moving on by his own choice through the
classics. Always, when he could, he read alone and out of doors; but
seldom has man more completely fulfilled Emerson's behest to compensate
for solitude with society, for he was one of the great comrades of
history. He found his society in places of his own selection--on the
Broadway stages, in the Brooklyn ferryboats, and in the gallery at the
Italian opera.
Here is his own testimony: "--the drivers--a strange, natural
quick-eyed and wondrous race--(not only Rabelais and Cervantes would
have gloated upon them, but Homer and Shakspere would)--how well I
remember them, and must here give a word about them.... They had
immense qualities, largely animal--eating, drinking, women--great
personal pride, in their way--perhaps a few slouches here and there,
but I should have trusted the general run of them, in their simple
good-will and honor, under all circumstances." And of the harbor:
"Almost daily, later ('50 to '60), I cross'd on the boats, often up
in the pilot-houses where I could get a full sweep, absorbing shows,
accompaniments, surroundings." There was a time when he affected fine
clothes, but as he matured his dress and the dress of his ideas became
strikingly informal, more like that of his comrades.
Of the five years before the "Leaves of Grass" appeared too little is
known. At thirty-one he was a natural Bohemian, independent enough not
even to do the conventional Bohemian things like drinking and smoking,
but he had shown no marked promise of achieving anything more than
his own personal freedom. His writing and public speaking had been
commonplace, and his journalistic work respectably successful. Then
in 1855 came the evidence of an immensely expansive development, a
development so great and so unusual that it met the fate of its kind,
receiving from all but a very few neglect, derision, or contempt. John
Burroughs tells of the staff of a leading daily paper in New York,
assembled on Saturday afternoon to be paid off, greeting the passages
that were read aloud to them with "peals upon peals of ironical
laughter." Whitman's family were indifferent. His brother George said
he "didn't read it at all--didn't think it worth reading--fingered it
a little. Mother thought as I did ... Mother said that if 'Hiawatha'
was poetry, perhaps Walt's was." Obscure young men like Thoreau and
Burroughs were moved to early admiration, but their opinion counted for
nothing with the multitude. Emerson was the single man of influence to
"greet [Whitman] at the beginning of a great career." The larger public
paid no attention to him; the smaller, artistic public did what they
always do to a defiantly independent artist. Whitman determined his own
reception when he wrote,
Bearded, sunburnt, gray-neck'd, forbidding, I have arrived,
To be wrestled with as I pass for the solid prizes of the universe,
For such I afford whoever can persevere to win them.
In 1856, in a new form and with added material but under the same
title, there came a second edition that received more attention and
correspondingly more abuse. His frank and often wanton treatment of
sex gave pause to almost every reader, qualifying the approval of his
strongest champions. Emerson wrote to Carlyle: "One book, last summer,
came out in New York, a nondescript monster, which yet had terrible
eyes and buffalo strength, and was indisputably American--which I
thought to send you; but the book throve so badly with the few to whom
I showed it, and wanted good morals so much, that I never did. Yet I
believe now again I shall." In the meanwhile the ultra-respectable--of
the Jaffrey Pyncheon type--were eager to hound Whitman and his
publishers out of society. Undoubtedly the advertising given by his
enemies contributed no little to the circulation of the third and again
enlarged edition of 1860. Of this between four and five thousand copies
were sold in due time.
In 1862, when his brother George was seriously wounded at
Fredericksburg, Whitman became a hospital nurse in Washington. With
his peculiar gifts of comradeship and his life-long acquaintance with
the common man, he was able to give thousands of sufferers the kind of
personal, affectionate attention that helped all, who were not doomed,
to fight their way to recovery. From every side has come the testimony
as to his unique relationship with them. One must be quoted:
Never shall I forget one night when I accompanied him on his rounds
through a hospital, filled with those wounded young Americans whose
heroism he has sung in deathless numbers. There were three rows of
cots, and each cot bore its man. When he appeared, in passing along,
there was a smile of affection and welcome on every face, however
wan, and his presence seemed to light up the place as it might be
lit by the presence of the Son of Love. From cot to cot they called
him, often in tremulous tones or in whispers; they embraced him,
they touched his hand, they gazed at him.... He did the things for
them which no nurse or doctor could do, and he seemed to leave a
benediction at every cot as he passed along. The lights had gleamed
for hours in the hospital that night before he left it, and as he
took his way towards the door, you could hear the voice of many a
stricken hero calling, "Walt, Walt, Walt, come again! come again!"
The fruits in poetry from these years of duress were in some ways the
richest of his lifetime. They were included in the edition of 1865
under the title "Drum-Taps." Here were new poems "of the body and of
the soul," telling of his vigils on the field and in the hospital,
not shrinking from details of horror and death; and here also were
poems that dealt with the implications of the war and of nationalism
militant. "Drum-Taps"--the title poem--and "Beat! Beat! Drums!" sound
the call to arms. "The Song of the Banner at Daybreak" contrasts the
patriotism of the philistine with the patriotism of the idealist.
"Pioneers! O Pioneers!" sings of America for the world, with its
thrillingly prophetic fourth stanza,
Have the elder races halted?
Do they droop and end their lesson, wearied, over there beyond
the seas?
We take up the task eternal, and the burden, and the lesson,
Pioneers! O pioneers!
And "President Lincoln's Burial Hymn" ("When Lilacs last in the
Door-yard Bloom'd") with "O Captain! My Captain!" are preëminent among
the multitude of songs in praise of Lincoln. Whitman wrote fairly in a
letter: "The book is therefore unprecedently sad (as these days are,
are they not?), but it also has the blast of the trumpet and the drum
pounds and whirrs in it, and then an undertone of sweetest comradeship
and human love threads its steady thread inside the chaos and is heard
at every lull and interstice thereof. Truly also, it has clear notes of
faith and triumph."
There were other fateful fruits of his hospital service. It is the
salvation of the surgeon and the nurse that they adopt a professional
attitude toward their tasks; they save individual lives in their
struggle to save human life. But it was the essence of Whitman's
work among the soldiers that he should pour out his compassion
without stint. The drain of energy forced him more than once to leave
Washington for rest at home, and assisting at operations resulted in
poisonous contagions. He seemed to recover from these, only to give
way in 1873 to a consequent attack of paralysis, and, though he had
nineteen years to live, he was never quite free from the shadow of this
menace.
During the latter years, however, public respect increased as his
strength waned. Popularity this self-elected poet of the people never
gained, but he became a poets' poet. A Whitman vogue developed among
the consciously literary, just as a Browning vogue did in the same
decades. It is rather a misfortune than otherwise for any art or artist
to be made the subject of a fad, but the growth of Whitman's repute
was slow and was rooted in the regard of other artists. In the years
near 1870 essays and reviews in England and Germany showed how deeply
"Leaves of Grass" impressed the small group of men who knew what the
essentials of poetry were and were not afraid to acknowledge their
great debt to this strange innovator. The timid culture of America at
first shrank as usual from any native work which was un-European in
aspect, and lagged behind foreign indorsement of something freshly
American just as it did in the cases of Mark Twain and "Joaquin" Miller
(see pp. 293 and 403). When it did begin to take Whitman seriously, the
heartfelt admiration of Freiligrath in Germany and of William Michael
Rossetti and John Addington Symonds in England, the published charge
that America was neglecting a great poet, and the public offer of
assistance from English friends combined to build up for "the good gray
poet" a body of support to which the belated interest of the would-be
intellectuals was a negligible addition. From 1881 to his death eleven
years later the income from his writings was sufficient to maintain him
in "decent poverty."
In "Myself and Mine" Whitman delivered an admonition in spite of which
he has been discussed in a whole alcoveful of books and in innumerable
lectures:
I call to the world to distrust the accounts of my friends, but
listen to my enemies--as I myself do;
I charge you, too, forever reject those who would expound me--for
I cannot expound myself;
I charge that there be no theory nor school founded out of me;
I charge you to leave all free, as I have left all free.
The comment and the controversy which have accumulated around his
poems and himself center about two nodal points: one is the relatively
obvious consideration of the objections to his poetic form, his subject
matter, and his conduct, and the other--far more complex and subtle--is
the statement and appraisal of his philosophy of life.
Prejudice and ignorance have had altogether too much to say about
Whitman's versification,--as they still have in connection with the
freer verse forms of the present day. Two or three simple facts should
be stated at the outset, by way of clearing the ground. His earliest
poetry was written in conventional form; the form of "Leaves of Grass"
was the result neither of laziness nor of inability to deal with the
established measures. Throughout his work there are recurrent passages
in regular rimed meter. "O Captain! My Captain!" (1865), "Ethiopia
Saluting the Colors" (1870), and the song of "The Singer in the Prison"
(1870) are deliberate resorts to the old ways. More likely to escape
the attention are unlabeled bits scattered through poems in Whitman's
usual manner. The opening of the "Song of the Broad-Axe" is in eight
measures of trochaic tetrameter with a single rime--it sounds like
Emerson's; and the first four lines of section 14 in "Walt Whitman,"
or the "Song of Myself," are iambic heptameters, a perfect stanza.
Furthermore, he was not utterly alone in his generation. Similar
experiments by some of his contemporaries are almost forgotten, because
there was no vital relation between form and content; because there was
nothing vital in them; but Whitman's rhythms survive because they are
as alive as the wind in the tree tops.
He theorized out his art in detail and referred to his lines as
apparently "lawless at first perusal, although on closer examination a
certain regularity appears, like the recurrence of lesser and larger
waves on the sea-shore, rolling in without intermission, and fitfully
rising and falling." His feeling,--and this is the right word for a
question of artistic form, which should not be determined primarily by
the intellect,--his feeling was that the idea which is being expressed
should govern from moment to moment the form into which it is cast,
since any pattern imposed on a long poem must handicap freedom. In many
a descriptive passage there is a succession of nice adjustments of
word and rhythm to the thing being described. The flight of birds, the
play of waves, the swaying of branches, the thousandfold variations of
motion, are easy to reproduce and easy to perceive, but Whitman went
far beyond these to the innate suggestions of things and of ideas.
At the same time--not to be occupied in a search for variety which
becomes merely chaos--he adopted a succession of pattern rhythms,
taking a simple, free measure and modifying it in the reiterative
form frequently used by Emerson and common to "Hiawatha." There was
some acumen in Mrs. Whitman's comparison, for Longfellow's assumption
of "frequent repetitions" was a reverting to the parallelism that
prevails in most folk poetry, the same parallelism which is the warp
of Whitman's patterns. Whitman was just as conscious in his choice
of diction as in his selection of measures. Poetry, he agreed with
Wordsworth, was choked with outworn phrases; the language of the people
should be the source of a poetic tongue. From this he could evolve a
"perfectly clear, plate-glassy style."
In execution he was, of course, uneven. He wrote scores upon scores of
passages that were full of splendor, of majesty, of rugged strength,
of tender loveliness. In general it is true that the lines which
deal with definite aspects of natural and physical beauty are most
effective--lines of which "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking" are
the purest type; but many of the poems and sections in which concrete
imagery is summoned to the explication of a general idea are often
finely successful--as in his stanzas on the poet, or on himself, "the
divine average," for example:
My foothold is tenon'd and mortis'd in granite;
I laugh at what you call dissolution;
And I know the amplitude of time.
To the hostile critic he offered an abundance of lines for unfriendly
quotation, as almost every prolific poet has done. Furthermore, he
opened to attack all the series of "catalogue," or "inventory,"
passages, in which he abandoned the artistic habit of selective
suggestion and overwhelmed the reader with an avalanche of detail.
It is not necessary to defend these vagaries or excesses; they are
obvious eccentricities in Whitman's workmanship, as are also the wanton
barbarisms of wording into which he occasionally lapsed. There are good
English equivalents for _omnes_ and _allons_ and _dolce_ and _résumé_,
and better ones than _promulge_, _philosoph_, and _imperturbe_.
The most violent objections launched at Whitman were based on his
unprecedented frankness in matters of sex. It was the habit of the
Victorian period, whether in England or in America, to shroud in an
unwholesome silence the impulse to beget life and the facts surrounding
it as if they were shameful matters. In consequence a central element
in social and individual experience tended to become a subject of
morbid curiosity to young people and one of furtive self-indulgence to
adults. This bred vicious ignorance, distorted half-knowledge, and,
among other things, hysterical protestations at any open violation of
the code in action or in speech. People seemed to feel that they were
vindicating their own probity by the voluminousness of their invective.
So Whitman was made a scapegoat, just as Byron was at an earlier date;
and the merits of the controversies are obscured by the fact that
however much in error the poets may have been, their accusers were
hardly less in the wrong. Out of the babel of discussion one clearest
note emerged in the form of a letter from an Englishwoman to W. M.
Rossetti, who had lent her "Leaves of Grass":
I rejoice to have read these poems; and if I or any true woman
feel that, certainly _men_ may hold their peace about them. You
will understand that I still think that instinct of silence I
spoke of a right and beautiful thing; and that it is only lovers
and poets (perhaps only lovers and _this_ poet) who may say what
they will--the lover to his own, the poet to all because all are
in a sense his own. Shame is like a very flexible veil that takes
faithfully the shape of what it covers--lovely when it hides a lovely
thing, ugly when it hides an ugly one. There is not any fear that the
freedom of such impassioned words will destroy the sweet shame, the
happy silence, that enfold and brood over the secrets of love in a
woman's heart.
This single judgment naturally cannot serve as a universal ultimatum,
but it should serve as a warning for those who jump to the conclusion
that only one mood is possible for the writer or reader of such
passages. Those who are disturbed by them should be willing not to read
the few score lines that are responsible for all the turmoil.
The only other charge against Whitman worth mentioning--the complaint
at his "colossal egotism"--is a subject more for interpretation than
for defense. Properly understood, it leads far toward an understanding
of the whole man. In the first place, if all his "I's" should be taken
literally they would amount to no more than an unusual frankness of
artistic expression. Every creative artist is of necessity an egotist.
He is bound to believe in the special significance of what he is
privileged to utter in words or tones or lines and colors. The whole
anthology of poems on the poet and his work is a catalogue of supreme
egotisms, even though most of them are written in the third person
rather than the first. Whitman cast aside the regular locution without
apology. But, as a further caution to the supersensitive, his "I's" do
not always mean the same thing. Sometimes they are explicitly personal,
as in,
I, now, thirty-six years old, in perfect health, begin,
Hoping to cease not till death.
Sometimes they stand just as explicitly for "the average man." This
he explained in the preface to the 1876 edition: "I meant 'Leaves of
Grass,' as published, to be the poem of average Identity (of _yours_,
whoever you are, now reading these lines).... To sing the Song of that
law of average Identity, and of Yourself, consistently with the divine
law of the universal, is a main purpose of these 'Leaves.'"
Finally, the egotistic "I" is often a token of the religious mysticism
at the back of his faith. Without an understanding of this factor in
Whitman he cannot be known. "Place yourself," said William James in
his lecture on Bergson, "at the center of a man's philosophic vision
and you understand at once all the different things it makes him
write or say. But keep outside, use your post-mortem method, try to
build the philosophy up out of the single phrases, taking first one
and then another, and seeking to make them fit, and of course you
fail. You crawl over the thing like a myopic ant over a building,
tumbling into every microscopic crack or fissure, finding nothing
but inconsistencies, and never suspecting that a centre exists." It
is James again who gives the exact cue to Whitman's mysticism, this
time in a chapter of "Varieties of Religious Experience." It is the
experience of the mystic, he explains, to arrive in inspired moments
at a height from which all truth seems to be divinely revealed. This
revelation is not a flashlight perception of some single aspect of
life, but a sense of the entire scheme of creation and a conviction
that the truth has been imparted direct from God. It is clear, like the
view from a mountain top, but, like such a view, it is incapable of
adequate expression in words,--"an intuition," and now the words are
Whitman's, "of the absolute balance, in time and space, of the whole
of this multifarious, mad chaos of fraud, frivolity, hoggishness--this
revel of fools, and incredible make-believe and general unsettledness,
we call _the world_; a soul-sight of that divine clue and unseen thread
which holds the whole congeries of things, all history and time,
and all events, however trivial, however momentous, like a leashed
dog in the hand of the hunter." It was the fashion of speech of the
Hebrew prophets, when thus inspired, to preface their declarations
with "Thus saith the Lord"; Whitman, with his simpler, "I say" or "I
tell you," regarded himself no less as mouthpiece of the Most High.
The vision made him certain of an underlying unity in all life and of
the coming supremacy of a law of love; it made him equally certain of
the mistakenness of human conditions and unqualifiedly direct in his
uttered verdicts.
This sense of the wholeness of life--a transcendental doctrine--made
all the parts deeply significant to him who could perceive their
meaning. The same mystic consciousness is beneath all these passages,
and all the others like them:
I celebrate myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
* * * * *
The wild gander leads his flock through the cool night;
_Ya-honk!_ he says, and sounds it down to me like an invitation;
(The pert may suppose it meaningless, but I listen close;
I find its purpose and place up there toward the wintry sky.)
* * * * *
I believe a leaf of grass no less than the journey-work of the stars,
And the pismire is equally perfect, and a grain of sand, and the egg
of the wren,
And the tree-toad is a chef-d'oeuvre for the highest,
And the running blackberry would adorn the parlors of heaven,
And the narrowest hinge in my hand puts to scorn all machinery,
And the cow crunching with depress'd head surpasses any statue,
And a mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels,
And I could come every afternoon of my life to look at the farmer's
girl boiling her iron tea-kettle and baking short-cake.
It explains, too, the otherwise bewildering excesses of the "inventory"
passages, which, for all their apparent unrelatedness, are always
brought up with a unifying, inclusive turn. In the universe, then,--and
Whitman thought of the word in its literal sense of a great and single
design,--man was the supreme fact to whom all its objects "continually
converge"; as man was God-created, Whitman was no respecter of
persons, but a lover of the common folk, in whom the destiny of
human-kind resided more than in presidents or kings. And since he
considered the race in the light of ages upon ages, the generating of
life seemed to him a matter of holiest import.
For the carrying out of such a design the only fit vehicle is the
purest sort of democracy; all other working bases of human association
are only temporary obstacles to the course of things; and as Whitman
saw the nearest approach to the right social order in his own country,
he was an American by conviction as well as by the accident of place.
Governments, he felt, were necessary conveniences, and so-called rulers
were servants of the public from whom their powers were derived. The
greatest driving power in life was public opinion, and the greatest
potential molder of public opinion was the bard, seer, or poet. This
poet was to be not a reformer but a preacher of a new gospel; he was,
in fact, to be infinitely patient in face of "meanness and agony
without end" while he invoked the principles which would one day put
them to rout.
I hear it was charged against me that I sought to destroy institutions;
But really I am neither for nor against institutions;
(What indeed have I in common with them?--Or what with the
destruction of them?)
Only I will establish in the Mannahatta, and in every city of These
States, inland and seaboard,
And in the fields and woods, and above every keel, little or large,
that dents the water,
Without edifices, or rules, or trustees, or any argument,
The institution of the dear love of comrades.
To the bard he attributed knowledge of science and history,--the
learning of the broadly educated man,--but, beyond that, wisdom:
He bestows on every object or quality its fit proportion, neither more
nor less....
He is no arguer, he is judgment--(Nature accepts him absolutely;)
He judges not as the judge judges, but as the sun falling round a
helpless thing:
As he sees farthest, he has the most faith.
He is no writer of "poems distilled from foreign poems"; he is the
propounder of
the idea of free and perfect individuals,
For that idea the bard walks in advance, leader of leaders,
The attitude of him cheers up slaves and horrifies foreign despots.
In America, whose "veins are filled with poetical stuff," Whitman was
certain not only of the need for poets but of their ultimate power; for
_in_ America, the cradle of the race, and _through_ the bards God's
will was to be done.
Whitman arrived at the acme of self-reliance. With the mystic's sense
of revealed truth at hand, and a devout conviction that it was the
poet's duty--his duty--to show men a new heaven and a new earth, he
went on his way with perfect faith. Emerson wrote of self-reliance in
general, "Adhere to your act, and congratulate yourself if you have
done something strange and extravagant, and broken the monotony of a
decorous age." Yet he remonstrated with Whitman, and in the attempt
to modify his extravagance used arguments which were unanswerable.
Nevertheless, said the younger poet, "I felt down in my soul the clear
and unmistakable conviction to disobey all, and pursue my own way";
in doing which he bettered Emerson's instructions by disregarding
his advice. Hostile or brutal criticism left him quite unruffled. It
reënforced him in his conclusions and cheered him with the thought
that they were receiving serious attention. After Swinburne's fiercest
attack says Burroughs: "I could not discover either in word or look
that he was disturbed a particle by it. He spoke as kindly of Swinburne
as ever. If he was pained at all, it was on Swinburne's account and not
on his own. It was a sad spectacle to see a man retreat upon himself as
Swinburne had done."
His daily preoccupation with "superior beings and eternal interests"
gave him some of the elevations and some of the contempts of the
Puritan fathers. It leads far to think of Whitman as a Puritan stripped
of his dogma. It accounts for his daily absorption in things of
religion, for his democratic zeal, his disregard for the adornments
of life, even for his subordination of the sentiment of love to the
perpetuation of the race. In these respects he dwelt on the broad and
permanent factors in human life, regarding the finite and personal
only as he saw them in the midst of all time and space. And this
leads to the man in his relation to science, with which Puritan dogma
was at odds. Whitman was not in the usual sense a "nature poet." The
beauties of nature exerted little appeal on him. He had nothing to
say in detached observations on the primrose, or the mountain tops,
or the sunset. But nature was, next to his own soul, the source of
deepest truth to him, a truth which science in his own day was making
splendidly clear. The dependence of biological science on the material
universe did not shake his faith in immortality. He simply took what
knowledge science could contribute and understood it in the light of
his faith, which transcended any science. Among modern poets he was one
of the earliest to chant the pæan of creative evolution.
Rise after rise bow the phantoms behind me,
Afar down I see the huge first Nothing--I know I was even there,
I waited unseen and always, and slept through the lethargic mist,
And took my time, and took no hurt from the fetid carbon.
Before I was born out of my mother, generations guided me,
My embryo has never been torpid--nothing could overlay it.
For it the nebula cohered to an orb,
The long, slow strata piled to rest it in,
Vast vegetables gave it sustenance,
Monstrous sauroids transported it in their mouths, and deposited it
with care.
All forces have been steadily employed to complete and delight me,
Now I stand on this spot with my Soul.
It is impossible, as all critics agree, to compass Whitman in a book
or essay or compress him into a summary. He was an immensely expansive
personality whose writings are as broad as life itself. It is almost
equally impossible for one who has really read over and through and
under his poems to speak of him in measured terms. The world is coming
round to Whitman much faster than he expected. Every great step in
human progress is a step in the direction he was pointing. His larger
faith, whether so recognized or not, is yearly the faith of more and
more thinking people. And in an immediate way his influence on the
generation of living poets is incomparably great.
BOOK LIST
=_Individual Author_=
WALT WHITMAN. Works. Selections from the prose and poetry of Whitman.
O. L. Triggs, editor. 1902. 10 vols. The best single volumes
are Leaves of Grass, Complete Poetical Works, and Complete
Prose Works. (Small, Maynard.) 1897 and 1898. During Whitman's
lifetime ten successive enlarged editions of Leaves of Grass were
published: in 1855, 1856, 1860, 1867, 1871, 1876, 1881 (Boston),
1881 (Philadelphia), 1888, 1889, 1891. Other titles are as
follows: *Drum-Taps, 1865; *Passage to India, 1871; *Democratic
Vistas, 1871; Memoranda during the War, 1875; Specimen Days and
Collect, 1882, 1883; Two Rivulets, 1876; *November Boughs, 1888;
*Good-bye, My Fancy, 1891. (Titles with the mark * were included
as new sections in the next forthcoming edition of Leaves of
Grass.)
=Bibliographies=
Selections from Whitman. O. L. Triggs, editor. 1898.
Library of Literary Criticism of English and American Authors,
Vol. VIII, pp. 129-153. C. W. Moulton, editor. 1905. Cambridge
History of American Literature, Vol. II, pp. 551-581.
=Biography and Criticism=
There is no complete standard biography. The best single volume
surveys are Walt Whitman, by G. R. Carpenter, 1909 (_E. M. L.
Ser._); and Walt Whitman: his Life and Works, by Bliss Perry,
1906 (_A. M. L. Ser._).
BINNS, H. B. A Life of Walt Whitman. 1905.
BOYNTON, P. H. Whitman's Idea of the State. _New Republic_, Vol.
VII, p. 139.
BROOKS, VAN WYCK. America's Coming of Age. 1915.
BURROUGHS, JOHN. Notes on Walt Whitman as Poet and Person. 1867.
BURROUGHS, JOHN. Whitman: a Study. 1896.
CARPENTER, EDWARD. Days with Walt Whitman. 1906.
CHAPMAN, J. J. Emerson and Other Essays. 1892.
DART, W. K. Walt Whitman in New Orleans. _Pub. Louisiana Hist.
Soc._, Vol. VII, pp. 97-112.
ELLIOT, C. N. Walt Whitman as Man, Poet, and Friend. 1915.
FERGUSON, J. D. American Literature in Spain. 1916.
FOERSTER, NORMAN. Whitman as Poet of Nature. _Pub. Mod. Lang.
Assoc. of Amer._, Vol. XXI (N. S.), pp. 736-758.
GOULD, E. P. Anne Gilchrist and Walt Whitman. 1900.
GUMMERE, F. B. Democracy and Poetry. 1911.
HOLLOWAY, EMORY. Cambridge History of American Literature, Vol.
II, Bk. II, chap. i.
JONES, P. M. Influence of Whitman on the Origin of "Vers Libre."
_Modern Language Review_, Vol. XI, p. 186.
JONES, P. M. Whitman in France. _Modern Language Review_, Vol.
X, p. 1.
LANIER, SIDNEY. The English Novel. 1883.
LEE, G. S. Order for the Next Poet. _Putnam's Magazine_, Vol. I,
p. 697; Vol. II, p. 99.
MACPHAIL, ANDREW. Walt Whitman, in _Essays in Puritanism_. 1905.
MORE, P. E. Walt Whitman, in _Shelburne Essays_. Fourth Series.
1906.
PATTEE, F. L. American Literature since 1870, chap. ix. 1915.
PERRY, BLISS. Walt Whitman: his Life and Work. 1906 and 1908.
SANTAYANA, GEORGE. Walt Whitman, in _Interpretations of Poetry
and Religion_. 1900.
STEDMAN, E. C. Poets of America. 1885.
STEVENSON, R. L. Familiar Studies of Men and Books. 1882.
SWINBURNE, A. C. Studies in Prose and Poetry. 1894.
TRAUBEL, H. L. _In re_ Walt Whitman. 1893.
TRAUBEL, H. L. With Walt Whitman in Camden, p. 473. 1906. (This
is Vol. I of Traubel's diary notes made during Whitman's life.
Vol. II, 1908; Vol. III, 1914. Vol. IV is announced for early
publication, and the whole work, when completed, will fill
eight or ten volumes.)
WALLING, W. E. Whitman and Traubel. 1916.
TOPICS AND PROBLEMS
Select and discuss poems and stanzas in Whitman which are written in
conventional rhythms.
Select and discuss passages in which he employs changing rhythms
adjusted to the persons or objects in hand.
Study Whitman's diction with reference to his use of the average man's
speech and to his occasional use of foreign words, corrupted words
(whether foreign or English), and coined words.
List and discuss poems which are clearly autobiographical. Does this
list include any personal lyrics?
List and discuss poems written in the first person but intended as
poems of "the divine average."
Select and discuss poems and passages on the theme of companionship.
Select and discuss poems and passages which express his sense of
universal law.
Read his longer poems for passages on the subject of the state, the
rulers, and public opinion.
Read and discuss his utterances on poetry and the poet, noting
especially "The Song of the Banner at Daybreak" and "As I sat by Blue
Ontario's Shore."
Read and discuss Whitman's utterances on war and nationalism.
Read for an estimate of his feeling for the beauties of nature.