Specimen Days

Walt Whitman is mainly known as a poet, and hardly known for his prose writings. Specimen days in America, published in 1882 is his second work of prose that was published in his lifetime. In the 1830s the young Whitman, as a teenager, working as a printer's assistant, started contributing articles to newspapers, and in 1838 he founded a newspaper and worked on it as its first editor. He continued working on various other newspapers. Whitman is known to have been seriously writing poetry during the second half of the 1840s, but it wasn't until 1855 when his first volume of poetry was published, a slim volume of just 12 poems entitled Leaves of Grass.

In fact, Whitman wrote a lot more prose, but some of that wasn't discovered until 2016. show more Walt Whitman wrote a novel, Life and Adventures of Jack Engle, which was serialized in 1852. He also wrote a series of articles Manly Health and Training, literally "Man's Health". In 1877, he published Democratic Vistas, a book partly about America and partly literary criticism.

Specimen Days is likewise hard to pinpoint. What kind of book is it, really? It seems to be a bit of everything, some parts are most likely diary entries, and some are memoirs, some are essay-like meditations. Whitman wrote that he first wanted to call it "Cedar-Plums Like" and he describes it as "a melange of loafing, looking, hobbling, sitting, traveling—a little thinking thrown in for salt, some literary meditations, some of my own caprices, meditations, egotism (...).

The first entry or first passage of Specimen Days seems to be an editorial note by Whitman. It is dated July 2nd, 1882, and observes that the work before us is "incongruous and full of skips and jumps (...) a huddle of diary-jottings, war-memoranda of 1862-'65, Nature-notes of 1877-'81, with Western and Canadian observations". On the whole, the work seems very spontaneous, as free of restraints as the best parts of Leaves of Grass. However, the work as a whole is thoroughly edited, as is shown by the extensive notes that are provided. They are called "end notes", but they aren't collected at the end of the book, but rather at the end of each passage. The touch of the editor is also noticeable in the first section of the book, which appears to provide a chronological early life of the author, describing his hometown.

The collection of prose fragments is a bit of a jumble, although it does seem to be in chronological order. It doesn't have "parts" as I suggested above. In as far as there are portions or sections distinguishable in the work, these segments do not have a length that is representative for the period they refer to. The first portion is devoted to his youth is relatively long, but there is one short passage that seems to sum up all operas Whitman saw or remembered during a period of almost ten years in his life.

The whole book consists of "jottings" short prose entries or passages that are usually only about 200 or 300 words long. In some cases they are dated, but usually only with the day and the month, it often isn't clear which year.

For all the quirks and oddities of the work, Specimen days in America is a wonderful work to read. Regardless of whether it is really about Walt Whitman (although it seems to be), it gives a great impression of life in America during the mid to late nineteenth century, with intense descriptions of Whitman's experiences visiting the wounded soldiers during the American Civil War, and later his lyrical descriptions of nature.

Published late in his life, it seems Whitman was aware that his strength lay in spontaneous, unedited works. It seems he wanted to publish these diary jottings as pure as possible. In many ways, Walt Whitman seems to have been a truly free man, who would not let him be bound or tied down by convention. This unhemmed freedom is strongly felt in Leaves of Grass and it is equally strongly present in Specimen Days. show less

Treasured gift from many years ago. Reads as a loose diary of entries in the 1860s. Highly recommend it if you can get hold of a copy...!