Whitman: Poetry and Prose

1. I have finished 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass. Exquisite. His main device is the catalog. He inventories America, good and bad. He loves the totality. I adored this first edition and look forward to reading final edition (1891-92) soon.

What a paean to masculinity, its physicality, the play of physique through clothing--and without clothing. The naked male is here iconographic. It's always a surprise to me how very transparent he was in his preferences so early in our history. Women by contrast, though he seeks to balance his men with them, lack physical detail that brings the lusty descriptions of men to life. ("The Female equally with the Male I sing.") Yet women are far more likely to be described by their setting, the home, or show more their place amid a tumult of children, than for their sheer physicality. Part of this was simply the age, when there was great outrage against prurient feminine depiction, among so-called civilized society at least. Part seems to be Whitman's disinterest. I'm reminded of Michelangelo's Medici Tombs in Florence, whose female nudes have been criticized as too male, their musculature wrong, their breasts appended almost as an afterthought.

3. Reading Specimen Days next, his big prose miscellany. This begins with an overview of both the paternal and maternal branches of his family and their lives on Long Island, New York, in the early 1800s. The description of L.I. Includes some of his boyish activities there, his friends and their exploits. It's a vivid dispatch from another world. That he writes of these matters so late in life--he visits the old family graveyards and resurrects his dead--lends special poignance. He moves on to his well-known visits to the bedsides of injured Civil War (1861-65) soldiers, mostly Union but Confederate also, among whom his brother George lay convalescing for a time. He writes letters home for the soldiers, distributes small amounts of money, listens to their tales, reads them the Bible, kisses a few, and watches them die. Most are amputees, some gravely ill with typhoid. Some laid helpless on the field of battle for days before being brought to primitive field hospitals.

Oh heavens, what scene is this? – is this indeed humanity – these butcher's shambles? There are several of them. There they lie, in the largest, in an open space in the woods, from 200 to 300 poor fellows – the groans and screams – the odor of blood, mixed with the fresh scent of the night, the grass, the trees – the slaughter-house! O well is it their mothers, their sisters cannot see them – cannot conceive, and never conceived, these things.

In the section called "A Cavalry Camp," Whitman's enthusiasm--can we call it ecstasy?--at for the first time being among actual soldiers, and not only the sick, seems to me keen. Back in Washington in August of 1863, he daily sees President Lincoln on L'Enfant's broad, dusty avenues. Before long they have a nodding acquaintence with each other. Sometimes the president is in a barouche, at other times he rides a grey horse amid a detachment of uniformed cavalry, swords drawn.

Let me say this at the halfway point of Specimen Days, everything works! Every phrase is compelling. I have never read a more riveting collection of miscellaneous pieces. After the war, Whitman stayed in Washington to work in in the Office of the Attorney General in 1866 and '67 and, he says, "for some time afterward." In February 1873 he's stricken with a "paralysis" that sounds to me like stroke. It forces him to retreat to the famous little house in Camden, New Jersey. He's bed-ridden there through 1875 and '76. On recovery he is still partly disabled but is able to retreat to a country farm belonging to his friends the Staffords on "Timber Creek, twelve or thirteen miles from where it enters the Delaware." Here the book enters a nature phase. All I see before me now are descriptions of nature. It remains to be seen if I will be as beguiled by these pages as I was by his war recollections.

More to come. show less

After having read the collection, I won't go as far as saying I'm a fan of Whitman's—but it was a more than worthwhile experience to see how his work stood out, especially stylistically, from others' at the time. Heartening, too, to see experimentation in different genres. Evidence here of what a complex and contradictory being one human can be.

Oh Walt. Finished during bus ride home. Warning - Leaves of Grass may leave you wanting to hug strangers on the bus - so many stories hurtling to the Park and Ride.

Walt Whitman was one of the first people that the United States of America could really claim as a poet. Of course, we had Edgar Allan Poe, but he wasn’t really appreciated in his own time, despite inventing so many genres. As such, this collection contains all of Whitman’s Poetry and Prose works. It includes the original version of Leaves of Grass, and it also includes the last version of Leaves of Grass that Whitman was alive to approve of.

The prose is something that I was not familiar with. I have read Leaves of Grass in one form or another before this point. I don’t remember which version it was, but it might have also had two versions included together. I would have to check. Going back to the prose; it contains an show more Autobiography of sorts. It talks about the life and times that Whitman lived through; probably with a sweet beard.

There really isn’t much else to say about this book. My only real complaint is that the paper used in this volume is a bit thin and delicate. Also, the book doesn’t really explain why it chose to include two versions of Leaves of Grass in an explicit manner. Perhaps it does later on in the notes, but I don’t usually bother with notes that come after the fact. I might have to look that up.

Now that I researched a bit, it does occur to me that I read about the critical response to his free verse poems. They did not follow the British Model of Poetry, they were too new. They didn’t have any real meter or rhyme scheme and weren’t a copy of Shakespeare or something. So people were bewildered and annoyed at this new thing. Also, some of the poems were very homoerotic and the public didn’t like that. At times it has been an open acceptance of his works, and at others, it has been a vitriolic attack on everything that Whitman’s poetry stands for.

Other than the thinness of the paper used in this book and the fact that it doesn’t address these issues with the poetry in a forward or some other portion of the book, this is a great resource. It doesn’t feel like a book you can really flip through, since the pages are so thin, and the book is pretty old. It doesn’t help that it is a library book and as a rule, I don’t mess with library books. show less

As Ralph Waldo Emerson is the essayist of America's literature, so Whitman is its poet. Who can deny the delight of crafts like "the transparent green-shine" and "[I] am not contain'd between my hat and boots"?

Very heavy - good for library, not good for beach reading - thin paper and small print. (need smaller book to tote in bag).

Song of Myself... very tolerant and accepting of others (from all walks of life).

The end all and be all. Whitman makes my blood dance.