Resources

 

Click on Whitman and Dickinson here for additional reading suggestions.

WHITMAN SITES:

The Walt Whitman Archive: This is the introductory page to the Walt Whitman Archive, which I co-direct with Kenneth M. Price of the University of Nebraska. Eventually we hope all of Whitman's work will be included on this site, in addition to many materials about Whitman. If you click on the "Bibliography" button, you can find a search engine that will take you to all the criticism on Whitman, year by year, from 1976 to the present. Also available is a good biography of Whitman that Price and I wrote, along with a good chronology of the events of his life. There are a lot of valuable materials on this site, so explore it thoroughly. http://www.whitmanarchive.org

Reviews and Criticism: This is part of the Whitman Archive, and this site includes all the contemporary reviews of Whitman's work, so you can get a good idea of how readers in the nineteenth century responded to his poetry. You will also find a number of critical works on Whitman available here. http://www.whitmanarchive.org/criticism/

Photo Index: Again, this is part of the Whitman Archive. Here you can view all the photographic portraits of Whitman, arranged by decade. When you click on any individual photo, you will get a large version of the photo along with my annotations about that particular portrait. Take a look especially at the annotations for the 1855 frontispiece portrait that we will discuss in class. http://www.whitmanarchive.org/gallery/

Leaves of Grass Editions: Again part of the Whitman Archive. Here you can see facsimiles of various editions of Leaves of Grass, and you can view, page by page, the 1855, 1856, 1867, and 1871 editions of Leaves. http://www.whitmanarchive.org/works/

Walt Whitman Home Page: This is the great Library of Congress site, with wonderful facsimiles of several Whitman notebooks, including the notebook in which he can be seen working out the new style for the 1855 Leaves of Grass, and some Civil War notebooks, which he kept while nursing soldiers in Washington DC hospitals. http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/wwhtml/wwhome.html/

Leaves of Grass 1891: An electronic version of Whitman's final edition of Leaves of Grass. http://www.princeton.edu/~batke/logr/index.html

American Experience PBS Walt Whitman film biography: This is the film we watched in class, with extra materials, available for viewing online. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/whitman/ If the film isn't available here, try this link.

DICKINSON SITES:

Dickinson Electronic Archives: This is a great site, but it changes regularly and can be hard to figure out. There are lots of different pieces. Take some time to explore. You can view a number of Dickinson's manuscripts, and you can click to have them magnified for very close examination. Do note that this site at points requires a username and password. To gain access, type "dickinson" (with a small "d") for the name, then the password "ink_on_disc". http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/dickinson/

Emily Dickinson Lexicon: This is a remarkable site, facilitating a careful examination of Dickinson's language. It contains a complete lexicon of every word she used in her poetry, and it offers a searchable version of the 1844 Webster's Dictionary of the American Language, which both Dickinson and Whitman depended on. http://edl.byu.edu/index.php

Poems by Emily Dickinson, edited by Mabel Loomis Todd and T. W. Higginson: This site lets you examine the complete 1891 edition of Dickinson poems, so you can see what her poetry looked like in the hands of her earliest editors. The revised 1924 edition is available here; you can see how for the first seventy years after Dickinson's death, her poems were a very different body of work than they are today.

Emily Dickinson Links: this site gives links to information about Emily's family, pictures of family members and of their homestead, early reviews, and many other materials. http://www.wsu.edu/~campbelld/amlit/dickinson.htm

Contents of Emily Dickinson Journal: This site lets you link to all the articles and reviews that have appeared in the journal over the past eighteen years, many of which you will find illuminating. http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/emily_dickinson_journal/

Whitman/Dickinson Combined Site: Here is a site I worked on with a number of professors from around the country. We developed a series of teaching sites on Whitman's and Dickinson's work. Each site is focused on a particular theme or topic. Explore each site; I'll have you focus on particular parts of the site as the semester goes on.

General sites: A University of Wisconsin site that deals with how to read poetry: http://www.wisc.edu/writing/Handbook/ReadingPoetry.html

A University of Wisconsin site that discusses how to quote and cite literary works: http://www.wisc.edu/writing/Handbook/QuoLiterature.html

A Western Michigan University site that gives advice about writing essays about literature: http://homepages.wmich.edu/~cooneys/tchg/lit/adv/lit.papers.html

DICTIONARIES

The 1844 Webster's dictionary, searchable, is available at the Emily Dickinson Lexicon site. This is the dictionary that both Whitman and Dickinson used.

The 1913 Webster's Dictionary, searchable: http://humanities.uchicago.edu/forms_unrest/webster.form.html This dictionary gives you definitions close to the time Whitman and Dickinson lived.

The OED (Oxford English Dictionary). This site works only with a University of Iowa connection; you can always go to the Infohawk page at the Main Library website and search for OED. This dictionary allows you to search etymologies and to track the history of the word from its first recorded usage in the language.

The Online Etymological Dictionary is a wonderful resource for discovering the "fossil poems" that lie behind every word in the language. http://www.etymonline.com/