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: 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. 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
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/
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.
Virtual Emily Dickinson: this site gives information about Emily's family, pictures of family members and of their homestead, and other materials. http://www-unix.oit.umass.edu/~emilypg/index1.html
Contents of Emily Dickinson Journal: This site lets you link to numerous articles and reviews that have appeared in the journal over the past six years, many of which you will find illuminating. http://www.Colorado.EDU/EDIS/journal/
Whitman/Dickinson Combined Site: Here is a site I've been working on with a number of professors from around the country. We are working to develop 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, but take a look particularly at the "Dickinson, Slavery, and the San Domingo Moment" site, which adds some context to the discussion we will have about "As the starved maelstrom."
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 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.
Copyright © Ed Folsom, The University of Iowa. All rights reserved. Homepage: http://www.english.uiowa.edu/faculty/folsom
Updated August 27, 2004