For further reading and study:
As you might imagine, there is an abundance of material about Whitman. One of the best biographies is Gay Wilson Allen's The Solitary Singer (1955, now available in a U. of Chicago Press paperback), a long and very full critical biography: all the known facts of the life are here, along with solid readings of the major poems. Justin Kaplan's Walt Whitman: A Life (1980) is not as ambitious, nor does it contain close readings of the poems, but it offers an enjoyable narrative of Whitman's life. Paul Zweig's Walt Whitman: TheMaking of the Poet follows Whitman from the 1840s up through the Civil War; it is lively and suggestive. Philip Callow's more recent biography, From Noon to Starry Night (1992) is not as reliable, but Jerome Loving's monumental recent biography, Walt Whitman: The Song of Himself (1999) is a very full record of Whitman's life and clears away a lot of myths.
The criticism on Whitman is voluminous and varied, in both approach and quality. A good place to begin is Gay Wilson Allen's New Walt Whitman Handbook (1975), a helpful and informative guide on all kinds of issues--textual, thematic, stylistic, etc. James E. Miller, Jr.'s Critical Guide to Leaves of Grass (1955) is a classic aid to reading the poems. Floyd Stovall's Foreground to Leaves of Grass (1974) is a compendium of Whitman's knowledge of other writers, of opera, drama, etc.--all the things that influenced the writing of Leaves. Edwin Haviland Miller in Walt Whitman's Poetry: APsychological Journey and Stephen Black in Walt Whitman's Journey into Chaos (1975) offer psychoanalytic readings, as does--less successfully but more recently--David Cavitch in MySoul and I: The Inner Life of Walt Whitman (1986). Jerome Loving's book on Emerson, Whitman and the American Muse (1983) is a full examination of the Emerson-Whitman connection. The best formal studies of Whitman's poetry are Howard Waskow's Whitman: Exporations in Form (1966) and C. Carroll Hollis's Language and Style in Leaves of Grass (1983). Two excellent recent studies placing Whitman firmly in the political and social environment of his times are M. Wynn Thomas's The Lunar Light of Whitman's Poetry (1986) and Betsy Erkkila's Whitman The Political Poet (1988). M. Jimmie Killingsworth's Whitman's Poetry of the Body (1989) is an excellent analysis of the way Whitman uses sexual imagery and the way that imagery is both embedded in and challenges nineteenth-century sexual attitudes, and my own Walt Whitman's Native Representations (1994) discusses Whitman in the context of various 19th-century American cultural developments (including baseball and photography). David Reynolds's Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography (1995) views Whitman in relation to hundreds of cultural events and developments in 19th-century America.
The interesting questions of Whitman's homosexuality are dealt with by a number of critics, most successfully Michael Moon in Disseminating Whitman (1991) and Byrne Fone in Masculine Landscapes (1992). Gary Schmidgall's recent Walt Whitman: A Gay Life (1997) has been controversial; it attempts to offer a gay biography of Whitman.
Some good collections of critical essays are: Milton Hindus, ed., Leaves of Grass One Hundred Years After (1955), E. H. Miller, ed., A Century of Whitman Criticism (1969), and James Woodress, ed., Critical Essays on Walt Whitman (1983). I edited Walt Whitman: The Centennial Essays (1994), which collects essays by the most prominent Whitman scholars of the past twenty-five years. Two good collections of recent essays include The Cambridge Companion to Walt Whitman, edited by Ezra Greenspan (1995) and A Historical Guide to Walt Whitman, edited by David Reynolds (2000). I also edit the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, which publishes current research on Whitman.
The standard bibliographies, listing virtually all the criticism on Whitman up to 1975, are Scott Giantvalley's Walt Whitman, 1838-1939: A Reference Guide (1981) and Donald D. Kummings's Walt Whitman, 1940-1975: A Reference Guide (1982). For criticism after 1975, see the "Current Bibliography" in each issue of the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, which I edit here at Iowa.
For Whitman's influence on writers who followed him, see James E. Miller, Jr., Karl Shapiro, and Bernice Slote, Start with the Sun (1960) (Whitman's relation to D.H. Lawrence, Hart Crane, Dylan Thomas, W.C. Williams, Henry Miller); James E. Miller, Jr., The American Quest for a Supreme Fiction: Whitman's Legacy in the Personal Epic (1979) (Stevens, Eliot, Pound, Williams, Crane, Olson, Berryman, Ginsberg); and Hyatt Waggoner, AmericanVisionary Poetry (1982) (Crane, Williams, Roethke, Ammons, Wagoner). I edited (with Jim Perlman and Dan Campion) a collection of poems and essays by poets from Whitman's time to our own who all "talk back" in some direct way to Whitman; it is called Walt Whitman: The Measure of His Song (1980), with a revised and expanded edition published in 1998. I also edited with Gay Wilson Allen a collection of international responses to Whitman's work, Walt Whitman and the World (1995). The Collected Writings of Walt Whitman is a massive project, begun in 1955 by New York University Press and still underway. The goal was to print everything Whitman ever wrote: his poetry, prose, letters, notebooks, newspaper articles, daybook entries, etc. So far there are 22 volumes--six of correspondence, three of a variorum edition of Leaves (containing all the changes in all the various editions), two of prose, one of fiction and early poems, and nine of various notebooks and journals. The first two volumes of Whitman's Journalism (six volumes are projected) recently appeared, edited by Herbert Bergman and Douglas Noverr. The standard edition of Leaves is now the Comprehensive Reader's Edition, which is a volume in this series; there are more volumes yet to come.
Copyright © Ed Folsom, The University of Iowa. All rights reserved. Homepage: http://www.english.uiowa.edu/faculty/folsom
Updated August 27, 2004