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May 3: For our final meeting, we'll go (as per Paul's suggestion) to The Sanctuary on Gilbert Street (near the corner of Court); there's parking on Court and behind the building The Sanctuary is in. We will discuss Democratic Vistas. Please be sure to look it over again, and read the Whitman Encyclopedia entry by Arthur Wrobel that gives you the somewhat complicated publication history of this essay; it's available here. I've published a new facsimile edition of the original Democratic Vistas, which, to my surprise, you can access here. Read, between the irritating ads, my introductory essay, "The Vistas of Democratic Vistas," and let me know how you'd argue with it. You've already read the original version of the essay in Two Rivulets, and, if you have time, it would be good to do so again, so that you can encounter the original endnotes that Whitman included with the essay--revealing notes that he later excluded when he reprinted DV. Also read the illuminating chapter (Chapter 7) by Stephen Mack from his book The Pragmatic Whitman, available here on the Whitman Archive; this chapter focuses on DV and offers one take on its significance. Earlier this semester, you read my essay on "Lucifer and Ethiopia," where I discuss how "Ethiopia Saluting the Colors" was clearly part of Whitman's original conceiving of DV (he thought the poem would be published in The Galaxy at the same time as part of the essay, as if the poem was some sort of companion to DV. We may also talk about some of Whitman's very late ("old age") poems.
You're all working on your essays, so don't bother with a Sunday evening response this week. Instead, we'll end with an informal discussion of some of the odds and ends that we've touched on or ignored over the semester. I have made some notes on your seminar essay and on the process we'll use to respond to essays. You can can access that information here.
April 26: We will focus today finally on Drum-Taps and Memories of President Lincoln. You have already read this material, but please review it for our discussion this week, and think particularly about teaching this material: how can you best use Whitman's Civil War writings in an undergraduate classroom as we enter into the sesquicentennial of the war?
This is obviously a gigantic topic, and some of the most exciting new scholarship on Whitman is focused on this period, in part because so much remains to be done, in part because the sesquicentennial of the war (and of Drum-Taps) is fast approaching. To orient yourself, read this essay by Ted Genoways, which tracks the amazing textual history of Drum-Taps. You might also want to read the chapter I wrote with Ken Price on the Civil War writings in Re-Scripting Walt Whitman, available here. Be sure to review the Civil War chapters in Loving (1 and 9) and in Reynolds (12-14). Be sure to look at Whitman's Civil War notebooks at the Library of Congress site here and here.
Also be sure you've read from Specimen Days (pp. 729-804 in Poetry and Prose). Compare this Civil War section of SD to Memoranda During the War (at Special Collections on its own and in Two Rivulets ). Look at excluded passages in appendices of Prose Works 1892, vol. 1, pp. 296-329 (on reserve and on CD). Explore wartime sections of Edward Grier's Notebooks and Unpublished Manuscripts , vol. 2 (on reserve and on CD). Read from Selected Letters (pp. 33-116). Read "Death of Abraham Lincoln" (Whitman's lecture) from Collect (pp. 1060-1071 in Poetry and Prose). Also in Poetry and Prose , glance at other pieces on Lincoln and the war from Notes Left Over (p. 1096) and November Boughs (pp. 1202-1208, 1220-1223, 1229-1231, 1233-1242). Poetry: Read Drum-Taps and Sequel to Drum-Taps in their original 1865 version (at Special Collections and also on the Archive). Feel free to look at changes in the 1871 Leaves . Read the deathbed Drum-Taps and Memories of President Lincoln (pp. 416-468 in Poetry and Prose). Focus on whichever poems interest you, but certainly consider "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd" (459). Because many of the original poems from Drum-Taps and Sequel wind up scattered throughout other clusters, here are page numbers for some of them (chosen for relevance or quirkiness) in Poetry and Prose: "Shut Not Your Doors" (175), "Quicksand Years" (563), "Year of Meteors" (380), "Years of the Modern" (597), "Ashes of Soldiers" (598), "A Broadway Pageant" (383), "Old Ireland" (493), "Weave in, My Hardy Life" (590), "Pensive on Her Dead Gazing" (605), "Chanting the Square Deific" (559), "Ah Poverties, Wincings, and Sulky Retreats" (589), "Old War-Dreams" (593). These aren't high priority, but higher perhaps than others later dispersed. Read four more poems never in Drum-Taps yet warlike in spirit: "As I Ponder'd in Silence" (165), "To Thee Old Cause" (167), "The Return of the Heroes" (486), "By Broad Potomac's Shore" (591). Here's a link for an encyclopedia entry that might help you orient yourself to this martial cluster. Here's another link from which you can connect to early reviews (including ones by John Burroughs, Henry James, and William Dean Howells) of Drum-Taps.
For your Sunday evening response, please address a single poem in Drum-Taps or Sequel to Drum-Taps and work out a reading of it: imagine this response as a set of teaching notes on the poem. What would you emphasize in the form, imagery, language; how would you contextualize the poem, historically, biographically, within the Drum-Taps book or cluster? Choose a poem that seems particularly "teachable."
April 19: Dimitrios Latsis will lead us in a discussion of the poem "Passage to India" and Whitman's other Columbus poems. Whitman's last Columbus poem, and arguably the last poem he was working on at his death, is "A Thought of Columbus," which is not in your Poetry and Prose volume. Here it is:
A Thought of Columbus.
[The MS of this poem was printed in facsimile in Once a Week, July 9, 1892; and the next issue, July 16, 1892, carried Traubel's account of its composition, "Walt Whitman's Last Poem," in which he tells how the poem, written on fragments pasted on two long strips of paper, was handed to him by Walt Whitman on the preceding March 16, ten days before he was to die. Some of the fragments were old envelopes whose postmarks indicate that the composition began as early as November, 1891. Complete MS in Charles E. Feinberg Collection, both rough and final drafts. The Clifton Waller Barrett Collection, University of Virginia Collection has also a draft of the first six lines.]
The mystery of mysteries, the crude and hurried ceaseless flame, spontaneous, bearing on itself.
The bubble and the huge, round, concrete orb!
A breath of Deity, as thence the bulging universe unfolding!
The many issuing cycles from their precedent minute!
The eras of the soul incepting in an hour,
Haply the widest, farthest evolutions of the world and man.Thousands and thousands of miles hence, and now four centuries back,
A mortal impulse thrilling its brain cell,
Reck'd or unreck'd, the birth can no longer be postpon'd:
A phantom of the moment, mystic, stalking, sudden,
Only a silent thought, yet toppling down of more than walls of brass or stone.
(A flutter at the darkness' edge as if old Time's and Space's secret near revealing.)
A thought! a definite thought works out in shape.
Four hundred years roll on.
The rapid cumulus--trade, navigation, war, peace, democracy, roll on;
The restless armies and the fleets of time following their leader --the old camps of ages pitch'd in newer, larger areas,
The tangl'd, long-deferr'd eclaircissement of human life and, hopes boldly begins untying,
As here to-day up-grows the Western World.(An added word yet to my song, far Discoverer, as ne'er before sent back to son of earth--
If still thou hearest, hear me,
Voicing as now--lands, races, arts, bravas to thee,
O'er the long backward path to thee--one vast consensus, north, south, east, west,
Soul plaudits! acclamation! reverent echoes!
One manifold, huge memory to thee! oceans and lands!
The modern world to thee and thought of thee!)Read "Passage to India" particularly carefully, and of course read through the materials that Dimitrios has given us. For your Sunday evening response, respond to any aspect of the poem (or the critical response to it) that you would like. What is Whitman's attraction to Columbus in the later decades of his life? Look at the "Passage to India" manuscripts on the Whitman Archive (available through the Integrated Finding Guide here).
Also, read again through the "Memories of President Lincoln" cluster. We can talk about Whitman's Lincoln poems a bit, and can think about why they find their way into the Passage to India book.
April 12: Jennifer Loman will lead us on a discussion of Passage to India, the book (which contains "Passage to India," the poem). I have emailed PDFs of the essays Jennifer has chosen for you to read. They focus on one of the strangest poems Whitman ever wrote, called "Chanting the Square Deific," a poem that originally appeared in Sequel to Drum-Taps and then migrated to Passage to India before finding its way back into Leaves of Grass in 1881 in the cluster "Whispers of Heavenly Death." Please read this poem closely and think about it as a Civil War poem, in which Whitman is expanding the conventional Christian trinity to become a quaternity and to include Satan, the rebellious force, in the Godhead. For your Sunday email response, please comment on "Chanting the Square Deific" and/or on any of the critical responses to it. Or look more broadly at Passage to India and comment on the structure of this book as a separate book.
Whitman published Passage to India as a separate book in 1870, then almost immediately appended it to Leaves of Grass (though it maintained its separate title page, table of contents, and pagination, just as Drum-Taps had when it was incorporated into the 1867 Leaves). But then Whitman separated the book from Leaves again and published it as the final section of Two Rivulets. This is an amazing book, and one of the least discussed of all of Whitman's creations. It is a fascinating document, beginning with a rivulet of prose and a rivulet of poetry on the same page, representing one of Whitman's boldest typographical experiments, melding prose and poetry. This book may be one of the most important editions for you to experience personally, so try to spend an hour or so with it in Special Collections. You can access a copy online at this site. Focus on the "Preface" and the section titled "Two Rivulets," but read through the whole book (it includes Democratic Vistas, Centennial Songs, As a Strong Bird on Pinions Free, Memoranda During the War, and Passage to India). Now is the time to read or revisit all of these texts. You should also read page 31-47 of my Whitman Making Books catalog and commentary, available online here. Read the Encyclopedia entry on Two Rivulets here, and look at the contemporary reviews here.
You could also use your reading response this week to engage Two Rivulets (and the place of Passage to India in it). You could consider the form of the parallel poetry/prose text, what it means in relation to TR and Whitman's poetics, what it means in relation to his moment in history, and, most of all, what it means to you. Is it a dumping ground, compost heap, monster on the loose, textual innovation, an early example of post-modern literature?
Two Rivulets was published as a companion volume to Whitman's reissue of the 1871-1872 Leaves of Grass, published in a special 1876 "Centennial Edition" on the hundredth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. There were, of course, national celebrations, and Whitman wanted Leaves to be part of it all. You have Whitman's "Preface, 1876" in the Library of America edition (pp. 1029-1038): this is the week to read that document with its amazingly revealing footnotes (we've looked at it a couple of times already, but read the whole document now). The first footnote is all about Passage to India. So this is also a good time to look at the companion volume to Two Rivulets, the 1876 Centennial edition of Leaves of Grass, in Special Collections. Note especially the arrangement of poems in this edition and the surprising clusters that appear here and then disappear in the final edition. This edition gets very little attention, so please do spend a little time looking at it. This was just after the time Whitman had decided to begin a second volume, a kind of follow-up and companion to Leaves, to be called Passage to India. When you read the book Passage to India in the Two Rivulets volume in Special Collection, also review Loving's comments on it in his biography (331-348).
April 5: Stefan Schoeberlein will lead us in a discussion of Whitman's international influence, with a focus on Germany and a close examination of his "internationalist" poem, "Salut au Monde." Stefan has sent out reading, but be sure to read "Salut" in all its forms, from the 1856 "Poem of Salutation" right up to the 1881 version; look at how its position within Leaves of Grass changed over the years. Focus your response on that poem or on any of the readings Stefan has given us.
We'll start discussing Drum-Taps, Memories of President Lincoln, and Whitman's other Civil War writings. Please do respond to the other prospectuses this week (and copy me on the emails you send to each participant). Let me know what times work for you to meet to discuss your prospectus. Please continue reading the Civil War writings, the Civil War sections in the biographies, especially the Civil War letters in the Correspondence, and Whitman's Civil War notebooks ("1862" and "Hospital" notebooks) available at the Library of Congress site.
You're now working on your essays, so much of your reading for the week should be focused there.
March 29: Tim Robbins will lead us in a discussion of Whitman and labor. Tim has sent us readings for next week. Focus on the various versions of "A Song for Occupations" (starting in 1855, where it was the second poem, immediately following the long poem that became "Song of Myself," then becoming "Poem of The Daily Work of the The Workmen and Workwomen of These States" in 1856, "Chants Democratic" #3 in 1860, "To Workingmen" in 1867, "Carol of Occupations" in 1871, and finally "A Song for Occupations" in 1881). Whitman tried out other titles as well ("Chant of Mechanics," "Song of Treades and Implements"). He revised the poem relentlessly. Look at his Blue Book revisions. The poem started out 178 lines long, grew to 205, then shrank to 151. What comes and goes? For your Sunday evening email, please focus on some aspect of this poem or on any of the readings Tim gave us.
Your main activity for Tuesday is to prepare a brief prospectus (250 words or so) for your seminar paper, articulating what your topic will be and what you think your argument will be, along with an informal working bibliography. Send that to me and to all seminar participants before the seminar on Tuesday. Respond individually to each member of the seminar (copy me on your responses) with suggestions, concerns, questions, and with criticism you've come across that might be useful. You may have more to say to some proposals than to others; that's fine. I'm less concerned with how much you say than with your willingness to offer candid responses: those will be most helpful to you as you begin the process of writing these essays. It's best to get concerns expressed early rather than encounter them later. Try to respond to the other seminar members by Friday of next week.
Meanwhile, keep reading the Civil War materials I assigned last week. We'll start discussing them this week.
March 22: Our discussion this evening will be on two different topics. Ben Miele will lead us in a discussion of Leaves of Grass as an epic, with a focus on the 1860 Leaves, but also thinking of how it helps to think of "Song of Myself" as an epic, and how Whitman plays off of epic conventions in general in trying to construct the poetry of democracy. Ben will be sending us some readings. Then Melanie Krupa will lead a discussion about the "Sea-Drift" cluster. We have already talked a bit about "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking," which of course made its first appearance in Leaves in 1860 and then reappeared in some version and in some different context in each edition after that. Track it through its various appearances, either using the editions on the Whitman Archive or, better, in Special Collections. This discussion will give us an opportunity to explore how Whitman developed his idiosyncratic "clusters," those groups of poems that seem thematically joined and yet can still be shuffled and reshuffled to create new juxtapositions in new clusters. "Sea-Drift" doesn't appear until 1881, so read the cluster in its final version (in our Poetry and Prose volume, it's on pp. 388-403). It had its origins in the "Sea-Shore Memories" cluster, which appeared in the 1871 Passage to India (which you can read in special collections in the Two Rivulets volume or in the 1871 Leaves of Grass). Track where the other poems in the cluster come from. Melanie would like us to read several articles, most available online. Read this essay by James Wohlpart; this important one by Michael VandBerg; Stephen Whicher's essay on a biographical approach to "Out of the Cradle," available on JSTOR; and a couple of other very short ones, links to come soon. Read Poe's "The Raven" and Blake's "The Chimney Sweeper."
If time permits, we'll begin our discussion about Whitman's Civil War writings, including Drum-Taps. This is obviously a gigantic topic, and some of the most exciting new scholarship on Whitman is focused on this period, in part because so much remains to be done, in part because the sesquicentennial of the war (and of Drum-Taps) is fast approaching. So please start the reading of this vitally important material. To orient yourself, read this essay by Ted Genoways, which tracks the amazing textual history of Drum-Taps. You might also want to read the chapter I wrote with Ken Price on the Civil War writings in Re-Scripting Walt Whitman, available here. Be sure to review the Civil War chapters in Loving (1 and 9) and in Reynolds (12-14).
Also be sure you've read from Specimen Days (pp. 729-804 in Poetry and Prose). Compare this Civil War section of SD to Memoranda During the War (at Special Collections on its own and in Two Rivulets ). Look at excluded passages in appendices of Prose Works 1892, vol. 1, pp. 296-329 (on reserve and on CD). Explore wartime sections of Edward Grier's Notebooks and Unpublished Manuscripts , vol. 2 (on reserve and on CD). Read from Selected Letters (pp. 33-116). Read "Death of Abraham Lincoln" (Whitman's lecture) from Collect (pp. 1060-1071 in Poetry and Prose). Also in Poetry and Prose , glance at other pieces on Lincoln and the war from Notes Left Over (p. 1096) and November Boughs (pp. 1202-1208, 1220-1223, 1229-1231, 1233-1242). Poetry: Read Drum-Taps and Sequel to Drum-Taps in their original 1865 version (at Special Collections and also on the Archive). Feel free to look at changes in the 1871 Leaves . Read the deathbed Drum-Taps and Memories of President Lincoln (pp. 416-468 in Poetry and Prose). Focus on whichever poems interest you, but certainly consider "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd" (459). Because many of the original poems from Drum-Taps and Sequel wind up scattered throughout other clusters, here are page numbers for some of them (chosen for relevance or quirkiness) in Poetry and Prose: "Shut Not Your Doors" (175), "Quicksand Years" (563), "Year of Meteors" (380), "Years of the Modern" (597), "Ashes of Soldiers" (598), "A Broadway Pageant" (383), "Old Ireland" (493), "Weave in, My Hardy Life" (590), "Pensive on Her Dead Gazing" (605), "Chanting the Square Deific" (559), "Ah Poverties, Wincings, and Sulky Retreats" (589), "Old War-Dreams" (593). These aren't high priority, but higher perhaps than others later dispersed. Read four more poems never in Drum-Taps yet warlike in spirit: "As I Ponder'd in Silence" (165), "To Thee Old Cause" (167), "The Return of the Heroes" (486), "By Broad Potomac's Shore" (591). Here's a link for an encyclopedia entry that might help you orient yourself to this martial cluster. Here's another link from which you can connect to early reviews (including ones by John Burroughs, Henry James, and William Dean Howells) of Drum-Taps.
March 8: Paul Morton will be leading our discussion on Calamus, and he will be assigningreadings that I'll send out by PDFs as soon as I get the materials. The readings will include Betsy Erkkila's now-classic essay on "Whitman and the Homosexual Republic" [from the Walt Whitman: The Centennial Essays volume that I edited]. I'm also going to include my own "Whitman's Calamus Photographs" [from Breaking Bounds: Walt Whitman and American Cultural Studies]: I'll be interested in your reaction to it. Also read the Calamus chapter in the book I co-authored with Kenneth Price, Re-Scripting Walt Whitman, now available on the Whitman Archive. Be sure to read the original sequence of love poems that stand behind Calamus, "Live Oak, with Moss." Also be sure to read, under the Criticism link on the Archive ("Selected Current Criticism") the Alan Helms piece on "Live Oak," the Herschel Parker essay on "Live Oak," and the Helms/Parker exchange: this will give you a sense of some of the heated debate that the Calamus poems still generate. Read some of Shakespeare's sonnets, easily available online, like here. Be sure to read, especially, sonnets 29 and 121, which critics have tied to Whitman's poems.
You've been reading some of Whitman's Civil War notebooks. Begin reading Whitman's published Civil War work, including Drum-Taps and Sequel to Drum-Taps (the book, not the cluster) and Memoranda During the War; read these bookson the Whitman Archive and/or in Special Collections. Memoranda is largely reprinted in Specimen Days, which you have in the Poetry and Prose volume, but there are some significant differences, so it's best to read it through in the original form.
For the e-mail journal response due Sunday evening, focus on any aspect of Calamus that interests you. You may want to offer a reading of a particular Calamus poem (or one of the earlier "Live Oak, with Moss" versions, or compare them), or you may want to enter the Parker/Helms debate. You may want to work with the way the "Live Oak with Moss" sequence differs from Calamus, and/or the way the Calamus cluster changes from edition to edition (there are some really striking omissions). Whitman's work with the cluster in the Blue Book is particularly striking, so you may want to examine that carefully and write about some aspect of Whitman's revisions there. (By the way, you can access the Blue Book at a couple of different places in the Whitman Archive, but this access point is the easiest to work with, since you can easily access particular pages; scroll down to "Leaves of Grass," then scroll through to the Blue Book, where you'll find a list of links to particular pages.).
March 1: We will begin our focus on the two most controversial clusters appearing in the 1860 edition of Leaves--Enfans d'Adam and Calamus . Whitman's manuscripts for these two clusters of poems demonstrate conclusively that the two clusters were very closely related from the beginning, and poems that were originally slated for one found their way to the other. Fredson Bowers's Whitman's Manuscripts: Leaves of Grass, 1860 (1955) documents this nicely (most of these manuscripts can be found on the Whitman Archive now). Bowers's introduction on the two clusters (lxiii-lxxiv) is worth reading: the book is available in the library and in the WWQR library on the fourth floor of EPB. It was the Enfans d'Adam cluster that got Whitman in trouble; interestingly, no one seemed much concerned by or offended by Calamus, though those have become the focus of discussions of Whitman's sexuality in the past forty years or so. Read the section on the two clusters on the "Details" page of the seminar website where you will also find a list of the poems that the Boston D.A. determined were obscene in 1882, including some Children of Adam poems. Be sure you're through Loving, chapters 9-10, and Reynolds, chapters 9-11 and the first part of chapter 12 (up to p. 403, "Onset of War"). Keep up, too, with the Selected Letters, reading all the letters through 1860. And do read in Poetry and Prose Whitman's recollections of his encounter with Emerson over Enfans d'Adam (pp. 938-939 in Specimen Days and "A Memorandum at a Venture," pp. 1054-1060).
Kelly Franklin will guide the discussion as we look in detail at Enfans d'Adam. Kelly will email us about additional readings to do: he is going to suggest, among other things, R.W.B. Lewis's classic chapter on Whitman in The American Adam. Read James E. Miller, Jr.'s "Children of Adam [1860]," from Walt Whitman: An Encyclopedia, and Ken Price's and my section on the 1860 Leaves in the Whitman Archive biography. Read the cluster at least in its original (1860) and final (1881) versions; it would be best to read through it in the 1867 and 1871 editions as well. For your email response this week, please address some aspect of “Enfans d'Adam” / “Children of Adam” that interests you—how the sequence changes, how to read a particular poem, how the cluster relates to “Calamus,” or anything else that grabs your attention about his much-discussed but still relatively under-analyzed cluster. You may, for example, want to consider the implicit sexual politics of Enfans d'Adam, especially since many early women's rights advocates were great admirers of the sequence, and especially of "AWoman Waits for Me."
Meanwhile, begin preparing for our discussion on Whitman and the Civil War. Be sure to read Reynolds and Loving's Civil War sections (and go back and re-read the opening section of Loving's biography, where he begins with the war before returning to it later). Read the Selected Letters, 1860-1865 (pp. 33-116), where you'll find some of Whitman's most memorable and powerful writing. Read the Civil War notebooks available on the Library of Congress American Memory site, available here and here. Explore the other Civil War notebooks and notes available in Edward Grier's Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts, on reserve and on the CD-ROM (also check online at the ACLS Humanities E-Book site).
February 22: Become very familiar this week with the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass, using both the copies in Special Collections as well as the copy available on the Whitman Archive. Special Collections has multiple copies of the 1860, both the original Thayer & Eldridge edition and various pirated copies printed from the Thayer & Eldridge plates. The University of Iowa Press has also recently issued a beautiful facsimile edition of the 1860 Leaves in paperback, so you can easily purchase your own copy if you'd like to have it. The Whitman Archive also recently made available Whitman's "Blue Book," his working copy of the 1860 Leaves, where you can see the hundreds of changes he was contemplating making to the 1860; it's a fascinating glimpse into Whitman's endless frenetic revision of Leaves. Both the 1860 edition and the Blue Book are available here.
Read Leaves in this radically revised 1860 format, and think about the ways this edition changes the nature of the project from the 1856 edition. In Special Collections, look at the odd little pamphlet called Leaves of Grass Imprints, issued by Thayer & Eldridge in a remarkable effort to publicize the book. I'll ask Eric Conrad, a member of the previous Whitman seminar, to come and tell us a bit of what he's been finding out about this pamphlet in his own research. We will focus over the next couple of weeks on the two most controversial clusters appearing in the 1860 edition of Leaves--Calamus and Enfans d'Adam. Whitman's manuscripts for these two clusters of poems demonstrate conclusively that the two clusters were very closely related from the beginning, and poems that were originally slated for one found their way to the other. Fredson Bowers's Whitman's Manuscripts: Leaves of Grass, 1860 (1955) documents this nicely (most of these manuscripts can be found on the Whitman Archive now). Bowers's introduction on the two clusters (lxiii-lxxiv) is worth reading: the book is available in the library and in the WWQR library on the fourth floor of EPB. It was the Enfans d'Adam cluster that got Whitman in trouble; interestingly, no one seemed much concerned by or offended by Calamus, though those have become the focus of discussions of Whitman's sexuality in the past forty years or so. Read the section on the two clusters on the "Details" page of the seminar website where you will also find a list of the poems that the Boston D.A. determined were obscene in 1882, including some Children of Adam poems. Be sure you're through Loving, chapters 9-10, and Reynolds, chapters 9-11 and the first part of chapter 12 (up to p. 403, "Onset of War"). Keep up, too, with the Selected Letters, reading all the letters through 1860. And do read in Poetry and Prose Whitman's recollections of his encounter with Emerson over Enfans d'Adam (pp. 938-939 in Specimen Days and "A Memorandum at a Venture," pp. 1054-1060).
For this week's session, focus on the ways Whitman has structured the 1860 Leaves. For the e-mail journal response this week, you might want to address the new introductory poem for the book, "Proto-Leaf" (eventually "Starting from Paumanok"): how does this poem position and frame the book in a way "Song of Myself" did not? What is the effect of having "Song of Myself" no longer be the opening poem? Or you might want to address some of Whitman's formatting decisions in this edition (think of his decision to number the verses of the poems, for example, or the variety of decorations he uses). Or consider his invention here of "clusters," and address the way a cluster like "Chants Democratic and Native American" works. We'll talk about the 1860 edition as a whole. I'd like to have you use your email response to probe some aspect of this edition you find puzzling or illuminating or intriguing. We'll save "Calamus" and "Enfans d'Adam" for Paul and Kelly, but any other part of the book is open for discussion (you might, for instance, want to address his decision to conclude the book with the new poem, "So Long!").
February 15: Now that you have read Whitman's notes on language, The American Primer, available in The Collected Writings on reserve in the Daybooks and Notebooks volumes (vol. 3), where it is titled "A Primer on Words," read the other Whitman language notebooks in the same volume (also available on your CD-ROM, if it's working, and also available online at the ACLS Humanities E-Book site.). The notebooks on language run in Volume 3 of Daybooks and Notebooks from p. 664 to p. 825--this is some of the most important reading you'll do (that passage I read in class, where Whitman was trying to figure whether the project he had in mind would be a novel, a play, or a poem, was from these notebooks). Also, please start working on the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass. We have a number of copies (some of them pirated copies) in Special Collections, so try spending some time with the book there, and make some notes on the odd typefaces, design, and structure. You can also access it, of course, on the Whitman Archive. We're now 150 years after the original publication of this amazing edition--maybe the most amazing edition--of Leaves. While you're in Special Collections, read "A Song of the Rolling Earth" in the 1856 version (where it's called "Poem of The Sayers of the Words of The Earth") and in the 1860 version ("To the Sayers of Words"); again, the original versions are also available on the Whitman Archive and on the CD-ROM. Think of this poem as Whitman's working out of some of his theories about language. How would you go about developing a reading of that poem? Read "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking" carefully in its 1860 Leaves appearance, where it is "A Word Out of the Sea." Also read it in its original published form in the 1859 Saturday Review, where it's "A Child's Reminiscence," available on the Whitman Archive. Read the poem in its final context, as the lead poem in the cluster Sea-Drift (pp. 388-403 in the Poetry and Prose volume); read the other poems in the cluster. Continue reading in both Reynolds and Loving; pace yourself now to finish these books by midterm. Read the Whitman correspondence up through the 1860 letters in the Selected Correspondence book, and read in the Whitman Chronology up through 1860.
Write your weekly e-mail journal entry (send it to the seminar on Sunday evening) on either "A Song of the Rolling Earth" or "Out of the Cradle" in relation to the language notebooks (including "The Primer of Words"): focus on one way the notebooks help illuminate the poem. Or focus on some aspect of Whitman's revision of these poems.
February 8: We will pick up our missed discussion from last week on Reynolds and Loving; please review the responses from everyone. We will look together at some sections of "Song of Myself" and other 1855 poems. Please read through my website on "The Sleepers." We will also discuss the Preface to the 1855 Leaves, and we'll discuss Whitman's strategies for the book and the accidents that produced the book object that we now fetishize as one of the founding artifacts of American poetry. Read Whitman's temperance novel, Franklin Evans (in Early Poems and Fiction, a volume in the Collected Writings, on reserve. There are also various editions of Franklin Evans in the Library. Read Michael Warner's "Whitman Drunk," (from Betsy Erkkila and Jay Grossman, eds., Breaking Bounds: Whitman and American Cultural Studies [New York: Oxford UP, 1996], 30-43); I'll put copies in the Whitman Seminar slot in the mailbox in the Zimansky Reading Room, 310 EPB), and I'll email you a PDF of it. Read at least 30 of Whitman's journalistic pieces from 1840-1845 in Journalism (on reserve); use the index to choose pieces that deal with subjects that interest you. Read "Letters from a Traveling Bachelor," his 1849-50 series of articles for the New York Sunday Dispatch. Read "Pieces in Early Youth," in Poetry and Prose, 1100-1158; read four or five other Whitman short stories (including "The Child's Champion" and "The Half-Breed") and ten of his early poems in Early Poems and Fiction, on reserve. Also read Whitman's "The Primer of Words," his notes on language and the promise of American English. This material was later edited by Horace Traubel into a little book called An American Primer. Read it in the Daybooks and Notebooks volumes of The Collected Writings, on reserve (it starts on p. 728 of vol. 3 of the Daybooks and Notebooks), or read it online at the ACLS Humanities E-Book site. Gradually, this site is making available the entire New York University Press Collected Writings of Walt Whitman; currently you can access most of the Correspondence, all three volumes of the Daybooks and Notebooks, all six volumes of the Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts, the Variorum Leaves of Grass (3 vols.), and the Prose Works 1892 (2 vols.). This site can thus save you some trips to the Reserve Reading Room in the Library.
Discussion: Why did Whitman give up fiction? Why did he give up conventional meter and rhyme? What was he up to with his early poetry and fiction? How does Whitman's journalism help us contextualize the poetry? Is he a different Whitman in prose than he is in poetry? Write your e-mail response this week (email them to the group by Sunday evening) on one of these questions.
February 1: Read: 1856 Leaves in Special Collections (make notes on arrangement and titles [!] of poems) and/or on the Whitman Archive. Read Loving, through chapter 8; Reynolds, chapters 6-8; Specimen Days , in Poetry and Prose , 713-730. Discussion: "Song of Myself" and Whitman's various editions of Leaves . Read Emerson's "Nature," "Self Reliance," "The Oversoul," and "The Poet" in any collection of Emerson's works. Read "Whitman to Emerson, 1856," in Poetry and Prose , 1350-1361. Look at Vol. 1 of Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts (on reserve, NYU Press edition), which include Whitman's autobiographical notes and his notebooks from his New York days (1841-62); you've now read the notebook called "albot Wilson" (pp. 53-82), where you saw "Song of Myself" beginning to emerge, but now read around in those early notebooks in Vol. 1. Read "The Eighteenth Presidency" in the Poetry and Prose volume (clear in the back): what do you make of this tract that Whitman had set in type but apparently never distributed?
Discussion: What is this 1855 object called Leaves of Grass ? A book of poems? How does the prose preface function in relation to the poems? How does the 1856 incarnation of the book redefine Whitman's project? Write a one-page e-mail to me and to the seminar on the differences between--and implications of--Loving's and Reynolds's representation of one incident in Whitman's life. Or compare Loving's or Reynolds's presentation of one incident to another Whitman biographer's presentation of the same incident. Send the email by Sunday evening.
January 25: Carefully read through the 1855 Leaves , including the Preface (in Poetry and Prose --and, I'd recommend, in the original first edition in Special Collections). Read the following essays on "Song of Myself" and the 1855 Leaves :
Lawson, Andrew. "'Spending for Vast Returns': Sex, Class, and Commerce in the First Leaves of Grass." American Literature 75 (June 2003), 335-365.
Martin, Robert. K. "Whitman's Song of Myself: Homosexual Dream and Vision." Partisan Review 42 (No. 1, 1975), 80-96.
Wardrop, Daneen. "Whitman as Furtive Mother: The Supplementary Jouissance of the 'Ambushed Womb' in 'Song of Myself.'" TSLL: Texas Studies in Literature and Language 40 (Summer 1998), 142-157.
Warren, James Perrin. "The 'Real Grammar': Deverbal Style in 'Song of Myself.'" American Literature 56 (March 1984), 1-16.
Dimock, Wai Chee. "Whitman, Syntax, and Political Theory." In Betsy Erkkila and Jay Grossman, eds., Breaking Bounds: Whitman & American Cultural Studies (Oxford UP, 1996), 62-79.
You can read these in the Main Library or find most of them online through JSTOR or Bartleby. I'll also put copies in one of the mail slots down low in the Zimansky Room (I'll mark the slot "Whitman Seminar")--if you use a copy there, please either make your own copy or read it in the Zimansky Room and then return it to the slot. Choose one of the essays and engage it in a one-page e-mail you send to me and to the seminar by next Monday afternoon.
Read Loving, Walt Whitman: The Song of Himself , chapters 1-7; read Reynolds, Walt Whitman's America , chapters 1-5; and read the biography by Folsom and Price on the Walt Whitman Archive through the section on the 1855 Leaves. Read Selected Letters , 1-31. Read the Talbot Wilson notebook, available in an unreliable and partial transcription in Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts (on reserve), but more effectively encountered in the online facsimile available at the Library of Congress American Memory site, accessible through the Whitman Archive. ( Whitman Notebooks, where it's called Notebook LC #80, "Earliest Notebook"). Read the section on the 1855 Leaves in my Whitman Making Books/Books Making Whitman (that I gave you in class).
Discussion: What is this 1855 object called Leaves of Grass? A book of poems? How does the prose preface function in relation to the poems? How does the 1856 incarnation of the book redefine Whitman's project?
Please watch, if you haven't yet, the recent PBS "American Experience" film, Walt Whitman, recently nominated last year for two Emmy Awards for nonfiction programming. You can watch the entire film in segments (I'm in it!) here. Watch the film critically. As you read Lovings and Reynolds, ask yourself what the film does that the books do not do and vice versa.
January 18: Introduction; Whitman Archive; discussion of "This Compost."
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