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The Texts: The following texts are available at Prairie Lights Books, 15 South Dubuque Street:
·Walt Whitman, Poetry and Prose, ed. Justin Kaplan (Library of America). This large edition offers an accurate reprint of the complete 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, the complete 1881 edition (with Whitman's two annexes), and a selection of poems that appeared in other editions of Leaves but not in the 1855 or 1881. It also prints the complete Specimen Days and Collect, along with some other selected prose (including the amazing invective, "The Eighteenth Presidency!"). The paperback edition updates and significantly supplements the original hardcover Library of America edition (which was ironically called Complete Poetry and Collected Prose).
·Jerome Loving, Walt Whitman: The Song of Himself (U California P). This is the most recent full biography of Whitman and the only one to incorporate recent biographical and textual finds.
·David Reynolds, Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography (Random House). We'll talk about how much of a "cultural biography" this is, but it's a book that will give you ideas about hundreds of places to go in 19th-century American culture where you can explore connections with Whitman.
·Joann P. Krieg, A Whitman Chronology (U of Iowa P). This handy little day-by-day, month-by-month, and year-by-year guide will serve you well in all kinds of ways.
·Edwin Haviland Miller, ed., Selected Letters of Walt Whitman (U of Iowa P). Gathers about one-twelfth of the known letters, but it's a shrewd selection by the editor of Whitman's Correspondence, and it includes the earliest known Whitman letters, which were discovered after the Correspondence volumes in the Collected Writings were published.
I will be giving you each a copy of my book, Whitman Making Books / Books Making Whitman (2005). This is a commentary written to accompany last year's exhibition of Whitman as a Bookmaker at the UI Museum of Art. It will be useful in helping you track the evolution of Leaves of Grass.
The Instructor: My office is 373 EPB; phone 335-0450 (with Voicemail, so you can always leave a message). E-mail is ed-folsom@uiowa.edu. I'm always there Tuesdays and Thursdays from 10:45 until noon--you can just stop by then--and other times by appointment.
Written Work: You will work toward a major seminar paper, hopefully of publishable quality, 20-25 pages in length. These essays will be due on Friday, May 6 at 5:00 at the latest. Note this date; late essays cannot be accepted, because a major part of your work in this seminar will be to read and comment on at least six of the seminar papers; you will do this during the weekend following the last week of classes and early in Finals Week. Plan your schedule accordingly. The heaviest part of your reading occurs in the first few weeks of the seminar so that you will have a good foundation on which to build ideas for a paper. By March 29, you will turn in to me a short prospectus, outlining just what your project is and where you think it will take you. I will discuss your topic at some length with you.
Seminar Sessions: This whole thing will work only if we come to depend upon and to energize each other. To that end, there will be no formal prepared reports, but rather I will ask all of you to prepare for all discussions, and everyone will be asked, too, to teach one edition of Leaves or a major cluster within Leaves, or one of hitman's other books, like Drum-Taps or Specimen Days), focusing on one poem, small group of poems, or prose work--that is, you will lead discussion on the material you choose after you find out all there is to know about it. You should plan these discussions to last no more than forty-five minutes. Your discussion should contextualize the poem or prose work you're focusing on within the particular edition of Leaves of Grass as a whole, within its particular cluster or section of Leaves, within Whitman's biography, and within the culture. You should prepare a brief bibliography for the seminar, listing and briefly annotating the best critical commentaries on the poem, cluster, and topic that you are teaching.
Each of you may choose one of the following topics. Many of them center on a particular "cluster" (as Whitman called them) in Leaves--this will be your cluster, and you will read it again and again until one poem emerges from the cluster as the best single poem to focus on in order to illuminate the cluster as a whole. Here are the clusters and topics; whoever first signs up for any particular cluster gets it, so you should make your choice soon.
1. You may choose any single edition of Leaves except the 1855 (first), which we'll be discussing the next two weeks. That leaves you the 1856, 1860, 1867, 1871, or 1881 editions (three antebellum, three postbellum). Or, for more focused work, you could choose one of the following books/areas
2. Calamus. Whitman and the origins of gay language. When did Whitman become gay? (This is not a biographical question, but a historical one.) How did his contemporaries react to these poems? What can we make of Whitman's own comments about the "political significance" of this cluster? Can Whitman's notion of camaraderie be understood in asexual ways?
3. Children of Adam. Whitman and women; Whitman and the body. How did his contemporaries react to these sexually explicit poems? What were women's reactions? What was Whitman's view of the nascent women's rights movement, and how do those views inform the poetry? Do these poems buy into 19th-century eugenics movements? Why did Emerson recoil from this cluster?
4. Drum-Taps and Sequel to Drum-Taps. Whitman and the Civil War. What was the war being fought for, in Whitman's mind? Can we trace a shift in his attitudes about the significance and necessity of the war during the 1860-1864 period and in the years just following? What are the effects of Whitman's centering of the war experience in the hospitals?
5. Democratic Vistas. Whitman as a political theorist and philosopher of democracy. How do Whitman's conceptions of democracy change from the 1850s to the 1870s? How and why do political philosophers still come back to this document? What kind of effect did it have in Reconstruction America? How does Whitman attempt to enter Reconstruction debates? How does DV relate to Whitman's reconstruction of Leaves in 1867 and 1871?
7. Whitman and race. In poems like "Song of Myself," "The Sleepers," and "Ethiopia Saluting the Colors" (as well as in various prose pieces and in early notebooks), Whitman directly confronts the issues of race and slavery. How do Whitman's ideas about race in America change over the years? Did he see the Civil War as a contestation over slavery? What were his attitudes toward the Reconstruction debates on race, and where do we see his reactions in his writings? What racial theories did Whitman absorb, echo, react to?
8. Specimen Days. Whitman as an autobiographer. How does SD work in relation to the poetry-as a companion, a gloss, an essential part? In Whitman's prose structuring of his own life, what beliefs about identity emerge?
9. Memories of President Lincoln. What is the basis of Whitman's fascination with Lincoln? What is it about Lincoln's words, actions, and beliefs that Whitman admires? What does Lincoln become emblematic of in Whitman's writings? How do his reactions to other presidents and politicians before and after Lincoln help to clarify his response to Lincoln? Is "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd" Whitman's last great poem?
10. "Passage to India," "Prayer of Columbus," "A Thought of Columbus." Whitman and the idea of American expansion. What were Whitman's attitudes toward progress, and how did he define progress? Is Whitman a hypernationalist, a proto-post-nationalist, an imperialist, a multiculturalist? What does he see to be America's evolving relationship to the rest of the world? What was his book project, Passage to India, all about?
11. "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry," "Song of Myself," "Whoever You Are," Songs of Parting. Whitman's construction of a new kind of reader. How does Whitman project the reader in his poetry (and prose)? What are the attributes of reading that Whitman tries to engender? How much of Whitman's conception of democracy has to do with his desire to change a nation's reading habits? Does Whitman develop a reader-response criticism?
12. "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking" and Sea-Drift. Whitman's fascination with the ocean and his attraction to death. What is the attraction of death in Whitman's work? What is the relationship of death and democracy? Why does Whitman believe the great poets of democracy will be the poets who can write the poems of death? How does the Civil War make us read the antebellum death poems differently, and how does Whitman's rearrangement of the poems alter the way we read them?
13. Sands at Seventy and Good-Bye My Fancy. Whitman and old age. What happens as Whitman constructs himself with a failing body and a lingering old age? How do stoic philosophies begin to alter and tinge the prevailing tones of Leaves?
14. By the Roadside. One of the most puzzling of Whitman's clusters, and one of the least commented on. How does it work as an introduction to Drum-Taps? Do these poems form a premonition of division? Do they call for a bloodletting? What is the historical backdrop for this cluster of poems? What is the road they are by the side of?
15. "Salut au Monde." Whitman's desire to be read and responded to outside of the United States. How has Whitman been responded to by writers and readers in other cultures? Why has he gained enormous popularity and significant followings in some cultures? How is his "Americanness" translated?
16. Two Rivulets . Whitman's least examined book: a compilation of things, including Memoranda During the War , Passage to India , Democratic Vistas , a group of poems called “Centennial Songs,” As a Strong Bird on Pinions Free , and an odd melding of poetry and prose called “Two Rivulets.” What does this book, which was issued as a matching volume for his 1876 Centennial issue of Leaves of Grass , tell us about Whitman's bookmaking, about his ideas of what poetry and prose do, and about what happens when he “clusters” entire books and introduces them with an idiosyncratic new cluster?
On Reserve: Here is a list of the books that are on reserve in the Reserve Book Room in the Main Library. We'll talk about these books, but they include all 22 volumes of the New York University Press Collected Writings of Walt Whitman, a project that is still far from complete. I will try to add books to the reserve list (there is now a stringent limit on number of books that can be put on reserve) as we decide that we need communal access to them.
Currently on reserve:
PS3200 .F61 Collected Writings of Walt Whitman, 22 vols. (2-hour)
PS3231 .A4 2004 The Correspondence , vol. 7 (a supplement to the six volumes of correspondence in the Collected Writings )
PS3203 .B45 1998 The Journalism, 2 vols. (2-hour)
PS3201 1860 Walt Whitman's Blue Book (facsimile of his working copy of 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass) (2-hour)
Walt Whitman: An Encyclopedia, ed. J. R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings, is an excellent resource and will be valuable to you throughout the term. It is in the Main Reference Room (the Reserve staff decided they could not move this book to the Reserve Reading Room). Call number is PS 3230 W35 1998.
We have a large library of Whitman criticism in the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review / Whitman Archive office (369-371 EPB) that you're welcome to use when the books begin disappearing off the university library shelves. See Eric Conrad, the managing editor of WWQR, who will have you sign out books so we can keep track of who has what.
Seminar Website: The URL for our website is http://www.uiowa.edu/~c008458a. On this site you will find the syllabus, an updated schedule of assignments, supplementary materials, and links to important Whitman resources on the Web, including the Walt Whitman Archive (http://www.whitmanarchive.org), which I edit with Kenneth Price of the University of Nebraska. Price and I also edited another electronic resource, called Major Authors on CD-ROM: Walt Whitman and Major Authors Online: Walt Whitman. Both are available to you. You can check out the CD-ROM from the Information Arcade in the Main Library (it works only on Windows). This CD will allow you to search the entire 22-volume Collected Writings, all editions of Whitman's Leaves of Grass, selected manuscripts, selected journalism, and all the contemporary reviews of his work.
WHITMAN SEMINAR SCHEDULE
(First Three Sessions)
January 18: Introduction; Whitman photographs; discussion of "This Compost"; the 1855 edition. Discussion: Why was Whitman attracted to photography?
January 25: Carefully read through 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.
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").
February 1: Read: 1856 Leaves in Special Collections (make notes on arrangement and titles [!] of poems). 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 to another Whitman biographer's presentation.