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Volume 25 Number 4, Spring 2008

ESSAYS: Whitman and Periodicals

Walt Whitman and the King of Bohemia: The Poet in the Saturday Press / Amanda Gailey [Examines the "poems, parodies, homages, reviews, and essays concerning Whitman that were either first published or reprinted in the Saturday Press," totaling "no fewer than 46 items--excluding advertisements," and proposes that these pieces "serve as a record of how the reading public responded to Whitman's controversial poems as he transitioned visibly into the role of vocational poet" and reveal how Henry Clapp, the publisher of the Press, molded Whitman "into a factional poet of the North"; concludes by looking at the two Whitman items Clapp published in his second, postwar, run of the Saturday Press.]

"Two More Throws Against Oblivion": Walt Whitman and the New York Herald in 1888 / Elizabeth Lorang [Examines Whitman's complex publishing relationship with the New York Herald from December 1887 through August 1888, when the poet published "a total of thirty-six pieces" there, more than he published in any other periodical, and proposes that this relationship reveals Whitman's understanding of "certain formal qualities" expected of newspaper poetry as he "worked within this poetic tradition, crafting short poems that could be understood by a mass readership and that participated in the public discourse of the community in which they were published."]

NOTES

Responding Kisses: New Evidence about the Origins of "Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field One Night" / Martin G. Murray [Uses the recently discovered "military service records" of Bill and Arthur Giggie, including Arthur's letter to Bill's mother, Elizabeth Giggie, describing Bill's death, to "shed some additional light" on the Civil War episode that stands behind Whitman's poem "Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field One Night"; suggests that the evidence indicates that Bill and Arthur Giggie may have been a homosexual couple serving together in the Union army, and that Whitman's poem may in fact record the end of this "love story."]

Three Unpublished Whitman Letters to Harry Stafford and a Specimen Days Prose Fragment / Ed Folsom [Transcribes three newly discovered Whitman letters to Harry Stafford in 1882, 1883, and 1884, along with a newly discovered prose fragment, "By the Pond," that appeared in a different form in Specimen Days.]

A Newly Discovered Image of Walt Whitman Restored by the Walt Whitman Association and the Mickle Street Review / Geoffrey M. Sill [Reprints a newly restored image of Whitman apparently related to the series of photographs taken of the poet by Frederick Gutekunst of Philadelphia in 1889.]

REVIEWS

Review of Walt Whitman, Franklin Evans, or The Inebriate: A Tale, ed. Christopher Castiglia and Glenn Hendler / Jon Miller

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Walt Whitman: A Current Bibliography / Ed Folsom

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Past Issues

Volume 25 Number 3, Winter 2008

ESSAYS

"'What is the Grass?': The Roots of Walt Whitman's Cemetary Meditation / Desiree Henderson [Examines the significance of the cemetery for Whitman, seeking to "locate the roots of Whitman's idyllic poetic space in the real space of the rural cemetery" by examining nineteenth-century "cemetery literature" and by analyzing how rural cemeteries--particularly Brooklyn's Mount Auburn and Green-wood cemeteries--were covered in periodicals of the era, including in Whitman's own journalism; argues that Whitman made "innovative use of the rural cemetery" in his poetry]

Portraits and Politics: The Specter of Osceola in Leaves of Grass / Kathryn Walkiewicz [Examines Whitman's "Osceola" and discovers the poem is a result of the poet's "piecing and pasting" his lines out of bits of George Catlin's description of Osceola and Catlin's recording of Dr. Frederick Weedon's account of Osceola's final days; argues that Osceola "remains merely symbolic for Whitman--a text to read and interpret."]

NOTES

Walt Whitman and Oscar Wilde: A Biographical Note / Gary Scharnhorst [Notes several previously unrecorded newspaper accounts of Oscar Wilde's 1882 visit to Whitman in Camden, including an extended account in the Cincinnati Gazette a month after the visit.]

An Unpublished Whitman Manuscript on Emerson / Ed Folsom [Reprints a newly found unpublished Whitman manuscript note about Emerson, registering Whitman's "sense of a decline in Emerson's powers as he ages."]

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Walt Whitman: A Current Bibliography / Ed Folsom

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Volume 25 Numbers One and Two, Summer/Fall 2007

DOUBLE ISSUE: Newly Discovered Reviews

ESSAYS

Sixty-Eight Previously Uncollected Reviews of Walt Whitman / Brett Barney, Amanda Gailey, Ted Genoways, Charles Green, Heather Morton, Kenneth M. Price, Yelizaveta Renfro [Lists sixty-eight previously uncollected reviews of Whitman's work published during his lifetime, and reprints thirty-eight of these newly discovered documents; with an introduction (1-7) and notes (70-76).]

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Walt Whitman: A Current Bibliography / Ed Folsom

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Volume 24 Number Four, Spring 2007

ESSAYS

The Good Gray Poet and the Quaker Oats Man: Speaker as Spokescharacter in Leaves of Grass / Brady Earnhart [Looks at how Whitman "invest[ed] Leaves of Grass with a human identity" and "offered the act of reading the mass-produced book as a corrective to the social disintegration that mass production itself had helped bring about"; goes on to examine the book in the context of "early modern advertising," arguing that "communing with 'Walt Whitman,' drinking milk with Elsie the cow, and eating bologna that has a first and a last name are acts that spring partly from a common set of cultural circumstances" surrounding the early development of advertising, and proposing that Whitman's "immersion in the rapidly growing advertising industry was a key factor in his learning the importance and some of the methods of making a mass-produced commodity feel like a close friend"; concludes that "Whitman's iconoclastic mix of poetry and advertising epitomizes his struggle to reconcile his visions of proletarian utopia and industrial capitalism."]

An Undocumented Review of the 1860 Leaves of Grass in the Liberator / Ezra Greenspan [Analyzes and reprints a review (by "T.V.") of the third edition of Leaves of Grass in William Lloyd Garrison's anti-slavery weekly, the Liberator, on September 7, 1860.]

Whitman and Modern Dance / Joann P. Krieg [Recounts the history of the creation and performance of choreographer Helen Tamiris's Walt Whitman Suite, a dance created in 1936 for the Federal Dance Project and based on "Salut au Monde," "Song of the Open Road," and "I Sing the Body Electric"; proposes that Tamiris is "a translator of Whitman's words into the new language of modern dance."]

REVIEWS

Review of A Companion to Walt Whitman, ed. Donald D. Kummings / Martin T. Buinicki

Review of Ruth L. Bohan's Looking into Walt Whitman: American Art, 1850-1920 / William Pannapacker

Review of David Haven Blake's Walt Whitman and the Culture of American Celebrity / Loren Glass

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Walt Whitman: A Current Bibliography / Ed Folsom

ANNOUCEMENTS

The Transatlantic Walt Whitman Association

 

Volume 24 Numbers Two and Three, Fall 2006/Winter 2007

DOUBLE ISSUE: Whitman as a Bookmaker

ESSAYS

Introduction: Whitman as a Bookmaker

The Census of 1855 Leaves of Grass: A Preliminary Report / Ed Folsom [Offers the results to date for the census of copies of the first edition of Leaves of Grass, reporting that 158 copies have so far been located; goes on to suggest how the census results change our understanding of the first edition, and offers a "printer's examination" of the 1855 Leaves, emphasizing the enormous number of variations in the copies.]

The Cover of the First Edition of Leaves of Grass / Matt Miller [Offers a close examination of the floriated font on the cover of the 1855 Leaves of Grass, compares that font to the font used on the title page, and discusses the significance of the way Whitman shaped the letters of his title; goes on to examine a Whitman poetry manuscript that unveils some otherwise disguised homosexual references in the poem eventually entitled "The Sleepers."]

The Disorder of Drum-Taps / Ted Genoways [Examines the printing history of Drum-Taps, comparing "the March 1865 [advertising] placard to the final table of contents," establishing "the high cost of paper in the late Civil War and Whitman's financial concerns," identifying "the different type designs in Drum-Taps," showing "how each change reveals a new stage in the production process," and reexamining "the surviving documentary evidence of the printing process to create a more complete chronology of the process of revision and publication"; concludes that the book was largely arranged to economize space and save paper and that Drum-Taps becomes a "poignant reflection of the war, embodying in its very arrangements the wounds and scars of April 1865."]

Osgood's Folly: The Sixth Edition of Leaves of Grass / Jerome Loving [Examines the relationship between Whitman and his 1881 Boston publisher, James Ripley Osgood, emphasizing their early acquaintance at Pfaff's beer hall in New York and re-examining the 1882 controversy over the "banning" of Leaves of Grass in Boston.]

David McKay: Whitman's Final Publisher / Charles Green [Examines the relationship between Whitman and his Philadelphia publisher, David McKay, and explores the motivation for McKay's surprising decision to publish an "unauthorized" collection of Whitman's poems eight years after the poet's death.]

"Damn 'em, God bless 'em!": Whitman and Traubel on the Makers of Books / Gary Schmidgall [Examines Whitman's many comments on bookmaking in his conversations with Horace Traubel during the final four years of his life, including the poet?s views on various publishers, printers, and binders as well as his views on typesetting, page design, proofreading, inking, title pages, and other material aspects of the bookmaking art; concludes with some examples of Traubel's views on bookmaking.]

REVIEWS

Review of Conserving Walt Whitman's Fame: Selections from Horace Traubel's 'Conservator,' 1890-1919, Gary Schmidgall, ed. / Steve Marsden

Review of Charles M. Oliver's Walt Whitman: A Literary Reference to His Life and Work / Ed Folsom

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Walt Whitman: A Current Bibliography / Ed Folsom

 

Previous Issues:

Volume 24 Number One Summer 2006

ESSAYS

From Language to Empire: Walt Whitman in the Context of Nineteenth-Century Popular Anglo-Saxonism / Heidi Kathleen Kim

Walt Whitman and the Trimbles: New Zealand, the First Concordance of Leaves of Grass, and the Dunedin Public Library / Joel Myerson

NOTES

The Sesquicentennial of the 1856 Leaves of Grass: A Daguerreotype of a Woman Reader / Ed Folsom

The Uniform Hieroglyphic: A Contemporary Graphological Study of Whitman's Signature / Todd H. Richardson

REVIEWS

Review of Andrew Lawson's Walt Whitman and the Class Struggle / William Pannapacker

Review of Ed Folsom's Whitman Making Books / Books Making Whitman / Joel Myerson

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Walt Whitman: A Current Bibliography / Ed Folsom

ANNOUNCEMENTS

Walt Whitman Way in Washington, D.C.

Volume 23 Numbers Three/Four Winter/Spring 2005

DOUBLE ISSUE

ESSAYS

"A Woman Waits for Me": Anne Gilchrist's Reading of Leaves of Grass / Steve Marsden

Emerson, Whitman, and Eros / Len Gougeon

REVIEWS

Review of Ed Folsom and Kenneth M. Price, Re-Scripting Walt Whitman: An Introduction to His Life and Work / Michael Robertson

Review of Ezra Greenspan, ed., Walt Whitman's "Song of Himself": A Sourcebook and Critical Edition / Luke Mancuso

Review of Fred Hersch Ensemble, Leaves of Grass (CD) / Lyman Leathers

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Walt Whitman: A Current Bibliography / Ed Folsom

ANNOUNCEMENTS

In Memoriam: Fernando Alegria, 1918-2005

Volume 23 Numbers One/Two Summer/Fall 2005

SPECIAL DOUBLE ISSUE: MEMORANDA DURING THE WAR

ESSAYS

Remembering a Convulsive War: Whitman's Memoranda during the War and the Therapeutics of Display / Mark B. Feldman [Argues that “the war of disunion and the subsequent dismembering of bodies . . . convulsed and stalled Whitman’s poetics, which depended upon a series of metaphoric relations between body, nation, and text,” and that through a series of “gruesome narrative displays, Whitman struggled to find a way to represent the war therapeutically,” inventing in Memoranda “a representational form that would preserve the convulsiveness of the period.”]

“Civil War Nursing Narratives: Whitman’s Memoranda During the War and Eroticism” / Daneen Wardrop [Demonstrates how Whitman’s Memoranda “shares with the nursing narratives that preceded his work some important aspects of style and tone,” and offers a “cultural assessment” of Whitman’s book “within the context of those previous memoirs, utilizing themes of democracy, the typical American, motherhood, and . . . the eroticism that forms between nurse and patient”; the extended comparisons are focused on Louisa May Alcott’s Hospital Sketches, Georgeanna Woolsesy’s Three Weeks at Gettysburg, and Sarah Emma Edmonds’s Nurse and Spy in the Union Army.]

NOTES

“An Unpublished Whitman Manuscript about Writing the ‘History of the Secession War’” / Ed Folsom [Reproduces and transcribes a Whitman manuscript from the University of Rhode Island about how “some years” must pass before a history of the “Secession War” can be written.]

“Whitman and Kate Field” / Gary Scharnhorst [Documents American feminist journalist, lecturer, and actor Kate Field’s (1838-1896) admiration for Whitman.]

“Whitman and Teddy Roosevelt: An Unpublished Whitman Prose Manuscript at Sagamore Hill” / Sherry Ceniza, Ed Folsom, and Jerome Stueart [Transcribes a Whitman manuscript at Theodore Roosevelt’s Sagamore Hill home about the need for a “rough” and “very ample” new literature to capture the “genius of Democratic America”; goes on to discuss Roosevelt’s views of Whitman, and Whitman’s views of Roosevelt.]

"Walt Whitman’s Advice to New Jersey State Scholars: An Unknown Interview” / Nicole Kukawski [Reprints a forgotten interview with Whitman that appeared in The Signal (newspaper of the State Normal School of New Jersey) in 1888, conducted by George Worman and Francis B. Lee, and offers background and analysis.]

“An Unpublished Early 1870s Photograph of Whitman” / Ted Genoways and Ed Folsom [Reprints a recently discovered photograph of Whitman taken by William S. Pendleton in Brooklyn in the early 1870s.]

REVIEWS

Review of Walt Whitman, Memoranda During the War, ed. Peter Coviello / Ted Genoways

Review of Daniel Mark Epstein, Lincoln and Whitman / Kenneth M. Price

Review of M. Wynn Thomas, Transatlantic Connections: Whitman U.S., Whitman U.K. / William Pannapacker

Review of Arnie Kantrowitz, Walt Whitman / Gary Schmidgall

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Folsom, Ed. “Walt Whitman: A Current Bibliography.” Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 23 (Summer/Fall 2005), 72-87.

ANNOUNCEMENTS

Unsigned. “The Sesquicentennial of the First Edition of Leaves of Grass.” Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 23 (Summer/Fall 2005), 88-90. [Lists and describes various sesquicentennial conferences and events taking place nationwide during 2005.]

 

22:2-3 Fall 2004/Spring 2005

SPECIAL DOUBLE ISSUE: WHITMAN AND AMERICAN INDIANS

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ESSAYS

A Tribe Called Text: Whitman and Representing the American Indian Body / Nicholas Soodik [Examines “the language with which Whitman represents the American Indian body” and argues that “the image of the Indian” marks Whitman’s failure to “project actual physical presence in a literary text” because he “textualizes and . . . obscures the Indian body, aligning the indigenous American with the trope of writing and the composition of the text itself”; focuses on “Song of Myself,” “Starting from Paumanok,” “The Sleepers,” and Whitman’s story “The Half-Breed.”]

Reading Boddo’s Body: Crossing the Borders of Race and Sexuality in Whitman’s "Half-Breed" / Thomas C. Gannon [Offers an extended cultural reading of Whitman’s early story “The Half-Breed,” focusing on psychosexual and post-colonial implications of the story in the context of Whitman’s career, and examining Whitman’s half-breed character Boddo as a racial and sexual “border figure.”]

Whitman and "The Indian Problem": The Texts and Contexts of "Song of the Redwood-Tree" / Steven Blakemore and Jon Noble [Offers an extended reading of “Song of the Redwood-Tree” in the context of California history, arguing that Whitman is “comparing the redwoods in the archetypal California forest with the demise of the ‘red’ race in America, and he is attempting to crystallize a mythic resolution of what was historically known as ‘the Indian problem’”; concludes that this poem is “a significant evolutionary text in the debate over race and culture in the nineteenth century.”]

NOTES

"Be radical—be radical—be not too damned radical!": The Origins and Resonance of Whitman’s Signature Expression / Kenneth M. Price [Examines Whitman’s fondness for “put[ting] forth two assertions followed by a negation cutting against the grain of emphasis” and tracks the source of this pattern to Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Qveene, then suggests the larger ramifications of what Whitman called “the not-too-damned sure spirit.”]

An Unrecorded Whitman Interview / Ed Folsom [Reprints and comments on a May 19, 1890, New York Tribune interview with and report on Whitman.]

Huneker’s "A Visit to Walt Whitman" / Arnold T. Schwab [Examines the three versions of Huneker’s essay on his visit to Whitman, noting errors and significant changes, particularly those dealing with Whitman’s homosexuality.]

Walter de la Mare and Walt Whitman: A Bibliographic Note / James T.F. Tanner [Reprints a 1965 letter from the editor’s secretary at the London Times Literary Supplement, verifying that de la Mare was indeed the author of a 1915 TLS essay on Drum-Taps.]

A Corrected Map of Whitman’s Washington Boarding Houses and Work Places / Kim Roberts [Offers a corrected version of a map specifying the locations of Whitman’s residences and offices in Washington, D.C.; the original flawed map was printed on the back cover of the summer 2004 issue of the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review.]

REVIEWS

Review of Nick Selby, ed., The Poetry of Walt Whitman: A Reader’s Guide to Essential Criticism / Donald D. Kummings

Review of Judith Grace, Good-bye my Fancy: With Walt Whitman in His Last Days / Gary Schmidgall

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Walt Whitman: A Current Bibliography / Ed Folsom

ANNOUNCEMENTS

In Memoriam: Edward F. Grier

The Sesquicentennial of the First Edition of Leaves of Grass [Lists and describes the various sesquicentennial conferences and events planned to celebrate 100 years of Leaves of Grass.]

 

22:1 Summer 2004

ESSAY

Whitman's End of History: "As I sat Alone by Blue Ontario's Shore,"Democratic Vistas, and the Postbellum Politics of Nostalgia / Thomas F. Haddox [Examines the 1867 poem "As I sat Alone by Blue Ontario's Shore" and compares it to its antebellum version ("Poem of Many In One") and to Democratic Vistas, interrogating Whitman's "refusal to engage with the complexities of the present moment" as, with "Hegelian logic," he "proposes the end of history in the rise of the United States," conflating poet, people, and nation in a kind of transcendence of history, a transcendence that is troubled (but not defeated) by the Civil War and the social unrest of the Reconstruction period: "both his antebellum and postbellum poetry in fact show a frustration with politics that flows directly from his desire to identify himself with the nation, to unite his poetic will with an American democratic essence."]

NOTES

A Map of Whitman's Washington Boarding Houses and Work Places / Kim Roberts [Offers a list and description of the places Whitman resided and worked in while living in Washington, D.C.; accompanied by a map reproduced on the back cover of this issue.]

"Going to Bed": A Recovered Whitman Article from the Brooklyn Daily Eagle / Jerome Loving [Reprints and analyzes a recently rediscovered 1847 newspaper article by Whitman about sleep, and associates the article with "Song of Myself" and "The Sleepers."]

REVIEWS

Review of Walt Whitman, The Journalism, volume 2, ed. Herbert Bergman / Jerome Loving

Review of Jay Grossman, Reconstituting the American Renaissance: Emerson, Whitman, and the Politics of Representation / Mark Maslan

Review of William Pannapacker, Revised Lives: Walt Whitman and Nineteenth-Century Authorship / Michael Robertson

Review of Kenneth M. Price, To Walt Whitman, America / George Hutchinson

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Walt Whitman: A Current Bibliography / Ed Folsom