WHITMAN

1. Exact contemporary of Melville, Lowell, Longfellow (c 1820-1890)
   
2. Lower class Long Island family background
   
3. Father: radical enthusiast and acquaintance of of Tom Paine
   
4. Also follower of schismatic Quaker Elias Hicks
   
5. And follower of socialist author and lecturer, Fanny Wright
   
6. Self-educated: early readings Scott, Dickens, Homer, Greek dramatists, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, English romantics, George Sand, Volney, anticlerical Ruins (cf Frankenstein)
   
7. NY City hack journalist of 1840s, writing tales and poems as "Walter Whitman": conventional literary work includes temperance novel (Franklin Evans), poems that rhyme and scan, work in Democratic Review, editorial work for a great many NY papers, many now non-extant. Sided with radicals (free soil "barnburners") in party split of 1848. Lost job therefore as editor of Brooklyn Eagle. Anti-slavery but not abolitionist position.
   
8. Visit to New Orleans 1848.
   
9. Influenced by Emerson's "American Scholar," "The Poet," Influence of Bible, Quakerism, Paine radicalism, movement of 1840s, George Sand and French Socialists, Buddhism
   
10. Jacksonian ideology, "Young America": Cornelius Mathews' "Poems on Man"; copyright debate
    
11. Democratic Jacksonians in literature: John L. O'Sullivan, "manifest destiny"
    
12. Interested in Opera, astronomy, Egyptian studies, phrenology, mesmerism, Oriental literature
    
13. W knew Bryant, Fanny Fern, Poe, Emerson, Thoreau, etc.
    
14. Underwent several personal conversions of unknown cause in 1850s, emerging in 1855 as self-publishing, self-reviewing Walt Whitman of "Song of Myself" and Leaves of Grass, with manifesto ("Preface).
    
15. Homoerotic and homosexual program of later 1850s "Live Oak with Moss," Calamus poems ("adhesiveness" from phrenology) balanced by heterosexual Children of Adam poems ("amativeness"), reflected in third editiomn (1860). One of few major American authors to write from first hand knowledge about Civil War ("The Wound Dresser"),
    
16. Political and cultural emphasis of "Democratic Vistas," 1871 -- Feudalism (class structure and established literary and sexual forms) - - Materialism and infidelity -- ownership of property and wives -- vs future culture based on "personalism" and "perfect comradeship" -- rejection of Calvinistic sin -- bardic tradition -- spiritual regeneration of society through "adhesiveness" -- healing after Civil War -- progress -- cosmic evolution in nature -- assumption of different social roles, genders, sexual orientations
    
17. APPRECIATIONS by Emerson, himself, Thoreau, Henry James, Howells, Henry Adams, Matthew Arnold, Swinburne, Hopkins, Santayana, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, D. H, Lawrence, William Carlos Williams, Lorca, Randall Jarrell, Louis Simpson, Hart Crane, Allen Ginsberg
    
18. STYLE: repetition and parallelism -- analogy and metamorphosis (not simple personification) -- "myself" or "the self"? -- soul and body not in Cartesian duality -- Emersonian organicism, musical opera form, neologisms and foreign words, catalogue, parallelism, incremental repetition, envelope form, American speech rhythms, didacticism, imagism
    
19. Song of Myself
    
20. The Sleepers
    
21. Crossing Brooklyn Ferry
    
22. Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking
    
23. Sparkles from the Wheel
    
24. Dalliance of the Eagles
    
25. To a Locomotive in Winter
    
26. Noiseless Patient Spider
    
27. LANGUAGE: anarchisms, neologisms, contemporary Americanisms, foreign words (esp. French words referring to Revolutionary tradition) -- very rich (non-repeating) vocabulary distribution
    
28. BIBLIOGRAPHY:
    
29. Woodress, Eight American Authors
    
30. Myerson, The Transcendentalists
    
31. EDITIONS: 1855 (1st), preferred by Malcolm Cowley: 12 untitled poems, author and publisher not mentioned, bookplate illustration from daguerreotype as poseur/flaneur, hands on hips
    
32. 1856 (2nd): 32 poems, distributed by Folwer & Wells, phrenologists
    
33. 1860 (3rd), preferred by Roy Harvey Pearce: 154 poems
    
34. 1892 (9th), preferred by Whitman himself
    
35. Inclusive Edition (1924); Variorum Edition (1972)
    
36. HANDBOOK:`Gay Wilson Allen, New WW Handbook (rev 1975); G. W. Allen, A Reader's Guide to WW (1970)
    
37. Ezra Greenspan, Cambridge Companion to WW (1995)
38. BIOGRAPHY: G. W. Allen (rev, 1967), Justin Kaplan (1980)
39. CRITICISM: William D O'Connor, The Good Gray Poet, 1886 (defended W after his dismissal from Dept of Interior job)
    
40. J A Symonds (1893) printed W's claim though unmarried he fathered six children
    
41. Esther Shepard, WW's Pose (1938), claims influence of fragmentary epilogue in George Sand's novel, The Countess of Rudolstadt.
    
42. Roger Asselineau (1954). Developed issue of W's struggles with homoerotic and homosexual feelings
    
43. Gay Wilson Allen, The Solitary Singer (1955). Factual guide.
    
44. D H Lawrence, Studies in classic American Literature
    
45. Van Wyck Brooks, Times of M and W
    
46. Matthiessen, American Renaissance
    
47. Richard Chase, WW Reconsidered
    
48. Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel
    
49. Edwin H. Miller: WW's Poetry: A Psychological Journey (1968)
    
50. Joseph Jay Rubin, The Historic Whitman (1971)
    
51. James Woodress, ed. Critical Essays on WW (1983)
    
52. Robert K. Martin, WW; The Life After the Life (1992)
    
53. Joel Myerson, Whitman in His Times (1991)
    
54. Ed Folsom, WW's Native Representations (1994)
    
55. David S. Reynolds, WW's America (1995)
    
56. G. W. Allen and Ed Folsom, WW and the World (1995)
    
57. Betsy Erkila and Jay Grossman, Breaking Bounds: W & Amer. Cultural Studies (1996)
    
58. Graham Clarke, WW Critical Assessments (4v., 1996)
    
59. Nina Baym, Norton Anthology of AL, 5th ed., includes both 1855 and 1881 versions of "Song of Myself"(1998):