{"id":228072,"date":"2022-03-22T17:23:59","date_gmt":"2022-03-22T21:23:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/newscenter\/?p=228072"},"modified":"2024-04-22T08:14:11","modified_gmt":"2024-04-22T12:14:11","slug":"walt-whitman-more-important-now-than-ever-228072","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/newscenter\/walt-whitman-more-important-now-than-ever-228072\/","title":{"rendered":"Walt Whitman \u2018more important now than ever\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

Walt Whitman poems figure prominently in American literature. In 2017, Ed Folsom \u201976 (PhD) looked back on the legacy of the poet\u2019s work.<\/h2>\n

March 26 is the anniversary of the death of Walt Whitman, one of the most influential voices in American\u2014and world\u2014literature.<\/p>\n

Ed Folsom \u201976 (PhD), the Roy J. Carver Professor of English at the University of Iowa, has devoted his professional life to understanding Whitman\u2019s work. He\u2019s the author of 10 books, including Song of Myself: With a Complete Commentary<\/em> (University of Iowa Press, 2016), coedited with Christopher Merrill. He also coedits the Walt Whitman Archive<\/a><\/strong>, a resource for scholars and students around the world.<\/p>\n

Walt Whitman poems, letters, and early editions are also available in the University of Rochester<\/a>\u2019s libraries.<\/p>\n

\"close-up
Detail from a letter from Walt Whitman to Nat Bloom, September 5, 1863.
(University of Rochester\u00a0Department of Rare Books, Special Collections, and Preservation \/ J. Adam Fenster)<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

What is Walt Whitman\u2019s most enduring legacy?<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Folsom:<\/strong> His impact on American literature over the past century and a half is incalculable. Virtually every American poet has at some point engaged Walt Whitman directly, often in a poem, as Hart Crane did in \u201cThe Bridge\u201d or Allen Ginsberg in \u201cA Supermarket in California.\u201d<\/p>\n

Whitman always addressed his poems to readers in the future, and American poets have talked back to him continually\u2014arguing with him, praising him, questioning him about the diverse and democratic American future he promised. The list of American poets who have carried on this non-stop debate with him is endless: from Langston Hughes and Muriel Rukeyser to William Carlos Willams and Robert Creeley, from June Jordan to Yusef Komunyakaa to Mar\u00edn Espada. American poets have viewed Whitman\u2019s radical poetics as essentially intertwined with the national character, a kind of distinct and distinctive American voice.<\/p>\n

This Whitmanian voice is heard throughout the broader culture as well\u2014in films including Now, Voyager<\/em>; Dead Poets Society<\/em>; Sophie\u2019s Choice<\/em>; Bull Durham<\/em>; The Notebook<\/em>; Down by Law<\/em>, and many more; in television series such as Breaking Bad<\/em>, where Walter White\u2019s name indicates the Walt Whitman connection, and where Whitman\u2019s work plays a recurring central role; and in many recent ads, including those for iPad, Levi\u2019s, and, most recently, Audi. Whitman has been set to music by over 500 composers, including Charles Ives and Ned Rorem, and his presence is felt in art installations everywhere, including Jenny Holzer\u2019s recent New York City Aids Memorial, which features excerpts from \u201cSong of Myself.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"handwritten
A postcard from Walt Whitman to William Sloane Kennedy, January 18, 1888. Says Jessica Lacher-Feldman, assistant dean and the Joseph N. Lambert and Harold B. Schleifer Director of Rare Books, Special Collections, and Preservation: \u201cAs many people move further away from taking pen to paper, it\u2019s enlightening for students and researchers to see and experience these hand-written documents, connecting with their authors through these intimate exchanges, decades or sometimes centuries after they were written.\u201d (University of Rochester\u00a0Department of Rare Books, Special Collections, and Preservation \/ J. Adam Fenster)<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

What about his influence globally?<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Folsom: <\/strong>Another poetic dialogue has been taking place outside of the country\u2019s borders for the past 150 years, one that involves talking back to Whitman by an international group of writers\u2014from Federico Garc\u00eda Lorca to Jorge Luis Borges and Pablo Neruda, from Cesare Pavese to Czeslaw Milosz, from Fernando Pessoa to Artur Lundkvist, from Hermann Hesse to Thomas Mann, from Amin Rihani to Adonis, from Guo Moruo to Ai Qing, from D.H. Lawrence to Charles Tomlinson\u2014as his influence has extended far and wide, not only across race and social class and ethnicity and poetic style, but across nationalities, languages, and continents. As the writer Michael Cunningham\u2014whose book of novellas called Specimen Days<\/em> focuses on Whitman\u2014has noted, Whitman is now more like a public utility than a writer. His works and influence are so pervasive that artists in any medium view him as a source of power and sustenance that can be tapped into endlessly.<\/p>\n

\"cover
Whitman presented this first edition of Democratic Vistas<\/em> to William Henry Seward, the secretary of state under Lincoln. Whitman admired Seward, whose papers are housed at Rochester.
(University of Rochester\u00a0Department of Rare Books, Special Collections, and Preservation \/ J. Adam Fenster)<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

How did Walt Whitman become a poet?<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Folsom: <\/strong>Whitman was an autodidact; he was done with his formal schooling by the time he was 12, and he learned by reading books he took out of lending libraries and by visiting museums and by walking the streets of New York and Brooklyn. He learned typesetting as a teenager and published his first newspaper articles in his mid-teens.<\/p>\n

As he grew into the newspaper business, he developed a style of directly addressing his readers, something he would carry over with him to his radical new kind of poetry. That poetry drew from his journalism and from hearing orators speaking around the city. Whitman dreamed of becoming an orator himself and made notes for many speeches about America and democracy. He reshaped his journalistic voice and oratorical voice into a new kind of poetry that has traits of both journalism\u2014an attentiveness to detail, an obsession with close observation of the world around him\u2014and oratory\u2014long lines that often have the cadence of a speech. It\u2019s as if we\u2019re hearing a spoken voice on the page, directly addressing the \u201cyou\u201d\u2014that slippery English pronoun that can mean a single intimate reader or a world of strangers.<\/p>\n

\"close-up
A piece of Whitman\u2019s early fiction, published in November 1841 in the United States Magazine and Democratic Review,<\/em> under the name \u201cWalter Whitman.\u201d
(University of Rochester\u00a0Department of Rare Books, Special Collections, and Preservation \/ J. Adam Fenster)<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Where do you suggest someone begin when reading Walt Whitman?<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Folsom: <\/strong>His poetry is about a celebration of the single, separate individual and, at the same time, the celebration of the \u201cen-masse,\u201d the wild diversity of a nation that manages to stay unified while \u201ccontaining multitudes.\u201d Nowhere is this fluctuation between self and cosmos, individual and nation, better seen than in his longest and best poem, \u201cSong of Myself,\u201d a work that every American owes it to herself or himself to read.<\/p>\n

The new book I wrote with Chris Merrill is an attempt to help readers do just that: Chris and I talk about each of the 52 sections of the poem, so that readers can read the poem, then read our comments and begin joining in the give-and-take with Whitman that is the whole purpose of his work. Whitman demands that the reader actively talk back to the poetry and not accept it passively, and Chris\u2019s and my commentaries set out to initiate that dialogue.<\/p>\n

\"front
The Roycrofters, a reformist community, published this 1904 edition of \u201cSong of Myself\u201d in East Aurora, New York. Their work in printing, furniture-making, and other forms of design is a hallmark of the Arts and Crafts movement, shaping American design in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, says Lacher-Feldman, who calls this title page \u201can exemplar of Arts and Crafts design.\u201d
(University of Rochester\u00a0Department of Rare Books, Special Collections, and Preservation \/ J. Adam Fenster)<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

What do you make of Walt Whitman\u2019s newly discovered novel, Life and Adventures of Jack Engle<\/em>?<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Folsom: <\/strong>The discovery<\/a> of Jack Engle<\/em> is extremely important because, for the first time, we have fiction written and published by Whitman after he had started writing the poems that would be included in his first edition of Leaves of Grass<\/em>. Before this discovery, the latest known fiction by Whitman was published in 1848, and that always made it easy to assume that Whitman gave up fiction and took up poetry, since we had a convenient seven-year break between the last known fiction and the radical new poetry. Jack Engle<\/em> was published in 1852, Leaves of Grass<\/em> in 1855. Whitman had begun publishing his new free-form radical poetry in newspapers in 1850, so we now know that the poetry and fiction were mingling in ways we had never before known.<\/p>\n

This makes us rethink everything we thought we knew about Whitman\u2019s early writing career. Scholars and critics will be working on the implications of this for many years to come. We can now see that Whitman in the early 1850s was still unsure about what form his life\u2019s work would take.<\/p>\n

\"Cover
Exemplifying the complexity of the publication history of Whitman\u2019s Leaves of Grass<\/em>, this 1879 edition is a spurious issue of the 1860\u20131861 edition published by Thayer and Eldridge. \u201cWhitman spent much of his life revising Leaves of Grass,\u201d Lacher-Feldman says. \u201cIt began in 1855 as a 95-page volume of 12 unnamed poems; by 1892, the \u201cdeathbed edition\u201d as it\u2019s often referred to, contained 400 poems.\u201d
(University of Rochester\u00a0Department of Rare Books, Special Collections, and Preservation \/ J. Adam Fenster)<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Is there any relationship between the novel and Leaves of Grass<\/em>?<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Folsom: <\/strong>The place in Jack Engle<\/em> where we can see the themes of Leaves of Grass <\/em>emerging is chapter 19, where the plot of the novel comes to a dead stop as Jack wanders through the cemetery at Trinity Church in Manhattan and contemplates the various grave plots around him. He begins to think about how all \u201cplots\u201d end in these grave plots, where inscriptions on gravestones give us only the bare outlines of a life.<\/p>\n

Jack begins listening to the ongoing sea of life just outside the cemetery walls, and he realizes that life always flows past the places of death\u2014it may be a different throng of people wandering past, but that flow of life is ever-changing and always ongoing. It\u2019s here, at this moment, that we can feel Whitman losing interest in fictional plots\u2014those things that begin, follow a trajectory, and have an ending\u2014and beginning to become entranced with how to celebrate and focus on that ever-changing flow of life\u2014that thing that has no beginning and no end and that transfers endlessly among shifting forms of matter.<\/p>\n

\"portrait
Walt Whitman photographed in profile at his home in Camden, New Jersey, in 1891. (Public domain photo \/ Whitmanarchive.org)<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The nature of democracy is under discussion around the world right now\u2014and it\u2019s a subject with which Whitman himself was deeply concerned. What could people learn from reading his work?<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Folsom: <\/strong>When Walt Whitman first began making notes toward the poem that would become \u201cSong of Myself,\u201d he jotted down \u201cI am the poet of slaves and the masters of slaves.\u201d He was trying to assume a voice, in other words, that was capacious enough to speak for the entire range of people in the nation\u2014from the most powerless to the most powerful, from those with no possessions to those who possessed others. If he could imagine such a unifying voice, he believed, he could help Americans begin to speak the language of democracy, because if slaves could begin to see that they contained within themselves the potential to be slavemasters, just as slavemasters contained within themselves the potential to be slaves, then slavery would cease to exist, because people of the nation would begin to understand that everyone is potentially everyone else, that the key to American identity is a vast empathy with all the \u201cothers\u201d in the culture.<\/p>\n

In \u201cSong of Myself,\u201d Whitman says \u201cI am large, \/ I contain multitudes,\u201d and this voice that is vast enough and indiscriminate enough to find within itself all the possibilities of American identity would become the great democratic voice, a voice for the citizens of the country to aspire to. Today, the nation is so divided in political and social and economic and racial ways that it has become impossible to imagine a single unifying voice that speaks for America. Every voice that claims to speak for the \u201cAmerican people\u201d today is in fact a divisive voice, alienating as many Americans as it unifies. So Whitman seems more important now than ever.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s hard work to make the imaginative leap to a fully democratic voice, one that celebrates diversity and finds strength and unity in the wild variety that defines this nation. Whitman knew it would be difficult, perhaps impossible. During his lifetime, Whitman experienced a massive civil war, an entire generation of American men destroyed, when the union could not contain its multitudes and came apart at the seams. I think he would sense a similar danger today.<\/p>\n

\n

Editor\u2019s note: This story was originally published on March 23, 2017. It has been republished to mark the 130th anniversary of Walt Whitman\u2019s death.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On the anniversary of the Walt Whitman\u2019s death, Ed Folsom \u201976 (PhD) looked back on the legacy of the poet\u2019s work, examples of which are available in the University\u2019s libraries.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":752,"featured_media":229152,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[13092],"tags":[42,22722,9576,2276,1636,37122],"class_list":["post-228072","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-the-arts","tag-alumni","tag-rare-books-special-collections-and-preservation","tag-humanities","tag-literature","tag-poetry","tag-thought-leadership"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nWalt Whitman \u2018more important now than ever\u2019 Walt Whitman more important now<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Walt Whitman was one of the most influential writers of the 19th century and his work is as important now 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