|
|
Suggested Readings
Selected Bibliography of Secondary Materials on Walt Whitman, 1975-present
(annotations are from the Walt Whitman Review online bibliography:
http://www.uiowa.edu/~wwqr/index.html
)
Compiled and Edited by Professor Katherine Sugg
Allen, Gay Wilson. "How Emerson, Thoreau and Whitman Viewed the Frontier."
In Toward a New American Literary History: Essays in Honor of Arlin
Turner, edited by Louis J. Budd, Edwin H. Cady, and Carl L. Anderson.
Durham: Duke University Press, 1980
Allison, Raphael C. "Walt Whitman, William James, and Pragmatist
Aesthetics." Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 20 (Summer 2002), 19-29.
[Explores "Whitman's role in shaping James's thought" and evaluates
"Whitman's place in the pragmatist tradition," emphasizing the role of
aesthetics in pragmatism and offering a pragmatic reading of "Song of the
Broad-Axe" based on "Jamesian pluralism."]
Anderson, Quentin. "A Culture of One's Own." American Scholar 61 (Autumn
1992), 533-551. [Analyzes how Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman, reacting to
the "desiccating sameness in the preoccupations of those about them,"
invented "inclusive claims for the resources of the self" and "proclaimed
that the road to a community of equals lay solely in a transformation of
individuals--a wholesale secular conversion."]
Andrew, Helen [& others], eds. West Hills Review: A Walt Whitman Journal,
2 (Fall 1980), 1-122. [Contains 12 prose pieces, listed above and below by
author, and 30 poems by George Georgakis, Calvin Hernton, Robert R.
Hudson, Eugene McNamara, Evelyn Ames, Anne Ruth, Edger Baehr, John Ciardi,
Arthur Dobrin, Graham Everitt, Jennie Hair, Norbert Krapf, Kenneth A.
McClane, Roberta Metz, Errol Miller, Dan Murray, Toni Ortner-Zimmerman,
Nicholas Ronaldi, Jeff Schiff, Marcia Slatkin, William Stafford, Brian
Swann, John Tagliabue, David Wagoner, Maxwell Corydon Wheat, Jr, Gary
Eddy, and William Heyen.]
Arac, Jonathan. "Whitman and the Problems of the Vernacular." In Betsy
Erkkila and Jay Grossman, eds., Breaking Bounds, 44- 61. [Questions
traditional notions of Whitman's use of "the American vernacular" by
arguing "instead for a comparatist perspective that emphasizes mixture";
seeks "to redefine the grounds for transatlantic comparative study of
Whitman" by focusing on Whitman "as a poet in the culture of newspapers
and the economy of capitalism," a move that leads to a comparison of
Whitman with Baudelaire.]
Aspiz, Harold. So Long!: Walt Whitman’s Poetry of Death. University, AL:
University of Alabama Press, 2004. [Examines Whitman’s “treatment of death
by considering the entire range of his poetry and the way his attitudes
toward death define his career as an intellectual, a poet, and a person,”
and relates “his developing views of death and his literary treatment of
death to his social and intellectual milieu and to the wide-ranging
contemporary debate about the meaning of death.”]
----- Walt Whitman and the Body Beautiful. Urbana and London: University
of Illinois Press, 1980.
Athenot, Éric. Walt Whitman: Poète-cosmos. Paris: Belin, 2002.
[Introductory study of Whitman in Belin's "voix américaines" series;
chapters include "Le barde américain: parution et réception de Feuilles
d'herbe en 1855," "Whitman, poète révolutionnaire," "Feuilles d'herbe,
poème de l'extase," "Le rhapsode de l'Amérique," and "Whitman, poète et
prophète"; with short biographical overview (11-16), a conclusion on
"Whitman et la postérité," and a brief bibliography (125-126); in French.]
Byers, Thomas. What I Cannot Say: Self, Word, and World in Whitman,
Stevens, and Merwin.
Barron, James. "Whitman’s Old Hometown Facing Problems of Today."
New
York Times, 6 October 1980, Metropolitan Edition. [Says: "It is known that
he (Whitman) sold subscriptions to The Long-Islander (and) owned a local
printing shop. Whether he actually got around to publishing is doubtful.
No attic or archive around town has ever yielded a copy, and so the
Huntington Historical Society has concluded that he never edited an issue
or set type or made sales pitches as an ink-stained street vendor. The
society finds further support of its conclusion in the comments of
Whitman’s successor, who bought his printing press in 1840 and immediately
promised to follow a "reliable" schedule of publication." Replies in The
Long-Islander, 9 October 1980, include Walt Whitman’s chapter in Specimen
Days (1882) on "Starting Newspapers," an editorial on "Whitman and His
Newspaper," and three Whitman pieces reprinted from The Long-Islander in
1838.]
Beatty, Mary Lou, ed. Humanities 13 (March/April 1992). [Special issue on
Whitman and the American Renaissance, with editor's note, "The Walt
Whitman Centennial" (2), and two essays on Whitman, listed separately in
this bibliography.]
Bellis, Peter J. Writing Revolution: Aesthetics and Politics in Hawthorne,
Whitman, and Thoreau. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2003. [Part
Two, “Whitman” (67-117), consists of Chapter 4, “Whitman in 1855: Against
Representation” (69-101), and Chapter 5, “1856 and After” (102-117), which
argue that Whitman’s “new and radical poetic form does more than simply
correspond to his political positions; it extends them further, reconceiving aesthetic creation as itself a revolutionary act,” and traces
the ways the 1855 Leaves of Grass “enacts in language—and impels its
reader toward—a democratic reconstruction of America itself,” showing how
“these poems do not just contain or express political ideas; they work to
demonstrate and enact them”; goes on to argue that during the second half
of the decade of the 1850s, “Whitman’s poetry lost both its unifying force
and visionary confidence,” eventually becoming “dependent upon absence and
loss” and requiring “the acceptance of hierarchy and difference as
preconditions for the poet’s role as representative national figure”; also
offers a reading of “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” as a poem
of “discontinuity and rupture” (166-171); Chapter 4 appeared in an earlier
version in Centennial Review (1999).]
Bertolini, Vincent J. “‘Hinting’ and ‘Reminding’: The Rhetoric of
Performative Embodiment in Leaves of Grass.” ELH 69 (Winter 2002),
1047-1082. [Investigates “the rhetorical ethico-politics of subjectivity
operating in Whitman’s text,” wherein Whitman’s “I” invites the reader “to
see the self gaining expression in the poetry as ‘being realized’—being
instantiated, rendered real, brought into being—through the reader’s
participatory agency,” creating a “self compounded of both speaker and
reader, as much the abstract ‘you’ . . . as the lyric persona himself”;
and goes on to examine metaphors (“hinting,” “reminding,” “translating”)
from the first three editions of Leaves that “can be construed as a rough
theory-in-practice of . . . the rhetoric of embodied performativity in the
text.”]
Bickman, Martin. The Unsounded Centre: Jungian Studies in American
Romanticism. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1980.
[See "Words Out of the Sea: Walt Whitman," 95-116, and other references to
Whitman, 14, 22, 23, 31-36, 53-55, 76, 82, 87, 94, 119, 139, 147, 148.]
Blackwood, R. T. "William James and Walt Whitman." Walt Whitman Review, 21
(June 1975), 78-79.
Blasing, Mutlu. "‘The Sleepers’: The Problem of the Self in Whitman."
Walt
Whitman Review, 21 (September 1975), 111-119.
Bloom, Harold, ed. Walt Whitman. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2003. [Part
of “Bloom’s BioCritiques” series, “designed to introduce the reader to the
life and work of the world’s literary masters”; with a general preface,
“The Work in the Writer” (ix-xiii), by Bloom; “Introduction” (1-4) by
Bloom, arguing “a clear relation between Whitman’s biography and his
elaborate command of all the resources of trope”; “Biography of Walt
Whitman” (5-54) by Judith Connors; “‘The Proof of a Poet’—Walt Whitman and
His Critics” (55-82) by Matt Longabucco; two reprinted essays (Randall
Jarrell, “Some Lines from Whitman” [83-97] and Stephen Railton, “‘As If I
Were With You’—The Performance of Whitman’s Poetry” [99-121]);
“Chronology” (123-127), “Works by Walt Whitman” (129), and “Works about
Walt Whitman” (131-136).]
----- ed. Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself. Philadelphia: Chelsea House,
2003. [Part of “Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations” series; with
“Introduction” (1-12) by Bloom, mapping “the Sublime centers” of “Song of
Myself” and the “revisionary pattern of the entire poem”; “Chronology”
(281-287); reprints twelve essays (Robert J. Scholnick, “ ‘The Password
Primeval’: Whitman’s Use of Science in ‘Song of Myself’” [13-56]; William
E. McMahon, “Grass and Its Mate in ‘Song of Myself’” [57-71]; Zong-Qi Cai,
“Hegel’s Phenomenological Dialectic and the Structure Of Whitman’s ‘Song
of Myself’” [73-86]; Mark Bauerlein, “Whitman’s Language of the Self”
[87-104]; Herbert J. Levine, “Union and Disunion in ‘Song of Myself’”
[105-121]; Herbert J. Levine, “‘Song of Myself’ as Whitman’s American
Bible” [123-139]; Mark DeLancey, “Texts, Interpretations, and Whitman’s
‘Song of Myself’” [141-160]; Gayle L. Smith, “Reading ‘Song of Myself’:
Assuming What Whitman Assumes” [161-173]; William Birmingham, “Whitman’s
Song of the Possible American Self” [175-193]; Dana Phillips, “Whitman and
Genre: The Dialogic in ‘Song of Myself’” [195-221]; W. C. Harris,
“Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and the Writing of a New American Bible”
[223-244]; Michael D. Sowder, “Walt Whitman, The Apostle” [245-254]; Bill
Hardwig, “Walt Whitman and the Epic Tradition: Political and Poetical
Voices in ‘Song of Myself’” [255-279]).]
Bloom, Harold. The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages. New
York: Harcourt Brace, 1994. [Chapter 11, "Walt Whitman as Center of the
American Canon," 264-290, presents Whitman as the most important American
writer viewed "against the background of Western tradition": "No Western
poet, in the past century and a half . . . overshadows Walt Whitman or
Emily Dickinson"; Bloom identifies a handful of poems that "matter most in
Whitman," including "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd": "Only a
few poets in the language have surpassed 'When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard
Bloom'd': Shakespeare, Milton, perhaps one or two others. Whether even
Shakespeare and Milton have achieved a more poignant pathos and a darker
eloquence than Whitman's 'Lilacs,' I am not always certain."]
Boggs, Colleen Glenney. "Specimens of Translation in Walt Whitman's
Poetry." Arizona Quarterly 58 (Autumn 2002), 33-56. [Argues that, for
Whitman, "American poetry is that which emerges in acts of translation,"
and examines the "unlikely attachment between translation and the American
vernacular" as a way "to explain how Whitman negotiated his desire to be
aboriginal and universal, to be nationally unique yet globally
representative"; focuses on Specimen Days (as a kind of "literary
anthology, the specimen collection"), Longfellow's translations, and
Whitman's evocation of "translation" in "Song of Myself."]
Borges, Jorges Luis. "Note on Walt Whitman." Other Inquisitions 1937-1952.
Trans. Ruth L. C. Sims. Intro. James E. Irby. Austin and London:
University of Texas Press, 1964, 1965 (Second Printing, 1975), 66-72. [See
also "Valéry as a Symbol," 73-74.]
Borges, Jorges Luis. "Walt Whitman: Man and Myth." Critical Inquiry, 1
(June 1975), 707-718.
Boswell, Jeanetta. The American Renaissance and the Critics. Wakefield,
NH: Longwood Academic, 1990. [Annotations of 731 articles and book
chapters on Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, and Whitman. Part Five,
"Walt Whitman," pp. 411- 502 contains annotations of 131 essays, ranging
from George Santayana's "Poetry of Barbarism" (1900) to recent studies.]
Bové, Paul Anthony. "A ‘New Literary History’ of Modern Poetry: History
and Deconstruction in the Works of Whitman, Stevens, and Olson." Ph.D.
Dissertation, State University of New York at Binghamton, 1976. [DAI, 36
(December 1975), 3682A-3683A.]
Brand, Dana. The Spectator and the City in Nineteenth-Century American
Literature. [Chapter 8, "'Immense Phantom Concourse': Whitman and the
Urban Crowd," 156-185, explores "the nature and contexts of Whitman's
imaginative interaction with the city," his roles as a "flaneur" and a
metaphorical photographer of the urban landscape, and his partially
successful attempt "to offer a theory of how it might be possible to live
in the midst of crowds of strangers" by viewing individuals as
representatives of a collectivity--each face in the crowd becoming "the
temporary focus of a love that is actually directed toward the entire
collectivity."]
Brooks, David. "What Whitman Knew." Atlantic Monthly 291 (May 2003),
32-33. [Proposes that Democratic Vistas is "our nation's most brilliant
political sermon because it embodies the exuberant energy of American
society--the energy that can make other peoples so nervous--and it
captures in its hodgepodge nature both the high aspirations and the sordid
realities of everyday life," and because Whitman saw "that despite its
many imperfections, America is a force for democracy and progress."]
Burbick, Joan. Healing the Republic: The Language of Health and the
Culture of Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1994. [Examines "nineteenth-century narratives of
health"; Chapter 6, "Biodemocracy in Leaves of Grass" (113-131), analyzes
Whitman's "lusty, dissenting voice" that "celebrates the health of
America" at a time when social reformers were "ringing the alarm of ill
heath," and argues that Whitman set out to express the human body in
"poetic language [that] unifies the nation into a biodemocracy . . .
unifying all bodies together in the time and space of the American
nation."]
Callow, Philip. From Noon to Starry Night: A Life of Walt Whitman.
Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1992.
Cowley, Malcolm
Campbell, Josie P., ed. ATQ n.s. 6 (September 1992). [Special issue on
Whitman, with five essays, listed individually in this bibliography, and
an introduction by Campbell, 145-149.]
Ceniza, Sherry. Walt Whitman and Nineteenth-Century Women Reformers.
University, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1998. [Documents Whitman’s
friendships with mid-nineteenth-century women reformers (Abby Hills Price, Paulina Wright Davis, and Ernestine L. Rose) and argues that they
influenced Whitman’s growing "feminist" thought; the first chapter focuses
on the influence of Whitman’s mother on his writing.]
Cheney-Coker, Syl. The Blood in the Desert's Eyes. Oxford: Heinemann,
1990. [Poems. "Cactus Needles" (pp. 6-7), "The Miracle of the Morning" (p.
72), and "Children of Adam" (pp. 80-81), are either about or inspired by
Whitman.]
Clarke, Graham, ed. Walt Whitman: Critical Assessments. Four volumes.
Robertsbridge, East Sussex: Helm Information, 1994. [Volume 1, "The Man
and the Myth: Biographical Studies," reprints twelve documents, including
Emerson's July 1855 letter to Whitman, the New York Times obituary of
Whitman, and biographies or biographical statements by John Burroughs,
William O'Connor, Moncure Conway, Richard Maurice Bucke, Bronson Alcott,
George Rice Carpenter, Bliss Perry, Edward Carpenter, and Gay Wilson
Allen; Volume 2, "The Response to the Writing," reprints fifty-six early
reviews of Whitman's work, from Charles A. Dana's 1855 New York Daily
Tribune review to Thomas Wentworth Higginson's 1899 assessment, along with
ten recent (1955-1991) readings of "Song of Myself" and eight recent
(1949-1985) readings of "other poems"; Volume 3, "Writers on Whitman's
Writing," reprints thirteen statements by nineteenth-century writers (from
Thoreau through Henry James) and thirty-two by twentieth- century writers
(from G.K. Chesterton through Guy Davenport); Volume 4, "Walt Whitman in
the Twentieth Century: A Chronological Overview," reprints seventy pieces
of criticism published between 1900 and 1991.]
Clarke, Graham. Walt Whitman: The Poem as Private History. London: Vision
Press, 1990. Critical Studies Series.
Cody, David. “‘Getting more savage, as I grow older’: A Forgotten Glimpse
of Walt Whitman.” ANQ 17 (Spring 2004), 42-45. [Reprints, from a May 1904
Catalogue of Autographs and Manuscripts (Dodd, Mead), an expanded
transcript of Whitman’s July 28, 1857, letter (dated 1858 in the
catalogue) to an unknown correspondent, and comments on the significance
of the new material.]
Cohen, Rachel. A Chance Meeting: Intertwined Lives of American Writers and
Artists, 1854-1967. New York: Random House, 2004. [“Imaginative
nonfiction” about meetings between various American literary and artistic
figures; Chapter 2, “William Dean Howells and Annie Adams Fields and Walt
Whitman” (11-23), focuses on Howells and contextualizes his two meetings
with Whitman; and Chapter 5, “Walt Whitman and Mathew Brady” (42-47),
imagines a day when Whitman gets his photograph taken by Brady.]
Coghill, Sheila, and Thom Tammaro, eds. Visiting Walt: Poems Inspired by
the Life and Work of Walt Whitman. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press,
2003. [One hundred poems by one hundred poets responding to Whitman;
foreword by Ed Folsom (xi-xii), and introduction, “Expecting the Main
Things,” by Sheila Coghill and Thom Tammaro (xiii-xvii); all poems were
previously published, except the following: Robert Bly, “This Night: For
Walt Whitman” (17); Michael Dennis Browne, “Your Sister” (19); Thomas
Gannon, “Meeting the Master” (68); and Edward Hirsch, “Whitman Leaves the
Boardwalk” (87).]
Conway, Christopher. "Of Subjects and Cowboys: Frontier and History in
Pedro Mir’s ‘Countersong to Walt Whitman.’" Walt Whitman Quarterly Review
15 (Spring 1998), 161-171.
Camboni, Marina, ed. Utopia in the Present Tense: Walt Whitman and the
Language of the New World. Rome: Il Calamo, 1994. [Collects sixteen essays
originally presented at an international conference on Whitman held at the
University of Macerata, Italy, October 29-30, 1992, with an introduction
by Camboni (9-10); essays appear in four sections, "Time and tense,
language and rhetorics in Leaves of Grass" (13-88), "The poem as a
portrait, an icon and a body" (89-160), "Whitman's words: rhythm and form
song music and dance" (161- 234), and "The European reception: France and
Italy" (235- 300);
Darío, Rubén, and Francisco Aragón. “Walt Whitman.” Chain 10 (Summer
2003), 60-63. [Reprints Rubén Darío’s 1890 poem “Walt Whitman” in Spanish
(60), followed by two different translations of the poem into English by
Francisco Aragón (61-62), and a note on the translations by Aragón
(62-63).]
Davidson, Michael. Guys Like Us: Citing Masculinity in Cold War Poetics.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. [Chapter 4, “‘When the world
strips down and rouges up’: Redressing Whitman” (99-123), is a revised
version of an essay originally appearing in Betsy Erkkila and Jay
Grossman, eds., Breaking Bounds (1996).]
Dellamora, Richard. Masculine Desire: The Sexual Politics of Victorian
Aestheticism. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990.
["Excursus: Hopkins, Swinburne, and the Whitmanian Signifier," pp. 86-93,
proposes that Victorian writers used Whitman's name "repeatedly as a code
word for illicit desire between men," and traces such references in the
letters of Swinburne and Hopkins.]
Dickey, Frances, and M. Jimmie Killingsworth. “Love of Comrades: The
Urbanization of Community in Walt Whitman’s Poetry and Pragmatist
Philosophy.” Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 21 (Summer 2003), 1-24. [Argues
that “the social crisis produced by urbanization shaped Whitman’s poetry
and pragmatist thought in similar ways,” and examines Whitman’s struggles
with skepticism and relativism in light of his straddling of rural and
urban experience, finding that Whitman’s “untamed flow of sympathy” in his
urban poems of 1855 and 1856 gives way to an increasing “urbane doubt” and
“withdrawal from the city” in his 1860 “Calamus” poems.]
Diehl, Joanne Feit. Women Poets and the American Sublime. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1990. [Chapter One, "From Emerson to Whitman,"
pp. 1-25, argues that Whitman, "who defines the American Sublime," at once
liberates and imprisons women by encompassing them and speaking for them:
"Whitman's seemingly empowering poetics remains tainted for the woman
reader who would be a poet, for Whitman at once extols her preeminence as
he restricts her opportunities for an autonomous life of the imagination.
. . . Whitman gives, and Whitman takes away." The rest of the book
investigates how various women poets create a tradition of the
"Counter-Sublime."]
Dello Buono, Carmen Joseph, ed. Rare Early Essays on Walt Whitman. Darby,
Penna.: Norwood Editions, 1980.
Dougherty, James, Walt Whitman and the Citizen's Eye
Edmundson, Mark. "'Lilacs': Walt Whitman's American Elegy."
Nineteenth-Century Literature 44 (March 1990), 465-491. [Reading of
"Lilacs" based on analysis of Freud's 1917 "Mourning and Melancholia";
argues that "Lilacs" embodies a commitment to both melancholia and
mourning, inscribing a distinctly American vacillation between "aggressive
self-reliance and cold conformity."]
Epstein, Daniel Mark. Lincoln and Whitman: Parallel Lives in Civil War
Washington. New York: Ballantine, 2004. [Tracks the “parallel lives” of
Lincoln and Whitman from the day that Lincoln first read Leaves of Grass
to Whitman’s delivering his Lincoln lecture, with a focus on their
intersecting lives in Washington, D.C., during the Civil War.]
Erkkila, Betsy, and Jay Grossman, eds. Breaking Bounds: Whitman and
American Cultural Studies. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.
[Fifteen original essays, most delivered at "Breaking Bounds: A Whitman
Centennial Conference," held at the University of Pennsylvania in October
1992, with an introduction ("Breaking Bounds," 3-20) by Erkkila, and an
epilogue ("Whitman's Centennial and the State of Whitman Studies,"
251-264) by Grossman. The essays--which are arranged in the book under the
headings "Genealogies," "America's Whitmans," "Whitman's Americas," and
"Legacies"-- are listed individually in this bibliography.]
----- Whitman the Political Poet (1989)
----- Whitman Among the French: Poet and Myth. Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1980.
Fletcher, Angus. A New Theory for American Poetry: Democracy, the
Environment, and the Future of Imagination. Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 2004. [Develops “a dynamic theory of poetry as environmental form,”
tracking a tradition from John Clare through Whitman to John Ashbery;
deals with Whitman throughout the book, but focuses on him especially in
Chapter 6, “The Whitman Phrase” (94-116); Chapter 7, “The
Environment-Poem” (117-142); Chapter 8, “Waves and the Troping of Poetic
Form” (143-164); and Chapter 9, “Middle Voice” (165-174); Chapter 14,
“Precious Idiosyncrasy” (246-255), reads “Sparkles from the Wheel” to
demonstrate “how a description without place . . . is able to express the
life of an environing space, a self-organizing chorography.”]
Folsom, Ed. “In Memoriam: Robert Strassburg, 1915-2003.” Walt Whitman
Quarterly Review 21 (Winter/Spring 2004), 189-191. [Tribute to Whitman
scholar and composer Robert Strassburg.]
---- “Trying to Do Fair: Walt Whitman and the Good Life.” Speakeasy, no.
10 (March/April 2004), 14-18. [Examines Whitman’s idea of “the good life”
by looking closely at an 1881 letter the poet wrote to his young friend
Harry Stafford and suggesting ways that the letter echoes Whitman’s
lifelong belief that the good life was the result of what he called “a
sweet, tolerant liberal disposition.”]
---- . “Walt Whitman: A Current Bibliography.” Walt Whitman Quarterly
Review 21 (Winter/Spring 2004), 183-188.
----- . "Paradise on the Prairies: Walt Whitman, Frederick Jackson Turner,
and the American West." In Jay Semel and Annie Tremmel Wilcox, eds.,
Utopian Visions of Work and Community (Iowa City: Obermann Center for
Advanced Studies, 1996), 101-113. [Investigates why Whitman "disdained
utopias even while he loved perfection" and looks at how, after the Civil
War, Whitman began to "coerce paradise onto the prairies," projecting the
prairie states as the future center of democratic activity; suggests that
Turner picked up important elements of his "frontier thesis" from
Whitman.]
---- ed. Whitman East and West: New Contexts for Reading Walt Whitman.
Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2002. [Contains fifteen original
essays, each listed separately in this bibliography, along with a
"Preface" (ix-xi) and "Introduction: Whitman East and West" (xiii-xxiv),
both by Folsom.]
-----. What Do We Represent?: Walt Whitman, Representative Democracy, and
Democratic Representation. Iowa City: University of Iowa, 1998. [Folsom’s
1998 University of Iowa Presidential Lecture, delivered February 15, 1998,
dealing with how Whitman’s poetry negotiates the tensions between artistic
and political representation; illustrated with 125 photographs of
Whitman.]
---- ed., Walt Whitman: The Centennial Essays (Iowa City: University of
Iowa Press, 1994).
--- Walt Whitman's Native Representations. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1994. [Views Whitman's career from four different cultural
perspectives--the development of American dictionaries, the growth of
baseball, the evolution of American Indian policy, and the development of
photography and photographic portraits.]
--- and Kenneth Price, Re-scripting Walt Whitman: An Introduction To His
Life And Work (Blackwell Introductions to Literature). Blackwell, 2005.
----- Review of Jonathon Ned Katz, Love Stories: Sex between Men before
Homosexuality. Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 21 (Winter/Spring 2004),
179-182.
---- Review of Christopher Beach, The Politics of Distinction: Whitman and
the Discourses of Nineteenth-Century America. Nineteenth-Century
Literature 53 (June 1998), 122-126.
-----. Review of Guiyou Huang, Whitmanism, Imagism, and Modernism in China
and America. Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 15 (Spring 1998), 189-193.
Byrne Fone, Masculine Landscapes
Francis, Sean. “‘Outbidding at the start the old cautious hucksters’:
Promotional Discourse and Whitman’s ‘Free’ Verse.” Nineteenth-Century
Literature 57 (December 2002), 381-406. [Examines the first three editions
of Leaves of Grass in the context of the “promotional discourse” of
mid-nineteenth-century America, arguing that Whitman “modeled his
publicity efforts on his books’ behalf on the antics of such brash
contemporary promoters as James G. Bennett and Robert Bonner, taking
special care to assert the true and lasting worth of his project in a
marketplace full of ephemeral and merely material goods,” and argues that
Whitman’s form owes much to the street vendors and printed ads of his
time, even as it defines itself against the ubiquitous “‘low’ promotional
versions of poetry that were so prevalent”; concludes that, “convinced of
poetry’s absolute necessity, [Whitman] could advertise it most
persuasively.”]
Gambino, Richard. “Walt Whitman.” The Nation 277 (July 21-28, 2003),
14-17. [One of a series of articles in this issue on “American Rebels,”
this piece is a celebration of Whitman’s “faith in democracy,” a faith
based on “a distinctly American populism of pragmatic human experience.”]
Gardner, John Fentress. American Heralds of the Spirit: Emerson, Whitman,
Melville. Hudson, NY: Lindisfarne Press, 1992. [Chapter 4, "Walt Whitman:
The Poet of Death and Life," 112-147, argues that Whitman's faith was in
"the creative force, divine in both origin and destination, that underlies
all that exists and eternally evolves"; Chapter 5, "Walt Whitman: The New
Columbus," 148-180, compares "the life-gestures, the styles of the two
men, Whitman and Columbus"; Whitman, Melville, and Emerson are seen
throughout this book as America's cultural and spiritual founders, as
"spokesmen for the spirit," and as American prophets.]
Ginsberg, Allen. "Whitman's Influence: A Mountain Too Vast to Be Seen."
Sulfur 31 (Fall 1992), 229-230. [How Whitman's work affected modern
writers and predicted gay liberation and "a pragmatic transcendentalism
that's come true."]
Gillespie, Nick. "Poetic Licentiousness: What Does the President See in
Leaves of Grass?" Reason (July 1998), 48-49. [Suggests personal and
political reasons for President Clinton’s "longstanding fondness for
Leaves of Grass."]
Goytisolo, José Agustin. "O Capitán, mi Capitán!" ABC [Literario] (March
26, 1992), 21. [On Whitman as the poet of democracy; in Spanish.]
Grace, Judith. Good-Bye My Fancy: With Walt Whitman in His Last Days.
Oregon House, CA: Ulysses Books, 2004. [Dramatization of conversations
between Whitman and Horace Traubel on three different evenings, one in
1890, another in 1891, and the final one on the day of Whitman’s death in
1892, all based on Traubel’s With Walt Whitman in Camden; with an
introduction (11-17) by Robert MacIsaac and an afterword (“Walt Whitman
and Horace Traubel,” 113-119) by Thomas Fenn.]
Gray, Eric R. "Sexual Anxiety and Whitman’s ‘O Hot-Cheeked and Blushing.’"
ATQ 12 (March 1998), 5-26. [Offers a Freudian reading of the "hot-cheeked"
dream of exposure and embarrassment in "The Sleepers" (a passage Whitman
deleted in the 1881 version of the poem), viewing it as "about sexual
anxiety" where "the speaker regresses; the speaker feels post-coital guilt
after having sexual contact with a mother-figure, makes an unsuccessful
attempt to identify with an imposing father-figure, and finally retreats
in desperation to the mother’s ambivalent breast and eventually in the
following section to her death-like womb."]
Gray, Richard. American Poetry of the Twentieth Century. London: Longman,
1990. Longman Literature in English Series. [Chapter 4, "The Traditions of
Whitman: Other Poets from between the Wars," pp. 157-213, with the
following subsections: "The language of crisis and the language of
Whitman: other aspects of the social and cultural situation between the
wars," 157-161; "Whitman and the shape of American poetry," 161-162;
"Whitman and American populism: Sandburg, Lindsay, Masters," 162-168;
"Whitman and American radicalism: Rexroth, MacLeish, Fearing, Patchen,"
168-176; "Whitman and American identity: Hughes, Johnson, Cullen, Tolson,
Hayden, Brooks, and the question of black poetry," 176-184; "Whitman and
American individualism: Moore, Wylie, Millay, Miles, Bogan, Adams,"
184-194; "Whitman and American experimentalism: cummings," 194-199;
"Whitman and American mysticism: Rukeyser, Riding, Crane," 199-209.]
Ezra Greenspan, Walt Whitman and the American Reader
Grimes, William. "On Tape, Scholars Think They Hear Walt Whitman Reading."
New York Times (March 16, 1992), B1-2. [About the discovery of a tape of
what may be an 1890 wax cylinder recording of Whitman reading four lines
from his poem "America." Article appeared under different titles in
different editions of the Times and was reprinted in various versions in
many newspapers nationwide.]
Grossman, Allen. "The Poetics of Union in Whitman and Lincoln: An Inquiry
Toward the Relationship Between Art and Policy." In Walter Benn Michaels
and Donald E. Pease, ed., The American Renaissance Reconsidered
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 183-208.
Grossman, Jay. Reconstituting the American Renaissance: Emerson, Whitman,
and the Politics of Representation. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003.
[Re-examines the Emerson/Whitman relationship in light of the discourse
about representational politics from the founding of the United States
through the nineteenth century, emphasizing political, economic, and
artistic differences between Emerson and Whitman.]
Gunn, Thom. "Forays against the Republic." In Robert K. Martin, ed.,
The
Continuing Presence of Walt Whitman (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press,
1992), 206-212. [Suggests that Whitman's "ideally generous democracy" is
founded in the intersection between "the public and political" and "the
private and sexual"; his "explicit conflict" is "between the populist
athletic democracy and the specific athletic lovers." Originally published
in TLS (January 5-11, 1990).]
Gunn, Thom. "Whitman's Liberality." TLS (January 5-11, 1990), 3-4. [Review
essay on Edwin Haviland Miller, Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself": A Mosaic
of Interpretations; Betsy Erkkila, Whitman the Political Poet; and M.
Jimmie Killingsworth, Whitman's Poetry of the Body.]
Haigney, Jessica. Walt Whitman and the French Impressionists: A Study of
Analogies. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1990. Studies in American
Literature.
Hakutani, Yoshinobu. "Emerson, Whitman, and Zen Buddhism." Midwest
Quarterly 31 (Summer 1990), 433-448. [Discusses ways that Zen and American
transcendentalism are "somewhat akin": "In some aspects, Zen's method of
teaching resembles Whitman's in his poetry. . . ."]
Hans, James S. The Value(s) of Literature. Albany: State University of New
York Press, 1990. [Chapter One, "Whitman's Affirmation of the World," pp.
19-61, explores "Whitman's value system" as revealed in "Song of Myself,"
identifying "the ethic embodied in the aesthetic": "The central factor in
Whitman's value system is simply to make use of that which is available to
him; he values that which he sees around him because it is worth valuing."
Other chapters on Wallace Stevens and A.R. Ammons.]
Harrison, John Kent, director and writer. Beautiful Dreamers, 1990. [Film
about Whitman's 1880 visit to Dr. R. M. Bucke's London Asylum for the
Insane. Produced by Michael Maclear and Martin Walters; starring Rip Torn
as Whitman, Colm Feore as Dr. Bucke, and Wendel Meldrum as Mrs. Bucke.
According to the publicity poster, "It's about repression, and freedom /
It's about passion lost, and passion regained / It's about Walt Whitman,
and eating asparagus / But most of all, it's about feelings. . . . / A
motion picture about all of us." Premiered March 21, 1990, in London,
Ontario, and March 23 in Toronto.]
Herreshoff, David Sprague. Labor into Art: The Theme of Work in
Nineteenth-Century American Literature. Detroit: Wayne State University
Press, 1992? [Chapter on Whitman.]
Hummer, T. R. Walt Whitman in Hell. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
University Press, 1996. [Poems; the title poem (52-63) originally appeared
in the Kenyon Review (1993) and is accompanied here by the author's
explanatory notes (66).]
Hutchinson, George. "Race and the Family Romance: Whitman's Civil War."
Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 20 (Winter/Spring 2003), 134-150. [Examines
"the implications of Whitman's experience of the Civil War as a familial
tragedy, remembering Whitman as a member of a white, New York
working-class family that was experiencing continuous trauma throughout
the war years," leading to Whitman's "striking transformation of the
poetry of war into a poetry of primary relationships, attachment and
loss," but also leaving "the relation of African Americans to the Civil
War almost entirely unspoken, unrepresentable," because blacks did "not
belong to the national 'family' Whitman imagined and addressed."]
Ignoffo, Matthew F. What the War Did to Whitman: A Brief Study of the
Effects of the Civil War on the Mind of Walt Whitman. New York [etc.]:
Vantage Press. 1975. [Argues that Whitman’s "profound message . . . for
America Today" lies not in the "childlike optimism" of the pre-Civil War
writings, but in the "experienced idealism" of Drum-Taps and the elegy to
Lincoln.]
Isbell, Paul A. "En el sendero visionario." El Pais (March 26, 1992), "Cultura"
supplement, 12. [Suggests that Leaves of Grass, after the failure of
Marxism, offers a visionary path to a better future; in Spanish.]
Isbell, Paul A., ed. Homenaje a Walt Whitman en el Centenario de Su Muerte/Homage
to Walt Whitman on the Centenary of His Death. Madrid: Casa de America,
United States Information Service, 1992. [Pamphlet containing program of
Whitman Centennial program at Casa de America, December 1-2, 1992, and
also containing prefatory remarks by Ion de la Riva ("El Aula Walt
Whitman"/"The 'Aula Walt Whitman'" [2-5, in Spanish and English]), Jos‚
Morilla Critz ("Whitman en los Estudios Norteamericanos"/"Whitman's Place
in American Studies" [6-9, in Spanish and English]), and Paul A. Isbell
("Whitman's Vision" [11-15]); also contains passages from Whitman's poetry
(in Spanish and English) and two short essays by Gary Snyder and Roger
Asselineau, listed separately in this bibliography.]
Jeffs, William Patrick. Feminism, Manhood and Homosexuality: Intersections
in Psychoanalysis and American Poetry. New York: Peter Lang, 2003.
[Chapter 2, “Walt Whitman: Man’s Words and Manly Comradeship” (27-45),
examines the ways “Whitman sexualizes language” and looks at his “grand
triad” of “rhetorical potency, sexual equality, and political ideals,” all
built on “his idea of ‘manly friendship’” and his “masculine words” that
point “toward the establishment of a better, freer, American democracy.”]
Gambone, Kenneth F. ed., Remembering Walt Whitman (N.p.: Walnut Leaf,
1992),
Greenspan, Ezra. Walt Whitman and the American Reader (1990).
Jarrell, Randal.
Jay, Gregory. "Catching up with Whitman: A Review Essay." South Atlantic
Review 57 (January 1992), 89-102. [Discusses "Whitman's two chief
topics--politics and sexuality" in relation primarily to Betsy Erkkila's
Whitman the Political Poet (1989), M. Jimmie Killingsworth's Whitman's
Poetry of the Body (1989), David Reynolds's Beneath the American
Renaissance (1988), Ezra Greenspan's Walt Whitman and the American Reader
(1990), and Michael Moon's Disseminating Whitman (1991).]
Jensen, Beth. Leaving the M/other: Whitman, Kristeva, and Leaves of Grass.
Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2002. [Employing Jula
Kristeva's theories of subject formation and language acquisition,
explores the "integral role" of the "mother" (not the "biological mother
but instead psychoanalytical M/other, the primal or pre-Oedial M/other")
in Whitman's work starting in 1855 and tracing the transformation of
Whitman's image of the ocean from a "maternal image" to a deific
"father."]
Kaplan, Justin. Walt Whitman: A Life. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1980.
[What Emory Holloways life did for Whitman studies in the Twenties and Gay
Wilson Allen’s in the Fifties, Kaplan’s masterful biography should do for
the Eighties--a certain award winner.]
Kanadey, V. R. "Walt Whitman and the Bhagavad Gita." In C. D. Verma, ed.,
The Gita in World Literature (New Delhi: Sterling, 1990), 200-213. [About
Whitman's recognition of "two levels of perception of reality" and his
Yoga-like attainment of "supreme detachment."]
Kateb, George. "Walt Whitman and the Culture of Democracy." Political
Theory 18 (November 1990), 545-571. [Explores why Whitman is "perhaps the
greatest philosopher of the culture of democracy," particularly in his
examination of the way democratic culture is "the setting for democratic
individuality." Followed by four responses (572-600) by David Bromwich,
Nancy L. Rosenblum, Michael Mosher, and Leo Marx, each listed separately
in this bibliography.]
Katz, Wendy R. “Untying the Immigrant Tongue: Whitman and the
‘Americanization’ of Anzia Yezierska.” Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 21
(Winter/Spring 2004), 155-165. [Traces Whitman’s influence on the
Jewish-American immigrant writer Anzia Yezierska (1881?-1970) and suggests
that it was through Whitman that she found “a voice for immigrant
America.”]
Killingsworth, M. Jimmie. Whitman's Poetry of the Body (1989),
Kramer, Michael P. Imagining Language in America: From the Revolution to
the Civil War. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992. [Chapter 3,
"'A Tongue According': Whitman and the Literature of Language Study,"
90-115, analyzes "Whitman's early linguistic writings, An American Primer
being only the best known among them, not as theories of language that
help to illustrate his poetic practice, but as literary embodiments, in
and of themselves, of his linguistic imagination."]
Kuebrich, David. Minor Prophecy: Walt Whitman's New American Religion.
Kumar, Sudhir. "The Gita and Walt Whitman's Mysticism." In Abhai Maurya,
ed., India and World Literature (New Delhi: Indian Council for Cultural
Relations, 1990), 524-534. [Suggests that Whitman's poetry is "replete
with the plangent overtones from the Vedas and the Gita as the informing
principle," and specifically that the "'I' and 'You' of the Song of Myself
are the symbols of Lord Krishna and Arjuna."]
Kummings, Donald D., ed., Approaches to Teaching Whitman's "Leaves of
Grass" (New York: Modern Language Association, 1990
Lawrence, D. H. Studies in Classic American Literature (1922), reserves
special praise for Whitman.
Loving, Jerome. Walt Whitman: The Song of Himself. Univ. of California
Press, 1999.
----- ed. "Symposium: Walt Whitman Facing West." Walt Whitman Quarterly
Review 10 (Summer 1992), 1-39. [Special issue containing four essays,
listed separately in this bibliography, and an "Editor's Note," 1-2.]
----- ., ed. Civil War Letters of George Washington Whitman. With a
Foreword by Gay Wilson Allen. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University
Press, 1975. [Contains a 35-pp. introduction on the Whitman family and the
efforts to gain George Whitman’s release from prison; 61 letters, all but
15 unpublished (see Clarence Ghodes and Rollo G. Silver, editors, Faint
Clews & Indirections, Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1949,
143-182); G. W. Whitman’s Civil War Diary; George’s letter to Walt
Whitman, 6 September 1871; a military report on the Battle of the Crater,
8 August 1864; and "The Question of Andrew Jackson Whitman’s Military
Activities." As Allen writes, this volume "is a worthy contribution both
to Civil War history and to the biography of Walt Whitman."]
Martin, Robert K.The Homosexual Tradition in American Poetry
----- ed., The Continuing Presence of Walt Whitman (Iowa City: University
of Iowa Press, 1992),
Herreshoff, David Sprague. Labor into Art: The Theme of Work in
Nineteenth-Century American Literature. Detroit: Wayne State University
Press, 1992? [Chapter on Whitman.]
Mack, Stephen John. The Pragmatic Whitman
Martin, Robert K., ed. The Continuing Presence of Walt Whitman: The Life
after the Life. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1992. [Collection of
thirteen new essays and four reprinted ones, reprinted poems by Ronald
Johnson ("Letters to Walt Whitman," 232-239, originally in Valley of the
Many-Colored Grasses [1969]), and an introduction by the editor
(xi-xxiii).]
Maslan, Mark. Whitman Possessed: Poetry, Sexuality and Popular Authority.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998. [Examines "the connection
between sexual desire and poetic agency in Whitman’s poetry,"
demonstrating how, "in portraying male sexual desire as the subjection of
the body to an invasive force, Whitman drew on the rhetoric and
physiological theories of the sexual hygiene literature of his day";
argues that Whitman’s homosexuality "becomes the mark of his vocation—not
because his poetry expresses his sexuality, but instead because his
sexuality represents the violation of personal identity that poetry
requires"; and "connects Whitman’s erotics and poetics of possession . . .
to his views on poetic and political representation."]
-----. "Whitman, Sexuality, and Poetic Authority." Raritan 17 (Spring
1998), 98-119. [Examines the "consistent association of male homosexual
desire with poetic invention in Whitman’s poetry," arguing that "both
involve an invasion of his body and a suspension of his agency," thus
placing Whitman in the Romantic tradition that posits poetic inspiration
as penetrating and possessive, "the suppression of one’s identity":
"Whitman therefore presents his homosexuality as a token of the poetic
vocation."]
Mattson, Francis O., ed. Walt Whitman: In Life or Death Forever. New York:
New York Public Library, 1992. [Published in honor of the 100th
anniversary of Whitman's death, this catalogue reproduces documents from
the Berg Collection and the Oscar Lion Collection at the New York Public
Library, including the 1854 "Christ likeness" daguerreotype of Whitman, an
1872 Frank Pearsall photograph of Whitman, title pages of Franklin Evans
and the 1855 Leaves of Grass, an 1878 ink drawing of Whitman by Herbert
Gilchrist, and various prose and poetry manuscripts; with introduction (7)
and commentary by Mattson. Publication complements the Whitman Centennial
exhibition at the NYPL (March 20 to September 12, 1992).]
McWilliams, Jr., John P. The American Epic: Transforming a Genre,
1770-1860. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. [Chapter 8, "An
Epic of Democracy?," pp. 217-237, views Leaves of Grass in relation to the
epic tradition, arguing that, despite Whitman's late claims, Leaves of
Grass is not an epic, since it lacks necessary epical elements like a
structured narrative and a "culturally accepted hero."]
Merrill, Christopher. "Whitman's New Worlds." Massachusetts Review 33
(Spring 1992), 94-95. [Appreciation of how Whitman gave American poets
"permission to discover our own land- and city-scapes, courage to chart
the drifts and shoals and sea- lanes of our psyches. . . ."]
Joel Myerson, ed., Whitman in His Own Time.
Miller, Edwin Haviland. lt Whitman's "Song of Myself": A Mosaic of
Interpretations.
Miller, James E. Jr, The American Quest for a Supreme Fiction: Whitman's
Legacy in the Personal Epic. American Literary Realism 1870-1910,
Miller, Jane. Working Time: Essays on Poetry, Culture, and Travel. Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992. [One essay, "Spanish Poppy"
(67-78), focuses on how Andy Warhol and Whitman "understood the American
audience-- practical, whimsical, competitive--and the American artist's
relation to it as entertainer," and on how Whitman "gave us identity by
urging us to identify with him" while Warhol "tried to find identity in us
and in our objects and icons."]
Mitchell, William J. The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the
Post-Photographic Era. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992. [Chapter 9, "How To
Do Things with Pictures," reprints the 1883 "butterfly" portrait of
Whitman (198) and discusses the nature of Whitman's "posed fiction" (196,
220).]
Moon, Michael. Disseminating Whitman, 1991
Moramarco, Fred, and William Sullivan. Containing Multitudes: Poetry in
the United States since 1950. New York: Twayne, 1998. [Surveys the work of
about 60 poets of the second half of the twentieth century, reflecting
"Whitman’s vision of the United States as a country whose strength and
uniqueness are its pluralism"; Chapter 8, "Restoring Whitman’s Vision: The
Anthologies of the Eighties" (314-328), by Moramarco, argues that by the
1980s, with its "emerging pluralism," "the poetry of the United States
moved toward a restoration of Whitman’s vision," evident in the diversity
represented in recent poetry anthologies.]
Nathanson, Tenney. Whitman's Presence: Body, Voice, and Writing in Leaves
of Grass. New York: New York University Press, 1992.
Oakes, Karen. "'I stop somewhere waiting for you': Whitman's Femininity
and the Reader of Leaves of Grass." In Laura Claridge and Elizabeth
Langland, eds., Out of Bounds: Male Writers and Gender(ed) Criticism
(Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1990), pp. 169-185. [Argues
that Whitman's poetry is duplicitous in the way it "permits him to have
the illusion of intimacy without any of its risks, to soothe his feminine
fear of the loss of the other while it assuages his masculine fear of the
loss of the self," and suggests that his earlier poems incorporate "a more
'feminine' voice, imagine a more generous, subtle, and intimate
relationship with his reader," while the later poems tend "toward
universalization and away from the feminine voice of proximity and
invitation."]
Olds, Sharon. "Nurse Whitman" and "The Language of the Brag." In her Satan
Says. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1980, 13, 44- 45.
[Poems.]
Olney, James. The Language(s) of Poetry: Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson,
Gerard Manley Hopkins
Padgett, Ron, ed., Teachers & Writers Guide to Walt Whitman.
Paglia, Camille. Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to
Emily Dickinson. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990. [Chapter 23,
"American Decadents: Emerson, Whitman, James," pp. 598-622, claims that,
by "bardic instinct," Whitman "revives the cosmology of the ancient mother
cults," becoming a "son-lover and priest of the hermaphrodite goddess,"
writing "literature's most perfectly Dionysian poetry" (though his
"eroticism remains in Decadent voyeuristic suspension . . . the penis
stays soft"): "His poetry is a substitute for intimacy and a record of the
swerve from it." Isolated and autoerotic, Whitman is best seen in a line
of descent from "Khepera, the masturbatory Egyptian First Mover" to the
"sexually ambiguous worlds of Aubrey Beardsley and Jean Genet."]
Pannapacker, William. Revised Lives: Walt Whitman and Nineteenth-Century
Authorship. New York: Routledge, 2004. [Examines self-representation in
the U.S. from the American Revolution through the nineteenth century,
discussing how authors create personae and how those personae are
appropriated by interpretive communities; the introduction (xiii-xix) and
three chapters focus on Whitman: Chapter 2, “Politics, Poetics, and
Self-Promotion: Whitman and Lincoln” (19-47); Chapter 3, “‘He Not Only
Objected to My Book, He Objected to Me’: Walt Whitman, James Russell
Lowell, and the Rhetoric of Exclusion” (49-104); and Chapter 4, “‘What Is
a Man Anyhow?’: Whitmanites, Wildeans, and Working Class Comradeship”
(105-127).]
Pallikunnen, A. G. Eastern Influence on Whitman’s Mysticism, and Other
Essays in Literature. Alwar, India: Pontifical Institute Publications,
1975.
Pascal, Richard. "Walt Whitman and Woody Guthrie: American Prophet-Singers
and Their People." Journal of American Studies 24 (April 1990), 41-59.
[Influence of Whitman on Guthrie's poetry and songs, with focus on "the
plight of the socially engaged artist in a modern mass society"; both
Guthrie and Whitman failed to initiate "the enlightened popular response
they each purported, loudly, to foresee."]
Patell, Cyrus R. K. “Representing Emergent Literatures.” American Literary
History 15 (Spring 2003), 61-69. [Examines Sherman Alexie’s poem,
“Defending Walt Whitman,” and (briefly) Maxine Hong Kingston’s novel,
Tripmaster Monkey, as case-studies of “the problem faced by all US
minority cultures: how to transform themselves from marginalized cultures
. . . into emergent cultures capable of challenging and reshaping the US
mainstream.”]
Pérez Gállego, Cándido. "Poeta del cuerpo y poeta del alma." ABC [Literario]
(March 26, 1992), 18. [About Whitman's singing of the body as well as the
soul; in Spanish.]
Perkovich, Mike. Nature Boys: Camp Discourse in American Literature from
Whitman to Wharton. New York: Peter Lang, 2003. [Traces the origin of
“camp” in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century American literature,
including Whitman, arguing that “camp” helped define homosexuality and
“create the homosexual”; Chapter Two, “Vigil Strange: Men at War in Camp”
(23-51), explicates “Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field One Night” in terms
of how Whitman’s “poetry goes over the top in various ways, or camps,”
creating “grief [that] is both homoerotic and military,” with “the latter
quality . . . legitimat[ing] the former.”]
Perosa, Sergio. "America, non avrai altro Io all'infuori di me." Corriere
della Sera [Milan, Italy] (February 2, 1992), Cultura 1-2. [Appreciation
of Whitman's career and achievement, with emphasis on how Whitman
substitutes nature and self for history and past; in Italian.]
Peterson, Merrill D. Lincoln in American Memory. New York: Oxford
University Press, 1994. [Discusses how Whitman in "When Lilacs Last in the
Dooryard Bloom'd" "summoned the inspiration to engrave the funeral
permanently in American memory" (21-23), and discusses Whitman's "Death of
President Lincoln" lecture (138-140).]
Pettit, Michael, ed. "A Celebration of Whitman." Massachusetts Review 33
(Spring 1992), 65-106. [A Centennial gathering of six poems about or
inspired by Whitman and twelve brief prose statements about Whitman, along
with one visual construction inspired by Whitman, all by poets; the prose
statements and original poems are listed separately in this bibliography.
The reprinted poems are Allen Ginsberg's "I Love Old Whitman So" (from
White Shroud), p. 77; Thomas Lux's "Walt Whitman's Brain Dropped on
Laboratory Floor" (from Drowned River), p. 91; and Paul Zimmer, "Leaves of
Zimmer" (from Zimmer Poems), p. 106. Also contains an introduction by the
editor, 66-68, in which he notes "To celebrate another poet's death might
seem odd, but for Whitman, . . . life and death were particularly
inseparable."]
Phillips, Dana. "Nineteenth-Century Racial Thought and Whitman's
'Democratic Ethnology of the Future.'" Nineteenth-Century Literature 49
(December 1994), 289-320. [Argues that "Whitman's racial politics are more
complicated, more conflicted, and considerably less admirable than his
reputation for a broad and easy tolerance of others suggests," and
proposes that "Whitman's apparent 'multiculturalism' actually functions as
a means of specifying, despite all the evidence to the contrary, the
singular culture of the United States and the common racial identity of
its citizens."]
Piercy, Marge. "How I Came to Walt Whitman and Found Myself."
Massachusetts Review 33 (Spring 1992), 98-100. [Memoir of encounters with
Whitman's poetry beginning in high school, how he gave "permission to be
where I was and who I was."]
Pollak, Vivian. The Erotic Whitman. Univ. of California P, 2000.
Portelli, Alessandro. The Text and the Voice: Writing, Speaking, and
Democracy in American Literature. New York: Columbia University Press,
1994. [Chapter 6, "Symbols: The Oral Origins of the World," contains a
section called "The Tongue and the Heart: Whitman" (129-135), arguing that
"Whitman's dream of the voice is rooted upon typographical soil" and thus
his "poetry is the triumph of writing, won by means of the absorption in
it of a triumphant orality."]
Price, Kenneth M. To Walt Whitman, America. Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 2004. [Examines Whitman as “a foundational figure in
American culture . . . so central to practices and formulations of
American culture, past and present, that we may use his life, work, ideas,
and influence to examine major patterns in our culture over the last 150
years”; chapters include “Whitman in Blackface” (9-36), dealing with
Whitman and race; “Edith Wharton and the Problem of Whitmanian
Comradeship” (37-55); “Transatlantic Homoerotic Whitman” (56-69), dealing
with John Addington Symonds, Edward Carpenter, D.H. Lawrence, E.M.
Forster, and Gilbert Adair’s Love and Death on Long Island; “Xenophobia,
Religious Intolerance, and Whitman’s Storybook Democracy” (70-89),
examining John Dos Passos, Ben Shahn, and Bernard Malamud; “Passing,
Fluidity, and American Identities” (90-107), dealing with William Least
Heat-Moon, Gloria Naylor, and Ishmael Reed; and “Whitman at the Movies”
(108-138), examining the use of Whitman in films from 1913 to the
present.]
--- Whitman and Tradition: The Poet and His Century. Yale UP, 1990.
Ramalho Santos, Irene. Atlantic Poets: Fernando Pessoa’s Turn in
Anglo-American Modernism. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England,
2003. [Investigates “Pessoa’s relationship with Whitman,” arguing that
“the way Pessoa reads Whitman can help us refine our understanding of the
American modernists’ relationship with the ‘Poet of American Democracy’”;
Whitman is of central concern in Chapter 2, “From Whitman to Pessoa:
Eliot’s From Poe to Valery Revisited” (58-82); Chapter 3, “Atlantic Poets:
Whitman, Crane, Pessoa” (83-114); and Chapter 4, “Center, Margin, and
Poetic Arrogance: Whitman, Dickinson, Pessoa” (115-153), and is mentioned
throughout the book.]
Ramirez, Jan Seidler. "Whitman and the Bohemians." Humanities 13
(March/April 1992), 14-16. [Reviews Whitman's bohemian Pfaff-rathskeller
days and the poet's influence on "the cultural revolution that erupted in
Greenwich Village on the eve of the First World War."] Redondo, Ana, and
Javier Azpeitia. "Versiones de Whitman." Quimera: Revista-de-Literatura
109 (1992), 34-39. [Compares translations ("distinct versions or, if you
will, mutual refutations") of "Song of Myself" by Francisco Alexánder,
Jorge Luis Borges, José María Valverde, Concha Zardoya, Léon Felipe, and
Mauro Armiño (as well as a version by the authors of the essay); in
Spanish.]
Reeves-Golding, Mari, and Michael Golding. Walt Whitman: Poetry in Song.
Brownsville, CA: Carl Mautz Publishing, 1992. [Cassette recording of
Whitman poems set to music by the Goldings, who also sing the songs,
accompanied by a single guitar.]
Reynolds, David. Walt Whitman (Live and Legacies). Oxford UP, 2005.
---- Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography. Knopf, 1995.
--- Beneath the American Renaissance (1988)
Reynolds, David S. "Of Me I Sing: Whitman in His Time." New York Times
Book Review (October 4, 1992), 1, 27-29. [How the America of Whitman's
time was as politically corrupt, as polluted, and as sex-obsessed as
America today, and how Whitman in his poetry used an "improving strategy"
to emphasize the positive aspects of his culture; also discusses Whitman's
sexuality, arguing that we can "go too far in imposing our sexual
standards on his."]
Rorty, Richard. "American National Pride: Whitman and Dewey." In Achieving
Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1998), 1-38. [Views Whitman and John Dewey as
shapers of a "new, quasi-communitarian rhetoric" that "set the tone for
the American Left during the first six decades of the twentieth century,"
and as "prophets" of a new secular "civic religion" that "offered a new
account of what America was, in the hope of mobilizing Americans as
political agents."]
Sagar, Keith. "Hopkins and the Religion of the Diamond Body." Cambridge
Quarterly 27 (1998), 15-44. [Discusses similarities between Whitman and
Hopkins (30-36) in "their informal prose" and in various poems—including a
pairing of Hopkins’s "The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo" with Whitman’s
"Spontaneous Me," and Hopkins’s "Epithalamium" with Section 11 of "Song of
Myself."]
Sarracino, Carmine. The Idea of the Ordinary. Alexandria, VA: Orchises,
2003. [Poems, two of which focus on Whitman during the Civil War and
after: "This Day" (11-16) and "The Hospital Ships" (46).]
Schmidgall, Gary, ed., Intimate with Walt.
Schwiebert, John E. The Frailest Leaves: Whitman's Poetic Technique and
Style in the Short Poem. New York: Peter Lang, 1992
Selby, Nick, ed. The Poetry of Walt Whitman: A Reader’s Guide to Essential
Criticism. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2004. [Gathers and analyzes excerpts from Whitman criticism
from 1855 to the present, setting out to “draw together some of the most
significant, important and interesting critical analyses of Whitman” in
order to demonstrate “how Whitman has always been read with a purpose”;
and argues that the critical tradition of “reading Whitman makes apparent
the turbulent pressure upon national and individual identity from which
America was constructing itself in the second half of the nineteenth
century.” Chapters, each including critical excerpts by several authors
with commentary by Selby, include “Early Reviews” (8-27, with work by R.
W. Emerson, Charles A. Dana, Charles Eliot Norton, Edward Everett Hale,
Henry David Thoreau, John Robertson, and anonymous reviewers), “Whitman in
the Early Twentieth Century” (28-54, with work by John Addington Symonds,
George Santayana, Ezra Pound, and D. H. Lawrence), “Whitman and the
‘American Renaissance’” (55-74, with work by F. O. Matthiessen, Charles
Feidelson, and Randall Jarrell), “Whitman, Myth Criticism, and the Growth
of American Studies” (75-92, with work by R. W. B. Lewis and Roy Harvey
Pearce), “Whitman, Cultural Materialism, and ‘Reconstructive’ Readings”
(93-115, with work by M. Wynn Thomas, Ed Folsom, and David S. Reynolds),
“Ideology and Desire: Whitman and Sexuality” (116-136, with work by
Malcolm Cowley, Robert K. Martin, and Nick Selby), and “Ideology and
Deconstruction: Whitman and ‘New Americanist’ Critiques” (137-157, with
work by Karen Sanchez-Eppler, Allen Grossman, and Jonathan Arac); with
“Introduction” (1-7) and “Bibliography” (168-172), both by Selby.]
Selinger, Eric Murphy. What Is It Then between Us?: Traditions of Love in
American Poetry. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998. [Chapter 1, "An
Example to Lovers," 27-55, asks the questions "How does Whitman teach his
readers to love?" and "What sort of love does he teach?": the answers
involve Whitman’s "poetic of ‘acceptation’ and idealizing praise," his
creation of "a realist rhythm of identification and withdrawal" that
enacts "a love-cure of the reader, with the ‘I’ of Leaves of Grass
alternatively our therapist and an exemplary patient."]
Shapiro, Karl. "The First White Aboriginal." The Poetry Wreck: Selected
Essays 1950-1970. New York: Random House, 1975, 156-174. [Reprinted from
his In Defense of Ignorance, 1960.]
Sherbo, Arthur. "Last Gleanings from The Critic: Clemens, Whitman, Hardy,
Thackery, and Others." Studies in Bibliography 47 (1994), 212-221. [Offers
"hitherto unrecorded materials by and about American and English authors"
appearing in The Critic (1881-1906), including a letter Whitman published
in the October 13, 1888, issue (214), responding to Edmund Gosse's essay,
"Has America Produced a Poet?" Whitman says, in part, that "the names of
Bryant, Emerson, Whittier, and Longfellow (with even added names,
sometimes Southerners, sometimes Western or other writers of only one or
two pieces) deserve in my opinion an equally high niche of renown" as any
of the great English poets, "after placing Shakspere on a sort of
preeminence of fame not to be invaded yet."]
Sill, Geoffrey, ed. Walt Whitman of Mickle Street: A Centennial
Collection. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1994. [Collects all
the papers delivered at the Whitman conferences sponsored by the Whitman
Studies Program at Rutgers University, Camden, from 1985-1990; with an
"Introduction" by Sill (xi-xvii). The essays, all originally published in
the Mickle Street Review, are: Daniel Hoffman, "'Hankering Gross,
Mystical, Nude': Whitman's 'Self' and the American Tradition" (1-17);
Justin Kaplan, "The Biographer's Problem" (18-27); Louis Simpson,
"Strategies of Sex in Whitman's Poetry" (28-37); David S. Reynolds,
"Whitman and Nineteenth-Century Views of Gender and Sexuality" (38-45);
Daniel Aaron, "Whitman and the Founding Fathers" (46-53); Betsy Erkkila,
"Whitman and American Empire" (54-69); Peter Balakian, "Whitman as
Jeremiah" (70-79); Ed Folsom, "Whitman and the Visual Democracy of Poetry"
(80-93); Alan Trachtenberg, "Whitman's Visionary Politics" (94-108); Xilao
Li, "Whitman and Ethnicity" (109-122); Joseph Coulson, "The Poem Is the
Body: Pronominal Relation in 'Song of Myself'" (123-128); Tenney Nathanson,
"Whitman's Address to His Audience" (129-141); William H. Shurr, "The
Salvation of America: Walt Whitman's Apocalypticism and Washington
Irving's Columbus" (142-150); Jerome Loving, "Whitman's Idea of Women"
(151-167); Sandra M. Gilbert, "'Now in a Moment I Know What I Am For':
Rituals of Initiation in Whitman and Dickinson" (168-178); Vivian R.
Pollak, "Death as Repression, Repression as Death: A Reading of Whitman's
'Calamus' Poems" (179-193); Kenneth M. Price, "Whitman's Influence on
Hamlin Garland's Rose of Dutcher's Cooly" (194-204); Lorelei Cederstrom,
"Walt Whitman and the Imagists" (205-223); Norma Wilson, "Heartbeat:
Within the Visionary Tradition" (224-235); Sigurdur A. Magnússon, "Whitman
in Iceland" (236-243); Walter Grünzweig, "'Inundated by This Mississippi
of Poetry': Walt Whitman and German Expressionism" (244-256); Alexander
Coleman, "The Ghost of Whitman in Neruda and Borges" (257-269); Roger
Asselineau, "When Walt Whitman Was a Parisian" (270-275); Gay Wilson
Allen, "Kornei Chukovsky, Whitman's Russian Translator" (276- 282); Yassen
Zassoursky, "Whitman's Reception and Influence in the Soviet Union"
(283-290); and William Heyen, "Piety and Home in Whitman and Milosz"
(291-296).]
Geoffrey Sill and Roberta Tarbell, eds., Walt Whitman and the Visual Arts
Snyder, John. The Dear Love of Man: Tragic and Lyrical Communion in Walt
Whitman. Studies in American Literature, Vol. 28. The Hague: Mouton & Co.
N. V., 1975.
Sommer, Doris. Proceed with Caution, when engaged by minority writing in
the Americas. 1999. [Ch X “
Sorisio, Carolyn. Fleshing Out America: Race, Gender, and the Politics of
the Body in American Literature, 1833-1879. Athens: University of Georgia
Press, 2002. [Chapter 6, "'Who Need Be Afraid of the Merge?': Whitman's
Radical Promise and the Perils of Seduction" (173-201), "juxtapose[s]
Whitman's trust in the body as an equal partner on the journey toward
knowledge with Emerson's and Fuller's faith in transcendence" and argues
that Whitman "harkens back" to earlier interpretations of sexuality in
order to "defy his day's rigid corporeal categories," thus challenging
"the modern structures of knowledge that were coming to dominate his age"
by replacing "what Foucault identifies as scientia sexualis with an ars
erotica"; concludes by suggesting that the "liberatory potential" of
Whitman's early work is attenuated by his later vision of "a new race of
North Americans that is predominantly masculine and Caucasian."]
Stiles, Bradley J. Emerson’s Contemporaries and Kerouac’s Crowd. Madison,
NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson Press, 2003. [Chapter 2, “Whitman: The Self in Two
Places at Once” (34-44), argues that for Whitman “the self occupies two
separate loci simultaneously—one timeless, the other constrained by the
space/time continuum—while yet remaining a single identity,” and goes on
to track how the “self” that is part of yet distinct from both “body” and
“soul” leads Whitman to his idea of Personalism (“his need to put a face
on everything he encounters, to know it personally”) and to his creation
of an “Over-Ego” that does “for the body-based sense of identity what the
Over-Soul does for the soul—subsume its identity within a larger structure
while remaining in the world of space/time.”]
Strassburg, Robert, ed. Walt Whitman Circle 6 (Spring 1998). [Quarterly
newsletter of the Leisure World Walt Whitman Circle, with national and
international Whitman-related news; this issue also contains a brief
article, "Walt Whitman in Israel: ‘Born and Bred in Hebrewism’" (1), by
Strassburg.]
Strassburg, Robert. Walt Whitman Music. For the 1992 Celebration of the
Walt Whitman Centennial. Laguna Hills, CA: Walt Whitman Music Editions,
[1990]. ["Compositions richly melodic in style. Inspired by the poetry of
Leaves of Grass, for solo voice, piano, chorus, chamber ensembles and
orchestra." Settings of nearly thirty individual Whitman poems, ranging
from a two-minute setting of "To You" to a ten-minute setting of "Eidólons,"
and including a 45-minute choral symphony called "Leaves of Grass,"
drawing on nineteen Whitman poems.]
Strout, Cushing. Making American Tradition: Visions and Revisions from Ben
Franklin to Alice Walker. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990.
[Chapter 5, "Pragmatic Godfather: Emerson, Whitman, and William James,"
pp. 72-87.]
Sweet, Timothy. Traces of War: Poetry, Photography, and the Crisis of the
Union. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990. [Chapter 1,
"Whitman's Drum-Taps and the Rhetoric of War," pp. 11-45; Chapter 2, "'The
Real War Will Never Get in the Books,'" pp. 46-77.]
Thomas, M. Wynn. "Walt Whitman and Risorgimento Nationalism." In Winnifred
M. Bogaards, ed., Literature of Region and Nation [Proceedings of the
Sixth International Conference on the Literature of Region and Nation]
(New Brunswick: University of Saint John, 1998), 345-367. [Suggests that
Whitman’s poetry reproduces, in an arresting way, the great central
ambivalences of the Risorgimento concept of nationhood operative in
nineteenth-century European history, and concludes by comparing Whitman’s
concept of America with the view of France developed in Jules Michelet’s
Le Peuple (1946).]
Traubel, Horace . With Walt Whitman in Camden,
Varner, Greg. "Sexuality and Democracy." The Washington Blade (March 27,
1998), 45. [Reports on a one-act play about Whitman, American Dreamer, by
Steve Jimenez, to be premiered at the National Theater in Washington,
D.C., on April 6, 1998.]
Warren, James Perrin. Walt Whitman's Language Experiment. University Park:
Pennsylvania State University Press, 1990.
White, William, ed. 1980: Leaves of Grass at 125: Eight Essays. Detroit:
Wayne State University Press, 1980. [Supplement to the Walt Whitman
Review.]
---- ed. "Walt Whitman Supplement: 161st Anniversary." The Long-Islander,
142 (22 May 1980), 17-20. [The 22nd annual Supplement reprints 13 reviews
of Whitman books, 1855-1892, by Henry David Thoreau, William Dean Howells,
Henry James, Charles A. Dana, Rufus W. Griswold, William J. Fox, Harry D.
Hughes, William S. Walsh, and five unidentified critics, plus two
portraits and three drawings.]
Whitman, Walt. The Journalism. Volume 1: 1834-1846. Edited by Herbert
Bergman; Douglas A. Noverr and Edward J. Recchia, Associate Editors. New
York: Peter Lang, 1998. [First volume of a projected six-volume collection
of Whitman’s journalism, part of The Collected Writings of Walt Whitman,
though not published by New York University Press. The first volume
contains journalism from 1834-1839 (New York Mirror; Long Islander;
Universalist Union), 1840-1841 (Hempstead Inquirer; Long-Island Democrat;
Long-Island Farmer and Queens County Advertiser), 1842 (Brother Jonathan;
New York Aurora; Sunday Times; Evening Tattler; New World), 1842-1843
(Sun; Daily Plebeian), 1843 (Subterranean), 1844 (Sunday Times & Noah’s
Weekly Messenger; New-York Democrat), 1845 (Broadway Journal; United
States Magazine, and Democratic Review; American Review), 1845-1846
(Brooklyn Evening Star), 1846 (Brooklyn Eagle, and Kings County Democrat).
With Preface (xxv-xxxii) by Bergman; "Chronology of Walt Whitman’s Life
and Work" (xxxiii-xxxvii) by Gay Wilson Allen, supplemented by Bergman;
"Introduction: Walt Whitman as a Journalist, 1831-January 1848" (xliii-lxx)
by Bergman; "Appendix A: Source Location of Reprinted Items" (483-484);
"Appendix B: Missing Issues" (485); "Appendix C: Files Searched" (486);
"Notes" (487-536); and "Textual Tables" (537-564) by Recchia.]
Zardoya, Concha. "Afirmación de libertad y de fuerza." ABC [Literario]
(March 26, 1992), 20. [Views Whitman as the dynamic poet of liberty; in
Spanish.]
|
|
