Word: walts
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...CORRESPONDENCE OF WALT WHITMAN, VOLUMES I & II (394 & 387 pp.)-Edited by Edwin Haviland Miller-New York University Press ($ 10 each...
Unlike that of Walt Whitman's captain, the fearful task of American scholarship will never be done. Sixty-nine years after Whitman's death, a squad of 14 scholars is at work on a projected 14-volume edition of his collected writings. The first two volumes consist of 707 letters handsomely printed and annotated, and apparently not so much as a postcard to a landlady has escaped. It is a curious collection, not only for the Whitmaniac or the addict of Americana, but for all who find interest in what a genius talks about when...
...brother Jeff, his tour of duty in Washington as clerk in the Treasury and the Indian Bureau of the Interior Department and his stint as a volunteer male nurse in the gruesome military hospitals of the Civil War. Leaving his clerk's desk in the afternoon, "Loving Old Walt" (as he liked to sign himself) checked in at one of the huge whitewashed dressing stations near the capital. It is easy to raise a coarse snigger at the ambiguity of Whitman's motives for playing the male nurse among what he called the "huge swarms of dear, wounded...
Democratic Presence. As the letters show. Whitman was nagged by more than one man's fair share of family troubles. One brother was feebleminded, another alcoholic, another a syphilitic who died insane; a sister was married to an artist and blackmailer of whom Walt wrote as "a cringing crawling snake"; a sister-in-law was a streetwalker; his "loud, tight, crafty" carpenter father was no help at all. Only his sturdy Dutch mother, for all her complaints, parsimony and illiteracy ("Not being boss of your own shanty ain't the cheese," she wrote), gave aid and comfort...
...dressing, he insisted that his own art was a totality in itself. In one of the oddest letters ever written by a poet (it is in the third person), he sent to an admirer a blurb for his work, intended to be passed on to his publisher. "Personally," wrote Walt, "the author of Leaves of Grass is in no sense whatever the 'rough,' 'eccentric,' 'vagabond' or queer person that the commentators persist in making him . . . always bodily sweet & fresh, dressed plainly & cleanly, a gait & demeanor of antique simplicity ... an American Personality, & real Democratic Presence...