Word: whitmanic
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Nothing Top-Loftical. Whitman was a great, .puffing manifesto writer, a dogmatist of the "I." In view of this, it is odd that in the most personal of all art forms, the private letter, Whitman should be rather closemouthed. He disdained "top-loftical" correspondence and "fancy words," so that there is a good deal of all-too-plain prose about the Washington weather, small sums of money, and "good grub" at his boardinghouse. The reason for his reticence seems to be that when the poet's private emotions were most powerfully involved, convention made him rein in his rhetoric...
...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, sick and dying boys." Yet, if he had not visited them, the child soldiery in the wards would, for the most part, have been utterly alone with the horrors of 1860 surgery...
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...
Like Robert Frost after him, Whitman was first acclaimed in Britain; in the native land he celebrated, he was long left to push his own barrow. In one letter he is found trying to promote a visit to the U.S. of the prestigious Alfred Tennyson. His letter to the poet is curious on three counts. With its evocation of the "seething mass" of America and its "measureless crudity," it gives a prose version of his poetic vision. As such, its effect was only to scare off a poetic grandee, and it showed a naively crude Marxist notion of culture...
...Whitman did not think of culture as an integral part of life but as a top 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...