Word: whitmans
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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...
...critic as signaling something new and distinctively American. It has been an emancipation proclamation for later generations of U.S. writers as apparently diverse as Thomas Wolfe, Saul Bellow, Henry Miller, James Agee and Jack Kerouac-and for writers anywhere who have felt inhibited by form and classic restraint. Whitman tapped a gusher, and no one reading the letters can doubt that he knew just what he was doing. To a correspondent he gleefully quoted a derisive squib from a critic, which said that he had arrived in New York "carrying the blue cotton umbrella of the future...
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...