There is then creative reading as well as creative writing. When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion.
[RWE, "American Scholar"]
To publish: post in reply to this page the title of your seminar project, a sentence identifying the focus of the project, and the link to the project on your blog.
The conclusion of Folsom and Price’s Re-Scripting Walt Whitman turns from historical problems of editing Whitman’s work to the digital editing project underway for the past decade at the Whitman digital archive. I think this is a brilliant conclusion to the book. The problem in making sense of Whitman’s work is ongoing, though not in the typical senses of an editorial, scholarly project; Whitman’s work was coneceived that way: as ongoing creation.
An electronic edition, unlike a print edition, is typically issued as work in progress rather than as a finished product. As it is made public, its readers become active agents in its continuing creation—pointing out omissions, suggesting improvements, challenging transcriptions. The Archive is revised and expanded virtually every day, and newly discovered documents can be seamlessly folded into the existing structures so that the edition is always up to date. It is the perfect medium for an author who was always revising and reordering and rethinking his work. As editors, we are confident that the Archive will keep the re-scripting of Whitman active for generations hence.
Folsom and Price get into some of the technological specifics of what this means in terms of digital scholarship (tagging, XML, etc). But here is the key point: the digital is not just a better medium for representing Whitman’s massive metonymic project (the book that reflects the man and his times by being ‘part of the actual distraction’ of those times; like a photograph); it is representative of the process through its own processing.
I think this takes us all the way back to Emerson, to where we began: to American Scholar, to the search for a book that would be more than a book, and a reader that would uncover through reading the luminous allusion of the world. And it takes us forward to where we are now: to Democratic Vistas and to Whitman’s halting yet eqaully visionary view of a future for American literature, culture, democracy. In that regard, another point made by Folsom and Price in the appendix I think illuminates something of Whitman’s vision for the democratic future (still unwritten). They note that the print edition of the Collected Works privileges ’solitary authorsthip” over social production of text, over ‘jointly produced intellectual work.’ We read Whitman and Emerson as solitary authors; and yet I would argue that both are deeply interested (and in Whitman’s case, concerned) with the joint production and process of intellectual work.
And for that reason, I agree with Folsom and Price’s assertion, and would use it as an entry point, epigraphically speaking, for the seminar paper in this course you are about to embark on: In the last analysis, we are not editing Whitman for Whitman but for ourselves and for all those interested in him in our historical moment.
In a manner of speaking, it seems to me that such is what Whitman is writing against, and writing for, in “Democratic Vistas”: American readers who will take an interest in him, but not for him, for themselves. In this sense, I give particular attention to the paragraph toward the end where Whitman returns to his ‘gymnastic’ metaphor and focuses his ‘new theory of composition’ not on authors but on ‘the process of reading,’ on what readers will do with those authors and their necessarily incomplete books. It is noticeable to me that Whitman prefaces this by indicating that his ‘prospects’ for this future of new forms of reading and writing are “not merely the pedagogue-forms, correct, regular, familiar with precedents, made for matters of outside propriety, fine words, thoughts definitely told out–but a language fann’d by the breath of Nature…” Whitman is thinking of a new school. Or more to the point, thinking of a literature and a poetry that will provide a school for American democracy–and that will not be the vision of school already in place.
This interest in ’school,’ at least to my way of reading, associates Whitman with Emerson’s school, with Emerson’s interests from “American Scholar” forward. This also suggests–to use the terminology I have been focusing on–that Whitman’s ‘gymnastic’ imagery is more metonymy than metaphor: he wants readers who actively read, reminding us that the gymnasium is already a school. And it suggests something that is there in Whitman from the beginning. Whitman thinks of his poetry as a ‘perfect school.’ We learn this from one of the poetry manuscripts available at the Whitman archive.
[Poem—a perfect school]
a TG 2 get— P[deletion, illegible] description of [deletion, illegible] ChrPoem—a perfect school,
gymnastic, moral, mental and
sentimental,—in which
magnificent men are formed
—old persons come just as
much as youth—gymnastics,
physiology, music, swimming bath
—conversation,—declamation—
—large saloons adorned with
pictures and sculpture—great ideas
not taught in sermons but imbibed
as health is imbibed—
—love—love of woman—all manly exercises
—riding, rowing—the greatest persons
come—the president comes and
the governors come—political economy
—the American idea in all its
amplitude and comprehensiveness—
—grounds, gardens, flowers, grains—
cabinets—old history taught—
1833
1776
67
Date
The lines beginning “The three or four poets are well” were probably drafted in 1853 or 1854, just before the first publication of Leaves of Grass (1855). “Poem—a perfect school” was probably written in the 1850s also.
Editorial note
“The three or four poets are well” are draft lines of the third poem, entitled “Leaves of Grass,” in Leaves of Grass (1855). It became “Burial Poem” in 1856, “Burial” in 1860 and 1867, and took its final title, “To Think of Time,” in 1871. The poem outlined in “Poem—a perfect school” was apparently never written.
This sort of reading–reading back into manuscripts, reading across Whitman’s various revisions and publications–is something the Archive makes more accessible. Folsom and Price describe the digital as a ‘perfect medium’ for Whitman’s process. I might only add, or bring out, this implication. That Whitman’s own conception of the ‘process of reading’ (from Democratic Vistas) suggests to me that such process reading (and re-reading), messy though it may be, messy as I would say, in metonymy, is part of the schooling that Whitman has in mind.
Proof, as if needed, that we absorb Whitman (still) as much as he absorbed his culture. With thanks to Mark Nowak for passing along this blog post On the Twittification of Whitman.
Speaking of Twitter–in reference to Democractic Vistas. Is ‘twitter’ the problem of the flatulent culture and literature he criticizes, or possibly part of its democratic future? Whitman uses the term ‘idiocracy’; do we have that now, only call it ‘mediacracy’?
Something startles me when I thought I was safest. This opening line from Whitman’s “This Compost” (originally published in the 1856 edition) comes to mind when I try to make sense of “Democratic Vistas.” Whitman seems startled by where he finds himself in post-Civil War, reconstruction America. (Remember Emerson’s opening line in his great essay “Experience”: Where do we find ourselves?) It is and isn’t the America and the democracy he had been envisioning in his writing since 1855. It is strange and familiar. And I feel startled by the essay: interested in where it wants to go, familiar with some of its echoes of the Whitman of Leaves of Grass, and startled by its inability to get there. You thought Emerson’s essays were strange? Folsom and Price in chapter 6 of Re-Scripting Walt Whitman provide helpful social and historical context for Whitman’s essay and for the problem of reconstruction in his writing. I copy below two relevant paragraphs. Should you be interested in doing more with this strange but important text in Whitman, or with Whitman and race and reconstruction, I invite you to read further in the chapter.
If “Passage to India” and “After All Not to Create Only” were celebratory (perhaps at times naively so), Democratic Vistas mounted sustained criticism of Reconstruction-era failures. Based in part on essays that had appeared in the New York journal the Galaxy in 1867 and 1868, Democratic Vistas responds most immediately to a racist diatribe by the Scottish essayist and historian Thomas Carlyle, “Shooting Niagara: And After?” Carlyle’s “great man” view of history left him impatient with democracy and opposed to efforts to expand the franchise in either the US or Britain. For him, the folly of giving the vote to blacks was akin to going over Niagara Falls in a barrel. Whitman grants Carlyle some general points, acknowledging, for example, the “appalling dangers of universal suffrage in the U.S.” because of the “people’s crudeness, vices, caprices.” In fact, Whitman gazes piercingly at a society “canker’d, crude, superstitious and rotten,” in which the “depravity of our business classes . . . is not less than has been supposed, but infinitely greater.” Yet he contrasts these current problems with “democracy’s convictions [and] aspirations” and ultimately provides a ringing endorsement of democracy as the safest and only legitimate course for the US. His thought on the intertwined fates of the US and democracy—his “convertible terms”—is future-oriented. He preceded the philosopher and educator John Dewey in arguing that the United States was not yet made and thus could not be categorically assessed, just as the history of democracy was yet to be written because “that history has yet to be enacted.” “We have frequently printed the word Democracy,” Whitman wrote in Democratic Vistas; “Yet I cannot too often repeat that it is a word the real gist of which still sleeps, quite unawaken’d” (PW, 2:390). Democracy always remained for Whitman an ideal goal, “resid[ing] altogether in the future” (PW, 2:390), and never a realized practice. The history of America, so he hoped, would eventually define the word for the first time, because in his own day, he believed, democracy was only “in its embryo condition” (PW, 2:392). Crucial to his program for strengthening democracy are what he calls “personalism” (a form of individualism in which every person develops uniquely but always remains aware of his or her interconnectedness with the larger social body) and the nurturance of an appropriate “New World literature” that would demand more aggressive reading habits, literature that would awaken the populace and make them argue with the author instead of lull them to sleep and have them passively accept whatever the author professed.
For all of the idealism of Democratic Vistas, however, the work clearly arose out of Whitman’s struggle with the radical politics of the Reconstruction era, and it raises troubling and perhaps unanswerable questions about his attitudes toward the Radical Republican agenda of quickly securing civil rights and voting rights for freed (male) slaves. If Whitman’s faith in the future of American democracy was clear, his vision of the place of African Americans in that future was blurred. As he was writing Democratic Vistas, the shape of the new nation was uncertain, as malleable as the intense debates and shifting votes of a Congress that was revising the very Constitution and threatening to impeach the president, Andrew Johnson. Whitman, during this time, continued to spend evenings visiting the Civil War hospitals that remained opened, still filled with wounded soldiers two years after the war had ended, but he also devoted some of his time to trips to the Capitol to watch the extraordinary night sessions with their impassioned debates on Reconstruction legislation, including the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution. For the Radical Republicans who controlled Congress, the war increasingly seemed to have been fought not just to emancipate the slaves (the Thirteenth Amendment had taken care of that) but to enfranchise them and guarantee them equal rights under the Constitution (this was the arena of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, and the amazing debates dealt with the very tricky issue of trying to unwrite the Constitutional provision that slaves counted as only three-fifths of a person, and trying to inscribe just what the black person’s newly granted full humanity meant). Whitman, like many Americans, was unsure about where he stood on these momentous issues.
Whitman refers early in the essay to the People–the promise of America and democracy, but also, always, the problem. The people, we learn, are in need of some learning. But the People are ungrammatical, untidy, and their sins gaunt and ill-bred. (968) But who are the people? Who are to be included? How do the people learn or realize this democracy that is not yet fulfilled?
The keyword, the crypt-word, of Whitman’s Civil War prose, so far as I can see, is “convulsiveness.” It comes toward the end of memoranda that he puts at the center of his autobiography, Specimen Days. In the original Memoranda During the War, the section shows up in an introduction, warning the reader of the “convulsive” character and condition of the writing to come. Here is the passage, in total [from the UVA e-text of Memoranda]:
DURING the Union War I commenced at the close of 1862, and continued steadily through ‘63, ‘64 and ‘65, to visit the sick and wounded of the Army, both on the field and in the Hospitals in and around Washington city. From the first I kept little note-books for impromptu jottings in pencil to refresh my memory of names and circumstances, and what was specially wanted, &c. In these I brief’d cases, persons, sights, occurrences in camp, by the bedside, and not seldom by the corpses of the dead. Of the present Volume most of its pages are verbatim renderings from such pencillings on the spot. Some were scratch’d down from narratives I heard and itemized while watching, or waiting, or tending somebody amid those scenes. I have perhaps forty such little note-books left, forming a special history of those years, for myself alone, full of associations never to be possibly said or sung. I wish I could convey to the reader the associations that attach to these soil’d and creas’d little livraisons, each composed of a sheet or two of paper, folded small to carry in the pocket, and fasten’d with a pin. I leave them just as I threw them by during the War, blotch’d here and there with more than one blood-stain, hurriedly written, sometimes at the clinique, not seldom amid the excitement of uncertainty, or defeat, or of action, or getting ready for it, or a march. Even these days, at the lapse of many years, I can never turn their tiny leaves, or even take one in my hand, without the actual army sights and hot emotions of the time rushing like a river in full tide through me. Each line, each scrawl, each memorandum, has its history. Some pang of anguish — some tragedy, profounder than ever poet wrote. Out of them arise active and breathing forms. They summon up, even in this silent and vacant room as I write, not only the sinewy regiments and brigades, marching or in camp, but the countless phantoms of those who fell and were hastily buried by wholesale in the battle-pits, or whose dust and bones have been since removed to the National Cemeteries of the land, especially through Virginia and Tennessee. (Not Northern soldiers only — many indeed the Carolinian, Georgian, Alabamian, Louisianian, Virginian — many a Southern face and form, pale, emaciated, with that strange tie of confidence and love between us, welded by sickness, pain of wounds, and little daily, nightly offices of nursing and friendly words and visits, comes up amid the rest, and does
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not mar, but rounds and gives a finish to the meditation.) Vivid as life, they recall and identify the long Hospital Wards, with their myriad-varied scenes of day or night — the graphic incidents of field or camp — the night before the battle, with many solemn yet cool preparations — the changeful exaltations and depressions of those four years, North and South — the convulsive memories, (let but a word, a broken sentence, serve to recall them) — the clues already quite vanish’d, like some old dream, and yet the list significant enough to soldiers — the scrawl’d, worn slips of paper that came up by bushels from the Southern prisons, Salisbury or Andersonville, by the hands of exchanged prisoners — the clank of crutches on the pavements or floors of Washington, or up and down the stairs of the Paymasters’ offices — the Grand Review of homebound veterans at the close of the War, cheerily marching day after day by the President’s house, one brigade succeeding another until it seem’d as if they would never end — the strange squads of Southern deserters, (escapees, I call’d them;) — that little genre group, unreck’d amid the mighty whirl, I remember passing in a hospital corner, of a dying Irish boy, a Catholic priest, and an improvised altar — Four years compressing centuries of native passion, first-class pictures, tempests of life and death — an inexhaustible mine for the Histories, Drama, Romance and even Philosophy of centuries to come — indeed the Verteber of Poetry and Art, (of personal character too,) for all future America, (far more grand, in my opinion, to the hands capable of it, than Homer’s siege of Troy, or the French wars to Shakspere;) — and looking over all, in my remembrance, the tall form of President Lincoln, with his face of deep-cut lines, with the large, kind, canny eyes, the complexion of dark brown, and the tinge of wierd melancholy saturating all.More and more, in my recollections of that period, and through its varied, multitudinous oceans and murky whirls, appear the central resolution and sternness of the bulk of the average American People, animated in Soul by a definite purpose, though sweeping and fluid as some great storm — the Common People, emblemised in thousands of specimens of first-class Heroism, steadily accumulating, (no regiment, no company, hardly a file of men, North or South, the last three years, without such first-class specimens.)
I know not how it may have been, or may be, to others — to me the main interest of the War, I found, (and still, on recollection, find,) in those specimens, and in the ambulance, the Hospital, and even the dead on the field. To me, the points illustrating the latent Personal Character and eligibilities of These States, in the two or three millions of American young and middle-aged men, North and South, embodied in the armies — and especially the one-third or one-fourth of
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their number, stricken by wounds or disease at some time in the course of the contest — were of more significance even than the Political interests involved. (As so much of a Race depends on what it thinks of death, and how it stands personal anguish and sickness. As, in the glints of emotions under emergencies, and the indirect traits and asides in Plutarch, &c., we get far profounder clues to the antique world than all its more formal history.)Future years will never know the seething hell and the black infernal background of countless minor scenes and interiors, (not the few great battles) of the Secession War; and it is best they should not. In the mushy influences of current times the fervid atmosphere and typical events of those years are in danger of being totally forgotten. I have at night watch’d by the side of a sick man in the hospital, one who could not live many hours. I have seen his eyes flash and burn as he recurr’d to the cruelties on his surrender’d brother, and mutilations of the corpse afterward. [See, in the following pages, the incident at Upperville -- the seventeen, kill'd as in the description, were left there on the ground. After they dropt dead, no one touch'd them -- all were made sure of, however. The carcasses were left for the citizens to bury or not, as they chose.]
Such was the War. It was not a quadrille in a ball-room. Its interior history will not only never be written, its practicality, minutia of deeds and passions, will never be even suggested. The actual Soldier of 1862-’65, North and South, with all his ways, his incredible dauntlessness, habits, practices, tastes, language, his appetite, rankness, his superb strength and animality, lawless gait, and a hundred unnamed lights and shades of camp — I say, will never be written — perhaps must not and should not be.
The present Memoranda may furnish a few stray glimpses into that life, and into those lurid interiors of the period, never to be fully convey’d to the future. For that purpose, and for what goes along with it, the Hospital part of the drama from ‘61 to ‘65, deserves indeed to be recorded — (I but suggest it.) Of that many-threaded drama, with its sudden and strange surprises, its confounding of prophecies, its moments of despair, the dread of foreign interference, the interminable campaigns, the bloody battles, the mighty and cumbrous and green armies, the drafts and bounties — the immense money expenditure, like a heavy pouring constant rain — with, over the whole land, the last three years of the struggle, an unending, universal mourning-wail of women, parents, orphans — the marrow of the tragedy concentrated in those Hospitals — (it seem’d sometimes as if the whole interest of the land, North and South, was one vast central Hospital, and all the rest of the affair but flanges) — those forming the Untold and Unwritten History of the War — infinitely
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finitely greater (like Life’s) than the few scraps and distortions that are ever told or written. Think how much, and of importance, will be — how much, civic and military, has already been — buried in the grave, in eternal darkness !……. But to my Memoranda.
I key in on this vision of “stray glimpses” and convulsive writing: of representation that not only has limitations, but wants somehow to preserve them. It seems to me it has much to do with what Whitman means by ‘the real war will never get in the books.’ I have also argued that this has something to do with Whitman’s photographic vision of the war that comes through this prose–which can be contrasted with the actual photographs made famous by Brady and Alexander Gardner (image here: Harvest of Death).
Is this a different Whitman–this vision of limitation? Perhaps. But there is also a parallel for us to consider from Emerson. The apparent shift that Emerson seems to make around “Experience.” This too seems to focus more on limitation and suffering–and presumably for good reason. But is the writer’s recognition of that limitation completely foreign to the celebrated singing of “Song of Myself”?Yet again, I think the concept of metonymy holds for us a key. The vision in the war memoranda (as throughout Specimen Days) is thoroughly, sometimes disturbingly, metonymyic. The effects of war represented best (after all) in the “parts of the actual distraction” as Whitman puts it in the “Convulsiveness” chapter of SD. And we know that vision is not new to Whitman–also characterizes the poetry. And it is the same metonymy that shows up in Emerson’s thinking (early and late) and figured in this line from “Experience”: “I know better than to claim any completeness for my picture. I am a fragment and this is a fragment of me.”
The difference to consider, rather, is the way Whitman’s Civil War poetry (so it seems to me) is not as thoroughly metonymyic. In fact, seems much more interested in metaphor, and in producing metaphors of war, and war as metaphor.
