Walt Whitman looked to many different areas of American culture to develop a distinctively American poetry. This book investigates four of the areas he found most fertile for his own poetic development: the evolution of American dictionaries, the growth of the national sport of baseball, the decimation of American Indians, and the development of American photography. From each of these cultural activities, Whitman absorbed key aesthetic lessons that helped him compose his poetry.

This book offers the most comprehensive and detailed reading to date of Song of Myself. One of the most distinguished critics in Whitman studies, Ed Folsom, and one of the nation's most prominent writers and literary figures, Christopher Merrill, carry on a dialog with Whitman, and with each other, section by section, as they invite readers to enter into the conversation about how the poem develops, moves, improvises, and surprises. Instead of picking and choosing particular passages to support a reading of the poem, Folsom and Merrill take Whitman at his word and interact with "every atom" of his work. The book presents Whitman's final version of the poem, arranged in fifty-two sections; each section is followed by Folsom's detailed critical examination of the passage, and then Merrill offers a poet's perspective, suggesting broader contexts for thinking about both the passage in question and the entire poem.

It is now difficult to imagine that, in the years before Whitman's death in 1892, there was real doubt in the minds of Whitman and his literary circle whether ""Leaves of Grass"" would achieve lasting fame. Much of the critical commentary in the first decade after his burial in Camden was as negative as that in Boston's Christian Register, which spoke of Whitman as someone who ""succeeded in writing a mass of trash without form, rhythm, or vitality."" That the balance finally tipped toward admiration, culminating in Whitman's acceptance into the literary canon, was due substantially to the unflagging labor of Horace Traubel, famous for his nine volumes of Whitman conversations, but less well-known for his provocative monthly journal of socialist politics and avant-garde culture, the ""Conservator"". ""Conserving Walt Whitman's Fame"" offers a generous selection from the enormous trove of Whitman-related materials that Traubel included in the 352 issues of the ""Conservator"". Among the revelatory, perceptive, and often entertaining items presented here are the most illuminating of the ""Conservator's"" more than 150 topical essays on Whitman and memoirs, by many of his friends and literary cohorts that shed new light on the poet, his work, and his critical reception. Also important is the richer understanding these pages afford of Horace Traubel's own sophisticated, deeply humane, and feisty views of America.

This comprehensive volume celebrates the 150th anniversary of the 1855 edition of Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass" with twenty essays by preeminent scholars representing a variety of critical perspectives that focus exclusively on the original edition. Once regarded as primarily a collector's item, this edition is now viewed as the poet's most bold and compelling articulation of the possibilities of American democracy. The essays weave a rich tapestry of the most current, innovative criticism on this foundational book of American poetry. The contributors treat Whitman's poetry, his biography, his politics, his reception in the United States and abroad, race and ethnic issues, nineteenth-century America, and even the complex typographical history of the first edition of "Leaves of Grass." The volume also includes a tribute from the renowned poet Galway Kinnell.

This book is the first to offer a comprehensive selection of Walt Whitman's Civil War poetry and prose with a full commentary on each work. Ed Folsom and Christopher Merrill carry on a dialogue with Whitman (and with each other) as they invite readers to trace how Whitman's writing about the Civil War develops, shifts, and manifests itself in different genres throughout the years of the war. The book offers forty selections of Whitman's war writings, including not only the well-known war poems but also his prose and personal letters. Each are followed by Folsom's critical examination and then by Merrill's afterword, suggesting broader contexts for thinking about the selection. The real democratic reader, Whitman said, 'must himself or herself construct indeed the poem, argument, history, metaphysical essay-the text furnishing the hints, the clue, the start or frame-work,' because what is needed for democracy to flourish is 'a nation of supple and athletic minds.' Folsom and Merrill model this kind of active reading and encourage both seasoned and new readers of Whitman's war writings to enter into the challenging and exhilarating mode of talking back to Whitman, arguing with him, and learning from him.

By reconsidering Whitman not as the proletarian voice of American diversity, but as a historically specific poet with roots in the antebellum lower middle class, Andrew Lawson in ""Walt Whitman and the Class Struggle"" defines the tensions and ambiguities about culture, class, and politics that underlie his poetry. Drawing on a wealth of primary sources from across the range of antebellum print culture, Lawson uses close readings of ""Leaves of Grass"" to reveal Whitman as an artisan and an autodidact ambivalently balanced between his sense of the injustice of class privilege and his desire for distinction. Consciously drawing upon the languages of both the elite culture above him and the vernacular culture below him, Whitman constructed a kind of middle linguistic register that attempted to filter these conflicting strata and defuse their tensions: ""You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me, / You shall listen to all sides and filter them from yourself."" By exploring Whitman's internal struggle with the contradictions and tensions of his class identity, Lawson locates the source of his poetic innovation. By revealing a class-conscious and conflicted Whitman, he realigns our understanding of the poet's political identity and distinctive use of language, and thus valuably alters our perspective on his poetry.

IN 1961 the first volume of Edwin Haviland Miller's "The Correspondence was published in the newly established series the Collected Writings of Walt Whitman. Miller proceeded to publish five additional volumes of Whitman letters, and other leading scholars, including Roger Asselineau, compiled accompanying volumes of prose, poems, and daybooks. Yet by the late 1980s, the Whitman Collected Writings project was hopelessly scattered, fragmented, and incomplete. Now, more than forty years after the inaugural volume's original publication, Ted Genoways brings scholars the latest volume in "Walt Whitman: The Correspondence. Incorporating all of the letters Miller had collected before his death in 2001 and combining them with more than a hundred previously unknown letters Genoways himself gathered, volume 7 is a perfect accompaniment to Miller's original six-volume work. Among the more than one hundred fifty letters collected in this volume are numerous correspondences concerning Whitman's Civil War years, including a letter sending John Hay, the personal secretary to Abraham Lincoln, a manuscript copy of "O Captain, My Captain!" Additional letters address various aspects of the production of "Leaves of Grass, the most notable being an extensive correspondence surrounding the "Deathbed Edition, gathered by Whitman's friend Horace Traubel, and reproduced here for the first time. Most significantly, this volume at last incorporates Whitman's early letters to Abraham Paul Leech, first published by Arthur Golden in "American Literature in 1986. The revelations contained in these letters must be considered among the most important discoveries about Whitman's life made during the last half of thetwentieth century. Regardless of whether its significance is great or small, immediate or long-term, each new piece of Whitman's correspondence returns us to a particular moment in his life and suggests the limitless directions that remain for Whitman scholarship.

In 1992, the year of the hundredth anniversary of Walt Whitman's death, a major gathering of international scholars took place at the University of Iowa. Over 150 participants heard papers by 20 of the world's most eminent critics of Whitman. Three generations of scholars offered new essays that brilliantly tracked the course of past and present Whitman scholarship. So significant was this historic celebration of the great American poet that the opening session was covered by CBS Sunday Morning, National Public Radio's Morning Edition, the New York Times, and other newspapers across the country. Musical and theatrical performances, art exhibitions, slide shows, readings, songs, and even a recently discovered recording of Whitman's voice were presented during the three days of the conference. But the heart of the conference was this series of original essays by some of the most innovative scholars working in the field of American literature. There has never been a more important collection of Whitman criticism. In these essays, readers will find the most suggestive recent approaches to Whitman alongside the most reliable traditional approaches. Walt Whitman: The Centennial Essays captures Whitman's energy and vitality, which have only increased in the century after his death.