7ALT7HITMAN 7HERETHE&UTURE "ECOMES0RESENT the iowa whitman series Ed Folsom, series editor WALTWHITMAN WHERETHEFUTURE BECOMESPRESENT EDITEDBYDAVIDHAVENBLAKE ANDMICHAELROBERTSON VOJWFSTJUZPGJPXBQSFTTJPXBDJUZ University of Iowa Press, Iowa City 52242 Copyright © 2008 by the University of Iowa Press www.uiowapress.org All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Design by Richard Hendel No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher. All reasonable steps have been taken to contact copyright holders of material used in this book. The publisher would be pleased to make suitable arrangements with any whom it has not been possible to reach. The University of Iowa Press is a member of Green Press Initiative and is committed to preserving natural resources. Printed on acid-free paper issn: 1556–5610 lccn: 2007936977 isbn-13: 978-1-58729–638-3 (cloth) isbn-10: 1-58729–638-1 (cloth) 08 09 10 11 12 c 5 4 3 2 1 Past and present and future are not disjoined but joined. The greatest poet forms the consistence of what is to be from what has been and is. He drags the dead out of their coffins and stands them again on their feet .... he says to the past, Rise and walk before me that I may realize you. He learns the lesson .... he places himself where the future becomes present. walt whitman Preface to the 1855 Leaves of Grass { contents } Acknowledgments, ix David Haven Blake and Michael Robertson Introduction: Loos’d of Limits and Imaginary Lines, 1 David Lehman The Visionary Whitman, 8 Wai Chee Dimock Epic and Lyric: The Aegean, the Nile, and Whitman, 17 Meredith L. McGill Walt Whitman and the Poetics of Reprinting, 37 Kenneth M. Price “Debris,” Creative Scatter, and the Challenges of Editing Whitman, 59 Michael Warner Civil War Religion and Whitman’s Drum-Taps, 81 Benjamin R. Barber Walt Whitman’s Song of Democracy, 91 Angela Miller The Twentieth-Century Artistic Reception of Whitman and Melville, 106 Ed Folsom So Long, So Long! Walt Whitman, Langston Hughes, and the Art of Longing, 127 James Longenbach Whitman and the Idea of Infinity, 144 Kirsten Silva Gruesz Walt Whitman, Latino Poet, 151 Contributors, 177 Index, 179 { acknowledgments } This book has, from its inception, been a work of Whitmanesque comradeship and collaboration. It began life as “Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass: The Sesqui- centennial Symposium,” held at the College of New Jersey in September 2005. The symposium was funded in part by a generous grant from the New Jersey Council for the Humanities and was sponsored by the TCNJ Office of Academic Affairs, the School of Culture and Society, and the Department of English. The College of New Jersey was founded in 1855, the same year as the publication of Walt Whitman’s first edition of Leaves of Grass, and the college’s Sesquicentennial Committee gen- erously included the symposium under its wing. Many administrators, faculty, and students at the college made the symposium possible. We would especially like to thank President R. Barbara Gitenstein, Provost Stephen Briggs, Associate Provost Suzanne Pasch, and Dean Susan Al- bertine. Ellie Fogarty of Academic Affairs served, in essence, as the event’s third director, always with good humor and grace. Jo Carney and Paulette LaBar put the English Department’s resources at our disposal at several crucial points, and we are grateful to them; to all our English Department colleagues; to the depart- ment’s student assistants Francine Roche, Angie Velez, and Liz Finelli; and to project coordinator Jane Marchetti. Our work on this volume was supported by the Support of Scholarly Activities committee of the College of New Jersey. It has been a privilege to collaborate with Holly Carver and Ed Folsom at Uni- versity of Iowa Press, who do their work with a Whitmanesque generosity of spirit. Thanks also to the two anonymous reviewers, whose rigor and insight greatly im- proved this manuscript. Finally, we want to thank our families—Julie, Eben, and Eva Blake and Mary Pat and Miranda Robertson—for their patience, love, and support. { david haven blake and michael robertson } Introduction Loos’d of Limits and Imaginary Lines Walt Whitman believed in anniversaries. As editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, he liked to remind his readers when they had come upon an important date from the past: the Battle of Long Island, the signing of peace agreements with Great Britain, Alexander Hamilton’s death. In preparation for Evacuation Day in 1847, he cele- brated the departure of British troops from New York City and noted the anniver- sary’s fitting coincidence with the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday. Marking the thirty-second anniversary of the Battle of New Orleans, he told readers that he had exclaimed “Hurrah for Hickory!” at the breakfast table and listened from the rooftop to a thirty-gun salute as it resounded across the East River. The pattern would continue into old age with Whitman giving lectures, writing poems, and of- fering public greetings for an array of celebrations and memorial observances. His lectures commemorating the anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s death played a major role in securing his national reputation.1 In 2005 the United States, along with much of the rest of the world, celebrated the 150th anniversary of the publication of the first edition of Leaves of Grass, a book which brashly introduced the world to a new kind of poet: Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos, Disorderly fleshy and sensual .... eating drinking and breeding, No sentimentalist . no stander above men and women or apart from them . no more modest than immodest.2 Whitman would go on to publish numerous editions of his poems, editions that would significantly expand his vision and voice. But the qualities that readers most valued in the nineteenth century and afterward—the confident flouting of literary convention; the spiritual fervor and earthy assurance of the author’s voice; the clarion call for political, aesthetic, and sexual change—were all present in the 1855 first edition. On the 150th anniversary of Leaves of Grass, Whitman’s admirers gath- ered on college campuses in the United States and Europe; they attended exhibits at the Library of Congress, the New York Public Library, and the South Street Sea- port Museum; and they participated in public readings of Whitman’s poems—all as a way of commemorating a poetic career that had taken Whitman from the streets of Brooklyn to the military hospitals of Washington, D.C., to the working- class neighborhoods of Camden, New Jersey. In honoring the first edition of Leaves of Grass, these events recognized the history of a poet and a book that have shaped the literature not only of the United States but of countries far beyond its borders. The essays in this collection arose out of one of those events, “Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass: The Sesquicentennial Symposium,” which the College of New Jer- sey hosted September 22 to 24, 2005. Founded in 1855, the College was a partic- ularly appropriate site for celebrating a poet who for nineteen years called New Jersey home. In addition to scholarly presentations, the symposium featured an array of aesthetic responses to Leaves of Grass: Matthea Harvey, David Lehman, and James Longenbach read their poems on the symposium’s opening night; a show in the College Art Gallery featured works by nearly a dozen artists inspired by Whitman; Stephen Collins offered a sparkling performance as Walt Whitman in the one-man play “Unlaunch’d Voices”; and the Fred Hersch Ensemble performed Hersch’s jazz composition Leaves of Grass, an expansive, celebratory piece that re- ceived both critical and popular acclaim during the sesquicentennial year. It was a testament to Whitman that the symposium not only involved writers, musicians, and artists but also drew a highly diverse audience, including community activists, ministers, physicians, psychologists, and teachers. In the course of both formal presentations and informal dialogue, it became clear that the symposium’s participants regarded the anniversary not simply as an occa- sion to honor the poet but also as an opportunity to reflect on his complicated legacy, to consider the promise and the burden of his work. The great poet, Whitman wrote in 1855, exists “where the future becomes present,” and his poems frequently ad- dress posterity, encouraging readers to think that he has dissolved the years between them (13). As he comments in “Song of the Open Road,” the poet is “loos’d of lim- its and imaginary lines,” free to travel across the confines of space and time (299). “What is it then between us? / What is the count of the scores or hundreds of years between us?” Whitman asks in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.” “Whatever it is, it avails not—distance avails not, and place avails not” (310). One hundred fifty years later, Whitman’s assertions seem at once problematic and hopeful, clever and naïve. He may be with us, but there is little consensus about what that presence means. This collection represents the complexity of contemporary responses to Whit- man and Leaves of Grass. Although Whitman aimed to transcend the limitations of 2 { introduction } his moment and place, the time and space of the sesquicentennial celebration clearly exerted a considerable impact on these essays. The symposium occurred in the midst of an increasingly unpopular war in Iraq and only days after a failed fed- eral response to disastrous flooding in New Orleans. On the symposium’s last day, bus loads of students left New Jersey to join the thousands of protestors who had converged on Washington, D.C., to oppose the war.