Abstract
To Travel. After a flurry of jobs with many different New York papers, even serving as editor for some, Whitman takes a position in New Orleans, bringing his younger brother Jeff with him. The glories of travel through the eastern and southern States gives Whitman great energy. He writes in both poetry and prose about their trip, particularly their northern route coming back—the Mississippi River, the Great Lakes. “I Sing the Body Electric,” “I Saw in Louisiana a Live-Oak Growing,” discussion of the sexual—Vivian Pollack, Betsy Erkkila, Jerome Loving.
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Notes
- 1.
Whitman, “Song of Myself,” Library, 82.
- 2.
Karen Karbiener, “Introduction,” Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (New York: Barnes and Noble, 2004), xxxi.
- 3.
Ibid., xxxii.
- 4.
Loving, Walt Whitman, 114–18. Loving points out that while the Whitmans were not in steerage with immigrant travelers, they had probably booked second-class passage. But they could observe the celebrity—and the clothes—of the first-class passengers.
- 5.
Ibid., 119.
- 6.
Whitman, “I Sing the Body Electric,” Library, 123 and the full page that follows. On page 124 a passage begins, “A woman at auction … …” The image recurs in “Song of Myself” as well, “The quadroon girl is sold at the stand” and there are several lengthy passages there about African American men. The most moving is “I am the hounded slave …. I wince at the bite of the dogs,/ Hell and despair are upon me …. crack and again crack the marksmen./ I clutch the rails of the fence …. my gore dribs thinned with the ooze of my skin” (Library, 63).
- 7.
Loving, Walt Whitman, 134–35.
- 8.
Loving, Walt Whitman, 139–40. The biographer draws as well on Whitman’s answers to questions posed to him by the New Orleans Picayune, compiling information on its fiftieth anniversary in 1887.
- 9.
Whitman, Through Eight Years, “Specimen Days,” Library, 705.
- 10.
Whitman, “New Orleans in 1848,” Library, 1202–4.
- 11.
Whitman, “I Saw in Louisiana,” Library, 279–80.
- 12.
Whitman, “Specimen Days,” Library, 815–16.
- 13.
Whitman, “Song of Myself,” Library, 27.
- 14.
Scott Donaldson, The Impossible Craft. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2015: 100.
- 15.
Loving, Walt Whitman, 270. He also notes that “slept with” might have a reference to “a contingency sleeping arrangement in a working-class neighborhood,” and be literal. He also sees some of the poet’s objectionable sexual references to stem from class. “I Sing the Body Electric” comes directly from “the poet’s Brooklyn and Long Island experiences.” See 202–3.
- 16.
Whitman, “Calamus.8,” “Poems Excluded from the ‘Death-Bed’ Edition,” Leaves of Grass, Barnes and Noble Classics, 755.
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Wagner-Martin, L. (2021). To Travel. In: Walt Whitman. Literary Lives. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77665-7_4
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