Abstract
Whitman’s Life as “Poet” shows his movement into literary circles, being visited by Thoreau and Alcott, spending sociable evenings at Pfaff’s in New York, moving toward the third printing of Leaves of Grass in Boston. New poems related to Brooklyn and New York City, and adding more than a hundred new poems to the collection—“Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” “Children of Adam,” the “Calamus” group.
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Notes
- 1.
Michael J. Colacurcio, “Idealism and Independence,” Columbia Literary History of the United States, ed. Emory Elliott. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988: 219.
- 2.
Whitman, “Song of Myself,” Library, 80–81.
- 3.
Whitman, “Song of Myself,” Library, 62–63, 75–76.
- 4.
William Chapman Sharpe, Unreal Cities. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990: 69–70.
- 5.
Karen Karbiener, “Introduction,” Leaves of Grass, xl.
- 6.
“1865 (Drum-Taps): A separate book of poems on the Civil War, not initially part of Leaves of Grass but an important later addition.
1865–1866 (Sequel to Drum-Taps): Bound in with Drum-Taps after Lincoln’s death.
1867 (Fourth Edition): Leaves of Grass poems, plus the annexes “Drum-Taps,” “Sequel to Drum-Taps,” and “Songs before Parting.”
1871, 1872, 1876 (Fifth Edition): Published in Washington, DC, in 1871 with ten new poems, and republished again later that year with the separately paginated section Passage to India, also published as a separate volume that year. The 1872 impression contains the annexes “Passage to India” and “After All, Not to Create Only.” The 1876 impression came out in two variants: Leaves of Grass, Author’s Edition, with Portraits and Intercalations, and Leaves of Grass, Author’s Edition, with Portraits from Life; a companion volume entitled Two Rivulets accompanied both.
1881, 1882, 1883, 1884, 1888, 1889, 1891–1892 (Sixth Edition): The 1881 plates were used in all subsequent impressions of Leaves of Grass during Whitman’s life-time.” Karen Karbiener, “Introduction,” Leaves of Grass, 161–62.
- 7.
Loving, Walt Whitman, 179.
- 8.
Whitman, “Specimen Days,” Library, 566.
- 9.
Loving, Walt Whitman, 147.
- 10.
Ibid., 149.
- 11.
Lawson, Walt Whitman, 82. According to Lawson he was no longer invited to Anne Lynch’s Waverly Place salon.
- 12.
Whitman, WWCIII, 403, in Loving, Walt Whitman, 403.
- 13.
Loving, Walt Whitman, 224–25; and see Journals of Bronson Alcott, 278–94.
- 14.
See Delia Cabe, Storied Bars of New York: Where Literary Luminaries Go to Drink. New York: Countryman, 2017: 21–30; Karen Karbiener, “Whitman at Pfaff’s: Personal Space, A Public Place, and the Boundary-Breaking Poems of Leaves of Grass (1860),” Liberators of New York, ed. Sabrina Fuchs-Abrams. Newcastle on Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2009: 1–38; and Whitman Among the Bohemians, ed. Joanna Levin and Edward Whitley. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2014.
- 15.
Karbiener, “Whitman at Pfaff’s,” 2–3.
- 16.
Whitman “From Pent-up Aching Rivers,” Library, 248–49.
- 17.
Whitman, “I Sing the Body Electric,” Library, 258.
- 18.
Whitman, 3 poems from “Calamus,” Library, 285–86.
- 19.
Whitman, “These I Singing in Spring,” Library, 272–73.
- 20.
Whitman, “Behold This Swarthy Face,” Library, 286.
- 21.
Whitman in “Chronology,” Library, 1348.
- 22.
Whitman, “Letter to Emerson, August 1856,” Library, 1327.
- 23.
John Tytell, Reading New York. New York: Knopf, 2003: 105.
- 24.
Karbiener, “Whitman at Pfaff’s,” Literature of New York, 11–12.
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Wagner-Martin, L. (2021). Whitman’s Life as “Poet”. In: Walt Whitman. Literary Lives. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77665-7_6
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