Abstract
This chapter, Family and Civil War. Commentary by Edwin Fussell, Josephine Miles, Denis Donoghue on Whitman’s pre-war poems. His rationales for his work, particularly his letter to Emerson and his essay, “The Eighteenth Presidency!” Isenberg and Lawson on class in relation to slavery and insurrection.
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Notes
- 1.
Edwin Fussell, Lucifer in Harness. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973: 123. He does not emphasize Whitman’s use of the sexual.
- 2.
Josephine Miles, Eras and Modes in English Poetry. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957: 56–57, 202.
- 3.
Denis Donoghue, The American Classics: A Personal Essay. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005: 180–81. He also adds a somewhat ironic assessment, saying that one needs to read the poems as poems “rather than national anthems, hymns, manifestos, or campaign speeches.”
- 4.
Lawson, Walt Whitman, xiv, xvii–xviii.
- 5.
Whitman, “Letter to Ralph Waldo Emerson,” Library, 1334.
- 6.
Whitman, “Letter to Ralph Waldo Emerson,” Library, 1329. There is also an extensive discussion of the absence of sexual matter in American writing, in which Whitman notes the need of “an avowed, empowered, unabashed development of sex” (1334).
- 7.
Jack Salzman, “Literature for the Populace,” Columbia Literary History of the United States, ed. Emory Elliott. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988: 549.
- 8.
Thomas Wortham, “William Cullen Bryant,” Columbia Literary History, 283.
- 9.
Lawson, Walt Whitman, 9, 82.
- 10.
Jack Salzman, “Literature for the Populace,” Columbia, 549–50.
- 11.
Whitman, “The Eighteenth Presidency!” Library, 1307.
- 12.
Whitman, “The Eighteenth Presidency!” Library, 1308, 1317. Whitman’s poem “To the States,” from the 1860 Leaves of Grass, repeats these ideas (Library, 415).
- 13.
Whitman, “The Eighteenth Presidency!” Library, 1319, 1321–24.
- 14.
Whitman, “The Eighteenth Presidency!” Library, 1315.
- 15.
Nancy Isenberg, White Trash, 112.
- 16.
Nancy Isenberg, White Trash, 103–7.
- 17.
Whitman, “The Eighteenth Presidency!” Library, 1308.
- 18.
Whitman, “The Eighteenth Presidency!” Library, 1324. Reflecting this energy and wisdom of the young, America itself, says Whitman, “is a proud, young, friendly, fresh, heroic nation of thirty millions of live and electric men” (1325).
- 19.
Whitman, “The Eighteenth Presidency!” Library, 1324.
- 20.
Whitman, “Ship Ahoy!” Library, 1257.
- 21.
Loving, Walt Whitman, 105, 110.
- 22.
Loving, Walt Whitman, 110–11.
- 23.
Loving, Walt Whitman, 143–44.
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Wagner-Martin, L. (2021). Family and the American Civil War. In: Walt Whitman. Literary Lives. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77665-7_7
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