Whitman Archive and Wonderland

Like Alice I seemed to have fallen into a rabbit hole. Falling, falling, falling with images and sounds floating past me as I try to make sense out of all it. At one point I had a tab for each of the six versions of “Leaves of Grass” in the Whitman Archive and moved awkwardly from one to the other, trying to match them up to find changes the poet made as he moved toward the death bed version of his poem. Then, I couldn’t help myself; I had to see the man. What did he look like when he wrote the 1855 version? How did age along the way and what’s the last image of him we have? I was disappointed to discover that archive doesn’t have a photograph of Whitman after 1866. But later images of poet are easy to find.

The correspondence in the archive is currently limited to letters from Walt Whitman’s brothers Thomas Jefferson Whitman and George Washington Whitman. I enjoyed reading a few of them but realized they weren’t helping me to understand the poem … another rabbit hole.

But then I tumbled into another branch of the rabbit hole that informed and enhanced my reading of the poem. The archive has a large collection of contemporary reviews of Whitman's work and they are organized by edition of the poem. For me, part of understanding this work comes from learning how it was received at time it was written. The New York Daily Times finds the poem “too frequently reckless and indecent though this appears to arise from a naive unconsciousness rather than from an impure mind.” The critic quotes extensively from Whitman’s frontpiece and several of the poems are reprinted in this review. The reviewer is clearly not comfortable with much of Whitman’s language but closes by saying that an open minded reader “will discern much of the essential spirit of poetry” in Whitman’s work. I have always been told that Whitman’s work represented a huge change for poetry, that his work was a departure from the poetry of the day. I read several of the reviews and enjoyed exploring the critical response of his contemporaries.

Next, I will climb out of the rabbit hole and work exclusively with the 1855 digital copy of “Leaves of Grass”.

RSS in the classroom

Students need to proof, edit and critique each other’s papers in composition classes; I think this could be managed through blogs and a class specific RSS. Assignments would be posted on individual blogs and the comment section would be used for, well, comments. Additionally, students could print out the essays and edit on them directly and bring them to class to exchange and discuss. This will require a different kind of management on the teacher’s part but it would not be difficult.

Thoughts after Thursday's readings and discussion

Today’s technology has reinvigorated the art of correspondence. E-mail, texting and Facebook have people using a QWERTY keyboard and the twelve keys or pads of their cells phone to communicate. My son and his peers write to each other much more than my friends and I ever did but at what price? I’ll admit I’m writing to friends and family too on all of the devices. For the most part, I use the rules of grammar, spelling, and punctuation I learned in elementary school but I must confess they are slipping away. My son told me I didn’t need to sign my text messages because he knew who was writing. He also could not understand why I bother with question marks, commas, and apostrophes. I realize texting and writing in Blogs and other on-line settings are not the same but I’m not sure everyone sees it that way. Bass and Rosenzweig note that “writing through on-line interaction,” allows for “joining literacy with disciplinary and interdisciplinary inquiry” (6) which is very exciting but I worry that in a student’s haste to participate they may not write carefully and thoughtfully. This is something that needs to be considered as we use technology in the classroom. At this point, I’m not sure how this will work. It’s something I hope to understand by the end of this course.

Bass and Rosenzweig discuss the importance of teaching “the critical evaluation of sources” (8) and “introducing students to the inquiry process” (10) before diving into use of web for accessing information. Is it safe to assume students will arrive at with this understanding or is this something we should be prepared to address in our classrooms?