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”.
the rabbit hole looks pretty productive! . . . there's a lot there . . . I think the contemporary reviews are very interesting .. . especially if we think about them as bridges between the poem and audience, i.e. as the reviewers trying to reckon Whitman's poem into the contemporary scene . . . also, obviously, fascinating for the reading conventions/ideologies they deploy to make sense of Whitman. To what extent are they reading (and rewriting) Whitman with different notions of poetry, the poet, the text, etc.
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