Walt Whitman Quarterly Review

Folsom, Ed

WWQR VOL. 36 NO. 4 (SPRING 2019)
227
WALT WHITMAN AT 200:
INTRODUCTION
This issue of the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review both celebrates and 
documents the two-hundredth birthday of Walt Whitman, an occasion 
marked by conferences, exhibits, performances, books, essays, special 
issues of journals, newspaper and magazine articles, websites, films, 
musical events, and other commemorative activities taking place all 
around the United States and around the world during 2019. As we 
begin the Third Whitman Century, this issue invites us all to pause 
for a few moments and take in the vast, stunning response (so far) to 
Walt Whitman at 200.
The year 2019 provides quite a contrast to 1919, at the end of the 
First Whitman Century, when celebrations of the poet certainly took 
place but were few in number, and the coverage in news media was 
slim. The New York Times focused on a single event at the Whitman 
Birthplace on Long Island, with a short article buried deep in the 
June 1, 1919, issue, describing how “the hundredth anniversary of the 
birthday of Walt Whitman was celebrated yesterday by a pilgrimage of 
American writers to the house where he was born at West Hills, L.I., 
and to the schoolhouse at Woodbury, on the Jamaica Turnpike, where 
Whitman taught school” (see Figure 1). The event was arranged by 
the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences, and it attracted “about 
200 pilgrims.” Whitman’s birthplace, now a New York State Historic 
Site, was then still privately owned, and the owners graciously “threw 
the place open to the party, which inspected the old house, the apple 
orchard and the rest of the setting in which was reared the poet, who 
was generally acclaimed yesterday as America’s greatest.” 
Tributes were read by those present and from writers who could 
not attend, such as Edgar Lee Masters, who presented his “verdict 
upon Whitman”: “he has more nearly justified the ways of God to 
man than any writer that we have produced, and perhaps more so 
than any poet who has lived. . . . He found life good, and sang of its 
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the Whitman centennial is a story in and of itself. The New York 
centennial event that the Times did not cover back in 1919 was the 
Whitman Fellowship International dinner at the Brevoort Hotel in 
Greenwich Village on May 31, 1919, which Traubel—in ill health—
attended, and at which thirty-eight-year-old Helen Keller, the deaf 
and blind author and political activist, gave a powerful tribute to her 
friend and compatriot Traubel. We offer a special section honoring 
the centenary of the death of Horace Traubel, whose vast nine-volume 
With Walt Whitman in Camden is one of the most revealing works 
ever created about an author. We include Keller’s tribute to Traubel, 
as well as the last extended essay Traubel wrote about Whitman, 
published in the Centennial Edition of his Whitman-inspired maga-
zine, The Conservator. In that final piece, he concludes with this: “He 
used to say that when you got his meaning Leaves of Grass was no 
longer ‘I, Walt Whitman, of Manhattan the son,’ but just as much ‘I, 
Horace Traubel, of Camden the son,’ or ‘I, anybody, man or woman, 
of anywhere, the son or daughter.’”
Then we offer a Bicentennial gallery—a kind of visual feast, a 
partial gathering of posters, flyers, brochures, and assorted artwork 
created for just some of the Whitman events that have been taking 
place during this Whitman Bicentennial year. We could not gather 
them all, but the ones here can stand—just like a Whitman catalog—
as random representative samples of the vast and diverse outpouring 
of response to Whitman as we open the Third Whitman Century. 
At the end of the issue, we have some reviews of recent books on 
Whitman, and then conclude, as usual, with the annotated bibliog-
raphy of work on Whitman. It is a particularly robust bibliography 
this time, listing nearly 150 essays, newspaper and magazine articles, 
films, podcasts, musical compositions, and books that have already 
appeared during the Bicentennial. The various programs, exhibits, 
and celebrations continue through the rest of this year, and our next 
issue—a combined Summer/Fall 2019 Bicentennial issue—will bring 
you up to date, as well as presenting some exciting new scholarship 
on Whitman and his work.
The University of Iowa          ED FOLSOM


English

Walt Whitman at 200: Introduction

Loving, Jerome

Walt Whitman's Seventieth Birthday Party and the Ghost of Ralph Waldo Emerson

Grossman, Jay

Manuprint

Walt Whitman: A Current Bibliography, Summer/Fall 2019

Back Matter, Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, vol. 37, no. 1/2

Front Matter, Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, vol. 37, no. 1/2

The Centennial of Horace Traubel's Death: Editor's Introduction

Riley, Scott

Keats’s Prophecy of Whitman, Whitman’s Critique of Keats

Mirzababazadeh Fomeshi, Behnam

“Till the Gossamer Thread You Fling Catch Somewhere”: Parvin E’tesami’s Creative Reception of Walt Whitman

Back Matter, Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, vol. 36, no. 1

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