Walt Whitman Quarterly Review

Karbiener, Karen

English

Reconstructing Whitman’s Desk at the Brooklyn Daily Times

Bernardini, Caterina

The Longest Day: Dino Campana and Walt Whitman Across Italy and South America

Back Matter, Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, vol. 32, no. 3

Price, Kenneth M.

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WWQR VOL. 33 NO. 2 (FALL 2015)
REVIEWS
Schmidgall, Gary. Containing Multitudes: Walt Whitman and the British 
Literary Tradition. New York: Oxford University Press. 386 pp.
Gary Schmidgall’s ambitious study provides the most thoroughgoing 
treatment yet of Walt Whitman’s relationship to British literary prede-
cessors, primarily poets. Other Anglophone writers, including Whit-
man’s compatriots William Cullen Bryant, Edgar Allan Poe, Henry 
Wadsworth Longfellow, and Fanny Fern were closer at hand, but 
Schmidgall implies (by making them outside the pale) that they were 
less engaging and less pressing. Highlighting the potent force of British 
writing in the nineteenth-century U.S., Schmidgall devotes a chapter 
each to connections between Whitman and William Shakespeare, John 
Milton, Robert Burns, William Blake, and William Wordsworth and 
then treats more briefly a group Whitman called other “big fellows”: 
Walter Scott, Thomas Carlyle, Oscar Wilde, Algernon Swinburne, and 
Alfred Tennyson. Like Harold Bloom, Schmidgall is ultimately inter-
ested in Whitman’s “gymnast’s struggle” with strong predecessors. He 
also makes the shrewd observation that Whitman “read no other poet’s 
works as intensely as he read, reread, and revised his own” (xx).
Schmidgall observes that an effort to tie Whitman “umbilically 
to the British literary tradition is bound to seem a contradictory and 
counterintuitive project—a fool’s errand” (xiii). But that’s only if one 
takes Whitman at face value, as many have. The inspiration for Leaves 
of Grass, Whitman often claimed, came not from other writers but from 
first-hand experience. In an unpublished manuscript, probably drafted 
prior to 1855, Whitman insisted “there is something better than any 
and all books, and that is the real stuff whereof they are the artifi-
cial transcript and portraiture” (NUPM 1: 188). He even audaciously 
declared that his own book functioned differently than others, that 
Leaves of Grass provided unfiltered experience itself: “You shall possess 
the good of the earth and sun” rather than “spectres in books.” Yet at 
other times—especially late in life—Whitman was more candid about 
the importance of reading to his writings. In a conversation with Horace 
WWQR VOL. 33 NO. 2 (FALL 2015)
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Traubel recounted in With Walt Whitman in Camden, he discussed the 
minor poet John Sterling, a friend of Thomas Carlyle: 
“It is interesting—even odd—how many things come into, stay in, a man’s mind 
which he cannot account for!” Then they would “pop up” after awhile, “a man 
thinking he owned them himself.” . . . “What a strange make-up of beginnings 
and ending and appropriations we are!” (WWWC 3:119)
For Whitman, a poet who often minimized his learning and sometimes 
posed as being rude, uncouth, and vulgar, one goal was to benefit from 
reading without appearing pedantic or derivative. He read voraciously 
and unpredictably, and as a poet he rarely seems imitative because of 
his extraordinary mixture of registers. Whitman owed a lot to British 
literary giants, though, as Containing Multitudes demonstrates so thor-
oughly. Especially enlightening is Schmidgall’s ability to establish affin-
ities between Whitman and Milton, a highly learned and allusive poet. 
Throughout the book Schmidgall is perceptive (and at times delightfully 
witty) in his comments on Whitman in connection with Wordsworth, 
Tennyson, and, of course, Shakespeare—the focus of one of his most 
extended discussions.
Containing Multitudes is provocative in the best way, prompting 
questions that go beyond its scope. For Whitman, how does the British 
literary tradition compare in importance to the American tradition? 
And should Anglophone poets be considered as unquestionably more 
significant for him than writers Whitman read in translation? (It is good 
to remember that Whitman carried copies of Dante and Virgil in his 
knapsack at various times in the Civil War.) Emerson once remarked 
that Leaves of Grass was a “remarkable mixture of the Bhagvat Ghita and 
the New York Herald.” This famous observation stresses sources both 
below and beyond Schmidgall’s emphases on high culture and Britain. 
Emerson’s New York Herald remark seems especially fitting in light of 
recent discoveries that Whitman occasionally developed found poetry, 
forging some of his Civil War poetry, for example, out of material he came 
across in various newspapers. Found poetry is consistent with Whitman’s 
comment in his marginalia that “all kinds of light reading, novels, news-
papers, gossip etc., serve as manure for the few great productions and 
are indispensable or perhaps are premises to something better.” That 
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WWQR VOL. 33 NO. 2 (FALL 2015)
easy-to-overlook “etc.” contained a lot: scientific and pseudo-scientific 
treatises, historical studies, geographies, self-help manuals on learning 
to swim, and thousands and thousands of pages of newsprint, a surpris-
ing number of them preserved by Whitman himself and ultimately by 
the Library of Congress and other repositories. Promiscuous reading 
proved useful to Whitman—but how, when, and to what extent? For 
Whitman, we may wonder what was more important, influences from 
high culture or those from more popular sources? We need additional 
work on Whitman’s reading so we know with increasing specificity 
what was within his intellectual purview: we need work comparable to 
that already done on Emily Dickinson, Herman Melville, and Mark 
Twain. Some promising work by Matt Cohen on Whitman’s margina-
lia and annotations has begun to appear on the Walt Whitman Archive, 
and we can hope that eventually this work will be fully fleshed out. In 
scholarship as a whole, in this era of big data, what are some of the next 
steps we can anticipate over the next thirty years or so? We will never 
get beyond the need for good human judgment about the significance 
of echoes, reappropriations, remixing (the kind of work Schmidgall has 
so ably performed), but we can have our attention alerted to echoes we’d 
never heard, borrowings we’d never seen, as increasing amounts of our 
cultural heritage becomes machine-traceable. Stefan Schöberlein has 
recently demonstrated how Whitman’s borrowing from Maximilian 
Schele De Vere’s Stray Leaves from the Book of Nature contributed phras-
ing and key ideas to “This Compost” and “The World Below the Brine.” 
Other non-literary but nonetheless key intertextual references almost 
certainly will be discovered in an age when computer-aided detection 
of intertextuality is becoming more feasible.
Schmidgall’s book may not provide much sense of the global 
reach of Whitman’s curiosity and ambition (for example, his fascina-
tion with Homer and other ancient Greeks, and his interest in writers 
from Germany, Persia, Iceland, France, and elsewhere), but Containing 
Multitudes: Walt Whitman and the British Literary Tradition may do some-
thing more important: it provides an invaluable account of Whitman’s 
affinities with many of the finest writers who ever worked in his language.
University of Nebraska-Lincoln              KENNETH M. PRICE


Schmidgall, Gary. Containing Multitudes: Walt Whitman and the British Literary Tradition [review]

Robbins, Timothy

Marsh, John. In Walt We Trust: How a Queer Socialist Poet Can Save America From Itself [review]

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Reconstructing Whitman’s Desk at the Brooklyn Daily Times

The Longest Day: Dino Campana and Walt Whitman Across Italy and South America

Back Matter, Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, vol. 32, no. 3

Schmidgall, Gary. Containing Multitudes: Walt Whitman and the British Literary Tradition [review]

Marsh, John. In Walt We Trust: How a Queer Socialist Poet Can Save America From Itself [review]

Back Matter, Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, vol. 33, no. 1

Previously Undocumented Art Criticism by Walt Whitman

Front Matter, Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, vol. 33, no. 1

Ivo Andrić’s Response to Walt Whitman

Triangulating Blake, Whitman, and Ginsberg

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