Walt Whitman Quarterly Review

Schmidgall, Gary

Grace, Judith. Good-bye my Fancy: With Walt Whitman in His Last Days [review]

Examines the three versions of Huneker's essay on his visit to Whitman, noting errors and significant changes, particularly those dealing with Whitman's homosexuality

Schwab, Arnold T

Huneker's "A Visit to Walt Whitman"

Kummings, Donald D

Selby, Nick, ed., The Poetry of Walt Whitman: A Reader's Guide to Essential Criticism [review]

Back Matter, Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, vol. 22, no. 1

Robertson, Michael

Pannapacker, William. Revised Lives: Walt Whitman and Nineteenth-Century Authorship [review]

Whitman/Eakins Film

Tribute to Whitman scholar and composer Robert Strassburg

Folsom, Ed

ANNOUNCEMENTS 
IN MEMORIAM: 
ROBERT STRASSBURG, 1915-2003 
Robert Strassburg, composer, musician, poet, and teacher-who died Octo-
ber 18, 2003, in Laguna Woods, California-may have been the last true 
Whitman enthusiast. He admired the great Whitman disciples like Horace 
Traubel and Richard Maurice Bucke, people who fervently believed that 
Whitman's poetry would eventually transform the world. Bob Strassburg wrote 
hundreds of letters to friends around the world each year, expressing his "love 
for the poet's passion, pulse and power." "For more than 150 years, Walt 
Whitman has been the voice of joyous self-confidence, women's liberation, 
and religious tolerance," Bob once wrote; "If anyone person can be said to be 
the prophetic soul of what this nation can be, it is Walt Whitman." He read 
everything by and about Whitman and memorized a large part of Leaves of 
Grass. He had little patience with what he called "ivory tower" arguments 
about Whitman's work, though he knew them all and argued with them intel-
ligently and passionately. Within days of the publication of each new issue of 
the walt Whitman Quarterly Review, I would receive a long handwritten critique 
from Bob, carefully responding to each essay, challenging some, praising oth-
ers. In his mid-eighties, facing terrible health problems including a worsening 
eye condition that nearly blinded him, he would mention that he had nonethe-
less stayed up most of the night to finish reading the latest issue on the very 
day he had received it. 
And he wasn't just reading wWQR. He was running Whitman seminars at 
Leisure World, the retirement village where he lived and where he organized 
numerous retirees into an active Walt Whitman Fellowship that met regularly, 
brought in speakers, and carried on the tradition of the Bolton, England, 
Whitman fellowship that, in the late nineteenth century, met regularly to fig-
ure out how Whitman could guide us into the next century. He edited (and 
wrote most of the copy) for the waltWhitman Circle, a newsletter of the Leisure 
World Walt Whitman Circle, and he kept it going from 1991 right up to the 
Winter/Spring 2003 issue, reporting regularly on Whitman events worldwide, 
reviewing new books on Whitman, and always quoting Whitman's "words of 
wisdom" that would lead, Bob felt, to "a world of peace and non-violence." He 
traveled to high schools and colleges to proselytize on Whitman's behalf, and 
in his final months he was meeting with a new disciple who wanted to learn 
about Whitman from Bob, the world's most willing mentor. Last year, Bob 
mounted a letter-writing campaign to political leaders around the world, urg-
ing them to "act now for a new beginning, so that no child, woman or man in 
the world goes to bed hungry," and listing the things "we must do to stem the 
tides of poverty, war, hatred and envy." Those letters always contained 
Whitman's words, "Each answering all, / Each sharing the world with all." Bob 
proudly sent me a copy of a supportive response he had received from George 
McGovern, in which the former presidential candidate wrote, "What a won-
189 
derful world it would be if your values and those of Walt Whitman should one 
day prevail." 
Right to the end, too, Bob continued to compose music, much of it based 
on Whitman's poetry. His last years were devoted to finishing Congo Square, an 
opera based on Whitman's encounter with slave auctions while he was editing 
the New Orleans Crescent in 1848. Bob wrote over thirty settings of Whitman's 
poetry, including his powerful walt Whitman Trilogy for piano. His Leaves of 
Grass choral symphony was premiered in Tokyo in 1992 and performed in Los 
Angeles the same year by the Cal State L.A. Symphony Orchestra, the Pasa-
dena City College Chamber Chorale, and the Cal State L.A. Concert Choir. 
Much of Bob's music is available on CD, including Thomas Hampson's per-
formance (on his 1997 To the Soul EM! recording) of Bob's setting of "Prayer 
of Columbus." 
At the "Whitman 2000" international conference in Beijing, Bob was hon-
ored as the Millennial Whitman Composer, and we had planned an evening 
concert featuring a performance of Bob's Whitman Trilogy for piano, to be played 
by one of Bob's former students, who had become a renowned concert pia-
nist. Unfortunately, she became ill and had to cancel out of the Beijing event, 
so Bob told me he would play the pieces himself. A week or so before the 
conference, I called Bob because I had not heard from him for a couple of 
weeks, and I was worried, because I was accustomed to weekly letters from 
him and usually phone calls too. When I finally got him on the phone, his voice 
seemed drained of its usual energy, and I asked if anything was wrong. "No," 
he said quietly, "I'll see you in Beijing." 
And see him I did: as the cab pulled up to our hotel near the Peking Univer-
sity campus, Bob struggled out of the car with his right arm in a sling. While 
rehearsing the Whitman Trilogy at his home, he had gotten up from the piano, 
felt faint, and fell, breaking his collarbone. But he was determined to play in 
Beijing, and so he had not told me about his injury, fearing that I might insist 
he stay home. When I asked him how in the world he thought he was going to 
perform, he said simply that he'd be fine. Assured by his son, Marc, a physi-
cian who accompanied Bob to China, that Bob would be able to make it through 
the performance, I decided not to cancel the concert. 
When I got to the concert hall the evening of the concert, Bob arrived, 
looking distraught. On the cab ride over, he had lost his glasses and so now 
could not read the music. He would have to play the difficult pieces largely 
from memory. So, with broken collarbone and virtually sightless, Bob weakly 
walked up on the stage of the packed Peking University auditorium, where he 
promptly popped a nitroglycerin pill to relieve his angina. I introduced him 
and, with great trepidation, handed him the microphone. It was at that mo-
ment the transformation took place: the frail man became the veteran per-
former, and he charmed the audience with his commentary on the music and 
with an energetic and memorable performance of his trilogy. He also played a 
new piece he had written for the occasion, a setting for voice and piano of 
Chinese writer Li YeGuang's poem "To Whitman." It was an unbelievable ac-
complishment. Afterwards, Chinese students crowded around to get their pic-
ture taken with the amazing Dr. Strassburg. That evening, it was easy to see 
why he had once been named the Outstanding Professor at Cal State L.A. On 
the way back to the hotel, Bob found his glasses in his coat pocket. 
190 
Behind all the many things he was- professor of music for many years at 
several institutions; student of Igor Stravinsky; founder of the Greater Miami 
Youth Symphony; scholar of the music of Ernest Bloch; composer of countless 
documentary film scores and Torah services and Psalm-settings; founding fac-
ulty member of the Brandeis Institute-Bob was at heart a poet. He put 
Whitman's words to work in his music, his teaching, and his life, and he made 
the poet's words sing. He published a book of his own poetry, Fire and Fret, in 
1977 and continued writing poetry almost to the day he died. His last poem is 
dated October 2, 2003: 
In the sweeping spread of history 
We shall never know 
all the meaning 
All the glow 
around us. 
This multi-talented man, who believed Whitman's poetry would change that 
"sweeping spread of history," who put a musical glow around Whitman's words, 
who approached every moment of his life with passion, will be missed by the 
Whitman community that he so enriched for many decades. 
-Ed Folsom 
Robert Strassburg in Beijing, 2001. 
191 



English

In Memoriam: Robert Strassburg, 1915-2003

Traces Whitman's influence on the Jewish-American immigrant writer Anzia Yezierska (1881?-1970) and suggests that it was through Whitman that she found "a voice for immigrant America.

Katz, Wendy R

Untying the Immigrant Tongue: Whitman and the "Americanization" of Anzia Yezierska

Loving, Jerome

Whitman, Walt. The Journalism, volume 2. Ed. Herbert Bergman, Douglas A. Noverr, and Edward J. Recchia [review]

Examines Whitman's fondness for "putting forth two assertions followed by a negation cutting against the grain of emphasis" and tracks the source of this pattern to Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Qveene, then suggests the larger ramifications of what Whitman called "the not-too-damned sure spirit.

Price, Kenneth M

NOTES 
"BE RADICAL-BE RADICAL-BE NOT TOO DAMNED 
RADICAL!": THE ORIGINS AND RESONANCE OF WHITMAN'S 
SIGNATURE EXPRESSION 
Near the end of his life Walt Whitman advised Horace Traubel to "be radi-
cal-be radical-be not too damned radical!"l As early as 1930 Vernon 
Parrington's Main Currents in American Thought identified this remark as a key 
to Whitman's character and outlook. Many others have agreed. Thomas Brasher 
sees the statement as evidence that Whitman's "radicalness, cockiness, and 
boldness" were often tempered by a "prudent, sensible side." David Reynolds 
cites the "not too damned radical" statement as giving voice to a conservative 
element in the poet's temperament. Jon Panish notes that the phrase illus-
trates the complexity of Whitman's political attitudes. 2 Recently, the quota-
tion has gained currency beyond the sphere ofliterary criticism. Bryan Garman 
singles out the phrase by titling the introduction to his book on the working-
class hero "Be radical-be not too damned radical." And Paul Berman in-
vokes the phrase yet again in an essay reflecting on how the U.S. should react 
to Muslim militants. 3 
If Whitman was fond of a paradoxically prudent radicalism, he was even 
more fond of the rhetorical pattern "Be . . . be . . . be not" through which he 
expressed it. He habitually put forth two assertions followed by a negation 
cutting against the grain of emphasis. For example, he told Traubel to "be 
cocky, be cocky, don't be too damned cocky!" (WWWC, 2:135-136); "be 
individualistic, be individualistic, be not too damned individualistic" (WWWC, 
3:122); and "be bold, be bold, be not too damned bold!" (WWWC, 5:381). 
Brasher, in first pointing out Whitman's fondness for this construction, failed 
to observe that the "be bold, be bold, be not too damned bold" phrasing 
directly echoes Edmund Spenser, Whitman's likely source for the pattern un-
derlying all these varying expressions. In the third book of The Faerie Qveene, 
the Knight Britomart enters the House of Busirane so as to rescue Amoret, 
Scudamour's abducted bride. Britomart has entered a torturer's castle (the 
walls are decorated with tapestries depicting Jove's rape of assorted mortal 
women): 
Tho as she backward cast her busie eye, 
To search each secrete of that goodly sted, 
Ouer the dore thus written she did spye 
Be bold: she oft and oft it ouer-red, 
Yet could not find what sence it figured: 
But what so were therein, or writ or ment, 
She was no whit thereby discouraged, 
From prosecuting of her first intent, 
126 
But forward with bold steps into the next roome went. 
And as she lookt about, she did behold, 
How ouer that same dore was likewise writ, 
Be bolde~ be bolde, and euery where Be bold, 
That much she muz'd, yet could not construe it 
By any riddling skill, or commune wit. 
At last she spyde at that rowmes vpper end, 
Another yron dore, on which was writ, 
Be not too bold; whereto though she did bend 
Her earnest mind, yet wist not what it might intend.4 
In short, what has been understood as a signature Whitman expression be-
came his through adoption and modification rather than through individual 
invention.5 Ironically, when Whitman borrowed from Spenser he relied on a 
writer who in turn probably borrowed either from Ovid's myth of Venus and 
Adonis in Metamorphoses or from a folktale. 6 
Whitman toyed with different articulations of the "be ... be ... be not" 
rhetorical pattern. For example, he once gave Traubel advice about writing: 
"you are on the right track-; you will get somewhere. I don't seem to have 
any advice to give, except perhaps this: Be natural, be natural, be natural! Be 
a damned fool, be wise if you must (can't help it), be anything-; only be 
natural!" (WWWG, 1: 194). Apparently, it is possible to be too radical or indi-
vidualistic or cocky or bold, but not too natural. Yet the very "be ... be ... " 
pattern sets Whitman's mind on the course of assertion and counter assertion, 
so, in this instance, he embeds within his reflections on being natural the 
oscillation between being foolish and wise. Whitman's firm belief in the middle 
way, in finding a mean between extremes, is Aristotelian. As Whitman once 
wrote in a note to himself: "Aristotle mediums between extremes, also experi-
mental philosophy. (It seems to be the substratum on which are based mod-
ern literature, education, and very largely modern character.)"7 
In another remarkable exchange with Traubel, Whitman discusses a be-
lief in immortality and says: "perhaps the truth is, we are not so sure we are 
sure-not any of us-it is our age, in which the tendency of belief is, not to be 
so damned certain we are certain." He goes on to talk about John Burroughs's 
scientific temperament-"he will not say he is sure." Then Whitman says, 
"This spirit-the not-too-damned sure spirit-is the glory of our age" (WWWG, 
6:146-147). The whole "be ... be ... be not too damned" pattern seems to 
have become for Whitman a conscious syntax of his own thinking and, though 
its origins were much earlier, a defining marker of his era.s 
University of Nebraska-Lincoln KENNETH M. PRICE 
NOTES 
Horace Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden, 9 vols. (vol. 1: Boston: Small 
Maynard, 1906; vol. 2: New York: D . Appleton, 1908; vol. 3: New York: Mitchell 
Kennerley, 1914; vol. 4., ed. Sculley Bradley, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylva-
nia Press, 1953; vol. 5, ed. Gertrude Traubel, Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univer-
127 
sity Press, 1964; vol. 6, ed. Gertrude Traubel, Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univer-
sity Press, 1982; vol. 7, ed. Jeanne Chapman and Robert MacIsaac, Carbondale: South-
ern Illinois University Press, 1992; vols. 8 and 9, ed. Jeanne Chapman and Robert 
MacIsaac, Oregon House, CA: W.L. Bentley, 1996), 1 :223. Hereafter cited as WWWC. 
2 Vernon Louis Parrington, in the posthumously published third volume of Main 
Currents in American Thought, entitled The Beginnings of Critical Realism in America 
(New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1930), 85; see" Brasher, "'Be-, Be-, Be not too 
Damned-,'" Walt Whitman Review, 14 aune 1968), 60; David Reynolds, "Politics 
and Poetry: Whitman's Leaves of Grass and the Social Crisis of the 18508," The Cam-
bridge Companion to Walt Whitman, ed. Ezra Greenspan (New York: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1995), 82; Jon Panish, "Radicalism," Walt Whitman: An Encyclopedia, 
ed. J. R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings (New York: Garland, 1998) writes: 
"While Whitman's ideas on many of these issues put him among those people who 
were categorized at the time as 'radical,' his identity as a political and social radical is 
actually complex, as Whitman himself indicated when he told Horace Traubel, 'Be 
radical-be radical-be not too damned radical!'" (570). 
3 Bryan K. Garman, A Race of Singers: Whitman's Working-Class Hero from Guthrie 
to Springsteen (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 1. Paul Berman, 
"Totalitarianism and the Role of Intellectuals," Chronicle of Higher Education, May 9, 
2003, http://209.157.64.200/focus/f-news/l048757/posts. Accessed March 1, 2004. 
4 Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Qveene, ed. A. C. Hamilton et al. (Harlow, England: 
Pearson, 2001), 3.11.50, 54. Floyd Stovall has written that "it is inconceivable that 
[Whitman] could have endured to read much of the Faerie Queene" (The Foreground of 
Leaves of Grass [Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1974], 234). Stovall is 
probably correct, though there is evidence that Whitman at least read a selection from 
Spenser in Dr. L[udwig] Herrig's The British Classical Authors. Select Specimens of the 
National Literature of England from G. Chaucer to the Present Time. Poetry and Prose 
(Brunswick: George Westermann, 1851). In fact, Whitman read Spenser's "The Leg-
end of the Knight of the Red Cross" carefully enough to correct a typographical error 
(see Kenneth M. Price, "Whitman's Anthology of English Literature," [Duke Univer-
sity] Library Notes 50 Uanuary 1982], 33). Whitman's interest in Spenser may also 
have been piqued by his reading of Emerson, who quoted the "be not too bold" pas-
sage at the end of an essay on "Plato; or, the Philosopher." 
Curiously, though, Whitman's first known encounter with the "be ... be ... be 
not too bold" passage came from an unlikely source: his reading of an April 1849 
review of "Tennyson's Poems" in Blackwood's Magazine that discusses two Tennyson 
volumes, one entitled Poems and the other The Princess: A Medley. Whitman heavily 
annotated many parts of the article, though he did not happen to mark this passage: 
"The young poet had been spoilt-had grown over-confident. He was like Spenser's 
Knight in the Palace of Love, who sees written over every door, 'Be bold! Be bold!' 
Only over one door does [s]he read the salutary caution, 'Be not too bold!'" (457). 
Whitman's clipped copy of this review is in the Trent Collection, Perkins Library, 
Duke University. 
5 It is as if someone were to say: We hold these truths-we damn well better-to be 
self evident: that all men and women are created equal. When we modify famous 
statements in the course of conversation, we often do not cite SOUl'ces. 
6 "Bee bold on cowards (Venus sayd) for whoso dooth advaunce I Himselfe against 
the bold, may hap too meete with sum mischaunce. I Wherfore I pray thee my sweete 
boy forbeare too bold to bee." Ovid's Metamorphoses 10:628-630, as quoted in Iris 
Tillman Hill, "Britomart and Be Bold, Be not too Bold," ELH 38 (1971), 174. 
128 
Regarding the folk tale Dorothy Stephens remarks: "Signs in the House ofBusyrane 
caution Britomart, 'Be bold, be bold,' and then 'Be not too bold' (III.xi.54), quota-
tions from the Bluebeard folk tale. In the Bluebeard text behind Spenser's text, the 
next sentence of the jingle is 'Lest that your heart's blood should run cold.' Because in 
the folk tale Mr. Fox (Bluebeard) commands Lady Mary not to look at his former 
wives, intending to make her join them if she does, Busyrane's own allusion to the tale 
implicitly warns his headstrong guest that it could be lethal for her to attempt any sort 
of meeting with the woman who is his prisoner." See Stephens, The Limits of Eroticism 
in Post-Petrarchan Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 32. 
Shakespeare also alluded to this tale in Much Ado About Nothing. For further analysis 
of this folk tradition, see K. M. Briggs's discussion of "The Hole the Fox Did Make," 
an offshoot of the international tale type The Robber Bridegroom in "Historical Tra-
ditions in English Folk-Tales," Folklore 75 (1964), 235-240. Briggs prints one of the 
more memorable versions of this tale, centrally relying on the "be ... be ... be not 
too bold" pattern in A Dictionary of British Folk-Tales in the English Language (London: 
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970), 1 :446-448. For further contextual discussion, see 
Jacqueline Simpson, "'Be Bold, but not Too Bold': Female Courage in Some British 
and Scandinavian Legends," Folklore 102 (1991), 19-20. 
7 Whitman, Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts, ed. Edward Grier (New 
York: New York University Press, 1984),5: 1884. Ed Folsom discusses this passage in 
"Trying to do Fair: Walt Whitman and the Good Life," Speakeasy 10 (March/April 
2004), 17. 
8 Thanks go to Ed Folsom for drawing my attention to this passage and for his 
comments on it. 
AN UNRECORDED WHITMAN INTERVIEW 
In the New York Tribune of May 19, 1890, there appeared an article entitled 
"Whitman Near the End," in which an anonymous correspondent reports on 
his trip to Whitman's Mickle Street home in Camden, New Jersey, where he 
talked with Mary Davis, Whitman's housekeeper, as well as with Whitman 
himself. The article is accompanied by an engraved portrait of Whitman, an 
engraving of his Mickle Street home, and a facsimile of his signature. A copy 
of the article was tucked into one of the copies of the 1881-1882 Leaves of 
Grass (Boston: James R. Osgood) owned by Whitman collector Kendall Reed. 
Previously unrecorded, this interview offers some illuminating details of 
Whitman's last years, including an intriguing explanation of why he never 
married. Here is the entire article: 
WHITMAN NEAR THE END 
Pitiful Life of the Good Gray Poet at Camden 
129 


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