Walt Whitman Quarterly Review

Walt Whitman: A Current Bibliography, Summer 2021

Folsom, Ed

Review of&nbsp;Zachary Turpin and Matt Miller, eds. Every Hour, Every Atom: A Collection of Walt Whitman’s Early Notebooks and Fragments

Bair, Barbara

Zachary Turpin and Matt Miller, eds. Every Hour, Every Atom: A Collec-
tion of Walt Whitman’s Early Notebooks and Fragments. Iowa City: University of 
Iowa Press, 2020. xxxiv + 376 pp. Iowa Whitman Series.
Zachary Turpin and Matt Miller fittingly allude to a scrap of famous text for 
the title of their edited book of transcribed Whitman notebooks and fragments 
newly published in the Iowa Whitman Series.  For the book’s epigram, they 
quote more expansively from their manuscript fragment source and include a 
strike-through edit by Whitman:  “Every hour, every atom, every where is chock 
with beautiful miracles.”  Turpin and Miller’s book of transcriptions of Whit-
man pre-Civil War notebooks is just that—chock full of  beautiful miracles. 
Every hour, every atom—every comma and dash, every entry made in a mish 
mash of time, written by Whitman in small notebooks he carried with him and 
used to record everything under stars and sun, from the titles of books he was 
reading, to his framing and reframing (much as he did walls and doorways and 
stairways as a carpenter renovating a house) of ideas for his  soon to be emergent 
publications.  
Through their transcriptions Turpin and Miller provide the reader with 
nuances that can be detected from penciled half-words and smudges, inter-
lineations, and texts written up or down a page, turned sideways, changing 
pen strokes and handwriting—all translated into readily readable type. We find 
in the transcribed pages from the 1850s Whitman’s musings and formulation 
of future poems, often disguised in prose paragraphs or in experimental long 
prose-like lines or drafted in spurts and later crossed over.
Taken together, the notebook pages and fragments in Every Hour, Every 
Atom are dynamic, immediate, changing, evolving, and different in nature at 
different times.  In them Whitman borrows, observes, and struggles with his 
material.  We see crucially in the pages the hints and genesis of his published work 
to come—poems like “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” “Song of the Open Road,” 
“Miracles,” “The Sleepers,” “Song of the Broad-Axe,” “Salut au Monde!,” “I 
Sing the Body Electric,” “A Woman Waits for Me,” “Starting from Paumanok,” 
and of course “Song of Myself.” We also see elements of his private self not 
necessarily revealed in the finished products and ideas for creative work that 
were never fully rendered.
The notebooks and fragments Turpin and Miller have selected and tran-
scribed in Every Hour, Every Atom come from a variety of archival repositories, 
including special collections at the Boston Public Library, Duke University, 
the Library of Congress, the New York Public Library, Rutgers University, the 
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73
University of Tulsa, the University of Virginia, and Yale University. The edited 
book thus gives readers the gift of being able to compare unpublished notes and 
fragments from the pivotal years just proximate to the first 1855 publication 
of Leaves of Grass and further into the 1850s, as if they, too, were mining the 
various archives, and to have these disparate texts available in composite fashion 
for cross-study in terms of the inter-relation of their themes and elusions.  
Unlike the earlier and in many ways evergreen six-volume edition of 
Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts edited by Edward F. Grier (New 
York: New York University Press, 1984), this one-volume edition offers us note-
books and fragments from the various repository sources transcribed to include 
deleted portions and fits and starts of partial words as integral to the texts, 
rather than as deleted changes relegated to subtext as if dropped to the waste 
paper basket or the print shop floor.  Every Hour, Every Atom thus successfully 
conveys the semi-chaos of the original pages in dynamically integrated textual 
fashion, mirroring the texts as they were constructed and saved and modified 
by Whitman.  
It is significant in respect to this project that Whitman was such an appre-
ciator and master of the printed word and the printing process and that he 
spent a lifetime tackling the challenge of converting his handwritten poems into 
printed publications. It can be hard to transform handwritten documents like his 
notebooks into printed transcriptions that are easy to read and accessible, and 
also painstakingly rendered and accurate—and at the same time maintain and 
convey a sense of their original material manifestations and generative energy. 
Turpin and Miller have succeeded in doing so. 
We see evidenced as a result in the content presented what Miller has 
described elsewhere as the “hot boil” of Whitman’s creative mind just before 
the first July 4, 1855, publication of Leaves of Grass with its untitled, later to be 
further reworked, poems; rakish working man frontispiece (the poet Whitman 
refers to with mud on his boots); and democratic opus of a prose introduction. 
Most importantly, in the literal transcription of notebooks that Whitman often 
constructed from recycled paper into tiny tomes, and stitched with thread or 
tied with laces, and written in with a stub of a pencil easily fitted into a pocket, 
we are provided close witness to the hard-working craftsmanship of Whitman 
as a wordsmith and writer.
This one-volume edition is divided into two parts. The largest features a 
set of nineteen transcribed notebooks, named for first lines, beginning with the 
undated “Poem incarnating the mind” (pre-1855, from the Thomas Harned 
collection of Walt Whitman Papers at the Library of Congress) and ending with 
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74
“excerpt from Words” (ca. 1856-1860, from the Charles E. Feinberg collection 
of Walt Whitman Papers at the Library of Congress). These are followed in part 
two by fifty-three transcribed fragments drawn from many different archival 
collections. The book concludes with brief source and content notes from the 
editors.  
The first notebook pages greeting the reader read almost like a series of 
sketches of scenes for a novel. The opening scene imagines a “Poem incar-
nating the mind of an old man, whose life has been magnificently developed,” 
full of “the wildest and most exuberant joy . . . Joy Joy Joy, which underlines 
and overtops the whole effusion” (3). What an opening! The second scene is 
about “Crossing the Fulton ferry to-day” and encountering a former acquain-
tance, a fellow reporter and writer making his living as a lobbyist in Albany and 
Washington. The third scene is of merchants and tradesmen and the importance 
of prompt pay. One turns the page of the edition, and suddenly a fourth scene 
bursts forth with blood and gore and violence. It is about the plight and heroism 
of the fleeing “black sk[inned]” person or the red brown savage lashed to the 
stump (4).  By page eight of the notebook, Whitman has moved tranquilly on 
to “the water lily of the Nile” and “the honey-lotus – honey-clover” (5).  In the 
next, we find him launching his soul out into the universe with the nebula and 
to future ages. By page eighteen of the notebook, he has returned to the theme 
of the hunted, hounded, persecuted, and executed—the woman accused as a 
witch burned at the stake, the great queens walking serenely to the chopping 
block, the fugitive enslaved person who turns to stand and eye defiantly when 
he can run no longer (9). We can find this material reworked later into portions 
of “Song of Myself,” notably the “disdain and calmness of martyrs” passage in 
Section 33, where Whitman adds “All these I feel or am.”
To call the content of the notebooks eclectic is an under-statement.  
Excitement, political insight, poignancy, empathy, and spiritual persuasion all 
exude from their pages, as does the amazing promise of future works.  The poet 
who would announce he contained multitudes here claims “Tongue of a million 
voices” (6). Who could begin reading such pages, and put the book down? Each 
entry creates a new vision for the reader’s mind. The transcriptions make it all 
accessible.
In his famous letter to Whitman of July 21, 1855, written after first 
reading Leaves of Grass, Ralph Waldo Emerson referred to the happiness he felt 
reading the poems—the joy. Whitman refers to Emerson’s blessing upon him 
in his notebook pages (74). His  “long foreground somewhere” as a journalist, 
editor, printer, and freelance writer come very much into play in the notebooks 
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75
and fragments, and sometimes pose challenges for rendering transcription in 
typographical form. Turpin and Miller show us, for example, Whitman’s hand-
drawn manicules—a printer’s device of a hand with a pointing finger inserted 
to emphasize to the reader’s eye certain sections of an ad or broadside. They 
note his asterisks, or triple underlining words for extra emphasis, and names or 
addresses of persons encountered or interviewed. 
The fragments Turpin and Miller have selected include substantial pieces, 
such as med Cophósis (ca. 1852-1854) (also known as the “Women” notebook) 
(322-327), from the Feinberg collection, consisting of detached leaves from 
a notebook, the content of which resonates closely with fuller notebooks and 
published pieces.  In the transcribed content of the fragments and notebooks, we 
see Whitman thinking aloud on the page about various things to write—a poem 
on libraries, on tools, on tears, on insects, on legacies, or, as in a fragment from 
the University of Tulsa, a perfect school “gymnastic, moral, mental and senti-
mental,” large saloons, “manly exercises” and love and political economy—“the 
American idea in all its amplitude and comprehensives” (333).  In a fragment 
from the Trent collection at Duke University Whitman speaks of Peruvians and 
Mexicans and Spanish navigators (332). We see him developing his cataloguing 
style, even in listing residences where his family has lived in a fragment from 
the Berg collection at the New York Public Library (336).  In a Lion Collection 
fragment, he writes “The Poet says God and me / What do you want from us 
[?]” (339).  A fragment on being the poet of materialism from Duke University is 
jotted, incredibly, on the back of a patch of wallpaper perhaps from a residence or 
job site at which the poet/builder was working (340-341). In the notes, Whitman 
sometimes gives himself a talking-to about his worth, the power of personality, 
or the nature of authenticity for a poem. He ponders slavery, caste, and the 
workings of government, and the relative equality of women and of men. He 
explores the mysteries of attraction and love and magnetism. He proclaims the 
importance of the body. He notes the sinner, the criminal, the prisoner in a cell. 
He turns to the sciences, and to animal, mineral, and vegetable—the very atoms 
and molecules and chloroform of which make up the elements of the Earth, and 
a leaf of grass.  He ponders the collapse of time and space between individuals 
and generations.  We see rich references to calamus and to moss growing upon 
the live oak in Louisiana.
In one notebook from the Charles E. Feinberg collection of Walt Whitman 
Papers at the Library of Congress (known as the “Dick Hunt” notebook, for the 
name written at the top of its opening, and transcribed by Turpin and Miller 
on 189-233), Whitman creates a litany of names of men he knew in New York, 
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76
sometimes noting their physical characteristics or how he knows them, or their 
places of employment or encounter, and the types of labor they engaged in, 
making of his notebook pages a catalog of persons and trades, a song of occu-
pations, a social history roster of (primarily white-ethnic and masculine) work-
ing-class democracy. This is Whitman’s city of robust love, his cities with their 
arms around each other’s necks that he wrote about  in his Calamus work and 
“For You O Democracy” that can be read in another Iowa Whitman Series 
publication, Betsy Erkkila’s edited Walt Whitman’s Songs of Male Intimacy and 
Love (2011).
Turpin and Miller’s edition is as versatile in its potential for use as it is in 
subject matter and content. It  makes for delightful and mesmerizing nightstand 
reading for the dedicated Whitmaniac or for newly intrigued persons previ-
ously uninitiated to Whitman. It serves undoubtedly as an important scholarly 
source and reference work to have on hand for use in combination with archival 
sources. It can be mined by teachers and scholars as a complement to the study 
of Whitman’s other forms of writing—the draft poems, the correspondence, the 
various kinds of prose.  It can be used by enthusiasts as a base to treasure hunt 
for echoes in published writings. It is a prime example for teachers to utilize 
when teaching the fine art of transcription of literary texts to their students.  
And there is nothing like comparing transcriptions to images of orig-
inal texts or creating your own. Every Hour, Every Atom includes some select 
page-image illustrations of original texts as tantalizing examples. As a whole 
the edition can be beautifully paired with digital humanities resources that 
depict scanned original notebook pages and fragments, be that through the 
Walt Whitman Archive portal or through dedicated digital presentations based 
on particular repository collections.  The notebooks and fragments featured in 
Every Hour, Every Atom from the Feinberg-Whitman collection and Harned-
Whitman collections, for example, are fully available online through the Library 
of Congress web portal. The Library of Congress By the People Walt Whitman 
crowdsourcing transcription project provides a chance for volunteers to try their 
hand in experiencing the intimacy that creating transcriptions brings to the 
study of Whitman’s handwritten notebooks and other primary sources (crowd.
loc.gov/campaigns/walt-whitman/).  As Whitman wrote in his opening lines of 
Song of Myself, “for every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.”
Library of Congress        Barbara Bair
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77


English

Zachary Turpin and Matt Miller, eds. Every Hour, Every Atom: A Collection of Walt Whitman’s Early Notebooks and Fragments.

Anzini, Patrícia

 
NOTES
WAS WHITMAN “BETRAYED” IN BRAZIL?:  
GEIR CAMPOS, ANA CRISTINA CESAR,  
AND THE 1983 CHOPPING UP OF LEAVES OF GRASS
“The idea of translating Whitman’s poetry had never crossed my mind . . . 
the original language of the poet was enough for me to understand and love 
him well.”1 But Brazilian poet Geir Campos nevertheless decided to translate 
Whitman’s poetry, and not only once. In 1964, just a few weeks before Brazil 
fell under the rule of a right-wing military regime, Campos published Fôlhas de 
Relva, the first substantial selection of poems from Walt Whitman’s Leaves of 
Grass to be translated into Brazilian Portuguese.2 Nineteen years later, just two 
years before the collapse of the twenty-one-year regime, Campos revisited this 
selection and republished it by tacking on a “leafy pun”: Fôlhas de Relva (Leaves 
of Grass) became Folhas das Folhas de Relva (Leaves of Leaves of Grass) in 1983.3 
Why did Campos decide that his 1964 Fôlhas de Relva was not “enough 
to understand and love” the American poet in 1983? Why not simply republish 
his former translation as it was? In this brief commentary, I offer a new view of 
Folhas das Folhas de Relva through a reading and critique of “O Rosto, o Corpo, 
a Voz” (“The Face, the Body, the Voice”), Brazilian poet Ana  Cristina Cesar’s 
contemporaneous review of Campos’s retranslation. Besides briefly discussing 
the contribution of Cesar’s early critical piece to the reception of Leaves of Grass 
within the cultural and historical circuits of 1980s Brazil, I also offer, along 
with USAmerican translator and poet Reginald Gibbons, a translation of “O 
Rosto, o Corpo, a Voz” into English for the first  time. Such tasks must begin by 
evidencing how Campos transformed Fôlhas de Relva into Folhas das Folhas de 
Relva.
The readers who glance through the 1964 and the 1983 editions easily 
notice what both have in common: the same overall organization and number 
of poems (twenty-three in total, some complete, others in fragments), displayed 
according to Whitman’s arrangements of clusters and sequences in the 1891-
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51
1892 final, or “death bed” edition of Leaves of Grass. A more detailed look at 
them, however, could leave readers bewildered. To start with, and in radical 
contrast with the 1964 volume, Folhas das Folhas de Relva features Campos’s 
inclusion of extensive paratexts—a pen-and-ink portrait of Whitman drawn 
by Japanese-descent artist Joji Kussunoki; a biographical note summarizing 
Campos’s life and professional achievements; a preface written by countercul-
tural Brazilian poet Paulo Leminski; a list of other books published in the same 
series, accompanied by blurbs and reviews; and Campos’s own “Esta Tradução” 
(“This Translation”), a combining of a critical introduction with a quasi-theory 
of translation that opens  with a suggestive epigraph, “I too am untranslatable,” 
Whitman’s verse 52 in “Song of Myself.”
It is in “Esta Tradução” that Campos attempted an explanation of his 
second change in the 1983 edition: the title itself. He writes, “this is a translation 
of selected poems of Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman which, by parodying 
the title Flores das ‘Flores do Mal’ (The Flowers of ‘The Flowers of Evil’), quite a 
find by Guilherme de Almeida for his translation of selected poems of Charles 
Baudelaire’s Fleurs du Mal, could only be titled Folhas das Folhas de Relva” 
(141).4 Campos’s play on de Almeida’s translation of Baudelaire’s original title, 
as well as on Whitman’s and his own in 1964, added more layers to empha-
size the rewritings that his 1983 edition had gone through. The reader holding 
Folhas das Folhas de Relva was left with no doubt  that the Leaves of Grass s/he 
was about to get acquainted with was, for better or for worse, “loose leaves.” 
The most crucial and substantive change is on the level of poetics. Campos 
drastically remodeled Whitman’s poetry: he rearranged the original syntax and 
the typographical position of  the poems on the page, deleted his old punctuation, 
added some that was new, used altered typefaces and fonts, and updated, so to 
speak, Whitman’s diction so as to fit it into the 1980s Brazilian countercultural 
ethos and imaginary. Most blatantly, he dismembered Whitman’s stretched-out 
lines into halves of roughly equal length, rendering the original poems almost 
unrecognizable. Campos’s gesture, in sum, conventionalized—or “remodern-
ized”—the greatest novelty of Whitman’s lineation, what Brazilian critic Ivo 
Barroso has described as his “versicular-liturgical outpouring” (Barroso).5
Campos justifies these radical changes in “Esta Tradução” under Czech 
translation theorist Josef Cermák’s rubrics “sous-interpretée” and “sur-inter-
pretée.” Folhas das Folhas de Relva, Campos explains, is “an ‘over-interpre-
tation’ of selected poems and fragments of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass . 
. . whereas the ‘under-interpretation’ moves the translation toward the writer, 
the ‘over-interpretation’ moves it toward the reader.”6 That is, whereas in 1964 
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52
Campos attempted to preserve, as he put it, “what the original has in terms 
of strangeness” by strictly creating a translational equivalence of Whitman’s 
source language, culture, and poetics,  in 1983 he went “beyond-the-limit” and 
“over-interpreted” the poet by “erasing (Whitman’s) exotic characteristics,” 
radically minimizing the 1964 equivalence.7
Not convinced by Campos’s justification, the Brazilian poet Ana Cristina 
Cesar—to whom Whitman was an acknowledged forefather and a holistic pres-
ence in her works—grabs a pen and writes “O Rosto, o Corpo, a Voz” (“The 
Face, the Body, the Voice”), the first review of Campos’s “leafy choppings-up.” 
Published in the leftist Brazilian newspaper Jornal do Brasil just a few weeks 
after Folhas das Folhas de Relva had made its entrée into the Brazilian cultural 
landscape in 1983, the review reflects Cesar’s strong disapproval of Campos’s 
gesture. She argues, “no goal of popularizing —and no theoretical option 
concerning translation itself—seems to justify these abrupt choppings-up of the 
original line that unnecessarily betray the literary intention of the American 
poet.”8 And, borrowing Portuguese poet Álvaro de Campos’s epithets when 
describing Whitman’s verses in his own “Saudação a Walt Whitman”9 (“Salute 
to Walt Whitman”), Cesar is quite direct about what makes Whitman distinc-
tively Whitman, at least formally: “where are the jump-verses, the leap-verses, 
the spasm-poems for the Brazilian reader—be he erudite or not?.”10
It is difficult not to partly agree with Cesar’s remarks, especially when form 
is taken into account. Campos—some might argue—visually updated Leaves 
of Grass “backward” in Folhas das Folhas de Relva: Whitman’s poems appear 
less idiosyncratic and constrained; and Whitman, in turn, seems a stylistically 
conservative poet. But rather than “betraying Whitman’s literary intention” with 
his “loose poems” (i.e. translations), as Cesar put it, I read Campos’s gesture in 
1983 as his attempt to retranslate Whitman’s “content” rather than Whitman’s 
“form,” a dichotomy that Cesar is somewhat oblivious to in her review, but 
that Campos himself was quite aware of. Proof of this is the answer he gives to 
Brazilian scholar Maria Clara Bonetti Paro after being questioned in a personal 
letter whether Folhas das Folhas de Relva would have met with less success had 
Whitman’s verses not been fragmented: “I think Whitman’s ‘content’ does not 
depend on the ‘form’ of his verse. . . .”11
The explanation I have given elsewhere for Campos’s assertion that 
“Whitman’s content does not depend on the form of his verse” goes beyond 
Cesar’s remarks concerning formal equivalences in translation.12 I have read 
Folhas das Folhas de Relva as a paragon of what I called inter-creation: a trans-
lation practice in which the translator aims at preserving and balancing the 
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53
complexities of the cultural encounter between the source and target languages 
and texts while incorporating them into his/her work. What Campos attempted 
to balance in his inter- created Leaves of Grass was the cultural correspondence 
that Brazil and the United States shared at that time. Domestically, this corre-
spondence was represented by the 1970s Udigrudi/Marginal subculture; trans-
nationally, by the US hippie life-style and its modes of thought.13
As such, Campos’s inter-creation of Leaves of Grass was highly revisionist 
at a political and cultural level. It offered Brazilian readers a tangible imagina-
tive window to the kind of freedom and revolutionary spirit on which they could 
base their reading and acting during the most ferocious period of Brazil’s polit-
ical history: the military regime (1964-1985). Much like Whitman, the comrade 
of all rebellious souls, Brazilians could also be libidinous, defiant, subversive, 
all-encompassing, and gender-inclusive; and much like the United States, Brazil 
could also be, as Folhas das Folhas de Relva proved, an insurgent, military-free, 
and youth-based nation. In this way, and here is what Cesar mostly failed to 
acknowledge in her review, Campos did contribute to globalizing Brazil not only 
at a linguistic, but also at a cultural and political level.
For political, historical, cultural, and disciplinary reasons, creative 
encounters of Brazilian writers with Whitman’s works in translation such as 
Campos’s have yet to receive serious historical and critical attention in literary 
and cultural scholarship, both within and outside Brazil. Not to mention the 
scarce terrain of translations of Whitman’s works themselves—his early poems, 
experimental essays, prefaces, journals, short stories, journalistic series, and all 
the other editions of Leaves of Grass are still awaiting “translations to come” in 
Brazil. Given these yet incipient fields, Cesar’s unique piece on Campos’s 1983 
translation is thus remarkable—hence her final comment in “O Rosto, o Corpo, 
a Voz.” “Leafing through” Campos’s chopped-up Leaves is indeed “indispens-
able” to open “a much-needed discussion on translation of poetry” among us, 
either in Brazil, the U.S., or elsewhere.
Patrícia Anzini 
Research Center for Communication and Culture,
Universidade Católica Portuguesa
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Was Whitman “Betrayed” in Brazil?: Geir Campos, Ana Cristina Cesar, and the 1983 Chopping Up of Leaves of Grass

Review of&nbsp;Ed Folsom and Christopher Merrill. "The Million Dead, Too, Summ’d Up": Walt Whitman’s Civil War Writings

Mong, Derek

share one. The mouse politely, firmly—and wisely—refuses.  One unconscious 
turn of the vast bulk of his amiable friend’s body in its sleep, he points out, 
and he would be a goner. Quite. As one of this world’s little mice, I am always 
suspicious when Walt comes on strong!  
But Erkkila’s book is a first-class study by a first-rate scholar, an accom-
plished and beautifully written demonstration of Whitman’s continuing rele-
vance, and a heartening one in the light of the present rather parlous condition 
of the post-Trump United States. In it the better angels of America’s nature are 
once more encouraged to spread their wings. And in closing, let me draw atten-
tion to the remarkable series to which this book is a valuable addition. Surely, a 
critical essay surveying this body of work in its entirety is long overdue.  Would 
it not be a good idea for the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review to commission a 
promising young scholar to write it?
Swansea University M. Wynn Thomas
*
Ed Folsom and Christopher Merrill. “The Million Dead, Too, Summ’d Up”: 
Walt Whitman’s Civil War Writings. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2021. 
vi + 227 pp. Iowa Whitman Series.
We live in an age of eclectic anthologies. Take Whitman Studies, which, in 
the last two decades, has welcomed several volumes of writers talking back to 
Walt. These include Walt Whitman: The Measure of His Song (2019), now in its 
third edition; Visiting Walt: Poems Inspired by the Life & Work of Walt Whit-
man (2003); Lovejets: Queer Male Poets on 200 Years of Whitman (2019), and 
Walt Whitman hom(m)age 2005/1855, an avant-garde, Anglo-French affair that 
includes works by John Ashbery, Eleni Sikelianos, and Jorie Graham, among 
many others. Whitman himself gets in on the game too, with new editions of 
his journalism (Walt Whitman’s Selected Journalism, 2015), his late life talks 
with Horace Traubel (Walt Whitman Speaks, 2019), his early notebooks and 
manuscript fragments (Every Hour, Every Atom, 2020), and his writings on 
the sea (The Sea Is a Continual Miracle: Sea Poems and Other Writings by Walt 
Whitman, 2017). The vast Whitman oeuvre—and its chatty afterlife—has never 
felt more accessible, navigable, or fun.    
WWQR Vol. 39 No. 1 (Summer 2021)
66
Ed Folsom and Christopher Merrill’s “The Million Dead, Too, Summ’d 
Up”: Walt Whitman’s Civil War Writings shares much with these earlier titles, 
and others besides. The most recent book to anthologize and contextualize 
Whitman’s Civil War writings, it seeks, like this spate of selected editions, to 
elevate a Whitmanic subtopic. Like the anthologies of homage, it treats reader 
response as a relevant form of critique. The book’s co-editors embody this 
approach. Folsom is one of America’s foremost Whitman scholars; Merrill is a 
poet, non-fiction writer, and the director of the International Writing Program 
at the University of Iowa. The two are colleagues, and their joint commentary 
represents a continued warming of relations between English Departments’ 
Cold War rivals, literary studies and creative writing. Warming might be putting 
it mildly. This is post-glasnost. This is a START-Treaty partnership applied to 
a grim, if timely, subject: American disunion.  
We see this in the book’s form. There are forty entries—poems, excerpts 
from Memoranda During the War, and three letters—representing Whitman’s 
Civil War writing. Each entry receives a pair of commentaries (first Folsom, 
then Merrill) that create, over the course of the book, a twinned and (mostly) 
chronological analysis of the primary texts. This reminds me of Whitman’s 
Two Rivulets (1875-76), an oft-forgotten book that Folsom describes as “a typo-
graphical and stylistic experiment that positions both poetry and prose on each 
page—‘two rivulets’ of words running next to each other, the poetry at the top 
and the prose at the bottom” (4). “The Million Dead, Too, Summ’d Up” is, in its 
own way, three rivulets: one from the 19th century and two from the 21st. It’s 
criticism in stereo. It’s parallel play, as when two kids—in this case a professor 
and a poet—each learn something new from the looks they throw toward the 
other’s toy. 
There are obvious benefits to this approach. “The Million Dead, Too, 
Summ’d Up” is wonderfully browsable, even without an index, and I often found 
myself reading the entries out of order. If the average critical study risks encum-
brance, by notation and the long arc of a thesis unwinding across a handful of 
chapters, this book feels agile. I thought of Helen Vendler’s Dickinson: Selected 
Poems and Commentaries (2010) or The Art Shakespeare’s Sonnets (1997)—two 
studies that make their own art from a discrete series of attentive essays. I 
thought of the Unsung Masters Series, a recuperative enterprise from Pleiades 
Press and Gulf Coast that reissues overlooked poets with a selection of work and 
accompanying commentaries by poets and scholars alike. 
This form also expands the book’s possible uses. It is, first and fore-
most, a reassessment of Whitman’s Civil War writing—a reassessment I didn’t 
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67
think necessary until I started reading. As Folsom writes, Whitman’s war texts 
“seldom have received sustained and detailed reading” (7); that’s because the 
war marked, for many critics, Whitman’s decline. This book’s existence is an 
argument for the opposite. It’s also a generous aid for future research, ending 
with an eighteen-page annotated bibliography, arranged chronologically from 
newest to oldest. I was shocked to see the paucity of pre-1960s articles or the 
preponderance of those post-2000. This is a volume designed to launch new 
dissertations and seminars but also new stories (see Chris Adrian’s fictionalized 
take on Whitman’s hospice work, “Every Night for a Thousand Years,” 1997); 
plays (see Christopher Dwyer’s one-man show, Leaves of America, 2002); or 
poems. I can imagine it scanned or assigned to graduates and undergraduates 
alike, to young scholars and advanced creative writers looking, as Whitman 
writes, “to answer what I am for” (“Poets to Come”).
Folsom’s introduction begins that process, foregrounding the existential 
dilemma that the Civil War posed for Whitman’s democratic poetics. How, 
Folsom asks, can a poetry based “on a union of its diverse parts” (2) survive that 
union’s split? His framework is textual, his metaphors surgical. Folsom notes, 
as he has elsewhere, that the Civil War divides the first three editions of Leaves 
of Grass (1855, 1856, and 1860-61) from the last (1867, 1871-72, and 1881). He 
shows how Whitman’s postwar revisions “involved his decision to open [Leaves] 
up,” like a patient (3). Whitman starts by sewing unbound copies of Drum-
Taps—his stand-alone, fifty-three-poem book of war poems—into the 1867 
Leaves; Folsom describes this as a “bibliographic suturing.” Later, in the 1870s, 
the poet “bleed[s] his Civil War poems into the very fabric of Leaves” (3). Poems 
like blood stains, revision like incision—the metaphors are apt when “this is no 
book, / Who touches this touches a man” (“So Long!”). Like Whitman, Folsom 
reads the body as congruous with the body politic. 
Folsom’s subsequent commentaries are a delight. Drawing on a lifetime 
immersed in Whitman, his era, and the scholarship that followed, Folsom paints 
a detailed picture of Whitman’s Civil War. His critical lenses are historical, 
biographical, and textual, but it’s his formalist chops that drew my check marks 
of approval. Consider the book’s titular phrase, a section title from Memoranda 
that precedes “the longest sentence [Whitman] would ever compose” (11). 
Folsom analyzes that sentence, with its “seven parenthetical insertions,” “phrasal 
trenches,” and “thirty-some dashes,” as a purposefully “undiagrammable utter-
ance” that lurches and pauses, absorbing the bodies of the dead as it moves (11). 
It’s a Whitmanic catalogue, familiar enough, but it ends as a sentence fragment. 
Whitman had no way, Folsom writes, “to predicate this war” (11). It is a death 
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sentence, necessarily truncated, like so many soldiers’ lives and limbs.  
Other, surprisingly granular readings caught my attention too. Take the 
word “compost” in “This Compost”; consider the word “composition,” which 
pops up when critics and poets alike talk shop. The words don’t just share an 
etymological root, Folsom argues, but an idea: all writing, like all nature, orig-
inates in a breaking down. In the latter, that includes bodies—of flora, fauna, 
and homo sapiens. In the former, it’s sentences and words. Whitman’s linguistic 
experimentation, then, is part and parcel with his belief in pastoral regenera-
tion. Both bring renewal. Bodies recur once more in the repetition of “arms,” 
“arming,” and “arm’d” in “Drum-Taps” (the poem), a subtle reference, Folsom 
argues, to amputation. Whitman’s contractions—which I’d always read as a 
regrettable archaism—remind us of amputation too. Their elision leads to double 
meanings. “Summ’d,” for instance, can be read as “summoned” or “summed.” 
Whitman intends both—and does both—but it’s the former, the giving voice to, 
that evokes, in absentia, the unity in what’s left out: “one.”     
Folsom’s commentaries go beyond diction, though; they teach and 
inform. I now know that “Cavalry Crossing a Ford” is, at least by today’s stan-
dards, partially plagiarized. I know too that Whitman got into a bar fight with 
a Southerner after reciting “Beat! Beat! Drums!” These revelations draw on 
recent biographical and archival scholarship, but the anecdotal and surprising 
never eclipse the historical. This is a book that keeps the events of 1861-1865 
front and center without, thank goodness, devolving into a battlefield tour. The 
inflection point that was 1863—Stones River, Gettysburg, Chickamauga—gives 
new meaning to “Year That Trembled and Reel’d Beneath Me.” The ominous 
meteor showers in “the fall of 1859 and the summer of 1860” inform Whitman’s 
“Year of Meteors (1859-60)” as well as Melville’s poem “The Portent” and 
Thoreau’s image of John Brown, whose attack on Harpers Ferry Armory he 
described as “meteor-like” (28). 
Folsom, in other words, knows a lot, and his commentaries, at their best, 
feel like vibrant lectures. After all, he and Merrill developed this book after 
co-teaching a MOOC (massive open online course) at the University of Iowa. 
He tempers his smarts, however, with generosity. These essays shout out to 
fellow critics—Peter Coviello, Kerry Larson, Ted Genoways—introducing the 
reader to a field’s scholastic milieu. As a poet and critic writing about Whitman 
from the belletristic periphery—my last project was a series of essays on Bell’s 
Brewery’s Leaves of Grass beers—I found this gesture welcoming. I learned new 
names; I felt like I was “one of a living crowd” (“Crossing Brooklyn”). Folsom 
doesn’t inhabit “the Me myself” professor persona—despite his subject matter—
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but says “Round and round we go, all of us, and ever come back thither” (“Song 
of Myself”). 
If Folsom’s commentaries look inward, then Merrill’s look outward. If 
Folsom is a close-reading Americanist, then Merrill is a global comparativist. 
He reads Whitman in D.C. alongside Miłosz in Warsaw. He quotes Guillaume 
Apollinaire (“I love art so much […] that I joined the artillery”) and Charles 
Simic (“The sole function of the epic poet […] is to find excuses for the butcheries 
of the innocent”). His commentaries take more liberties than Folsom’s—the 
spice, if you will, to Folsom’s soup—but draw on a wider panoply of influences 
and interests. His experience writing about the Balkan Wars, front-page news 
in the 1990s, helps him meditate on the relationship between poetry and armed 
conflict. He dabbles in what’s come to be called—despite the term’s slippery 
imprecision—the poetry of witness. 
This is all to say that Merrill’s internationalism is key. It backgrounds 
the first-hand experiences, which often open or end a commentary, and that I 
grew to cherish. Merrill’s essays are shorter than Folsom’s, but they blend—and 
I count this a blessing—the personal and the poetic. In his reading of “When 
I Heard a Learn’d Astronomer,” he stares with “utter incomprehension” at the 
“stars above the Adriatic Sea” after surviving a ride in an ill-fated APC (60). A 
blood-stained Gettysburg bullet in his grandparents’ living room, and a family 
falling out over that grandfather’s estate, opens a short essay on war-torn siblings 
(“Two Brothers, One South, One North”). A telling quote from the Greek poet, 
Yannis Ritsos, closes it. Walt Whitman is often credited with, if not inventing, at 
least promoting reader response criticism; Christopher Merrill extends it admi-
rably. 
It is Merrill’s commentary on “Mother and Babe,” a two-line poem 
about nursing, that struck me most. Folsom characterizes this poem as one of 
Whitman’s “proto-imagist” lyrics—this book includes a healthy sampling—and 
both commentators think hard about juxtaposition. Why add this subject matter 
to Drum-Taps? How do short poems (“Cavalry Crossing a Ford,” “Hush’d 
Be the Camps Tonight,” and “Reconciliation”) talk to the long ones (“When 
Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d”)? How, in other words, do poets put 
books together? It’s a question relevant to critics and creative writers alike, and 
it leads Merrill to a paragraph-long disquisition on sequence and assembly. It’s 
a paragraph that I’ll soon be photocopying for my undergraduate poets, but it’s 
Merrill’s own juxtaposition that I’ll remember. Some years ago, his father-in-law 
died on the morning of his daughter’s fifth birthday. Merrill quotes his father-
in-law’s chaplain on the coincidence: “This is everything, isn’t it?” Whitman 
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70
would approve.    
 What shortcomings I find in “The Million Dead, Too, Summ’d Up,” are 
mostly sins of omission. If, as Folsom writes, Whitman “experienced [the war] 
in the body, on the body, and by the body” (his italics)—and lived long enough 
to see his own body fail—how might disability studies sharpen commentaries 
committed to tropes of amputation (206)? (Robert J. Scholnick’s essay, “‘How 
Dare a Sick Man or an Obedient Man Write Poems?’: Whitman and the Dis-ease 
of the Perfect Body,” warrants a mention.) Two or three of Merrill’s commen-
taries end in cliché (“Love conquers all” [175]; “that made all the difference” 
[183]); most rely, for their comparativist touchstones, on canonical (i.e. white 
male) European and American authors. This might lead some readers—I was 
initially among them—to question this book’s willingness to ask hard questions 
about Whitman and race.
To those readers I advise patience. There are five or six thoughtful 
commentaries that address race, but they appear late in the text. Folsom, for 
instance, rereads “Reconciliation”—that famous poem of graveside kissing—as 
spoken by a Black soldier. (“[T]he main duty of black soldiers at the end of the 
war,” he points out, was “burying the corpses” [185]). The analysis is a tour de 
force. Both commentators deserve praise for their takes on “Results South—
Now and Hence,” a cringe-worthy passage from Memoranda that Whitman 
suppressed when he folded Memoranda into Specimen Days, in which he ascribes 
Reconstruction’s failures to “black domination.” For Merrill, it “occupies a 
singular place in the history of American literary racism” (196). For Folsom it 
highlights “what is powerfully absent in Whitman’s voluminous writings about 
the war—the issue of race” (194).  
Many readers might recoil too at “Ethiopia Saluting the Colors,” a poem, 
as Folsom notes, that “[o]ften reads as betraying Whitman’s racism” (198). The 
truth is more complicated, and I appreciated the evenhanded work Folsom 
does here to unlock and analyze this poem’s persona. The main speaker, one 
of Sherman’s soldiers, cannot fathom a formerly enslaved woman saluting his 
colors. That woman seeks, in Folsom’s reading, someone “to guide her out of 
her objecthood and into her selfhood” (199). Neither gets what they hoped for; 
both walk off incomplete. This failure of perspective, of empathy really, is part 
and parcel to Whitman’s own. He saw the war as a battle for the union. With 
Lost Cause histories on the wane, and initiatives like the 1619 Project on the 
rise, more and more Americans (one hopes) see the war for what it was: a contest 
over slavery. This commentary, and this book, will contribute to that aware-
ness as well as the larger conversation that the field of Whitman Studies is now 
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having—in the wake of Whitman’s Bicentennial, Black Spring, and the publi-
cation of Whitman Noir: Black America and the Good Gray Poet (2014)—about 
Walt Whitman’s racial attitudes. It’s a conversation that is long overdue.  
Overall, “The Million Dead, Too, Summ’d Up” is a worthy sequel to Folsom 
and Merrill’s first foray into collaborative commentary, Song of Myself: With a 
Complete Commentary (2016). It also arrives, as its authors well know—and as 
articles in Harper’s and the Times have explored—at a time when we’re asking 
“if in fact the Civil War […] ever ended” (Folsom 205). Whitman watched, in 
real time, the Capitol’s construction. On January 6, 2021, we watched it face an 
insurrection. Whitman basked, in an 1864 letter to his mother (not included 
here), in that building’s “great bronze figure, the Genius of Liberty.” We have 
reason now to fear for Liberty’s vouchsafe: free and fair elections. 
 Were you looking to be held together by the lawyers?
 Or by an agreement on paper? or by arms?
 —Nay—nor the world, nor any living things, will so cohere.
So ends “Over the Carnage Rose Prophetic a Voice,” a poem written for the 
“Calamus” section before the war but revised for “Drum-Taps” after it. The title, 
like these lines, poses a question that plagues America today: what will help us 
cohere? What voice—or idea or challenge—will rise over our current carnage? 
Whitman’s answer is manly affection, what he calls “adhesiveness” elsewhere; it 
feels outdated today. Still, this poem, this book, and U.S. history remind us that 
we have cohered, however imperfectly, in the past. They also remind us that 
the cost for doing so, in Whitman’s time and our own, is often paid in blood. It 
seems entirely apt then that Whitman’s birthday fell on Memorial Day this year: 
May 31, 2021. There was reason to celebrate and reason to mourn.  
Wabash College        Derek Mong
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Ed Folsom and Christopher Merrill. "The Million Dead, Too, Summ’d Up": Walt Whitman’s Civil War Writings.

Front Matter, Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, vol. 39, no. 1

Cesar, Ana Cristina

“The Face, the Body, the Voice” 
Ana Cristina Cesar
Jornal do Brasil, “Caderno B”
April 23, 198314
Walt Whitman has the power to unsettle poets and readers. Reading Whitman 
is almost like becoming Whitman’s lover. It was Álvaro de Campos who took 
notice of this more radically in his “Salutation to Walt Whitman.” In this poem, 
Campos celebrates him sensually, kisses his portrait, and speaks of a “love erec-
tion,” although “abstract and indirect deep in his soul.” Other great poets, in a 
loving celebration, have sung him in verses that seemingly adopt— unreason-
ably, as the always restrained lover Borges would say—the style of his poems: 
García Lorca, in his “Ode to Walt Whitman,” and Vicente Huidobro, in his 
epic “Altazor.” It is symptomatic that this loving celebration reveals Whitman’s 
figure itself—the face, the beard, the body, the voice—disclosing true shudders 
of desire.
This shuddering does not come from a fascination with Whitman’s life. 
It matters little to write a biography of the great American poet (1819-1889), 
author of one of the most compelling books of poetry ever written, the bulky 
Leaves of Grass, “a song of the great collective individual, the common man or 
woman,” that has now made its appearance among us with a compilation titled 
Folhas das Folhas de Relva (Leaves of Leaves of Grass). “Whitman is to America 
what Dante is to Italy,” said Pound in unequivocal recognition of his vitality. 
Paradise is the word that emerges when one speaks of this vitality, and when 
Borges, in a classic text about the poet, shrewdly mentions that “to move from 
the paradisal orb of his verses to the insipid chronicle of his days is a melancholic 
transition.”
Whitman himself used to point out that his life was only “a few faint 
traces” of which he knew little or nothing. In reality, the fascination with the 
figure of this poet arises from his radical poetics. A true inventor, he affirms the 
foundation of the real on the word: the book is the poet. The final farewell—the 
key—of Leaves of Grass, is his saying that it is not a book: “It is I you hold and 
who holds you,” and he springs with desire into the arms of those who read 
it—that is, of those who touch it.
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55
This is what is fascinating about him—the other side of modernity, that 
which reinvents happiness. Whitman breaks with the metaphysics that imposes 
yet weeps over the distance between the world and language. Álvaro de Campos, 
a genius tortured by metaphysics, captured the great Whitman question most 
precisely: “In your lines, at a certain point, I don’t know if I’m reading or living./ 
I don’t know if my place is in the world or in your lines.”
Leaves of Grass realizes, within the book and as a book, “one of the few 
great things of modern literature: the figure of oneself.” This grand mythic 
figure establishes an intimate relationship with every reader, present and future, 
merges itself with the reader, and affirms itself as sensorially present. Thus, 
for those who apprehend Whitman’s poetics, to read Leaves of Grass is to kiss 
and be kissed by Whitman himself. The mediation of the portrait in Álvaro de 
Campos would not even be necessary. Poetically, the revolutionary euphoria of 
Whitman’s poetics abolishes the issue of representation as detachment.
The current Brazilian edition of Leaves of Grass is a selection of poems 
intended to either promote or vulgarize the book to the “non-erudite reader” (a 
singular contradiction: Whitman is precisely the poet who writes to the non-er-
udite reader, to the reader who is all Readers). Without a doubt, what is lost 
in it is the Whitmanian intention, which gives Leaves of Grass its form as a 
Book of Books, a Book physically present that says it is the poet himself. When 
leafing through these beautiful poems, it is worth keeping in mind that the 
original is not a compilation of loose poems: it is a book, which, like any book, 
wants to be an archetype, and this itself is a fundamental theme of Whitman’s 
poetry. If this collection can be justified by its purpose of promoting Whitman’s 
work, the same cannot be said of the translator’s option to break his originally 
long and captivating lines into two, three short verses in the translation. The 
rhythm, now choppy and modest, makes Whitman’s exclamatory, emotional, 
and rhetorical fluency disappear (rhetorical as in the original Greek sense of 
rétor, to convince, dissuade, or persuade the interlocutor, as Paulo Leminski 
rightly notes in the introduction to the edition). It also considerably reduces the 
level of emotion so intimately linked to the feverish pace of the long line, which 
imitates the intention of the text, its euphoric sensual affirmation, rhetoric of 
love, and recurrent metaphor of the word’s embrace. This metaphor traverses 
and shapes his country from end to end.
No goal of popularizing—and no theoretical option concerning transla-
tion itself—seems to justify the abrupt choppings-up of the original lines, which 
unnecessarily betray the literary intention of the American poet. Simply compare 
the current Brazilian translation with Borges’s translation, which faithfully 
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56
maintains the original versification and rhythm, even though he knew that the 
“longitude” of Whitman’s verses is not in itself so much a fundamental virtue 
of the poet as it is the “delicate verbal adjustment, affection and differences” of 
his long enumerations. Where are, as the poet Álvaro de Campos put it, “the 
leap-verses, the jump-verses, the spasm-verses” to the Brazilian reader, be this 
reader erudite or not? Where are the “hysterical attack verses” that “drag the 
wagon of our exalted nerves onto the floor, disorderedly, barely allowing us to 
breathe, bursting from living?”
One acknowledges this position perhaps to open a much-needed discus-
sion on translation of poetry among us while not preventing the welcoming of 
these Leaves. Leafing through them is, in any case, indispensable.
Translated by Patrícia Anzini and Reginald Gibbons
Notes
1 In the original, “Nunca me havia passado pela cabeça a ideia de traduzir a poesia de 
Whitman . . .  a língua original do poeta já me bastava para entendê-lo e amá-lo bem.” 
Campos’s statement can be found in an interview he gave to the Brazilian newspaper O Diário 
de Notícias on May 31, 1964, and which was titled “Meu Encontro com Walt Whitman” 
(“My Encounter with Walt Whitman”). Except where otherwise noted, all translations into 
Brazilian Portuguese are our own. The original quotations in Portuguese always come in the 
endnotes.
2 Whitman, Walt. Fôlhas de Relva, trans. Geir Campos (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Civilização 
Brasileira, 1964).
3 Whitman, Walt. Folhas das Folhas de Relva, trans. Geir Campos (São Paulo: Editora 
Brasiliense, 1983).
4 In the original, “ . . .  esta é uma tradução de poemas escolhidos das Leaves of Grass 
de Walt Whitman, e que, parodiando o título de Flores das ‘Flores do Mal’, bem achado 
por Guilherme de Almeida para a sua tradução de poemas escolhidos das Fleurs du Mal 
de Charles Baudelaire, não teria por que não se intitular Folhas das ‘Folhas de Relva.” 
Guilherme de Almeida (1890-1969) was an acclaimed writer and influential figure during 
the Brazilian modernist period. He would take eight years to translate twenty-one poems of 
Charles Baudelaire’s Fleurs du Mal. His translation was published in 1944 by José Olympio.
5 See “A Voz Oceânica de Walt Whitman,” available in gavetadoivo.wordpress.
com/2011/07/08/a-voz-oceanica-de-walt-whitman/
WWQR Vol. 39 No. 1 (Summer 2021)
57
6 In the original, “uma superinterpretação de poemas e fragmentos selecionados de 
Leaves of Grass”  . . .  a subinterpretação aproxima a tradução do autor, a superinterpretação 
aproxima-a do leitor.” Geir Campos, trans., Folhas das Folhas de Relva (São Paulo: Editora 
Brasiliense, 1983), 140.
7 In the original, “o que o original tem de estranho” and “retirar-lhe as características 
exóticas.” Geir Campos, trans., Folhas das Folhas de Relva (São Paulo: Editora Brasiliense, 
1983), 141.
8 In the original, “nenhum objetivo divulgatório—e nenhuma opção teórica da própria 
tradução—parece justificar esses cortes breves do verso original, que traem, sem necessi-
dade, a intenção literária do poeta americano.” Ana Cristina Cesar, Crítica e Tradução, ed. 
Fernando Paixão (São Paulo: Ática/Instituto Moreira Sales, 199), 253.
9 “Saudação a Walt Whitman” was written in 1915 by Álvaro de Campos, one of Portuguese 
poet Fernando Pessoa’s  heteronyms.
10 In the original, “Onde estão, para o leitor brasileiro, erudito ou não, os ‘versos saltos, 
versos pulos, versos espasmos?” Ana Cristina Cesar, Crítica e Tradução, ed. Fernando Paixão 
(São Paulo: Ática/Instituto Moreira Sales, 199), 253.
11 In the original, “O senhor acha que se o verso de Whitman não tivesse sido dividido 
a aceitação do público à Folhas das folhas de relva (sic) teria sido menor?;” “Acho que o 
‘conteúdo’ não depende da ‘forma’ do verso em Whitman . . . .(sic).” Campos sent his letter 
to Bonetti Paro in 1993. The scholar herself sent me a digitalized copy of  Campos’s letter by 
email in 2018.
12 Campos’s 1983 translation was the object of the second chapter of my unpublished 
2018 doctoral dissertation (Northwestern University) titled “‘Welcome, American Brother’: 
Cultural Encounters between Walt Whitman and Brazilian Writers.”
13 “Udigrudi” is a mocking reference, and an exaggerated transcription, of the way 
Brazilians mispronounce the word “underground” in Portuguese.
14 Cesar’s review has been published in Crítica e Tradução (São Paulo: Ática, 1999), a book 
edited by Fernando Paixão that compiles most of her work on translation and cultural and 
literary criticism.
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58


“The Face, the Body, the Voice”

Fleck, Jonathan

“Strong, manly, and full of human nature”: The Roots of Rubén Darío’s “Walt Whitman”

Review of Betsy Erkkila. The Whitman Revolution: Sex, Poetry, and Politics

Thomas, M Wynn

“Song of Myself” to a discussion of Whitman as a hospital “visitor” during the 
war. Edmundson credits The Better Angel: Walt Whitman’s Civil War by Roy 
Morris, Jr., for some of his inspiration. In reviewing that book in these pages more 
than twenty years ago, I admired the way Morris interwove the poet’s letters to 
soldiers, his Drum-Taps poems, and his diary observations into the whirlwind 
of the war and its terrible consequences. Part 2 of Edmundson’s study, “In 
the Hospitals,” recounts how Whitman rushed to Falmouth, Virginia, following 
the Battle of Fredericksburg in December of 1862 in search of his soldier-
brother George, who was slightly wounded. There the poet found “the kinds of 
Americans [he] had dreamed of in ‘Song of Myself,’ proud and self-reliant—a 
people, he believed, like none other in the world.” These soldiers, Edmundson 
writes, “were not the product of Homer and Virgil but of the Declaration and 
the Constitution” (118-19).
Edmundson has an easy way with words, and his finest sentence is his 
opening one: it best describes, or sums up, the uniqueness of the 1855 poem 
that would later be entitled “Song of Myself”: “Song of Myself genuinely begins 
not with words but with an image” (15). That, of course, is Whitman’s fron-
tispiece—the 1854 steel engraving of the “rough” standing with his hand on 
hip, hat cocked to one side, unjacketed and shirt open at the neck, celebrating 
“ourselves” as he celebrates himself.
Texas A&M University      Jerome Loving
*
Betsy Erkkila. The Whitman Revolution: Sex, Poetry, and Politics. Iowa City: 
University of Iowa Press, 2020. xvi + 276 pp. Iowa Whitman Series.
For many years now Betsy Erkkilla has been deservedly recognized as one of 
the most distinguished, and one of the most venturesomely ground-breaking, 
of our contemporary Whitman scholars. Her consistent interest has been in 
exploring the radical aspects of his poetics and his politics, and in crusadingly 
demonstrating their relevance to the social, cultural, and political circumstanc-
es of the present, particularly in the U.S.A.  Her early work on Whitman Among 
the French (1980) alerted her to the impact of the revolutionary political move-
ments in France on Whitman’s writing career, from the Year of Revolutions of 
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61
1848 through to the Paris Commune of 1871 (there’s a whole chapter on the 
Commune and on ‘the formative influence’ of French politics on his poetry 
in this new book), and she has continued to view Whitman accordingly as, at 
bottom, a truly revolutionary writer. Her latest study, a collection of key essays 
and lectures from the last few years, continues to present him in this light and 
includes an interesting chapter—“Whitman, Marx, and the American 1848”—
that juxtaposes Whitman and Marx and argues that their respective work “has 
a pressing relevance and urgency to the ongoing struggles over capitalist domi-
nance, democratic freedom, world union—and peace—today” (125).
Given that Whitman studies have long acted as a reasonably accurate 
barometer of the state of American society at large, repeatedly calling into focus 
such aspects of his case as most interestingly correspond to changes in the U.S.A. 
itself, it is surprising that no attempt seems to have been made by scholars to 
demonstrate the obvious affinities between Walt and “The Donald.” Both are 
world-class braggarts and narcissists with a genius for ruthless self-promotion; 
both created powerful avatars crafted to seem empowering while  identifying 
with an underclass fallen victim to capitalism’s latest incarnation; both are 
arch-individualists and share a visceral mistrust of state intervention; both are 
brilliant manipulators of the mass-media of their day, newspapers in Walt’s 
case, Twitter in Trump’s, and are classic products of the showbiz performance 
cultures of the States; both project alluring images of themselves as “represen-
tative Americans” who are America-obsessed and accordingly treat the rest of 
the world as wannabe America, and so on and so forth.
A grotesque misrepresentation of course, but perhaps one with sufficient 
disturbing truth buried somewhere within it to at least challenge prevailing 
scholarly orthodoxy. It shows Trumpism to be the foul dust floating in the wake 
of Whitman’s version of the American dream,  and reminds us how slippery is 
Whitman’s rhetoric (often as nebulous as it is sweeping), how open to ambiva-
lence are his positions, and how fascinatingly compact he is of contradictions 
that need to be taken seriously. In short, it may be time to recognize the possi-
bility that Whitman may have been speaking an important truth (for once!) 
about himself, when he warned Edward Carpenter in his old age that there was 
something in his nature “furtive like an old hen.” It may be timely to recognize 
and respect the strong, ineradicable strain of conservatism in him, a strain that, 
while increasingly obvious after the war, had nevertheless been there from the 
very beginning. Furthermore (though whisper it not in Gath), rather a lot of 
his poetry is standard-issue fustian, and vapidly vaticinatory, which makes the 
startling originality of his best writing all the more breathtakingly remarkable 
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62
and intriguingly puzzling.
That these are matters not pertinent to the approach adopted by my old 
friend Betsy Erkkila is unsurprising. She, like me, is an intellectual product of 
the 1960s and 1970s, and while my reading of Whitman was influenced by the 
thinking of Raymond Williams and the European New Left of that long ago 
era, hers was inalterably shaped by the major reform movements in the areas of 
race, ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation in the States whose origins can be 
traced back to that period. Not for nothing is her arresting new study subtitled 
Sex, Poetry, and Politics, given that so much of her outstanding work in the 
field of Whitman studies has attended to the interface between these different 
aspects of his writing. 
Her writing glints with original insights, as when, discussing Whitman’s 
treatment of women in his poetry and informatively setting it in the context 
of the times, she suggests that in his “poetic iconography the male figure is 
associated with democratic individualism, the female figure is associated with 
the federal union.” Whitman, she adds, “invokes the woman not only as the 
source of creative energy but as the generative force of justice and sympathy in 
the world”—an invocation clearly congruent with, yet different from, the senti-
mentalizing and confining Victorian treatment of the female figure. How, one 
is stimulated to speculate, does Whitman’s use of the female to embody crucial 
aspects of the desired national character of America compare with the contem-
poraneous use in France of Marianne for the same purpose (as in Delacroix’s 
famous painting Liberty Leading the People), or of Britannia in Britain? 
In her striking chapter on Whitman and the politics of language, already 
a well-worn subject of course, she perceptively distinguishes between the stilted, 
limited, and generalising way he used words from the French to express his 
feelings for women and the spectrum of French terms he employed to suggest 
the nuanced variety of emotional and sexual bonds between males. The best 
poems in Calamus (and there are plenty of duds) could profitably be read as a 
language experiment, an attempt to demonstrate that male-male relationships 
could be every bit as richly various in character as male-female relationships, 
and an attempt to develop the new “language of love” needed to encompass that 
truth. In that respect, Calamus asks to be compared with the great heterosexual 
English love-poetry of the Elizabethan period. 
Erkkila also reflects on the language war of the period, between those 
who thought American English should be strictly aligned with the very best of 
British English and those of Whitman’s opinion that the aim should be “always 
to keep language open, flexible, and responsive to the changing contours of 
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the American experience.” This was and is an exhilaratingly admirable goal. 
But it is not without its ambivalent aspects, as perhaps needs to be stressed in 
the light of present circumstances, when, as the prominent Japanese novelist 
Minae Mizumura argues in The Fall of Language in the Age of English, so many 
languages (including French) and linguistic cultures all over the world are in 
ever-increasing danger of being eventually killed by the global domination of 
English. Whitman’s interest in French, for example, was, as Erkkila demon-
strates, not only creatively enabling for him but generously inclusive in intent. 
But from the point of view of today’s language wars, it was a “contributionist 
interest.” His concern was to enrich English, and thus to Americanize it, by 
assimilating terms from the French and other “foreign” languages. Whitman 
never demonstrated an interest in learning any of the many languages that 
immigrants brought to the New York of his day, nor did he ever show an interest 
in seriously familiarizing himself with any of the distinctive and rich cultures 
from which those immigrants originated. His was a melting pot model of the 
States understandable in his period, not the mosaic model which seems far better 
suited to the cultural situation in the America of our present. Multiculturalism 
and Whitman seem to me to make somewhat uncomfortable bedfellows. 
One of the most intriguing features of Whitman’s poetry is the profligacy 
with which it varies its accounts of its wellspring. His foundation myths as a 
poet are many, and accordingly bewildering but inviting. Erkkila has long been 
attracted to the Whitman of the Body, and the book’s chapter on “Whitman and 
the Homosexual Republic” shows her at her most intensely engaged, subtle, and 
illuminating. Particularly valuable is her premise that in Calamus the language 
of same-sex love “intersects with other languages, including the languages 
of temperance, sexual reform, artisan republicanism, labor radicalism, phre-
nology, heterosexual love, familial and especially father-son relationships, and 
spirituality.” Whitman’s process of thinking, like that of his poetics, is “schizo” 
in character, to adopt Félix Guattari’s suggestive model. They might both be 
compared to a rhizome, the root-creeping plant that sends up shoots as it moves 
invisibly along underground. In structure, “Song of Myself” is a perfect example 
of just such a procedure.  Erkkila is adept at noticing how similar subterranean 
links connect Whitman with his seeming polar opposite, Emily Dickinson, 
another poet in whose work she is expert. Chapter five’s focus on Whitman and 
Dickinson’s  “Radical Imaginaries” neatly encapsulates the common devotion 
of New Yorker and New Englander alike to the challengingly unconventional in 
the realms of politics, poetics, and sexuality, and their envisaging of alternative 
states of both individual and collective forms of human existence.
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Erkkila’s useful strategy of twinning Whitman with other leading figures 
of his age continues via the comparison in chapter eight, “Whitman, Melville, 
and the Tribulations of Democracy”: both writers were children of families 
“that suffered losses as the result of an increasingly volatile capitalist market-
place,” and both resultantly found themselves cut adrift, left to find their own 
ways forward. Eventually, of course, they adjusted in dramatically different 
ways, Whitman’s temperament, basically sanguine though periodically streaked 
with such misgivings as found crude exasperated expression in poems like 
“Respondez!,” strongly contrasted with the weathered and seasoned ironies of 
Melville’s mature outlook. Whitman saw the cupola recently installed above the 
American Capitol as gleaming with the whiteness of democratic promise; Melville 
sardonically observed that there was rust on the iron dome. But the turmoil of 
their times moved them both to culturally transformative experimentations in 
style and voice, and to the production of what Erkkila nicely calls “Epics of 
Democracy” (171). Melville’s Battle-Pieces was an artfully constructed chamber 
of echoes, designed to represent the Civil War as just the latest tragic example 
of the tedious and futile human passion for conflict, while for all its chastened 
tragic tone, Drum-Taps was designed to represent the war as an entirely new 
kind of struggle for the future of a humanely tolerant and inclusive democratic 
order. Then, in war’s aftermath Melville, like Whitman, “looked to non-state 
forms of democratic affection and community as a means of countering the 
increasing use of military force and law to achieve social order.”
Her final chapter, “Public Love: Whitman and political Theory,” sees 
Erkkila challenging the political theorists and philosophers of democracy who 
have of late taken an interest in Whitman’s writings. According to her, “their 
work is . . . characteristic of a long tradition of liberal literary and political 
criticism that has bracketed or erased the collective, adhesive, and homoerotic 
dimensions of Whitman’s theory of democracy.” From her point of view, these 
academics are failing to recognize and respond to that which is truly revolu-
tionary and accordingly valuable about Whitman’s achievement, and of her 
course her entire book has been explicitly designed to draw attention to these 
crucial and challenging aspects of his case.
Reading this excellent book made one thing clear to me: Betsy Erkkila 
trusts much more in Whitman’s self-proclaimed universalism than I do. Product 
as I am of one of the world’s many marginalized and endangered cultures, I 
always remember the familiar story of the Elephant and the Mouse. The best 
of friends, they share everything together—or almost everything.  Short as they 
are of a second bed on one of their travels, the kindly elephant suggests that they 
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65
share one. The mouse politely, firmly—and wisely—refuses.  One unconscious 
turn of the vast bulk of his amiable friend’s body in its sleep, he points out, 
and he would be a goner. Quite. As one of this world’s little mice, I am always 
suspicious when Walt comes on strong!  
But Erkkila’s book is a first-class study by a first-rate scholar, an accom-
plished and beautifully written demonstration of Whitman’s continuing rele-
vance, and a heartening one in the light of the present rather parlous condition 
of the post-Trump United States. In it the better angels of America’s nature are 
once more encouraged to spread their wings. And in closing, let me draw atten-
tion to the remarkable series to which this book is a valuable addition. Surely, a 
critical essay surveying this body of work in its entirety is long overdue.  Would 
it not be a good idea for the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review to commission a 
promising young scholar to write it?
Swansea University M. Wynn Thomas
*
Ed Folsom and Christopher Merrill. “The Million Dead, Too, Summ’d Up”: 
Walt Whitman’s Civil War Writings. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2021. 
vi + 227 pp. Iowa Whitman Series.
We live in an age of eclectic anthologies. Take Whitman Studies, which, in 
the last two decades, has welcomed several volumes of writers talking back to 
Walt. These include Walt Whitman: The Measure of His Song (2019), now in its 
third edition; Visiting Walt: Poems Inspired by the Life & Work of Walt Whit-
man (2003); Lovejets: Queer Male Poets on 200 Years of Whitman (2019), and 
Walt Whitman hom(m)age 2005/1855, an avant-garde, Anglo-French affair that 
includes works by John Ashbery, Eleni Sikelianos, and Jorie Graham, among 
many others. Whitman himself gets in on the game too, with new editions of 
his journalism (Walt Whitman’s Selected Journalism, 2015), his late life talks 
with Horace Traubel (Walt Whitman Speaks, 2019), his early notebooks and 
manuscript fragments (Every Hour, Every Atom, 2020), and his writings on 
the sea (The Sea Is a Continual Miracle: Sea Poems and Other Writings by Walt 
Whitman, 2017). The vast Whitman oeuvre—and its chatty afterlife—has never 
felt more accessible, navigable, or fun.    
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66


Betsy Erkkila. The Whitman Revolution: Sex, Poetry, and Politics.

Back Matter, Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, vol. 38, no. 2

Front Matter, Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, vol. 38, no. 2

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