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chapter 1 Walt Whitman “Live”: Performing the Public Sphere Others take ‹nish, but the Republic is ever constructive and ever keeps vista. —whitman, from “by blue ontario’s shore” The want for something ‹nished, completed, and technically beautiful will certainly not be supplied by this writer, as it is by existing esthetic works. —whitman in conversation, via traubel Whitman is not well known for having recited his poetry out loud to others, and is on record as saying that he was “nothing of a reader,” that, in fact, he preferred not to read his own work and couldn’t recite it in any event, since he didn’t have it memorized (WWWC, 9:124). Despite such claims, he did perform on numerous occasions, both in private and in public , and attached great signi‹cance to those exercises. From his memoranda we know that he was in the habit of reading poetry aloud to himself from his youth, riding omnibuses up and down Broadway “declaiming some stormy passage from Julius Caesar or Richard, (you could roar as loudly as you chose in that heavy, dense, uninterrupted street-bass.)” (PP, 727). To his friend Horace Traubel in 1889 he recalled, “I did my best reading when I was alone that way—off in the woods or on the shore. Long ago, when I was a young man, Coney Island was a favorite spot. At that time Coney Island had not the reputation it has now—it was then a desert island—nobody went there. Oh yes! When I read, it was in solitude, never in frequented places, except perhaps, Broadway, on the stage-coaches, where a little noise more or less made no difference.” Earlier that year, again to Traubel, he recounted of his lyric “A Voice Out of the Sea,” “I always enjoyed saying it—saying it to the winds, the waters, the noisy streets—on 16 stagecoaches. And one has love for the sound of his own voice—somehow it’s always magnetic” (WWWC, 5:321, 463). In discussion with Traubel about the practice of reading aloud, Whitman cites Ernest Legouvé’s The Art of Reading (translated into English in 1879), a copy of which he owned, explaining that in one of the chapters an actress named Rachel is described as being “aroused when going to her room and reading aloud her plays, whatnot,” in part under the spell of her own voice; he concludes that “there are some who contend that no one can get a full or adequate idea of a poem till it is heard rendered aloud—the human voice to give it its free scope ring!” and adds, “I don’t know but there’s a vast deal to be said to that effect” (WWWC, 5:321). Although Whitman does not say so, in this remark he picks up another thread in Legouvé’s book, from the chapter “How Reading Reveals,” where that author contends that “even reading aloud is not without its delusions. If it discovers beauties, it detects faults as well. . . . How many writers and writings that I used to admire passionately, that possibly you admire passionately now, I have found totally unable to stand this terrible test!” Whitman tells Traubel that he always had tried his own poems-in-progress out by reading them aloud to himself “in a palpable voice” and by doing so was able “to get a new angle on them—see things I could not see in any other way” (WWWC, 3:375). In another conversation with his friend he notes, “The great French writer Legouvé says this is the ‹nal, the supreme, test, after all else is tried— how will a poem read, recite, deliver: with what effect? How will it hold its own when repeated? That is the court in which it must justify itself.” While he says he would not give such a theory his “radical endorsement,” Whitman regards it as one “not to be rejected scornfully” (WWWC, 4:116). In his early years, Whitman shaped by hand his texts for ultimate portability, creating reading copies that he could take with him on site to declaim. On the cover of a reading copy of Shakespeare’s Richard the Second that he made by tearing the leaves of the play out of a complete volume and binding them in wrapping paper, he wrote: “Had it put this shape to take in my pocket to Coney Island on my seashore jaunts—read it & ‘spouted’ it there.”1 Whitman...

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