Collage of Myself: Walt Whitman and the Making of Leaves of Grass

3. Kosmos Poets and Spinal Ideas

E ven as the nomadic Whitman of the early 1850s lived a life on the go, moving from house to house and desk to desk with his myriad notebooks and scattered drafts of lines, he was also searching for threads of order in what he had written, structures that would come to shape the poems of the first edition of Leaves of Grass. Whitman liked to call these concepts his “spinal ideas,” a phrase that calls to mind not only a human body but also a book, with its spine, holding its leaves together. The concept was highly elastic, and he applied it in different circumstances to mean different things. In this chapter I focus on the “spinal ideas” that are most thoroughly worked through in the early notebooks: concepts and themes that get fleshed out in actual lines, often in repeated drafts. One of the most important of these, which Whitman worked out in the “Talbot Wilson” notebook, is his concept of dilation, a principle involved in almost all of his first mature poems and which the notebooks show him preoccupied with during the Kosmos Poets and Spinal Ideas kosmos poets and spinal ideas 105 early and mid-1850s. Related to his notion of dilation is his concept of the kosmos, another key expression that helps us to understand much of what Whitman seems to have intended with his early work. These and other “spinal ideas” form structural principles that allowed Whitman to organize his scattered drafts without sacrificing the fragmentation, multiplicity, and fluidity essential to his project. They constitute mobile centers of gravity that could absorb and structure his lines without subordinating them to predictable metrical, narrative, or rhetorical ideas of order—ideas that, in Whitman’s estimation, were too closely tied to European conventions and that reflected a rigid and unitary outlook that was anathema to the poet’s own. With “spinal ideas” Whitman discovered a way to allow meaning to resonate and accrete around important moments in his notebooks, without smothering them in artifice and convention. As an experienced and versatile newspaperman, Whitman had considerable familiarity with the process of organizing disparate units of text. His nomadic lifestyle involved not only multiple moves from home to home, but from job to job as well. These jobs, which he referred to as “sits” (a term that held much the same meaning as the contemporary expression “gig”),1 occupied him throughout much of his early life, commencing with an apprentice printing job for the Long Island Patriot in 1831. Whitman worked at different jobs as a printer and compositor until a tremendous fire in the printing district of New York turned him to a short-lived vocation as a schoolteacher in 1836. He returned to the newspaper business in 1838 and worked as a printer, writer, compositor, and editor at many newspapers until his last sustained job in the business, from the spring of 1857 to the summer of 1859, editing the Brooklyn Daily Times. He was only twenty-two when he got his first job as a head editor working for the New York Aurora in 1842. Other substantial kosmos poets and spinal ideas 106 jobs included writing regularly for the Brooklyn Star between 1845 and 1846 and a sit as editor for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle from March 1846 to January 1848. Under his leadership the Eagle, which was primarily a partisan paper supporting the Democratic Party, turned its attention increasingly toward literary and cultural affairs; it is this job that provided him with many of his most important lessons in self-education (and considerable fodder for his early notebooks), writing numerous articles and reviews on literature, opera, and the stage, as well as covering important cultural events at local museums and lecture halls.2 Whitman worked for several other papers during these years, including the Evening Tattler, Democrat, Mirror, and Statesman; his irregular, ever-changing employment was not uncommon for a journalist at the time. We get a sense of just how volatile his working life was—and also of how casually he accepted his lifestyle—in this notebook entry: Edited Tattler in summer of ’42 Edited Statesman in Spring of ’43 Edited Democrat in Summer of 44 Wrote for Dem Review, American Review, and Columbian Magazines during 45 and 6—as previously. About the latter part of February ’46, commenced editing the Brooklyn Eagle—continued till last of January ’48 Left Brooklyn...