Whitman and Dickinson

After a year of low productivity, Whitman and Dickinson scholarship enjoyed a major upswing in 2004. The extra weight on the Whitman bookshelf is matched by the range of the new studies. Historical criticism and cultural studies remain the predominant approach, but we also get thematic works on ecology, death, and mysticism. The surge of interest extends to general-audience books as well as works for academic readers. Dickinson studies increased apace, with new books on biography, historical context, and textual criticism, including two full-length works on Dickinson and gardening.

i Walt Whitman

a. Books

Leading the long list of new books is To Walt Whitman, America (No. Car.) by Kenneth M. Price. The title comes from the poet's own time, when a letter from abroad, addressed only "To Walt Whitman, America," found its way into his hands. Price treats Whitman as "a foundational figure in American culture," an icon this book both substantiates and complicates. With a wide-ranging survey of cultural products Price establishes that "Whitman is so central to practices and formulations of American culture, past and present, that we may use his life, work, ideas, and influence to examine major patterns in our culture over the last 150 years." Some of the patterns taken up in the various chapters include "constructions of race and authorial identity, the formation of heterosexuality and homosexuality in literature, intersections between film and literary culture, and connections between Whitman's work and . . . nonconformist politics in the twentieth century." The complicating argument, in all of these topics, is that "however broad-minded Whitman has sometimes seemed and however liberating he has sometimes been, his primary allegiance was to a particular segment of the population, white working men." A key idea throughout is the concept of "passing" or "crossing," the movements by which Whitman and his readers at various times understood his poetry as questioning or reinforcing the values associated with boundaries of race, gender, class, region, genre, medium, and political affiliation. As in his earlier work Price seems most comfortable in exploring Whitman's writing in relationship to that of other artists, from canonical authors such as Edith Wharton, Langston Hughes, D. H. Lawrence, E. M. Forster, John Dos Passos, and Bernard Malamud to figures of popular culture such as D. W. Griffith, Muhammad Ali, William Least Heat-Moon, and even Marilyn Monroe.

Another strong reading in historical and cultural context, William Pannapacker's Revised Lives: Walt Whitman and Nineteenth-Century Authorship (Routledge), treats Whitman's "self-refashioning" poetry as autobiography, broadly defined to include not only the genre of prose narrative that by Whitman's time enjoyed a wide popularity but also other public efforts to present and define an author's self in such diverse works as popular literary criticism and presidential speeches. Comparing Whitman's experiment to the repeatedly revised works of Frederick Douglass, P. T. Barnum, and Abraham Lincoln, among others, Pannapacker argues that the "central duality" in the poet's work—"the reciprocal relationship of self and national representation"—produces a constant need for redefining the self in a time of rapid social and cultural change. Textual identity thus proves radically unstable and open to widely varying interpretations by both enemies and admirers on the literary scene. In this reading, Whitman participates in the secularization of culture that, in the genre of autobiography, co-opts the "template of the spiritual journey" from the old conversion narratives, "replacing the 'Celestial City' with the attainment of bourgeois status through the mastery of the self." The autobiographical subject overcomes problems of alienation and difference to claim the rights to such status. Through his revisions of selfhood Whitman left a legacy of "competing identities," whose claims for legitimacy would lead to disputes among Whitman's followers in the next generation, notably the British admirers that Pannapacker classifies into Whitmanites, Wildeans, and Working-Class Comrades. Though Pannapacker deals with a topic that has enjoyed a century and a half of critical attention, his use of new work in autobiography and literary reception makes this book a significant contribution to Whitman scholarship.

Harold Aspiz, departing somewhat from his...