Whitman and Dickinson

The surge in scholarship prompted by the 150th anniversary of the publication of the first edition of Leaves of Grass has been succeeded by notable growth in research spurred by the sesquicentennial of both the third edition of Leaves and the beginning of the Civil War. In addition to a major study of Whitman and cultural authority in a transnational context by Günther Leypoldt, this year saw the publication of a major book on Whitman's "lost years" of 1861-62 by Ted Genoways, a study of American bohemianism in which Whitman is a major figure by Mark A. Lause, a facsimile of the 1860-61 edition of Leaves edited by Jason Stacy, and an online edition of Whitman's "Blue Book," containing Whitman's revisions to the third edition, presented by the Walt Whitman Archive (www.whitmanarchive.org). A collection of essays edited by Kanwar Dinesh Singh demonstrates the ongoing engagement of readers with Whitman in a global context, particularly in India. Numerous articles reflect the rising interest in Whitman's bohemian circle, his position within transatlantic literary culture, his Civil War writings and experiences, and a wide range of other cultural contexts, including capital punishment, capitalism, Cratylism, and chemistry. And, as in most years, previously unknown documents were recovered and interpreted, providing readers and scholars with an ever-growing repository of printed and digital resources on Whitman, the most notable source of which is now the Archive.

While only two books exclusively devoted to Emily Dickinson appeared in 2009—one a collection of essays on her international reception and translation, the other a book on fashion in her life and work—a wide range of articles and book chapters were published, delving into issues that have been for a long time central to Dickinson studies: (inter)textuality, spirituality, epistemology, pedagogy, subjective identity, and political ideology, to name just a few. The scholarship further explores the disruptive, contingent, destabilizing force of the poet, spotlighting her interrogations of rhetoric, form, and cultural conventions, and often seeks to connect her to a larger world and reading public. As these writers attest, Dickinson's critiques typically are not separable from her style, with her politics defining her poetics and vice versa. At issue in the criticism, as ever, is Dickinson's irony, openness, and indeterminacy—the rigorous dialectical method that is felt to define her verse and present such lasting challenges. William Pannapacker contributed the Whitman section of this chapter, Tyler Hoffman the Dickinson section.

i. Walt Whitman

a. Books

Leypoldt's Cultural Authority in the Age of Whitman (Edinburgh) is a well-researched, complex study of the fields of literary production that Whitman occupied and that retrospectively constructed him as a major figure. Strongly influenced by the work of Pierre Bourdieu, Leypoldt presents "Whitmanism"—the discursive space occupied by Whitman—as a part of a larger cultural phenomenon that included Europe as well as the United States and that covers a span of time from the mid-18th to the mid-20th centuries. The authority attributed to Whitman is addressed from four complementary perspectives: the first section considers "how Whitman's literary space relates to transatlantic figurations of cultural professionalism, expressivist identity models, and post-Kantian narratives of legitimation," including figures such as William Wordsworth, Alfred Lord Tennyson, and G. W. F. Hegel; the second examines "how transatlantic parameters of professionalism shape mid-century American literary intellectuals," notably "key concepts of Whitmanian authority through the work and intellectual self-fashioning of Emerson and Whitman"; the third explores the "conceptual fields" of music, nature, and democracy and how those fields "function as contact zones between European and American theories of culture" that influenced and paralleled the careers of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Whitman; the fourth shows how the diverse, contradictory views of Whitman that existed in the 19th century were "narrowed into a modernist version of Whitman's nationalist program" by the processes of canon formation most notably demonstrated in the work of F. O. Matthiessen. Leypoldt's study raises compelling doubts about the linkage between literary form and political ideology; free verse is not inherently democratic...