Every Hour, Every Atom: A Collection of Walt Whitman's Early Notebooks & Fragments ed. by Zachary Turpin and Matt Miller (review)

The publishing of the rich fragmentary writings found in Whitman's notebooks and among his other papers began not long after the poet's death, with the poet's literary executor Richard Maurice Bucke's Notes and Fragments in 1899. Among others, Clifton Furness, the editors of the New York University Press collected writings of Whitman, Joel Myerson, and most recently the online Walt Whitman Archive in various ways followed suit, but even collectively have come far from a complete representation of what remains in the archives. Zachary Turpin and Matt Miller's Every Hour, Every Atom makes no pretense either of thoroughness or of order, but instead appeals to the "joy and excitement" in the discovery and proximity to the poet's composition process afforded readers by these documents (xix).

This collection reproduces eighteen pre-Civil War Whitman notebooks and part of another one, along with fifty-three documents referred to as "fragments", many of which were once integral with the notebooks. Some of these texts, such as "Calamus-Leaves. Live Oak,—with Moss.", have been much discussed in Whitman scholarship, while others are less frequently cited. While digital facsimiles of many of these documents are available at the Walt Whitman Archive or among the Library of Congress's online Whitman materials, this edition draws together transcriptions of materials that have not hitherto been assembled in one place. The editors' criteria for what to include are unapologetically subjective and haphazard in a Whitmanian way: "relevance to Whitman's poetry, relevance to scholarship, quality of writing, and insight offered into Whitman's mind, especially his poetic imagination" (xviii).

As those criteria make clear, and despite the mention of scholarly relevance, this is not a scholarly edition, though the transcriptions are detailed and accurate and the locations of source manuscripts and some of the scholarship about them are indicated in a brief set of notes in the back of the volume. Nor is it a facsimile edition; there are only ten photographic reproductions taken from the source documents, and there is no list of these at the start of the book. The collection is a hybrid of which Whitman, whose sense of the fluid relationship between manuscript and print Jay Grossman has labeled "manuprint", might well have approved: something of a type-facsimile of manuscript pages. The pages are, for the most part, diplomatically transcribed, including indications of Whitman's hash marks through entire sections or pages, as well as the circles, lines, brackets, manicules, and other metamarks with which his manuscripts are rife. The editors have rotated text that was written upside down "for readability", but the transcriptions remain challenging in a good way (xxvii). Drawings, and the newspaper clippings and other ephemera that Whitman clipped or pasted into his notebooks are for the most part not reproduced. What results is a kind of post-critical edition, more an evocation of Whitman's poem-generating process than a platform for textual-scholarly disputes about what is represented in the manuscripts or how to read the poems as eventually published.

Miller and Turpin know these materials well. Whitman's notebooks and fragments served as the documentary basis for Miller's monograph Collage of Myself and Turpin's bombshell discovery of Whitman's pseudonymous novel Life and Adventures of Jack Engle. Between this volume and the recently published electronic variorum of the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, readers now have unprecedented access to the composition processes that led to one of the most remarkable acts of poetry in literary history. As Turpin points out in his introduction, that process involved an extraordinary range of material documents and sources of inspiration, as Whitman's notebooks "are crammed to the edges with a hodgepodge of journalistic notes, housebuilder's calculations, lists...