Whitman Noir: Black America and the Good Gray Poet

Selected Bibliography

{ 189 } SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY American Experience: Walt Whitman. Directed by Mark Zwonitzer. PBS. WGBH, Boston. 2008. Television. Contains an extended discussion of Whitman and slavery and includes an appearance by poet Yusef Komunyakaa reading from the slave auction section of “I Sing the Body Electric” and commenting on Whitman’s racial attitudes. Beach, Christopher. The Politics of Distinction: Whitman and the Discourses of Nineteenth-­ Century America. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996. Beach’s book underscores Whitman’s pursuit to create a radical poetics rather than a radical politics per se. In his chapter on race and slavery, Beach argues that Whitman proved to be “radically innovative” and more aligned with “an ideal of democratic poetry, which demanded that he inhabit the subjectivity of each human being” to read the seeming contradictions of passages like those of the hounded slave in “Song of Myself” and the slave auction in “I Sing the Body Electric”; thus, rather than seeing these passages as contradictions, Beach sees in them the apotheosis of Whitman’s democratic poetry. In at least one critical respect, then, chapter 2 of Beach’s book contests some of the central premises of Karen Sánchez-­ Eppler’s article on “merger and embodiment.” Collins, Michael. “Komunyakaa, Collaboration, and the Wishbone: An Interview.” Callaloo 28, no. 3 (2005): 620–34. In Yusef Komunyakaa’s interview with Michael Collins, he concludes their discussion by noting that “Whitman’s concept of language seems cosmic and carnal” and that he hopes to “achieve a voice just as inclusive ” in his own poetry. Ellison, Ralph. Going to the Territory. New York: Random House, 1986. Ellison’s second collection of essays and addresses covers literature, music, and culture. It includes “The Novel as a Function of American Democracy” (1967), in which he underscores that Whitman’s poems were an important contribution to describing the American experience, as well as “On Initiation Rites and Power” (1974) and “Alain Locke” (1974), in { 190 } Selected Bibliography which Ellison recalls Whitman’s statement that a “native grand opera in America” may one day come from the tongues of African Americans. ———. Invisible Man. New York: Vintage, 1952. At a crucial moment in Ellison’s epic novel, the author features an exchange in chapter 9 where the protagonist finds himself in a confusing conversation with a young white professional male who likens their relationship to Jim and Huck and asks the protagonist if he has ever frequented Club Calamus. ———. Shadow and Act. New York: Random House, 1964. Ellison’s first collection of essays and addresses covers literature, music, and culture, with particular emphasis on the mutual exchange between blacks and whites in the creation of American identity. Includes an early essay “Beating That Boy” (1945), in which Ellison notes the significance of Whitman in the context of Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, and Twain and, importantly, their influence for his own writing. Folsom, Ed. “Lucifer and Ethiopia: Whitman, Race, and Poetics before the Civil War and After.” In A Historical Guide to Walt Whitman, edited by David S. Reynolds, 45–95. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Turning away from the issue of the figurative black presence in Leaves of Grass (as in the “hounded slave” passage in “Song of Myself” or the slave auction scene in “I Sing the Body Electric”) or the nonpresence (as in “A Boston Ballad”), Folsom analyzes the relationship of Whitman ’s poetics and race by examining the question of voice and agency in separate poems on opposite sides of the Civil War. Folsom notes that, while Whitman turns his narration over to a rebellious black slave at the heart of the “Lucifer” passage in “The Sleepers,” Lucifer and the voice of black radical dissent vanish from the final 1881 edition of Leaves. Folsom then addresses the 1870 poem “Ethiopia Saluting the Colors,” in which an old black woman has a voice but is seemingly confused and without a discernible sense of agency. Folsom traces the various placements of “Ethiopia” within Leaves as Whitman continually rearranges the volume. ———. “So Long, So Long! Walt Whitman, Langston Hughes, and the Art of Longing.” In Walt Whitman, Where the Future Becomes Present, edited by David Haven Blake and Michael Robertson, 127–43. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2008. Noting that Whitman uses the poem “So Long!” to close every edition of Leaves of Grass from 1860 on and that Langston Hughes opened his volume Selected Poems (1960) with the same words, Folsom explores the re- [3.128.199.88] Project MUSE...