Whitman and Dickinson

This year’s scholarship on Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson includes little overlap but is wide ranging, with a good deal of international scholarship on both authors. Most of the studies of Whitman and Dickinson come in the form of articles and book chapters, with only a few new books solely on either poet appearing. Among these new books, though, are important contributions, and this survey will address Martin Buinicki’s elegant Walt Whitman’s Reconstruction and Edward Whitley’s insightful Walt Whitman and Other Unlikely Candidates for National Poet as well as Linda Freedman’s major contribution, Emily Dickinson and the Religious Imagination, and J. Brooks Bouson’s stimulating Critical Insights: Emily Dickinson, with its combination of new essays and recently published articles.

The most notable feature of Whitman and Dickinson scholarship for 2011 is its international character. Collections of essays on Whitman appear in France and China, and new translations of Whitman in German, French, and Portuguese are released. Many articles on Dickinson reflect the influence of the August 2010 Emily Dickinson International Society conference at Oxford with its theme of “Were I Britain Born” and its emphasis on imaginative and artistic ties linking the New England poet to traditional and contemporary English writers. In addition to demonstrating Dickinson’s curiosity about distant parts of the world, this year’s scholarly writing reflects increased interest in her poetry on the part of critics and translators from many countries—including England, China, Japan, Ireland, Slovakia, and Australia—many of whom call attention to cross-cultural influences and affinities.

Whitman scholarship generally clusters around Whitman’s political thought; his literary influences and his influence on other writers; his responses to the Civil War; his writings in periodicals, both as a journalist and a poet; and his construction of a poetic voice. Several new resources for accessing and studying his work have also been published. In the scholarship on Dickinson, topics of greatest influence include artistic practices and influences, poetics, and religion, although other concerns of current interest—such as manuscript features, publication/editing history, and gender/sexuality concerns—are often introduced into discussions of Dickinson’s artistry, her intellectual command, and her powerful impact on readers. A valuable new resource for Dickinson scholars comes with Harvard University’s project to provide digital access to books in the Homestead and Evergreens libraries. Amanda Gailey contributes the Whitman section of this chapter, Jane Donahue Eberwein the Dickinson section.

i Walt Whitman

a. International Reception

A significant body of Whitman scholarship was published in 2011 in international publications, much of which, written in languages other than English, is beyond the purview of this survey but is worth mentioning as a trend. Frank Schablewski has published a selection of Whitman’s love poems in German and English (Rimbaud); Jean-Paul Auxeméry has published a new French translation of Democratic Vistas (Belin); and Bruno Gambarotto has published a new Portuguese translation of Leaves of Grass (Hedra). Europe: Revue littéraire mensuelle’s special issue (no. 990) on Whitman features over a dozen pieces in French by international scholars, many of which examine Whitman’s reception in different nations. Huang Zongying includes two essays on Whitman in Essays on the Study of English Language and Literature (Jilin), one of which, “‘I Am Large, I Contain Multitudes’: The Consciousness of the Self in Whitman’s Leaves of Grass” by Huang Zong-ying, is in Chinese, and the other, by Wendy Katz, is reviewed later in this chapter.

b. Whitman, Democracy, and Political Thought

Edward Whitley’s Walt Whitman and Other Unlikely Candidates for National Poet (No. Car.) offers a graceful study of three poets whose careers paralleled Whitman’s. African American abolitionist James M. Whitfield, Mormon women’s leader Eliza R. Snow, and Cherokee journalist John Rollin Ridge each, like Whitman, identified as outsiders and were thereby uniquely qualified to comment on the United States. Whitley compares each to Whitman and concludes that they all “took those aspects of their identities that potentially disqualified them from national citizenship and recast them as their qualifications to speak to and for the nation...