Whitman's Canadian Diary

JAMES DOYLE Whitman's Canadian Diary Among its many visions of continental and world unity Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass contains several passing references to 'Kanada.' These references, always thus eccentrically spelled with a 'K' and usually elaborated by allusions to trappers, snow-shoes, and 'Kanucks: can be tolerated by sympathetic Whitman readers as a kind of poetic shorthand based on an ideal conception of the northern country rather than on observation or experience. Whitman did, however, actually visit Canada late in his life, and wrote about his experiences of what was his only excursion outside the borders of the United States. These experiences did not, it is true, find their way in any substantial form into his poetry. His only literary record of the excursion was a brief account written for the London (Ontario) Advertiser, an account ultimately incorporated into Specimen Days (1893), and a series of rough notes edited after his death by William Sloane Kennedy and published in Walt Whitman's Diary in Canada, with Extracts from Other of His Diaries and Literary Note-Books (1904). ' These Canadian writings have received a modicum of textual and biographical attention, but no one has seriously considered them in terms of their possible significance for Whitman's art. Neither the diary nor the newspaper article is, of course, a polished literary creation; yet as the editors of the New York University Press standard edition of Whitman's work have suggested by their exhaustively inclusive poliCies, Whitman is a writer whose every scrap of literary output repays careful scrutiny. His Canadian writings, unpolished as they are, provide many insights into his imaginative conception of the North American landscape and society. These writings are further significantfor their relevance to an important and often overlooked element in nineteenth-century literature, the travelnarrative tradition. Journals, diaries, and true or semi-fictional narratives of travel were extremely popular in the nineteenth-century United States, and although Canada did not exert as great an appeal on the American imagination as Europe, the northern country was by no means overlooked . American literary figures who toured and wrote about Canada in the middle and late nineteenth century included Henry Thoreau, William Dean Howells, and Henry James, to name only a few.' Even in their rough, sketchy state, Whitman's Canadian jottings are worthy to be set in a comparative context with more fmished works such as Thoreau's A Yankee in Canada (1850), Howells's Their Wedding Journey (1872), orJames's UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 52, NUMBER 3, SPRING 198) 0042-0247/83/0500- 0277-0287$01,5010 ICl UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS 278 JAMES DOYLE 1871 essay on Quebec. The diary in Canada, as Elizabeth Waterston has suggested, might even be considered one of the most distinguished of nineteenth-century American travel writings, if not for its stylistic achievements , at least for its haunting, dream-like evocation of 'the Canadian current of life.'3 The diary in Canada must also be seen in the context of Whitman's personal, intellectual, and artistic development. When the poet set out from his home in Camden on his northern excursion in earlyJune 1880, his personal and artistic circumstances were rather ambivalent. Artistically he had moved beyond the preoccupation with universal suffering and death provoked by the Civil War and Lincoln's assassination, but a serious stroke and various other physical ailments had by the turn of the decade turned his thought and imagination more and more in the direction of his own personal suffering and imminent death. As is often the case with writers as they become increasingly aware of their infirmities, Whitman was also turning more frequently with autobiographical impulse towards the past, as he occupied himself with the journalistic notes and reminiscences which were eventually published as Specimen Days. Besides working on the Specimen Days notes, Whitman had written just before he left for Canada two nostalgic pieces on Abraham Lincoln and Ralph Waldo Emerson, the main political and artistic influences of his early years.4 As always, of course, he was working on revisions of Leaves ofGrass; in 1880 he was busy with the advanced stages of preparing a new edition, published in 1881. Also...