All about Walt Whitman

Ed Folsom on Whitman’s portraits:

Ed Folsom writes one of the most remarkable essays in this collection (The Cambridge Companion to Walt Whitman). His article, “Appearing in Print: Illustrations of the Self in Leaves of Grass” (GREENSPAN, 1997, pp.135-165), discusses about Whitman’s portraits on the covers of most editions of the Leaves. The frontispiece portrait of the 1855 edition is the first and most famous of them until today, and all the initial reviews of the book commented on it, especially because of the fact that the author’s name did not appear on the book cover. In his view, this portrait, “Over the next century, [...] would prove to be highly influential: It gradually worked to transform the way most American poets portrayed themselves on their book jackets and frontispieces” (1997, pp.135-7). The purpose of the critic is to study these illustrations of Whitman’s self along the poet’s life. He also informs us that Whitman did appropriate the technology of engraving and later of photoduplication and performed, along with the artists, a detailed work on his images. Whitman was also one of the most photographed men in the nineteenth century.

However, Ed Folsom has helped us with much more than this insightful essay. He and Kenneth M. Price are co-directors of The Walt Whitman Archive project on the Internet. The Archive comprises the following sections: Published Works, with Periodical Printings and Foreign Editions; Manuscripts, with Transcriptions and images; Biography and Correspondence; Criticism, which includes Contemporary Reviews (this section is a valuable and reliable source of information on the reception of the Leaves in the Nineteenth century), Selected Criticism, with copyrighted and out-of-copyright criticism and commentary, and even books, Bibliography, from 1975 to the present and Disciples, with the works of four of Whitman’s disciples: Richard Maurice Bucke[1], John Burroughs, William Douglas O’Connor and Horace Traubel; Pictures and Sound, which include a gallery of 128 images of Whitman, showing them in chronological order and an audio recording which is “a 36-second wax cylinder recording of what is thought to be Whitman’s voice reading four lines from the poem ‘America’”; there is also a Resources section and an About the Archive section, which gives a short summary of each of the people involved in the project. The criticism section also presents Whitman’s own reviews of Leaves of Grass, for he used to write reviews of his own books in the press, with many of them published anonymously. The purpose of the Archive is to compile Whitman’s vast work, poetry and prose, and criticism on him and his works from his time to the present. It is invaluable work.[2]

[1] Bucke was a Canadian physician who was one of Whitman’s best and loyal friends and who supported the poet in his last years, being his medical consultant as well. Bucke is also renowned as the writer of Whitman’s first biography (1883), in which he was helped by the poet (in writing parts of it and revising the rest), who traveled with him to important places in Whitman’s life. Bucke is also the author of Cosmic Consciousness: A Study in the Evolution of the Human Mind (1991), a classic study originally published in 1901, which presents Whitman surrounded by a mystical aura. Horace Traubel, another close and loyal friend of Whitman’s, wrote a work in nine volumes, With Walt Whitman in Camden, in which he collects and describes Whitman’s thoughts on all types of subjects; many of these volumes are already available at The Walt Whitman Archive.

[2] The Walt Whitman Archive is available at: <http://www.whitmanarchive.org/> Accessed on August 22, 2008.

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