Whitman Samplers

“Whitman in Selected Anthologies: The Politics of His Afterlife” by Kenneth M. Price, in The Virginia Quarterly Review (Spring 2005), One West Range, P.O. Box 400223, Charlottesville, Va. 22904–4223.

“I am large. . . . I contain multitudes,” Walt Whitman boasted in “Song of Myself,” and the century and a half since publication of the first edition of Leaves of Grass in July 1855 has proved him right. We’ve invented any number of Whitmans, from free spirit to prophet to patriotic sage to civil rights advocate to gay icon. Price, who is a professor of  English at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, traces the political uses to which Whitman’s “fluid identity” has been put in a number of  20th-century anthologies of the poet’s work and in a 21st-century collection meant to comfort Americans after the 9/11 attacks.

The earliest of the anthologies belongs to the “Little Blue Book” series that Emanuel Haldeman-Julius published out of Girard, Kansas, from 1919 to 1951, for working-class audiences. Along with Shakespeare, Hardy, Poe, Thoreau, Balzac, Kipling, Wilde, and the like, Haldeman-Julius introduced readers to the Soviet constitution and to an array of controversial thinkers, including Havelock Ellis and birth control pioneer Margaret Sanger. As many as 500 million of these Little Blue Books may have been sold over the years—for 10, five, and even two and a half cents a copy. (Tempered by his capitalist success, Haldeman-Julius, who began as a committed leftist, ended up a liberal New Deal Democrat.)

The publisher, says Price, saw Whitman as “a sympathetic figure who was compatible with his own views on religion, politics, and sexuality,” and it was in a context emphasizing socialism and openness about sexuality that the poet appeared in the series. Blue Book 73 had three different versions: Walt Whitman’s Poems, Poems of Walt Whitman, and Best Poems of Walt Whit-man. These were not critical editions, to say the least, and they often misrepresented Whitman’s meaning by rearranging the poems. Moreover, the cheap-looking volumes would never have met the aesthetic standards of the poet, who was always particular about his books’ appearance. But the cheap look made possible a low price, and that assured the series the widest distribution.

However little Haldeman-Julius charged, he “could not match the absolutely free distribution of the World War II Armed Services Editions.”  In A Wartime Whitman, edited by Major William A. Aiken, the poet became, through judicious selection and “editorial intrusiveness,” the champion of the American way of life that soldiers were fighting to defend.  Aiken “goes to some pains to make Whitman’s comradely love safe for the troops.” Indeed, writes Price, “the Whitman who emerges from the Armed Services Editions is a virile heterosexual man, a trumpeter of democracy, a person equivalent to a medic with direct experience of the war, a fellow a GI wouldn’t mind sharing a foxhole with.”

The most recent of the anthologies, I Hear America Singing: Poems of Democracy, Manhattan, and the Future, published by Anvil Press in 2001, makes no explicit reference to the attacks of 9/11, but the epigraph leaves no doubt: “I am the mash’d fireman with breast bone broken, / Tumbling walls buried me in their debris.” And these words appear on the back cover: “This selection of courageous and consoling poems focuses on Whitman’s vision of democracy, his love of Manhattan, his sense of the future—and of the community of peoples of this earth.” The publisher (no editor is named) calls Whitman “as much a poet for our time  as he was for the time of the American Civil War and its aftermath.”

Price believes that “American culture has been in an incessant conversation with Whitman ever since he imbued his art with the political vision of the founders, making freedom and equality the guiding principles that literally shaped the form and content of Leaves of Grass.” The voluble poet never tires of holding up his end of the conversation.