Stirred, Not Shaken

Last week I mentioned these. The top one called “Harvest of Death” (!) is supposed to be a group of dead Confederate soldiers; the one with trees in the background Northerners. But if you look closely at the detail (flipped & zoomed) in the third frame, you realize it’s really the same group of soldiers […]

. . . could fill books. But I’m a little embarrassed to say, one nagging curiosity about his personal life I have is: all the adhesiveness and historical context aside, did he really get as close to other men as he seems to have, and never end up experiencing physical consummation with any of them? […]

Remember the passage in Whitman’s anonymous self-review “Walt Whitman, a Brooklyn Boy” that goes “Of pure American breed, of reckless health, his body perfect, free from taint top to toe, free forever from headache and dyspepsia, full-blooded, six feet high, a good feeder . . .”? Check out this image of page 141 in the […]

Also at the LOC is Emerson’s original letter, photos of which are available here. Hope they have it out for us in October! (Lots of other important stuff also shown on this page.)

On October 24 we may be seeing some of the Harned Collection, pdf images of which are available at this site. The notebooks are especially cool because they record some of the first known writing in Whitman’s mature poetic style:

We might have a look at this VCU project (sorry for the weird url–just scroll to the top) to get inspired or to get ideas of what we don’t want to do with our annotations.

Once again, these articles just astound me. Not only is he brazen enough to lavish praise on his own book–he does this in a style that makes it obvious that he’s the author, sometimes lifting lines from his own Preface. The Charvat reading for this week teaches us that it wasn’t so rare for an […]

The first page of the poem, from all the major US editions of Leaves of Grass.\"Song\" slideshow

Tags: song of myself, ww20