Specimen Days & Collect gathers much of the prose Walt Whitman published in his lifetime. It’s a hard book to categorize, as unwieldy and idiosyncratic as the author’s poetry. The first part, “Specimen Days,” is a triptych. Its first section details Whitman’s reminiscences of his childhood and youth on Long Island (still wild at the time), Brooklyn, and Manhattan (which Whitman calls New York, Brooklyn still being a separate city). This material seems to have been solicited by a friend; I infer it was John Burroughs, a naturalist a generation younger than Whitman.
The second section prints many diary entries from Whitman’s volunteer work in military hospitals in and around Washington, D. C. during the Civil War (a term Whitman rarely uses, preferring to call it the attempted secession or the war for the Union). I had always heard him referred to as a male nurse, but from Whitman’s account, he reminds me more of a hospital chaplain; indeed, a good one. The section opens with the first battle of Bull Run, the shocking defeat that led many to advocate negotiating the terms of the South’s departure from the Union, countered by Lincoln’s steely resolve (reminiscent of Churchill staring down the group around Lord Halifax, who wanted to sue for peace with Hitler in May 1940). The closing counterpart of this is the account of Lincoln’s assassination. There is much fine writing between these bookends; for instance, a description of the Battle of Chancellorsville: excellent prose about a horrible scene.
The third section details his partial recovery from a stroke. He attributed his improvement to spending time outdoors, as often as possible, naked. I enjoyed this section’s generous depiction of his nature observations: kingfishers and other birds, trees, and streams. At one point, Whitman favorably compared the attractions of sea and shore to poems, painting, and music. The irony wasn’t lost on me that he chose to preserve this in a book and that I sat enjoying the prose on a beautiful day.
The second part, “Collect,” does precisely that. It incorporates Whitman’s lengthy essay, “Democratic Vistas,” some of his lectures, such as “Death of Abraham Lincoln,” and other pieces. “Vistas” contains his call for the United States to produce poets who turn from European models based on feudalism to express the essence of the American experience of democracy. Paradoxically, his fancy leads him to envision this idiosyncratic literature as a model for the entire world. Whitman’s unbounded faith in the potential of the country, were it to fully embrace democracy, is cheering. The essay contains an ambivalent take on women, though, at times progressive but at other times reflecting an idealized view of the traditional role of motherhood.
The book closes with a sampling of early pieces Whitman wrote from his days as a newspaperman; they reflect a writer still developing his voice and philosophy.
It’s difficult to rate this book; it seems too uneven to call it great. As Whitman ages and become a recognized literary figure, his style becomes overblown and verges on self-parody. For instance, his taste for overloaded, parenthetical, paradoxical sentences does him no service when he strays into philosophy to contrast Carlyle and Hegel. But soon, he returns outdoors and listens to birds, and all is well again.
There are several striking passages, such as this remark on the nature of poetry: “At its best, poetic lore is like what may be heard of a conversation in the dark, from speakers far or hid, of which we get only a few broken murmurs. What is not gather’d is far more — perhaps the main thing.”
Or this, in which Whitman anticipates reader response: “Books are to be call’d for, and supplied, on the assumption that the process of reading is not a half sleep, but, in highest sense, an exercise, a gymnast’s struggle; that the reader is to do something for himself, must be on the alert, must him or herself construct indeed the poem, argument, history, metaphysical essay — the text furnishing the hints, the clue, the start or frame-work. Not the book needs so much to be the complete thing, but the reader does. That were to make a nation of supple and athletic minds, well-train’d, intuitive, used to depend on themselves and not on a few coteries of writers.”
Repeatedly Whitman describes the kind of poetry that will accomplish this, fitting for democracy. For example: “America demands a poetry that is bold, modern, and all-surrounding and kosmical, as she is herself.” Whenever he writes in this vein, he seems to be Ezra Pound’s intellectual godfather. The irony is that Pound emigrated to pursue his vocation.
Passages such as these are so numerous that, despite its overall unevenness, this book is essential. ( )