During Walt Whitman's decade in Washington, DC, 1863-1873, he labored intensely, at times seeming to have three lives at once. He wrote the most distinguished journalism of his career; came into his own as a writer of letters; crafted memorable Civil War poetry, Drum-Taps and Sequel to Drum-Taps and later folded it into heavily revised and expanded versions of Leaves of Grass; and produced his searching but also flawed critique of American
culture, Democratic Vistas. Whitman's work through the first three editions of Leaves often receives the highest praise, yet his writing in the Washington years is exceptional, too, by any reckoning--and is all the more
remarkable given that he also cared for thousands of wounded and sick soldiers in Washington hospitals, serving as an attentive visitor. In addition, he served as a government clerk in various positions, most notably in the attorney general's office when much was accomplished on the road toward a multi-racial democracy including efforts to suppress the Ku Klux Klan, and much was also missed (both by the attorney general's office and by Whitman) in the efforts to advance a more just and vibrant
union. This book analyses Whitman's integrated life, writings, and government work in his urban context to re-evaluate the writer and the nation's capital in a time of
transformation. Drawing on an expanded Whitman corpus, including nearly 3,000 Whitman documents the author recently identified in the National Archives, Whitman in Washington demonstrates that the power of Whitman's Civil War and Reconstruction writing emerges, more fully than we could ever before have imagined, from his intimate knowledge of the capital city, its bureaucracies, and its tumultuous post-war history.
During Walt Whitman's decade in Washington, DC, 1863-1873, he labored intensely, at times seeming to have three lives at once. He wrote the most distinguished journalism of his career; came into his own as a writer of letters; crafted memorable Civil War poetry, Drum-Taps and Sequel to Drum-Taps and later folded it into heavily revised and expanded versions of Leaves of Grass; and produced his searching but also flawed critique of American
culture, Democratic Vistas. Whitman's work through the first three editions of Leaves often receives the highest praise, yet his writing in the Washington years is exceptional, too, by any reckoning--and is all the more
remarkable given that he also cared for thousands of wounded and sick soldiers in Washington hospitals, serving as an attentive visitor. In addition, he served as a government clerk in various positions, most notably in the attorney general's office when much was accomplished on the road toward a multi-racial democracy including efforts to suppress the Ku Klux Klan, and much was also missed (both by the attorney general's office and by Whitman) in the efforts to advance a more just and vibrant
union. This book analyses Whitman's integrated life, writings, and government work in his urban context to re-evaluate the writer and the nation's capital in a time of
transformation. Drawing on an expanded Whitman corpus, including nearly 3,000 Whitman documents the author recently identified in the National Archives, Whitman in Washington demonstrates that the power of Whitman's Civil War and Reconstruction writing emerges, more fully than we could ever before have imagined, from his intimate knowledge of the capital city, its bureaucracies, and its tumultuous post-war history.
Preface
1: Whitman, Washington, and the Convulsiveness of Civil War
2: Whitman as a Paradoxical 'Missionary to the Wounded'
3: Strayed Cattle: Anti-Pastoralism in Whitman's War Writings
4: Social Calamity, Personal Perturbations, and Office Decorum: How
Leaves of Grass Grew Pensive
5: Multi-racial Democracy and Black Democratic Vistas
Works Cited
Kenneth M. Price, Hillegass University Professor at the University
of Nebraska-Lincoln, has co-directed The Walt Whitman Archive since
1995. He is a founding co-director of the Center for Digital
Research in the Humanities at Nebraska. His previous books include
Whitman and Tradition: The Poet in His Century (Yale, 1990); To
Walt Whitman, America (North Carolina, 2004) and, with co-author Ed
Folsom, Re-Scripting Walt Whitman
(Blackwell, 2005). He has served as President of both the Society
for Textual Scholarship and the Association for Documentary
Editing.
The virtue of Whitman in Washington is that it keeps tensions in
place, and plumbs paradox, palpably wrestling with the legacy of
Whitman in the moment and calling us to our own reckoning of him
and his work for the future.
*Tyler Hoffman, American Literary History*
Price works to untangle Whitman's complex, often contradictory,
racial attitudes, showing through close readings and rich culture
and aesthetic contextualization how his views of African Americans
during slavery changed once emancipation occurred... The virtue of
Whitman in Washington is that it keeps tensions in place, and
plumbs paradox, palpably wrestling with the legacy of Whitman in
the moment and calling us to our own reckoning with him and his
work for the future.
*Tyler Hoffman, American Literary History*
No other book has done so much to trace the contradictions inherent
in the poet's work for the government and analyze the role it may
have played in his poetry and politics.
*Martin T. Buinicki, Valparaiso University*
Written with clarity and impressively researched, this study offers
a remarkable picture of a key period in Whitman's life.
*J. W. Miller, CHOICE*
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