So Long! Walt Whitman's Poetry of Death

(Elle) #1

per’s Weekly and the New York Leader on September 28, 1861; see Joann P. Krieg,
A Whitman Chronology (Iowa City: U Iowa P, 1998), 46.
13.LG, 284–291.



  1. Quoted in Ehrenreich, Blood Rites, 218, 222.
    15. On the piano as Whitman’s symbol for conventional, effeminate verse, see
    also “To a Certain Civilian” and “To a Locomotive in Winter,” LG, 323, 471–472.
    “Well-gristled” literally means well-endowed with cartilage, or soft tissue. Pos-
    sibly Whitman meant strong-boned or perhaps even well-grizzled, like his gray-
    ing self. Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language (London, 1818) cites
    “Grisled. See Grizzled.”

  2. Whitman, Memoranda During the War, 7.

  3. On Whitman’s attitude toward hanging, see Rubin, Historic Whitman, 117;
    UPP, 2:15–16; Loving, Walt Whitman, 496, no. 28. On Whitman’s enthusiasm for the
    Mexican War, see Thomas L. Brashear, Whitman as Editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle
    (Detroit: Wayne U Press, 1970), 87–90.

  4. Ellen Calder cited in Myerson, Whitman in His Own Time, 208 (the words
    attributed to Whitman are only an approximation, according to Mrs. Calder). The
    “secession slave-power” is mentioned in Democratic Vistas, in PW1892, 2:377.
    19.Corr, 1:114–115 ( July 7, 1863).

  5. A few weeks after he began visiting soldiers at the Washington hospitals, he
    noted that he had spent about two hours every day doing so: NUPM, 2:582. Consid-
    ering the many overnight visits and vigils and many longer visits, the total hours may
    be reckoned in the thousands.

  6. Whitman, Memoranda During the War, 57–58.

  7. In covertly editing Dr. Richard Maurice Bucke’s Walt Whitman (1883), Whit-
    man changed John Burroughs’s reference to his “maternal soul” to read “paternal
    soul”; see Harold Jaffe, “Bucke’s Walt Whitman: A Collaboration,” Walt Whitman
    Review 15 (1969), 192. Homosexuality had not been de¤ned by midcentury, and the
    references to Whitman’s supposedly “feminine” side, observed by both men and
    women contemporaries, deserve further study; see also page 000 and note 57, below.

  8. Davis, Whitman and the Romance of Medicine, 14, 50–51.

  9. Paul Zweig, Walt Whitman: The Making of a Poet (New York: Basic Books,
    1984), 343.

  10. Introduction to Whitman, Memoranda During the War, 17.
    26.WWC, 2:52–53. On Whitman’s photographic imagery, see also Ed Folsom,
    Walt Whitman’s Native Representations (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997), 126.

  11. Introduction to Whitman, Memoranda During the War, 14–15.

  12. Glicksberg, Walt Whitman and the Civil War, 121–123.

  13. For a gallery of Whitman photographs, see WWQR 4 (1986–1987), 1–72.

  14. Glicksberg, Walt Whitman and the Civil War, 82 n. The quotation, from Notes
    & Fragments, 96, appears in Howard J. Waskow, Whitman’s Exploration in Form (Chi-
    cago: U Chicago P, 1966), 54. In 1859 Whitman credited Dante with “a great vigor, a
    lean muscular ruggedness, and the fascination there always is in a well-told tragedy,
    no matter how painful and repulsive,” but free from the ®orid style of Shakespeare
    (NUPM, 5:163).


264 / Notes to Pages 166–172
Free download pdf