Whitman Tracked Between Editions, Rossetti as a Complex Subversive, and the
Collective Sense of Authorship: A Mixed Methods Accounting of a Hyperlinked
CalamusDavid ThomsonIndependent Scholardavid@leapanalytics.us
David Thomson is the current Lead Analyst at LEAP (Learning Evaluation and Assessment Psychology) Analytics
Alliance of Digital Humanities OrganizationsAssociation for Computers and the Humanities000657017122 December 2022article
This is the source
DHQ classification scheme; full list available at http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/taxonomy.xmlKeywords supplied by author; no controlled vocabularyThe version history for this file can be found on GitHub
I examine the influence of one literary text upon another by the open-source
programming methodology of information science. In particular, I look at
how the
Calamus sequence as rendered in the 1867 Leaves of Grass may be understood to be
topically present, although most of the sequence was removed and regrouped
by William Michael Rossetti toward publishing the first British Whitman
edition in the 1868 Poems by Walt Whitman. I
further demonstrate the complement of theory testing as I examine the
laudatory and cautionary nature of the Calamus poems. Those
celebrations and reservations about loving out of bounds may at once apply
either to the radical inclusivity of a new republic or in same-sex love.
While the utility of that laud-caution categorization remains tenuous,
looking at both the limitations and strengths of the approach demonstrate
the utility of employing a non-linear, even hypertextual sensibility
readily available to readers who wish to encounter the social cognitive
terrain of a literary work. On that terrain, I argue, readers can better
understand a mind produced in time and responding to its time.
This article examines the influence of one edition of Whitman's poems one a subsequent edition using open-source information science programming methodology
In editing
Poems by Walt Whitman (1868) for a British
readership, William Michael Rossetti strode the line between censorship and
advocacy, as well as that between an enabling and co-opted subversion. That
Hotten edition removed about one-half of Leaves of Grass
(1867) — including what would become Song of Myself — toward making
possible Whitman’s broader circulation in the United Kingdom. Poems was praised by the Saturday Review for
bringing forth the comely after removal of the indescribably filthy. That Poems was published at all, and continued to be
published into the 20th century, remains remarkable in a British publishing
culture that allowed officials to seize an entire press run before either the
author or publisher appeared in court to argue its merit.
Declaring
Poems to be a bowdlerized, censored or expurgated
text betrays an editorial/critical orientation contrary to the values of a
digital humanities community underscored by openness to process and
collaboration with others. It permits authorial identity and preferences to
trump the slate the values that permitted publication, however second-guessed
that edition was. To understand Poems to be bowdlerized
puts it in the company of The Family Shakespeare: in which
nothing is added to the original text, but those words and expression are
omitted which cannot with propriety be read in a family. That family-friendly Shakespeare
continues to remove the vulgarity and bawdy joys that Thomas’s sister Henrietta
sensed more than two centuries ago; the entire six volume set published by
Cambridge University Press can be acquired for about $350. Encamping Poems with The Bowdler Shakespeare,
while distantly viable, is to dismiss its achievement as the end result of
another morally squeamish, superficially selective editor whose first purpose is
to serve the family rather than the author. It is also to place Poems in a
timeless void, removed from the very social dynamics upon which production and
dissemination take place in the digital humanities.
More viable is to describe
Poems as an expurgated Whitman.
Rossetti can be accurately but narrowly understood as expurgating Leaves in his selection criterion to omit entirely
every poem which could with any tolerable fairness be deemed offensive to the
feelings of morals or propriety in this peculiarly nervous age. However, Henrietta’s editing of Shakespeare made no allowance for the
limitations of an age; her Shakespeare was in fact elevated as that fit for all
time. By contrast, Rossetti’s edition was qualified and even necessitated by his
particularly Victorian nervous age. Just as importantly,
one purpose of Rossetti’s edition was to serve a living author rather than the
sanctity of the family. He upheld American endorsers Burroughs (1867/1971) and
O’Connor (1866/2021), who each declared Whitman to be the
poet of the epoch. In judging Whitman as particularly
suited for the present age of his edition, Rossetti declared that Victorian
readers would benefit by judging for themselves the merits of Whitman, who
beyond all his competitors is incapable of all compromise and an initiator in
the scheme and form of his works.
Less viable, by far, is to judge
Poems as a censored text.
First, Rossetti served no official office in presenting his selected Whitman. He
merely offered his edition to the court of literary deliberation. Second, I
doubt any censor has so thoroughly considered and documented a case for
censorship. Rossetti offered his edition at invitation of a commercial
publisher. Further, he did so after first encountering Whitman’s work as a
reader and a leading commentator of Victorian publishing 12 years before his Chronicle article. That secretary to the Pre-Raphaelite
Brotherhood may have even identified in Whitman the American complement of the
movement. Yet further, his goal was to advance reception of an author rather
than thwart it.
Rather than argue Rossetti was either an advocate for or an expurgator of Whitman,
I offer a conciliatory, more utilitarian position. Rossetti brought forward a
selected Whitman that he thought possible to publish
within the constraints of his time. Moreover, he did so for the benefit of a
living author and a readership whose understanding of the man was all too
frequently shaped by the hearsay-report of the periodicals of the day. While his
depiction of a democratic spokesman championing the humanity of all is only one
aspect of Whitman, he also presented a Whitman who yearned to receive the love
that he offered to others and yet could only indirectly state. Accordingly, I
argue that Rossetti presented a Whitman who was both an all-too-humanly needy
American citizen and an egalitarian spokesman for the inherent worth of all —
regardless of nationality, vocation or any caste formation. This Whitman should
be the herald for the digital humanities on his dual insistence on hearing
others — all others — well, and being heard. This is a Whitman that should leap
off the page of any particular edition into the life of a poem inside and
outside of an edition. This is a Whitman that can be summoned from the free
access universe of individual editions and re-animated for present readers.
Rossetti’s pragmatism was also noted by Folsom (1991), who observed that Whitman
granted
Leaves was a commodity in a publishing market
(642). From the 1868 Poems through Selected Poems, Whitman
sought that larger audience not yet ready to read the ever-growing Leaves editions but who might be prompted to do so after
a kinder, gentler introduction. The compromise was not that of Whitman’s
redactors, but Whitman’s in his complicity to allow Leaves
to be partitioned into slimmer volumes and anthology samples .
Any excerpt — no matter how large or tamed into making Whitman one of other
conventional poets — called into question Whitman’s lifelong insistence that Leaves should be read as a whole. Only the entirety of
that reading experience with its lauds for cities, immigrants, commerce, mass
culture, industry, physicality, nondiscrimination, democratic affection,
equality and anti-Puritanism could secure for Whitman the
place he wished to occupy in American letters. Any less thorough presentation
amounted to a sanitizing process, making Whitman palatable for a public that
he had set out to challenge and remake.
Challenging that sanitizing assessment of
Poems, in particular, motivates my examination of the
multi-dimensional, variegated Whitman I sense Rossetti surveyed in Poems. Simultaneously, I challenge another dearly held
cultural narrative that locates authorship most authentically achieved in the
literary vision and products of a single writer. Today, Whitman is a brand name in present publishing, translation and
commentary more than an author who oversaw nine editions of Leaves in his lifetime. Even from the outset, Whitman ceased to be an author whose name was merely a placeholder
for various literary works. In reception and by his own design, Whitman was seen at once as shamelessly
self-aggrandizing, noble in promoting democratic virtues, and beastly in
celebrating the place of sex in human affairs. The ongoing attention he receives
depicts an author who rewards, cautions and edifies readers so variously that
the author Whitman must make way for various Whitmans, who indeed contain multitudes and, in fact, are prompted by their many receptions. The multitudinous
author of the poem that would become Song of Myself is not overtly present in
Poems because Rossetti excerpted no portion of it.
However, a Whitman comprised by and capable of containing multitudes is surveyed
by Rossetti in the various narrative voices that collectively illustrate both a
complexly declarative and privately evasive author.
In support of that position, I annotate the lexical and semantic traces of the
Calamus sequence. Even while the sequence has been consistently regarded as
the most overtly homoerotic material of Leaves — and among
that glossed as gross and indecent — Rossetti included 11 of 40 of those poems
that appeared in the 1867 Leaves. I do so by the semantic
indexing technology by which many of us daily access the world wide web.
Accordingly, I argue that Poems is truer to the spirit of
the 1867 Leaves than was apparent both to Whitman
dismissing it as a dismemberment and subsequent readers who primarily see
authorship as the stylistic verve at work in a singular literary work, as
envisioned by one writer. The alternative sense of authorship that I explore is
found in a Whitman who strides among the various editions
of his work, even while he is assisted by others. This Whitman in particular
should be considered as a herald of our particularly nervously collaborative and
open-access age. Among those are sympathetic readers and editors. That is to
suggest that even the career tendencies indexed by oeuvre
fail to contain an author understood as much by his particular literary
projects as by reception from his many sorts of readers proposing and disposing
of critical approaches. That Whitman may be empirically tracked in Poems not only by the Calamus, content that Rossetti
included, but also by that excluded. This hypertextual
Whitman Rossetti knew as a sympathetic reader because in his selection
and framing of Leaves he had to acknowledge its past and
present reception, even as he anticipated what may entice future readers in Poems.
A Cross-Atlantic Reception
Before addressing the present reception of Whitman and
Calamus, in particular, I
pause to frame the case for how Whitman the author was initially presented to
readers on each side of the Atlantic. I merely sample that reception and so
refer Whitman enthusiasts to the exhaustive catalogue of reviews prepared by
Barney et al. (2007). In doing so, I argue that neither the acerbic dismissals
nor sympathetic receptions were singularly instrumental in shaping the Whitman
whose name came to index a person and poetic more than singular literary works.
Whitman as a cultural product is implicitly
acknowledged whenever the man is equated with either his body of work or his
critical reception. I do so, moreover, because his early reception continues to
shape present commentary in this age in which cultural studies is a new edifice
framing authors for the next generation of authors seeking to ally themselves to
or reject influence. These present authors are not only
emerging and canonical writers, but also those who make the cases for authorship
and who few may even be regarded or come to be regarded as authors in their own
rites.
Rossetti’s advocacy for Whitman enfolded the poet’s career. That story begins with
Rossetti reading the 1855
Leaves, recommended to him by
William Bell Scott, the Pre-Raphaelite painter and poet who introduced the
brother of Christina and Dante to the 1855 first edition.
Then, as he argued in a republished letter to Scott prefacing his
introduction to Poems, Rossetti perceived its
substantiality and power were still ahead of any eulogium with which it might
have been commended to me. As the Pre-Raphaelite
chronicler perhaps eager to recognize an international cadre devoted to
depicting people at their quotidian best and worst, Rossetti favorably reviewed
Whitman’s poetry in the (London) Chronicle in 1867. One outcome of that review was an invitation by John
Camden Hotten to edit a selected poems offering the first tolerably fair chance
Whitman has had of making his way with English readers on his own showing. That edition was presented as a counter to the mostly
short-sighted, sneering, and depreciatory reception Whitman had so far
received.
In his 1867
Chronicle review of Whitman’s work, Rossetti
declared the American was an exemplary man of his time, even while he granted
that Whitman alludes to gross things, and in gross words — the clearest,
bluntest, and nearly the least civilly repeatable which can come uppermost to
the lips. For him Whitman’s entire originality demanded
some allowance among readers if their hesitations over his coarse language
would exclude him from court run by censors. He found Leavesintensely modern and intensely American, even while he
declared the book to be the largest poetic work of our
period. He defended his selected Leaves because
it was clearly impossible that the book, with its audacities of topics and of
expression included, should run the same chance of justice, and of circulation
through refined minds and hands, which may possibly be accorded to it after the
rejection of all such peccant poems. Regardless of Whitman’s reservations
of Poems, Peattie declared in his introduction to
Rossetti’s Selected Letters that Poems
helped secure Whitman’s place in literature outside of the United
States.
In a letter to Moncure Conway, an American pastor working at South Place Chapel in
London while Rossetti was preparing
Poems, Rossetti
relates he is pleased to work on a British edition of Whitman’s poetry . In one letter to fellow Whitman critic James McNeill Whistler,
Rossetti maintains a debtor and creditor account in his critical commentary.
That sober balance between expounding beauties and detailing faults is
particularly important in the case of so aboriginal and transcendent a genius
as Whitman. In responding to Whitman’s complaint of receiving ungrateful
treatment for his work in the United States, Rossetti returns the encouragement
lacking among Whitman’s countrymen: I suppose it is a very general if not
universal experience that anything that is at once great and extremely novel
encounters for some considerable time much more hostility than acceptance. In that letter he offers further consolation to Whitman by observing that
the hostile reception the poet reports is rather indeed a testimonial … [to]
the great intrinsic value of your writings.
Whitman’s animus toward his American contemporaries may be understood to be the
result of his radical eschewal of traditional rhyme and meter, and the radically
dissident voice of self-creation he named Walt, rather than Walter, in the
long untitled poem that became
Song of Myself. Readers’ conflation of persona
and poet is a constant in the 150 years of commentary and scholarship reviewed
in the Cambridge Companion to Whitman.
One early anonymous reviewer of the
Brooklyn Daily Times
well represents that trend in an opening assertion: Judgment on real
poems requires an account of the poet himself. The
fecund, coarse language of the opening poem in which Whitman names himself as
Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos prompted the reviewer
to declare, Politeness this man has none, and regulation he has none.
The depiction of a rude child of the people! — No imitation — Nor foreigner —
but a growth and idiom of America parodies Whitman’s introduction to the first
edition written in an equally unorthodox, but ecstatic manner. The reviewer
derided both the style and the man in judging the literary effects as those of a
fine brute who self-satisfyingly refuses the artificial teaching of a fine
writer or speaker. While other poets celebrate the actors and sites of
history, the poet of Leaves celebrates natural
propensities in himself; and that is the way he celebrates all. The end
result of that what I assume you shall assume poetic is
what the serpent left the woman and the man, the taste of the Paradisiac tree
of the knowledge of good and evil, never to be erased again. Equally offensive to the reviewer is the class betrayal of a poet who
fails to acknowledge other poets, even while he likes the ungenteel ways of the
laborers — is not prejudiced one mite against the Irish — talks readily with
them — talks readily to niggers — does not make a stand on being a gentleman,
nor on learning or manners.
Soon afterward, Edward Everett Hale reviewed the 1855
Leaves
in North American Review, similarly conflating
persona and poet. However, Hale credited the unnamed author as bringing to the
reader the freshness, simplicity and reality of what he reads, just as the
tired man, lying on the hillside in summer, enjoys the leaves of grass around
him. Hale’s greatest praise for Leaves,
however, comes in his commentary on Whitman’s broken prose preface celebrating
the unique possibilities of producing a national literature equal to the promise
of the nation. Hale praised Whitman’s assertion of native genius found most
urgently among the common people. Thus, Whitman’s public literary persona was
accorded the egalitarianism to which Rossetti was drawn and especially
represented in his handling of the Calamus poems.
The commentary most out of the step with Whitman’s contemporary reception came
from a woman remarkably out of step in her own rite. That came from Fanny Fern,
a.k.a. Sara Payson Willis, the highest paid columnist in the mid-19th century,
and one of Whitman’s inner circle of New York writers and artists. She declared
Leaves to be unspeakably delicious, after the
forced, stiff, Parnassian exotics of the reigning literati. She found the world
was in want of Whitman on two counts. First, she found him an advocate for women not ladies. Second, the
world was in want of men not gentlemen.
The man she found in
Leaves dared speak out his
strong, honest thoughts, in the face of pusillanimous, toadying, republic
aristocracy. While the persona and poet remain conflated, Fern
grants that Whitman spoke to and for others.
Rossetti also advocated for Whitman in introducing the American poet to his circle
of intimates. The most sustaining of those for Whitman was Anne Gilchrist, who
was introduced to Whitman’s poetry by Rossetti as he was compiling
Poems. Gilchrist, widowed at age 33 and mother to four
children, went on to complete Alexander Gilchrist’s biography of Blake with the
encouragement of the Rossetti brothers. She first read Whitman at age 41 when
serving as a single parent to her children and completing her husband’s great
life work. At that difficult time, Rossetti gave her his copy of the 1867 Leaves. In response to the transport she experienced as
a reader, she wrote a series of letters to Rossetti wondering how words could
cease to become words, and become electric streams like these. At Rossetti’s encouragement, Gilchrist turned those letters into the one
of the earliest substantive critical commentaries on Leaves. Among the poems prompting her to lay aside Leaves at times in response to all that it demanded of her was the
Calamus, sequence. What became known as An Englishwoman’s Estimate of Walt
Whitman was first anonymously published in The Radical
(Boston). One commentator annotated Gilchrist’s reading of Leaves as an intellectual revolution, a spiritual
illumination, a physical arousal, a personal passion toward accounting for how
a book reporting itself to be a man allow[ed] her to realize, after a lengthy
dormant period, tendencies that had been long in developing.
Only a year later did she reveal herself to and declare her love for Whitman in
the first installment of a life-long correspondence.
At the end of the century, well after the deaths of both Whitman and Gilchrist,
Rossetti in a letter to Anne’s daughter, Grace, laments the vapid praise given
to Whitman, whom he believed was due the reasonable, solid, and lofty homage to
which his writings are entitled. Before Whitman’s
death, Rossetti believed Whitman’s life as an artist and patriot should also be
acknowledged. Accordingly, Rossetti wrote then President Grover Cleveland in
particular and more generally the American public to succor the impoverished
poet in his remaining years .
While Peattie well annotated the background to the professional relationship
between Whitman and Rossetti entirely conducted by correspondence, Erkkila
(1989) and Ramsey (1997) are among the few commentators who acknowledged how
Whitman benefitted as a poet. In particular, both scholars recognized how
Rossetti’s grouping of Whitman’s civil war poems under the heading Drum-Taps
was instrumental to the later 1871
Leaves. Erkkila found
the final Drum-Taps cluster of the 1881 Leaves
appealing to Providence as it moves from patriotic exultation over the
mustering of troops to the suffering and loss of the war. Ramsey extended those
insights to argue that Whitman borrowed this suggestive ‘providential’ sequence
for the Drum-Taps (166) sequence as it was realized in 1871 Leaves. She observed that the underlying structure … remains
Rossetti’s, who provided … the thematic ‘cycle of war’ pattern by which Whitman
is taken to have interpreted the American civil upheaval (166).
To Whitman’s collaboration with Rossetti, and through him to Tennyson, Symonds,
Swinburne and Carpenter, the paradigmatic poet was more widely celebrated in
Britain than in his own country at the time of his death in
1892. Drawing the admiration of English composer Vaughn Williams, as well, was
Whitman’s political egalitarianism — expressed through notions of ‘manly love’
and comradeship. That manly-love fellowship, Collins
observed presented a powerful alterative to prevailing Victorian forms of
political and social relations (65). For that depiction of Whitman’s
egalitarianism Rossetti should receive some credit.
Simultaneously, Rossetti could be understood as one of Whitman’s (albeit
sympathetic) redactors. In his presentation of a Whitman heralding an
international brotherhood of comrades and celebrating the general revelation of
nature, he altered
Leaves’ clusters, at once reassigning
and renaming poems in complement to his sense of thematic unity. See Table 1 for
an overview. Rossetti is censorious in removing the material that would prompt
righteous indignation, rather than a considered response, from readers.
Rossetti’s dual role of redactor of and advocate for Whitman introduces the
complex terrain of subversion.
In introducing a collection of essays annotating Victorian publishing, Womack and
Decker (2016) observed the entangled relationships among writer, text, and
reader (xi) that accompanies any act of subversion. For Rossetti that demanded
acknowledging a peculiarly nervous age in which readers were expected to
principally object to any overt expression of sexual agency. Simultaneously,
however, he had to present that aspect of Whitman’s work that the dominant
culture of his day rejected. More distantly, in allying himself
Calamus, Included and Excluded from ‘Poems,’ and Assessed as
Laudatory or CautionaryIn all commentary to follow I employ the 1867 label
for each poem.1867 Leaves1867 labelPoems titleRossetti grouplaudWhoever You are Now Holding My HandWhoeverFit AudienceSongs of Parting0These I Singing in SpringSingSinging in SpringSongs of Parting1A SongASongLove of ComradesSongs of Parting1Not Heaving from my Ribb'd Breast OnlyHeavingPulse of My LifeSongs of Parting0Of the Terrible Doubt of AppearancesTerribleAppearancesWalt Whitman0Recorders Ages HenceRecordThe FriendWalt Whitman1Of Him I Love Day and NightDayNightA DreamWalt Whitman0To a StrangerStrangerTo a StrangerWalt Whitman1This Moment Yearning and ThoughtfulYearnOther LandsWalt Whitman1When I Peruse the Conquer'd FamePeruseEnvyWalt Whitman0What Think You I Take Pen in HandPenParting FriendsWalt Whitman1I Dreamed in a DreamDreamedThe City of FriendsWalt Whitman1Among the MultitudeMultiAmong the MultitudeWalt Whitman0Full of Life, NowFullCenturies HenceSongs of Parting1As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of LifeEbb’dElemental DriftsWalt WhitmanStarting from PaumanokSPStarting from PaumanokChants DemocraticIn Paths UntroddenPaths1Scented Herbage of my BreastScented1Are You the New Person Drawn to MeNewPerson0Roots and Leaves Themselves AloneRootsLeaves1Not Heat Flames Up and ConsumesNotHeat1Trickle DropsTrickle0City of OrgiesOrgies1Behold This Swarthy FaceBehold1I Saw in Louisiana a Live-Oak GrowingLouisiana1I Hear It Was Charged Against MeCharged1The Prairie Grass DividingPrairie1We Two Boys Together ClingingClinging1A GlimpseGlimpse1A Promise to CaliforniaPromise1Here, Sailor!Sailor1Here the Frailest Leaves of MeFrailest0No Labor-Saving MachineMachine1To the East and to the WestEastWest1Earth! My Likeness!Earth0A Leaf for Hand in HandLeaf1Fast Anchor'd, Eternal, O LoveEternal1Sometimes with One I LoveSometimes0That Shadow, My LikenessShadow1To a Western BoyWestern0Of You Whom I Often and Silently ComeSilently1
to Whitman, he had to account for a literary movement that emerged in response to
its time rather than was engineered by a coterie of young artists dissatisfied
with the Royal Academy.
Rossetti’s solution, I argue, was to present the new man of a new democratic
nation, whose love-longings for comrades could be spiritualized as canonically
as did Dante in
La Vita Nuova, Edmund Spenser in Amoretti, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning in Songs of the Portuguese. Framing Whitman as a
transcendental wooer of soldiers, stevedores, farmers, and tradesmen was also
resonant with the Pre-Raphaelite standard of naturalism. Those roughs were for Whitman in his broken prose manifesto the genius of
the United States [in] Their manners speech dress friendship — the freshness and
candor of the physiognomy — the picturesque looseness of their carriage
. Perhaps in Whitman’s egalitarian trope of the President’s
taking off his hat to them not they to him (iv) Rossetti early on found another
Pre-Raphaelite brother. The depiction of Whitman as the outsider artist
unfettered by existing conventions complemented the
self-creation of an author who learned carpentry from his father and was trained
in a trade at the printing press. More certainly, by 1868, Rossetti surveyed
Whitman’s attempt to define the new man in a new nation by eschewing rhyme and
even blank verse to the point that some poems may be regarded as a warp of
prose amid the weft of poetry (3).
More urgently, however, Rossetti celebrated Whitman’s open, extending and inviting
humanity. The poet’s subject, he noted in his introduction to
Poems, is every subject. He summarized Whitman’s
verve as realizing One’s self amid the En Masse of humanity. For Rossetti,
Leavesis the poem both of Personality and of
Democracy … in it the most literal view of things is continually merging into
the most rhapsodic or passionately abstract (5). Whitman’s British advocate and
Pre-Raphaelite chronicler, thus, illustrates the entanglement of relations that
Womack and Decker observed in reading and positively responding to the
subversive presence of a new art form.
Consider the double-edged subversion evident in the Swedenborg epigraph leading
off
Poems. That emendation was entirely Rossetti’s, who
employed it to spiritualize Whitman’s emphasis on the body as another sacred
site of creation. Rossetti excerpted the reflections of the 17th century
Christian mystic on the bodily presence of angels to suggest that both Whitman
and his panoply of American citizens may be regarded as emanations of heaven,
despite the gross ignorance Swedenborg observed respecting Angels and Spirits
as to suppose them to be minds without a form, or mere thoughts. Through Swedenborg, Rossetti at once elevates the peripheral citizenry of
the United States, exhorts readers for failing to entertain angels well, and
sanctifies Whitman’s work as that proceeding from an other-worldly messenger
finding his subject matter in the very stuff of the world. That gesture could be
understood as an enabling subversion because it honors Whitman’s project of
recognizing the inherent value of the entire citizenry, even those who are
rarely seen and still more rarely lauded. Yet, that spiritualization of people
in their material conditions simultaneously reifies understanding some as
radically Other than the captains of commerce, statesmen and exceptional
artists. In even acknowledging that polarism of spiritual and material
conditions to which Swedenborg objected and by which readers were likely to
dismiss Whitman, Rossetti may be understood to accede to the values and thinking
of a dominant culture well practiced in bigotry. In Rossetti’s gesture of
elevating manly love as a trope for egalitarianism, his
subversion may be understood to be co-opted and absorbed within the dominant
culture’s practices of finding and treating some more worthily than others. That
is to observe that if the roughs, criminals and men attracted to other men
should be entertained as possible angels, as Rossetti suggests in the epigraph
he appended to his selected Whitman, then the editor has only further muddied
their better reception as members of a common humanity. Likewise, if Whitman’s
celebration of manly love is spiritualized to emphasize a new and better
humanity emerging, then that better world remains shackled in caste and
entitlement by even acknowledging a material-spiritual split.
Present reception of the ‘Calamus’ sequence in the United States
Rossetti’s tenuous walk among his cultural terrain of reception has been
undertaken more recently by
Calamus commentators who depict Whitman as a
democratic, yet quite vulnerable speaker. Simultaneously, the sequence commands
critical attention in indexing frailty and desire independently of sexual
orientation . Cocks found it astutely illustrating the Victorian
evasion of sexual desire by spiritual communion.
three depictions of whitman in three different editions of leaves
Thomas found
Whitman adopting a different rhetorical strategy than
Song of Myself in a
speaker foregoing contradiction to state the complexities of love in order to
more ambivalently and fully accept the polar pairing of life and death (2010).
The Calamus sequence Thomas observed dramatizes love as predicated upon loss
and vice versa (643) toward identifying the complexities of human experience
(644). That more general human experience in love is a check to presidential
incompetency and growing sectional tensions. In the 1860
Leaves in which Calamus premiered, Reynolds
observed a campaign to appeal to a middle-class readership and show Whitman
neatly trimmed and conventional, rather than the rough persona of the first
edition. Figure 1 illustrates that contrast in personae, as well as showing the
more grandfatherly Whitman with whom Rossetti began a dialogue to launch the
first British edition of a radically redacted and regrouped Leaves.
That rebranded, more fashionable Whitman of 1860, enticed clerks and gaffers to
become Whitmaniacs . Wheat identified
Leaves
as therapeutic literature meant to form the free reader into a free person
and therefore an appropriate citizen for a fully democratic party,
while Calamus complements that spokesmanship quality of the sequence in its
insistence on speaking to the political and philosophical appeals of democracy.
How we adhere to one another, regardless of regional differences, is a primary
driver of the content, which Wheat interpreted as a spiritual counterpoint to
the far more carnal Children of Adam sequence. Sexual desire should be
understood as another cultural production that exists in negotiation within a
complex set of rules larger than our tendency to dichotomize sex into a private
experience distinct from public consequence . Accordingly, in the
evangel-poem Starting from Paumanok, Grossman found Whitman only implicitly
figuring as the apologist for manly love, while explicitly he does so for the
common mother of liberty, Ma Femme.
Common to all of these perspectives is the function of indirection in expressing
difficult and even repressed content. In recognition of that skillful avoidance
of explicit content that would raise the ire of a censor, gay writers emphasize
the otherness they sense in their sexual desire and identity .
Their otherness is particularly pronounced in a categorical, perhaps even
ontological sense of difference from their heterosexual counterparts . The result is indirection, until that time when same-sex desire may
be as simply and directly stated as does Whitman in
A Leaf for Hand in Hand.
Then we will see it common for you to walk hand in hand.
The sequence’s relation to the earlier manuscript grouping of
Live Oak, with
Moss brings attention both to the subversive act of declaring same-sex love and
self-censorship. Scholnick reviewed charges that Whitman self-censored in
distributing the contents of the 12-poem Live Oak, with Moss throughout the
larger Calamus sequence. Doing so effectively blunted their meaning, two commentators held. Allen anticipated this dispute by
noting that Whitman’s notebook manuscript of the Live Oak sequence more
coherently told the love story of one man for another than was evident in
Calamus,. While Scholnick agreed that the narrative unity of Live
Oak, with Moss was compromised in Calamus, he argued that the sequence
extends and deepens its themes in quite surprising ways (110). Countering a
charge of Whitman self-censoring , Parker assessed Live Oak, with
Moss as a gay manifesto when he selected it for inclusion
in the fourth edition of The Norton Anthology of American
Literature. The sequence Parker commented upon was that which Bowers
found in 1958 in the Valentine Collection of Whitman’s manuscripts, while the
one that Helms read was restored to its original manuscript order but gathered
from the 45-poem Calamus of the 1860 Leaves. Scholnick
observed that both critics make textual judgments on the basis of their
assumption that Whitman faced such widespread homophobia that he was forced to
engage in self-censorship. The silencing homophobia each argued
must have influenced the dissolution of Live Oak, with Moss into Calamus was
not present in American letters until much later in the 19th century, Scholnick
argued.
A further commonality is this: Both Helms and Parker privilege particular texts in
noting authorship. Neither regarded process as an integral process in
publication and a fostering component in authorship. By contrast, I argue that
the typeset-altered printer’s copy for the 1860
Leaves
that Whitman prepared co-existed in his mind with the manuscript version of
Live Oak, with Moss. That is a nod toward a new era of critical commentary
enabled by computer-aided assessment of texts that may be understood to
co-exist, regardless of manuscript dates and year of publication.
In that simultaneity of texts in dialogue with one another, an inter-edition
Whitman emerges who ever reminds readers that
Leaves is
accretive as the Mississippi delta in receiving the stuff of a continent. If
left unchecked, the river would shift its banks. Within the unchecked and
celebrated accretion of Leaves, one current is Calamus
as another is the Children of Adam cluster. Both find common expression in the
human need to adhere to one another, regardless of
expression in sexual attraction.
In
Starting from Paumanak (SP), the poem that serves as a Genesis function for
Whitman and that which Rossetti selected to introduce Poems,
Whitman illustrates the primacy of the sexual drive in listening to a
mockingbird inflating his throat, and joyfully singing (78). The moment
underscores not only lyric beauty and a poet finding his counterpart in the
natural world, but also that drive to find the best expression of ourselves — as
citizens and sojourners — in the subtle, clandestine, away beyond (78).
Immediately following Whitman allegorizes democracy as Ma Femme and pledges to
make the songs of passion, to give them their way (79). Among that humanity
Whitman declares he will represent are outlawed offenders whose songs Whitman
will transform into the true poem of riches — To earn for the body and the
mind whatever adheres, and goes forward, and is not dropped by death (79).
In this manifesto celebrating life itself and the lives of all citizens, even
those outlawed offenders, Whitman naturalizes his commitment to egalitarianism
and his stance in indirection. Whitman realizes the mockingbird sang not only
for himself, his mate attending to her brood, and for others listening. That
song was also a charge transmitted, and gift occult, for those being born (78)
delivered in a poem surveying the circumstances and settings of a poet’s birth.
That birth song I sense resounding in
Poems as much for
the citizenry of a new nation as for men loving one another in nonchalance in
the regrouped and disguised Calamus poems.
Accordingly, I neither seek to arbitrate which Whitman is at work in the
Calamus
sequence nor what that sequence held for its own time. Neither do I wish to
assess the aesthetic or ethical merit of one edition over another. More urgent
is simply following its rhetoric of indirection through two distinct groups of
Calamus poems toward showing a method of establishing influence in a literary
text. However rebranded, compromised and appropriated is that content, I sense
the Calamus content of Poems substantively recalls the
entire sequence presented in the 1867 Leaves. Those poems
also underscore both the loudly declarative Democratic spokesman and the more
personally evasive, vulnerable speaker Rossetti recognized in Leaves.
The extra-human processing that enables texts to co-exist may be understood as hypertextual. This term from information science is now
commonplace. Presently, hypertext is not merely a device by which additional
information may be clicked and so accessed in a moment.
It also suggests a state of mind that returns readers to the cacophony of
literary texts speaking to and against one another before
being orchestrated by the activity of critical response.
Inside a Semantic Indexing Machine
Hypertext was first introduced as a device through which,
for example, the work of handling personal file systems may be better effected
during the drafting of a technical paper . At that early
meeting of the Association for Computing Machinery, Nelson observed that those
files shade into manuscripts while the assembly of textual notes becomes the writing of text without a sharp break (84).
Those personal files exist in non-linear relation to what becomes the linearized
account of a paper read from start to finish. However, he noted a cost to that
linear ordering. The alternative or unrealized connections among the strands of
those information swirls are lost. Hypertext, by contrast, allows for a body of
written or pictorial material to be interconnected in such a complex way that
it could not conveniently be presented or represented on paper (96).
That hypertextual mind, I argue, is fundamental to those who write poetic
sequences. Nelson may be understood to well account for that simultaneity of
poems speaking to one another in complement, contrast and qualification in the
title of his paper,
A File Structure for the Complex, The Changing and the
Intermediate. That provisional world variously ordered in either a literary
work or a technical paper becomes yet more revealing when all possible content
is proximately represented in a relevance score.
Hypertext as an idea rather than a technique in information relay implicitly
acknowledges the modern topical indexing accomplished within a search engine.
Search terms survey a collective sensibility. Search engines simultaneously
offer assessment of the fit of our terms to particular internet resources. As
the ideas of a literary work are executed in but one of many possible linear
presentations, search terms similarly reveal the possible but not exhaustive
components of any given inquiry. While the results of a search may be judged to
be either spurious or helpful, we soon learn how to better locate that
information, audio or video that prompted an inquiry. Our trial and error
employment of the terms that may take us to internet topics may be understood as
the theoretical framing we bring to understanding a literary work. If our search
terms represent the theoretical framing we bring to any reading experience, then
the relevance scores of our internet queries represent assessment of fit for a
critical perspective.
I offer the analogies of internet searches and relevance scores to literary study
to illustrate a different approach to interpretation enabled by the digital
humanities. Regardless of the critical framing we bring either knowingly or
naively to reading literature, we can assess the rightness of its application
against the givenness of the word to word associational terrain fundamental to a
literary work. In that capacity alone we may be saved from imposing a critical
framing on a literary work. In complement to any exegetical program of
interpretation is the empirical presence of words proximately represented.
Open-source programming techniques in natural language processing, then, offer a
boon to the reader who first wishes to proceed from the radical givenness of a
text’s composition.
I pause over these now familiar wonders of search engine inquiry to illustrate the
basic mechanics of latent semantic analysis (LSA). It developed as an
information retrieval tool to index the relation of one term to another within a
static dataset, like a literary corpus . It has become a
theory of knowledge acquisition for the human capacity to infer meaning by the
context of usage . In demonstrating that an LSA
application could correctly supply the right answer to a multiple choice synonym
test at a better-than-guessing rate, Landauer and Dumais offered two
interpretations. The more conservative explanation is that the contextual
statistics of usage alone (211) sufficiently enable a machine to make the
appropriate choice. The more radical interpretation is that this inductive model
of learning reveals an important underlying mechanism of human cognition in
general (212). I follow that stronger argument in exploring the machine-aided
complement to demonstrating the relation of one poem to another.
The web of the present study is comprised mainly by the
word to word relations of
Poems, as well as the largely
absent Calamus sequence as Whitman realized it in the 1867 Leaves. That inter-edition resonance of influence may be understood
as hypertextual to suggest a state of mind that returns
readers to literary texts speaking to and against one another. It is anterior to
critical response. Accordingly, I use LSA to index the radical givenness of
terms within Whitman’s poetry.
LSA works by surveying the frequency of terms whittled down from words by
root-stemming in order to approximate their cross-document senses in a static
corpus. It is a bag-of-words method because neither
syntax nor part-of-speech is integral to the representation of content.
Fundamental is the frequency of terms in the corpus as a whole, not only within
individual documents. That corpus is assumed to model a system of simultaneous
equations that can determine the similarity of meaning of words and documents to
each other, thus approximating shop talk or
discourse.
LSA is only one approach in distributional semantics. However, whether the
architecture employed represents a corpus by its term-to-term relatedness or
from a window of its terms as does Hyperspace Analogue to Language (HAL) , word count is formative. Context is indirectly established by
a matrix formed by a survey of the words retained for analysis as those appear
in a document by document indexing. Both HAL and LSA are count models , or bag-of-word approaches in
modeling meaning through a set of term to term co-occurrences. This
approximation of sense-making Landauer and Dumais (1997) equated with the verbal
conditioning that prompts learning by means of inference. One limitation of
count models is that all information must be present before meaning can be
represented in a series of statistical transformations that represent a corpus
by only its most resonant terms. Syntax, however, never entirely weights a count representation.
Count and predict approaches each benefit the digital humanities. Selecting the
appropriate representational method should hinge upon the purpose for bringing a
set of texts together. If that collection of literary texts is assembled because
novelty of trope is expected, then the count method of LSA makes sense, for the
corpus itself argues against the value of predicting the likelihood of a term
followed by another. By contrast, if the corpus were comprised, for example, to
understand the nature of stylistic continuity between passages, then a predict
model is the appropriate choice.
The count model approach is right for the present study because novelty of trope
is instrumental in a poetic sequence. It is also appropriate toward
understanding the sensibility of an author rather than its expression in
particular works. The poems Rossetti excerpted from
Calamus are identical to
their Leaves presentation; regrouping and redacting the
number of them were Rossetti’s most important editorial tasks. The central
matter of the present study is tracking the possible resonance in sense between
excluded and included Calamus content.
This study hinges upon the ideational, non-linear presence of words summoned to
speak for the content of a literature meant for a new republic. Its emphasis is
the numinous presence of words like love, state and manly rather than development within a field of
expertise or the continuity of one draft of a novel with a later draft.
Accordingly, I selected LSA to model the influence I sense in the entirety of
Calamus being resonant within Poems and the excluded
content found in Leaves.
LSA emulates an inductive method of learning by two principles in cognitive
psychology: 1) we understand a topic by a set of words, and 2) those
associations are enriched, refined and schematized by further and even widely
variant exposure to that topic. LSA, then, is both a method for statistically
emulating induction and a theory of human learning . It
represents semantic sense in three steps. The first is by indexing the
co-occurrence of terms within and between documents of a corpus. The second step
of LSA employs a widely used factor reduction process known as singular value
decomposition (SVD). This step multiplies a matrix of term values by those of
the documents to produce ranked cross-products, or singular values. The greater
the singular values of those cross-products, the more information each provides
for the representation of a corpus. More concretely, those singular values in
the present study represent the sensibility most central to Rossetti’s edition
even as those poems are simultaneously influenced by the excluded
Calamus
content of Leaves.
The final LSA step truncates the full representation of a set of documents to one
that preserves its complexity but also eliminates noise. Each poem or section
contributes to semantic space by its unique term to term relationality.
Truncating dimensions, then, does not eliminate the full array of terms used to
summon sense, for documents rather than terms are ranked by their singular
values. This dimension reduction step eliminates not terms assigned to the row
of a matrix, but the column-defined documents that address corpus wide
tendencies. Because those columns are rank-ordered or orthogonal, the singular
value as the cross-product of both documents and terms offers a way for less to
say more. This dimension reduction step is precise enough that the original
matrix can be recomposed. Truncation, then, may be understood as the decision at
what decimal place to the right of the zero may be rounded up.
In the following research questions, I follow the distributed semantics of one
poem considered in its similarity to another. I do so without hyperlinks per se,
for that would require some personal set of files to have been constructed in
advance of inquiry. However, I follow a hyperlinked sensibility in allowing the
poems to speak to their relatedness in a common metric that can be readily
employed within the digital humanities. Moreover, I do so without imposing any
program to their relatedness. Rather, while entertaining a rhetoric of
indirection, I simultaneously test a theory that
Calamus is comprised by both
lauds and cautions for those who would love by standards not yet publish’d
(Paths 6). Accordingly, I asked:
What is the within-group relatedness of “Calamus” poems included in Poems?How related are Calamus poems across editions?What is the relation of the Calamus content Rossetti sampled to
Elemental Drifts in Rossetti’s Walt Whitman group? Does the excluded content show resonance with the evangel-poem Starting
from Paumanok?
A hypertextual program of reading the Calamus sequence
I account for the importance of Rossetti’s
Poems more truly representing the
Whitman’s legacy than either Whitman or modern scholars grant by a hypertextual
frame. That allows the 1867 Leaves to co-exist with Poems, even as Live Oak,
with Moss may be understood to co-exist with Calamus. In that hypertextual
field an author’s texts may speak simultaneously before they are ordered to
represent the linear frame of an argument conducted within the bounds of any
critical reading approach. Doing so implicitly derides the New Critical claim
that a text is sufficient onto itself. I argue otherwise, especially in the case
of Poems’ troubling relation to the 1867 Leaves. Accordingly, I argue Poems
reveals a greater sense of authorship than any of Whitman’s singular products of
composition, whether those be found in a poem, sequence or book. The present
study, then, courts the New Historicist allowance for the formative presence of
extra-textual material, especially that of the Calamus poems excluded in Poems
even while the 1867 Calamus has been completely erased by Rossetti’s
alternative groupings. In that sense of authorship I necessarily call into
question the power dynamics evident in dismissing Poems as the compromised,
bowdlerized or sanitized Whitman.
To examine that hypertextual Whitman, I employ the open-source statistical
platform R, which enables 10,000 distinct statistical operations, data handling
and imaging techniques. In complement to two particular software packages, I
used a freely available editor (Rstudio 2021) to process the text set, which I
captured in poem and section divisions on an Excel spreadsheet. The
lsa package allowed me to create a corpus comprised by
the whole of Poems and the excluded Calamus content
. I also employed that package to aggregately score the similarity of
one poem’s words against those from another poem. See Tables 2-4. That
representation I could further pass on to the LSAfun
package toward doing the passage to passage scoring featured in Tables 5-8
. That package also enabled me to examine the closest
semantic neighbors of a word.
I found 111 poems or sections sharing the greatest semantic similarity indexed by
stemmed terms comprising the whole of Poems and the excluded
Calamus content.
Those most generally applicable components of a text set retained for analysis
are called dimensions. In general, an LSA best performs in a space of 200 to 500
dimensions, although an empirical survey of 49 studies found optimal factors
from 6 to 1,000 dimensions . Singular values < .94 were
effectively removed from the corpus representation by setting each to 0. This
procedure highlights the underlying semantic structure of words. Those words
that are most similar are shown to be proximate to one another even if they
never co-occur in a document, while documents similarly benefit even if they
share no types (or words/terms) in common. This
technique, then, removes the limitations of tracking lexile usage. The advantage
of the share function in the present study is that the reduced set references
the semantic space of the corpus by the largest poem/section-level tendencies
and the entirety of the word-set that comprise it.
As reported in Table 1, I labeled each
Calamus poem either as a laud or a
caution for living out comradely love either in same-sex desire or in the
service of a new republic. That designation I held to be provisional, for it
springs from my own reading of Calamus as a poetic sequence granting that
those who love will experience both a sense of wondrous revelation and
resignation over lovers’ human limitations. I granted, too, at the outset that
one poem may have elements of each sensibility motivating it. A laud I took to be celebratory of a lover’s progress
through the difficult terrain of desire that can only be sensed at the periphery
of those standards Whitman in Paths declared depart from the pleasures,
profits, conformities (4) of social sanction. I considered a caution to be either a warning to those who would dare to love or an
illustration of a hazard in love. However, Whitman troping his poems as
herbage may make each a laud in celebration of an authentic life, even while
those same poems, or body-leaves growing up above me above death (Scented
3), resound in caution.
I test that laudatory-cautionary distinction by the distributed relation of one
word to another across both
Poems and the Calamus
sequence excluded from it. That distributed sense of one poem’s relation to
another I annotate by the cognitive science fundamental to information retrieval
, disciplinary trends in language use , and what mood or mind is operative within a discussion
. I do so first to demonstrate a method of reading that allows to literary
texts to speak to one another, even while offering metrics that approximate the
degree of similarity that may be found within and between groups of texts.
Such proximal indexing of a term within a poem and across others consequently
allows us to follow the aggregated relation of all terms within a poem to
another. That relation, or resonance, I track in the present study by reporting
the cosine approximation of relatedness. Most generally,
a cosine may be interpreted as a correlation, which in the present study range
continuously in strength from 0 to 1. Those correlations are more precisely
stated as the semantic distance between two vectors … given by the cosine of
the angle between them. Accordingly, I report a degree of
topical and thematic resonance between Whitman editions as the averaged cosine
similarity of one passage to another . Because cosine may
be understood as a correlation, we can expect different statements of concept
overlap. I consider the categorical predictor of
Calamus content to be either
included or excluded in Poems to be weak for a cosine of .10, while moderate is
> .30 and strong > .50 .
All Whitman texts employed in the present study came from the 1867
Leaves of Grass and 1868 Poems by Walt
Whitman archived on the Whitman archive maintained by the Center for
Digital Research in the Humanities at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. All
pages cited conform to the eBook edition of Poems
archived by the center. I cited excluded Calamus content by the line
number of the center’s 1867 Leaves edition.
The more nuanced decisions came in deciding which texts supply a non-
Calamus
complement to examine Calamus phenomenality. I also considered what
introductory sequence Rossetti admitted could possibly serve the naming function
of what became Song of Myself, but what Whitman called in 1867 the Walt
Whitman sequence.
Calamus bridges Poems and the 1867 Leaves. Accordingly, I used it to examine the within-group and
between-group relatedness of its poems (Q1 and Q2). I partitioned the poems
either by the laud or caution distinction earlier described. I further
partitioned the text set by Calamus content included or excluded from Poems. I selected Elemental Drifts for two reasons to
explore the resonance of Calamus content with an introductory poem Rossetti
believed he could publish without having to go to court (Q3). First, it appears
in Rossetti’s Walt Whitman cluster, where most of the Calamus he excerpted
is contained. Second, Elemental Drifts is widely anthologized and so serves it
as its own Whitman introduction to new readers. Finally, to examine the semantic
resonance of Calamus content with another of Whitman’s origin poems (Q4), I
selected Starting from Paumanok (SP). Grossman identifies what would become
SP as Proto-Leaf, which introduces the 1860 Leaves. Likewise, Rossetti allowed this evangel-poem to introduce
Poems. Its mission to bring comity by day and by
night between all The States (73) is present in the Calamus sequence as well.
Grossman observed that SP celebrates the Union as the evangel-poem of
comrades (74).
Results
Correlations in the Laudatory and Cautionary Calamus Content
of Poems1=Sing, 2=Asong, 3=Record, 4=Stranger, 5=Yearn,
6=Pen, 7=Dreamed, 8=Full; labels refer to the fully named poems reported in Table 1.12345678Whoever.75.58.41.41.10.46.04.20Heaving.46.07.27.47.003.27.39.02Terrible.54.16.52.27.32.30.05.03DayNight.34.18.28.52.04.31.71.04Peruse.17.03.17.12.01.02.01.03Multi.06.02.17.05.03.10.01.01
Q1: What is the within-group relatedness of Calamus poems included in Poems?
Precisely because of the novelty of trope expected in a poetic sequence, few poems
designated either as a laud or a caution resonate strongly in that distinction.
Rather, some poems celebrate manly love while others caution its practice. That
is clear in the poem to poem
comparisons measured by the averaged correlations of cosine that comprise each
poem. More toward illustrating a method in testing the caution-laud distinction in
Calamus
than toward arguing for its utility, I discuss the relationship of the cautionary
Whoever to
poems I take to be lauds for those who love others unconventionally or in service
of a new
republic. My primary point is this: Reader’s conclusions can be put to the test
within that
distributive semantics fundamental to either a count or predict approach. Any
argument can then be assessed and reconsidered by the evidence of document to
document and word to word
phenomena.
In the cautionary
Whoever, the speaker warns away a suitor. That intimate must
complete an apprenticeship to be in relation with the speaker. Better that the
suitor Put [him]
down and depart on [his] way (12) than give up all else (8). In the laudatory
Record that
warning is not issued to a suitor, but to any who would love as does the speaker
and understands the dread of an indifferent response from another. In Stranger
the speaker returns to the direct address, but in possibly warning the stranger
away from the fervor he or she may expect. While
the speaker in Whoever grants the suitor may perhaps be worthy of his attention,
the counterpart in Sing declares he is the only one worthy to praise the love of
comrades.
By contrast, a troop gathers around him in Sing. To that possibly worthy suitor
in Whoever, the speaker names himself the new husband and comrade (26).
That identity is most explicit in Sing at another pond-side, where him that
tenderly loves me, and returns again never to
separate from me (19) receives a calamus root as token from the speaker. In
ASong that
husband fathers the most splendid race the sun ever shone upon/ … With the
life-long love of
comrades (2-3). Those who remember Whitman as the husband of the few who dare to
love as
completely as he does and father to the many in Record should name him the
tenderest lover (3). Although unacknowledged in Stranger, the speaker might
have surely lived a life of joy (3) with another. Whitman again fancies
himself as the husband who received parting [as] the
parting of dear friends (5) in Pen, where he sees the embrace of two men on a
pier. In Full, which concludes the Calamus sequence, the speaker is husband
to you yet unborn (4). He
can only fulfill that office by his poems. Yet, the Calamus speaker also grants
a legacy of
being misunderstood, as he does in Whoever. In Pen that speaker cautions that
his subject
matter is neither the majestic battleship nor splendors of the past day (3), but
only that scene of two men parting as dear friends. His future readers, he
grants in Sing, will find only what they need in his poems, while fewer still
would receive calamus as their due. That husband-longing
professed in Record reframes the speaker as one Who was not proud of his songs,
but of the measureless ocean of love within him (5).
The caution-laud distinction, then, does not define a sub-genre for Whitman as
much as provide poles by which a non-scripted love will be experienced by the
wooer, the beloved and
the society framing both. The non-scriptedness of expressing that love either for
another man or
in service of a more radically inclusive republic is a topic larger than either a
cautionary or
laudatory rhetoric. Whitman’s sometimes cautious, sometimes joyful negotiation of
manly love
returns us to the experience of reading a poetic sequence. The difficult, even
damning terrain of
loving both out of bounds and out of measure is recognized even within the same
poem
celebrating that adventure. Accordingly, while the way to that greater love in
Whoever is
suspicious and uncertain, it rewards by revealing the new husband of a new
republic.
The Calamus content Rossetti selected for Poems qualifies
the laud or caution theme
defining each of the selections, for as was shown above, the decidedly cautionary
Whoever
strongly resonates with the exemplary laud found in Sing. In Table 3 reported
below, I further
test that laud-caution distinction in examining the lauds included and excluded
from Poems, thus
beginning to explore inter-edition resonance between Poems
and Leaves. I next do so with
poems I take to be cautionary (Table 4). Those annotations I offer in response to
Q2. I continue
that rippling-outward investigation to examine resonance in two other thematic
groups identified by Rossetti toward answering Q3 and Q4. The first cluster,
Walt Whitman, holds most of the
Calamus content excerpted for Poems. The second cluster I
examine is Rossetti’s Chants
Democratic, which introduces his Whitman edition. I examine the first poem of
that cluster, Starting from Paumanok (SP), in particular.
Correlations of the Laudatory Calamus Included and Excluded
in Poems12345678910111213Sing.49.75.66.11.08.45.58.11.02.03.15.16.01Asong.46.51.33.09.15.44.38.32.10.09.04.28.03Record.16.45.24.17.19.40.78.05.01.04.01.09.01Stranger.29.49.31.03.03.16.39.08.06.03.05.10.02Yearn.15.08.24.09.01.02.12.01.01.10.09.20.01Pen.15.40.15.15.21.56.75.002.17.05.01.20.12Dreamed.01.04.06.02.04.14.21.05.004.004.01.001.01Full.37.07.22.01.01.02.11.01.01.004.012.001.01
Correlations of the Laudatory Calamus Included and Excluded
in Poems continued.Excluded Calamus content: 1=Paths, 2=Scented,
3=RootsLeaves, 4= NotHeat, 5=Orgies, 6=Behold, 7=Louisiana, 8=Charged,
9=Prairie, 10=Clinging, 11=Glimpse, 12=Promise,
13=Sailor, 14=Machine, 15=EastWest, 16=Leaf, 17=Eternal, 18=Shadow, 19=Silently141516171819Sing.11.0416171819Asong.27.01.10.14.08.36Record.08.01.01.08.03.08Stranger.05.04.47.10.27.42Yearn.01.01.08.02.49.12Pen.03.03-.01.02.49.04Dreamed.004.01.02.01.01.35Full.004.01.02.01.01.02
Q2: How related are Calamus poems across editions?
Sing and Scented (.75) most dramatically resonated in the laudatory Calamus
content Rossetti included and excluded. Both poems are united in praise for
lovers and in the speaker’s unique ability to issue that praise. More strongly
at the level of trope, these poems advance through catalogues of the natural
world tokens the speaker imparts to those whom he finds have joined him in
approaching a liminal space defined as much by nature as desire. The leaves and
roots of Scented are more directly troped as the pages of a book springing
from the speaker that will yet be better regarded in the days to come. In Sing
those leaves take many forms: lilac, pine branches, moss from a live-oak,
laurel, maple, chestnut, wild orange and the calamus root, which is the token
of comrades (19). These other tokens of the natural world the speaker dispenses
as each follower needs and as he desires. He only reserves the Calamus, root to
them that love as I myself am capable of loving (28).
The strongest thematic resonance between the poems is the poet commissioned to
represent that love of comrades that will make possible a truly inclusive and
fostering democracy. In
Scented that commission is expected to enable
immortal reverberations through the States (25) and will one day be seen when
comrades can dissipate this entire show of appearance (36). That coming
enlightenment is more immediately sensed in Sing as the troop that gathers
around the speaker in his wildwood walkabouts. This troop comes to take on the
presence of a cloud of witnesses (Hebrews 12:1) because
it is comprised by dear friends dead or alive (13). These friends surround the
speaker, at once commissioning him and in need of the tokens he dispenses.
The poems are also joined in their strong resonance with other poems in the
Calamus
sequence. Of the 16 that may be understood to be laudatory, two are strongly
resonant
(RootsLeaves and Louisiana) in comparison to Sing, while three others
demonstrate moderate resonance between aggregate cosine relations between .25 and
.49.
Scented resonates strongly with one of the laudatory poems Rossetti included in
Poems, while moderately so with three others. The
near-zero correspondences of Calamus content occur most generally in the
briefest poems (e.g., Full and Prairie).
I considered the moderate resonance of
Full with Paths (.38). This final poem
of Calamus proposes that the Whitman who was once 40 years old in 1859, then
visible in public and as a poet of these States, would be invisible when the
imagined reader finds his poems a century or more later. That second life for
Whitman is in the reader’s imagination, Fancying how happy you were if I could
be with you (8). The complement for the first poem of the sequence comes also
in 1859, as the speaker is Bequeathing hence types of athletic love (14). In
establishing the project of the Calamus sequence and in anticipation of the
imagined reader finding it one day, the speaker Proceed[s] for all who are or
have been young men,/To tell the secret of my nights and days,/To celebrate the
need of comrades (16-18). That moderate resonance between its place as a laud
for a comradely literature that Rossetti included in Poems,
Full bears no greater relation to the excluded, far more overtly amorous
content of Calamus.
Correlations of the Cautionary Calamus Content Included and
Excluded in PoemsNewPersonTrickleFrailestEarthSometimesWesternWhoever.28.18.03.04.19.12Heaving.09.03.01.01.09.01Terrible.03.05.01.08.01.06DayNight.03.02.01.02.03.02Peruse.02.01.01.01.01.01Multi.01.01.01.01.01.02
In these poems that might all be considered cautionary, there is at best only near
moderate resonance.
Whoever provides exempla of that point in its various ways
of figuring caution. Its speaker cautions that he is not what a suitor supposes,
for the way to meet him is at best uncertain and even destructive. That suitor
would have to become a novitiate in order for the speaker to become your sole
and exclusive standard (8), that requiring the suitor to abandon The whole
past theory of [his] life and all conformity to the lives around [him] (10).
Because the courtship would require so much, the speaker warns away the suitor,
unless he is willing to seek him by stealth in some wood for trial (11). Only
in the marginal spaces of Paths will the suitor find the speaker as the new
husband or comrade (21). The peril of approaching the Beloved is equal to
that of reading his poems. Those poems, moreover, are evasive, for it is not
for what I put into it that I have written this book (32).
Of all the poems that may be considered cautionary in the sequence,
NewPerson is
the most resonant with Whoever (.28). That relation is weakly moderate, but is
best underscored by warning a suitor against his suppositions. To press that
point, the speaker of NewPerson asks the suitor if he believes friendship to
be an unalloy’d satisfaction (5). That metallurgical framing of friendship
suggests an unlikely but marvelous union of materials. In New Person those are
suggested by regard for trust, fidelity and heroism, all of which the speaker
offers as instances of maya, or illusion. That difficult union in Trickle is
troped by the wounds the speaker receives made to free you whence you were
prison’d (4). Those wounds also attend the confessional, sacrificial sense of
authorship summoned in Whoever, for they Stain every page, stain every song I
sing, every word I say (8). Yet, because the caution voiced in each poem is so
differently troped, there is only a weak correlative resonance (.18).
That capacity of the trope to level thematic resonance is clearly demonstrated in
the near zero correlations of
Multi with the cautionary Calamus content
Rossetti excluded from Poems. Multi congratulates the
suitor for identifying the speaker by secret and divine signs (2), even as the
poem cautions that recognition of a comrade can only proceed by such faint
indirections (6). The obstacle in recognition catalogued by NewPerson is
expecting a more socially scripted, idealistic relationship. Common to both
poems is the speaker acknowledging the interest of another at the cost of
prioritizing the Beloved above all others. Yet, because the poems so differently
address courtship and even recognition by another, they bear almost no
measurable relation (.03).
Q3: What is the relation of the Calamus content Rossetti sampled to Elemental
Drifts in Rossetti’s Walt Whitman group?
Resonance of Calamus and Ebb’d Part 1
Ebb’dPathsUntroddenScentedHerbageRootsLeavesBehold1 — her castawaysfor all who are, or men have been, young menthe many passing by Scents brought to men and women from the wild
woodsa Manhattanese2 — hoarse and sibilantthe Soul of the man I speak forimmortal reverberations through the States
To hear the sibyl one must nourish love.
The poet as sibyl, drawing only those who ready to hear.3 — seized by the spiritthe soul of man I speak for rejoices in
comradesO slender leaves! O blossoms of my blood!The prompt to wander wild-woodsA robust kiss4 — likenesses the life that exhibits itselfThat you hide in these shifting forms of lifePoems as roots reaching into the readerNonchalance dramatized in a kiss offered and returnedAverage cosine .40.53.55.31
As I followed the resonance of
Calamus into Ebb’d, in Rossetti’s Walt
Whitman cluster, I selected passages from the first two sections of Ebb’d I
thought might have counterparts in the Calamus content. I also shifted my
analysis from looking at the thematic resonance of entire poems to passages I
sensed following a rhetoric of disclosure modeled by portions of Ebb’d and
SP. In common for Tables 5-8, I first briefly outline the structure of those
non-Calamus poems Rossetti selected. I then examine their counterparts to the
Calamus excluded in Poems and so note that thematic
continuity if I could identify it. I italicize those
structural counterparts when suggested by the very language Whitman employed. In
Table 5, I could find Ebb’d counterparts in four Calamus poems excluded from
Poems, but did not find the Ebb’d structure of
part 2 as uniformly resonant with Calamus content examined in Table 6. In
measuring the similarity I detected, I gathered passages in the Calamus
content I found resonant with the non-Calamus content. That resulted in the
final row of Tables 5-8, in which I report the aggregated cosine of that
multi-passage similarity for each Calamus poem in relation to either Ebb’d
or SP passages. All passage to passage comparisons were either moderate or
strong in magnitude. Those far more consistently stable statements of thematic
resonance resulted from the tighter focus each demanded. While the poem to poem
comparisons reported in Tables 2-4 are useful in globally examining the
laud-caution tendency I find in Calamus, the passage-driven analysis of Tables
5-8 forced me to identify precisely how I found excluded Calamus content to be
in dialogue with material in Poems.
The castaways in
Edd’d trope all who wander, have wandered and will wander the
beach. While Paumanok is a birth site for Whitman who hears a fierce old
mother in the surf and embraces a father in the sand, Paumanok is more urgently
an elemental site of creation. The castaways of Edd’d then may also be found
in the young and old men whom Whitman addresses in Paths as much as in the
many passing by (6) the poems Whitman tropes as scented herbage, the scents of
foliage brought to those wandering the wild-wood, or the Manhattanese come with
a robust kiss for the Swarthy speaker. The sibilant surf of Ebb’d summons
the standards published and unpublished of Paths. In Scented the speaker
offers sibilant utterances in those immortal reverberations through the States
(25). That revealing spirit requires sympathetic magic, if not also sacrifice,
in RootsLeaves as its speaker promises the reader that love-buds will open If
you bring the warmth of the sun to them (9). In Behold the Whitman speaker
performs the sibilant function by drawing to him only those worthy in their
nonchalance. The spirit seizing the speaker of Ebb’d may also be understood,
alternately, as the soul rejoicing in comrades in Paths, while the spirit most
manifestly reveals itself in the poems of Scented speaker. Spirit seizure
prompts a robust kiss in Behold, while in RootsLeaves it is sensed in the
walkabouts of wild places. At Paumanok Whitman finds likenesses of himself
strewn on the beach. In Paths those likenesses are resonant with standards
exhibiting themselves as much in the drawing room as in the margins of
pond-waters. The Scented speaker finds likeness itself blurring the
boundaries between life and death, while Whitman’s catalogue of woodland wonders
in RootsLeaves are likened to poems exhorting love for the reader whoever you
are (7). Nonchalance is likened to the urge to bestow and return a kiss between
comrades in Behold.
Resonance of Calamus and Ebb’d Part 2 in Rossetti’s Walt
Whitman GroupItalicized passage represent poem quotes.Ebb’d 2PathsUntroddenScentedHerbageRootsLeavesLouisiana1 — I know notWriting to know, if only in retrospectKnowledge only comes in time and practice2 — the dirge, the voices of men and women wreck’sthe speaker escaping the clank of the worldThe dirge heard in recognition of death inseparably entwined with
lifeMen and women sufficiently dissatisfied with the conventional world
to seek authenticity in the natural3 — merge myselfthe margins of pond-watersImmersion within poems both bitter and beautifulA woodland walkThe poet as a live-oak 4 — the real Me stands yet untouch’dUnpublished standardsThe authentic self is that behind the mask of
materials5 — have not really understood anythingThat real reality hidden among forms of lifeThe poet disavowing the utility of his own tropeAverage cosine .33.70.32.33
The speaker of
Ebb’d is less a spokesperson for Everyman than Just Another
Person as seemingly strewn and randomly assembled in the detritus washed ashore.
That speaker makes no qualification for his ignorance at the start of the second
section. His not-knowing is that of other men and women deposited on shore by
the surf mother of whom they did not ask to be born. His oppression is daring to
speak sense to his condition; more so to ours: before all my arrogant poems the
real Me stands yet untouch’d, untold, altogether unreach’d (28). That abashed
humility finds counterpart in the Scented speaker who writes to be perused
best afterwards as much by his readers as himself. The RootsLeaves speaker
claims time and practice precede knowledge, for the intuited revelation of a
poem is only seed material for that greater to come. The dirge the Scented
speaker enjoins comes in recognition of our common end as both bitter and
beautiful. In RootsLeaves that dirge is the dissatisfaction with the
conventional world that prompts men and women to wander in wild spaces. In
Louisiana the speaker again senses himself in another natural world wonder: a
solitary live-oak rude, unbending, lusty (4). He, then, disavows the trope
because he could not prosper as solitarily since he thinks of little else (9)
than of friends. That unknown, authentic self of Ebb’d seeks the unpublished
standards in Paths. Death hiding in these shifting forms of life in
Scented does so for its own reasons beyond what the speaker can sense in other
than the material world obscuring the real reality (33).
The thematic resonance above identified brings evidence for the possibility that
the excluded
Calamus content is more largely at play in Poems than has been previously acknowledged. However, that resonance
indexed by the aggregate cosine relations of one poem to another simultaneously
illustrates that the thematic resonance suggested by words’ distributional sense
may and may not find complement between poems. The self-confessed ignorance in
Ebb’d only speaks in part to the confidence of a speaker dismissing some
standards but affirming others in Paths or proposing a trope for himself in
Louisiana and then resolving the poem by dismissing it.
Q4: Does the excluded content show resonance with the evangel-poem Starting from
Paumanok?
In the commentary below, I annotate hypertextual inquiry in responding to poem
excerpts and ideas reported in Table 8. I wanted to know if
Calamus content is
resonant in the non-Calamus poems Rossetti assembled to represent Whitman to a
UK Victorian audience. I selected Starting from Paumanok (SP) because the
sequence had always provided for Whitman a prelude-like purpose: from these origins I proceed because I was formed to do so.
The sequence also serves as a proxy for another prelude poem, the Song of
Myself sequence Rossetti chose neither to excerpt nor include in whole. In
particular, I wanted to know if the excluded Calamus content was resonant with
the poetics presented in SP.
While I could have more exhaustively catalogued such passage to passage resonance,
I opted to look at only those SP passages I found to be thematically present.
Accordingly, I confine my annotation to SP7 of
Poems,
which, as reported in Table 8, is either moderately or strongly
semantically resonant with the content from four Calamus poems Rossetti
excluded. While the cosine similarity score reported refers to the entire set of
words’ relationality from one passage to another, I reported the textual prompts
I found thematically resonant.
In the frame of
Calamus content, I find four components realized in SP7:An orienting poetic sprung from the natural world: I
will make poems of materialsStating subject matter: I will sing the song of
companionshipConsequents for that decision: I will therefore let
flame from the burning fires that were threatening to consume meStatement of commission: And who but I should be the
poet of comrades?
Correlations of Starting from Paumanok, 7 and Excluded
Calamus Content
SP7 componentPathsScentedRootsLeavesBehold1In the growth by margins of pond-watersHerbage, roots, leavesBreast-Sorrel, pinks of love, fingersSwarthy face, these gray eyes2 Joy in comradesI write, to be perused best afterwardsScents brought to men and womenComes one of Manhattanese3No longer abash’dI will say what I have to say by itselfGive a kiss in return4Manly attachmentSound myself and comrades onlyLove-buds put before youAmerican comrades land and seaAverage cosine .47.82.46.41
The poems found within the excluded
Calamus content reported in Table 7 entirely
spring from natural world settings. That may be done to naturalize or license
the prohibited content of the same-sex love that may be only indirectly named in
Poems. Perhaps, too, the settings resonate with the
larger Romantic sensibility of turning toward the natural world as a site of
authenticity. More certain is this: SP7 demonstrates either a high moderate or
strong resonance with this group of Calamus poems. In all of the poems, the
speaker identifies Nature as the spiritualized complement of human love.
Further, each of the speakers are declaratively bold for manly love and
camaraderie. Each speaker, moreover, can be identified as a moral spokesman. In
Paths the speaker is concerned for the standard of a fostering companionship
that can feed a soul. The false standards of pleasures, profits, conformities
(4) in Paths have long enough stifled and choked (51) the Scented speaker.
The common motivation of seeking companionship enfolds men and women in
RootsLeaves, as well as young persons wandering out in the fields when
winter breaks up (6). The Calamus poems become Love-buds put before you and
within you whoever you are (7). That community united by the need for
companionship fosters love in Behold, whose speaker returns the kiss of a
Manhattanese and allows it to become natural and nonchalant (7). Companionship
is so central of a standard in Louisiana that its speaker confesses that he
thinks of little else than his dear friends (8-9).
The template or form of
Calamus resonance I found apparent in SP7 is the
structure of resonance suggested only by that section. That suggested by SP13
takes own on its own rhetorical pattern and within the same magnitude of
resonance found in SP7:A figure of democracy summoned Whitman insisting that this figure sings for allPoems spring from whatever adheres and goes forward (163)The bard of personality (164) will declare all worthy and equal, even
while unifying our perceptions of separationAll poems and all things reference the soul
Correlations of Starting from Paumanok, 13 and Excluded
Calamus Content
SP13 component
PathsUntroddenScentedHerbageRootsLeavesBeholdSwarthy1for all who are, or men have been, young menDeath as the great leveler, the real realityAmerican comrades2the Soul of the man I speak foran example to loversan I who can return a kiss in the public room, or on the crossing of the street, or on the
ship’s deck3Bequeathing, hence, types of athletic loveHerbage as poems to be perused afterwards;
death and love are the perennial subjects of loversIf you become the aliment and the wet, [roots
and leaves] will become flowers, fruits, tall
branches and trees.Nonchalance 4the universal you as object of addressThe speaker’s use of we5Standards offered and reformed to feed the soulthat soul aware of death ascending even to the
atmosphere of loversAverage cosine .44.74.47.26
These poems excluded from
Poems resonate within the
rhetorical pattern of SP13. Rather than invoke a Ma Femme figure of democracy
in these poems, Whitman implies he is such a speaker. The subjects of these
poems — young and old men, the men and women who go a-Maying, American comrades
— number among Ma Femme’s brood beyond us and of us. Death is the
personified counterpart to Ma Femme in Scented, or the real reality awaiting
all behind the masks we employ to be perceived (33). However, Death is addressed
rather than addresses in Scented. Whitman’s various poem-level speakers serve
as proxies to Ma Femme in this group of poems. The commonality of her brood
Whitman finds in our moral condition of lovers’ mixed
desires to increase and be relieved from passion (Scented), and in what should
one day be a commonplace exchange of intimacy in the giving and return of a
kiss. The what goes forward of these poems is that athletic love (14), the
tendency of all poems to be understood best in retrospect (Scented), the
generative imperative seen in plant life and sensed in love, and the nonchalance
of all enabled to express that love (Behold).
The two rhetorical patterns discussed reveal strengths and weaknesses of the
associative reading method punctuated by similarity scoring. First, any pattern
is an inference that may or may not fit the sound and sense of a poem. Second,
that intuitive sense of fit I came to only by the strength of semantic resonance
underscored by similarity scoring. In both Whitman editions considered for the
present study,
Calamus content follows SP. Yet, in asking after the
foundational place for the Calamus content in Whitman’s work, I had to scroll
up on a monitor and turn back pages from the Calamus poems to examine their
resonance in SP. The structural patterns of Whitman’s evangel-poem preceding
even Song of Myself simply offer possible expressions of similar content, even
while suggesting the merit of a poetic sequence. The four poems excluded from
Poems exist in dialogue with one another, by
Whitman’s arrangement in the 1860 Leaves of Grass, as
much as do the 20 components of SP.
Discussion
This study refused to remain that of an almost quaintly removed drama of a
self-styled, self-taught 19th century American poet trying to secure a British
readership through a sympathetic critic, editor and advocate. In reviewing the
similar concerns — and sticking points — for commentators removed from one
another by more than 150 years, I sensed the present relevance of
Poems as a study in authorship aided by reception and
collaboration.
The author I sensed strode between the very different 1867
Leaves and Poems on two broad pathways. The
first is his unconditional egalitarianism; the second is by daring and
confessing to the hardships of loving others unrequited. That difficult love
perhaps most poignantly surveyed resides in Calamus. The love-longings Whitman
knew for both his own dear friends and an adoring reading
constituency escaped … from the pleasures, profits, conformities,/Which too
long I was offering to feed my soul. He confessed this unrequited
love in his career-long wooing of an audience he wished would grant him license
him to speak and be read beyond his own span of days. The authorship he desired,
however, had to be granted by others.
In his longing for acknowledgment and desire to speak authentically, Whitman keeps
company with a radically different, internationally-received and yet equally
idealistic Salman Rushdie reflecting on
The Satanic
Verses (1989). Despite the novelty and
importance of their respective projects, each was stymied by the same narrowly
moralistic reception that all but throttled authors set apart by a century. In
retrospect, telling the story of the life in hiding he bore with the name Joseph
Anton, Rushdie came to understand that his troubling and breakthrough novel
possessed its own life story:
When a book leaves its author’s desk it changes. Even before anyone has read it,
before
eyes other than its creator’s have looked upon a single phrase, it is
irretrievably altered. It
has become a book that can be read, that no longer belongs
to its maker. … It will make
its journey through the world and there is no longer anything the author can do
about it.
… The book has gone out into the world and the world has remade it.
That seeming agency of a literary creation, and certainly that of its readers,
troubled Whitman from
Poems forward. On his deathbed,
Whitman eagerly awaited the fourth slimmer volume of Leaves
that each of his editors promised would entice and prepare readers for his
accretive, ever growing life work published in nine editions from 1855 to 1892.
Folsom (1991) recounted how Whitman wanted to call the last sampling selected by
Edmund Clarence Stedman’s son, Arthur, Leaves, Junior in
ironic resignation to a literary culture dominated by anthologies and
textbooks.
I follow a reception-aided component of authorship into our present hypertextual
age. As Rushdie found,
Satanic Verses had become became
radically separate texts for those who would silence it as heretical and for
those who would defend it as an exemplar of free thought advanced in an open
society. Leaves as a literary work cannot be understood
apart from its various value-laden receptions. While it can be found in various
complete editions surveying its development from 1855 to 1892, it also is
partitioned in editions of Calamus generally faithful to the clusters Whitman
oversaw. Simultaneously, Calamus annotates and is annotated by a group of
contemporary photographers whose common subject matter is manly love . Perhaps equally unanticipated by Whitman is the present
availability of Walt Whitman’s Whisper: 36 Sex Poems
, which brings together the most explicit material from
Calamus and Children of Adam. Indeed, Leaves has
tracked vistas Whitman could only distantly imagine in a future Manhattan, where
only the frequent and swift flash of eyes offering me love could repay him
for his candor .
I offer the terms hypertext and resonance
for another age of reception in which observed an
inadequacy of descriptives in literary criticism for a way of speaking to the
intersection of art and history. Hypertext, that digital device often shaded in
blue, disrupts linearity and underscores the intertextuality that Nelson (1965)
identified in composition.
Resonance approximates the
relatedness of texts grouped by rhetorical function. However, the relationality
I sense among poems represents but a figure of the zodiac made visible not only
by the proximity of starry points in the universe of texts of assembled, but
also by their dynamic gravitational interactions. Other zodiac formations are
surely present.
Any set of corresponding passages may be indexed within the researcher’s concerns
by the field of associations believed to be most germane to the constitution of
those passages. Because I focused on the selected Whitman that Rossetti
presented to a Victorian readership, I restricted the semantic field under
consideration to
Poems and the 29 poems of Calamus
excluded. However, if I had asked how germane was Poems
to the assemblage of subsequent Whitman editions, then that semantic field
would have been radically different, as would each of the proximal weights a
term possesses in its relation to other terms. The passage to passage
correspondences I report uniformly exist as but singular expressions of a
semantic relatedness only within Poem’s space.
Accordingly, those statements of greater and lesser resonance can also be
understood as hyperlinks that at once disrupt and enrich
a particularly orchestrated reading experience.
The Whitman Archive, curiously, prompts a hypertextual sensibility because its
print predecessor imprints the e-edition posted by the Center. The structural
trope of book structure argues for its status as a self-contained object
, however proximate are other self-contained entities of e-book
editions. Despite all of its archival duty to Whitman’s original print editions,
the more dynamic sense of hypertext the reader must
provide. It is the same that Whitman himself experienced in his various
histories as the author of
Live Oak, with Moss,Calamus and the 1855 Leaves.
In tracing the evolution of the computer understood only to relieve humans of the
drudgework of thinking to opening up a new sort of thinking in the humanities,
McCarty (2012) proposes that the most important question before us is how we can
benefit the public imagination with a focus on literature akin to employing
telescopes in surveying the heavens. The justification of our work is, then, is
how we can contribute to the well-being of a citizenry. Examining the rich
semantic dialogue between editions produces its own meta-edition of that
enriched encounter that exists outside of thinking of authors as masterminds
behind particular print editions. It invites dialogue with present readers, who
ultimately can test their guiding assumptions within the radically descriptive
terrain of literary texts of interest.
Hypertext is a reader response strategy to the extent it engages with concerns
greater than a single reader’s experience with a text. Hypertext, in spirit,
delimits and makes possible the interpretive community to which a critical
interpretation appeals. However, annotating the mere presence of textual
dynamics is only the precursor for making an argument for the utility of doing
so. Regardless of the inherent properties deemed to be at work in a literary
text, I grant that readers create readerly texts, or opportunities, to comment
on those matters prompting interest after Fish (1980), who I first knew as a
Miltonist aware of the various interpretive camps in dialogue with one another
through the ages (1971). That reader-centered text-making I certainly employed
by following the literary rationale of a poetic sequence identified within and
between Whitman editions.
The hazard of any readerly writing of a literary text realized in interpretation
is researcher’s bias, or seeing what we wish to see based on the expectations of
inquiry. I argue that the distributed sense attending word usage brings a
necessary check to researcher’s bias in its extra-human capacity to index the
text created for interpretation, even if the text prompting interpretation
springs from one that any reader can encounter — regardless of who reads it and
for what purposes. It restores to texts their statuses as objects in the world,
however much each is a puzzle to which only the individual reader can respond
and however each reader responds as a member of an interpretive community. This
much should ease reception of those who believe the physical text of a poem is
sacrosanct . So does the digital humanist in recognizing the
plethora of texts so often available. The danger inherent to reading
hypertextually is that which attends any method: insisting that the marvel I see
is more urgent than those others have seen. I can write whatever text I wish to see in the star field of word to word
associations revealed by cosines. Simultaneously, and to my credit as a
reader-researcher, I must follow that associative rationale into the very theory
or discourse I believe constitutes the marvels I sense.
The largest stake of the present study is demonstrating a method that permits
literary texts to speak within their own assembled star fields of meaning
without insisting that they speak only as prescribed by an interpretive
community. In that charge I put my understanding of literary indirection to the
test. Whitman’s lauds and cautions in the
Calamus sequence are as likely to
motivate some poems as they are to exclusively define the lyricism of others.
More important than those mechanics of presentation, however, is the terrain
mapped by the word to word proximal semantics. Despite Rossetti excluding most
of the Calamus sequence, its sometimes laudatory, sometimes cautious take on
manly love pervades Poems, if only in the permissible
sense of the love of comrades underlying the radical inclusion Whitman expected
would be foundational to a new republic. Poems, then,
succeeded in offering the first sample tolerably fair chance [Whitman] has had
of making his way with English readers on his own showing 13 years after
Rossetti learned of the 1855 Leaves.
It presently succeeds in pointing toward a Whitman larger than a particular
edition of his poems. Through Poems I find both the
tireless speaker for democratic inclusion and a speaker, at times, exhausted by
the indirection required to woo the Beloved.
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