I Contain Multitudes
A New Life of Walt Whitman
I Contain Multitudes
A New Life of Walt Whitman
Lively and entertaining, this is the first comprehensive biography of Walt Whitman in more than twenty-five years, drawing on significant new discoveries and scholarship.
Walt Whitman is not only one of the most influential and popular poets in American history but also a symbol of American character and independence, as important to our nation’s identity as Abraham Lincoln, Harriet Beecher Stowe, or Louis Armstrong. While his poetry and exuberant style still inspire writers today, our understanding of his life is due for an update. It has been over a quarter of a century since the last full-length biography of Whitman, and in that time several works by Whitman have been rediscovered—including a novel and a men’s health manual—that put Whitman in a new light. In I Contain Multitudes, Eric G. Wilson draws on these discoveries to give us a fresh life of Whitman, one that reveals him to be more playful, flexible, and pragmatic than we had known.
Whitman emerges here as an artist adept in almost every literary genre. Across these varied writings, he fashioned a comedic vision based on the multifariousness of the cosmos. In his life as well, he created a wide range of personae. Like an experienced actor, Whitman had many roles and selves at the ready: the urban dandy, the Broadway bohemian, the humble Civil War nurse. Wilson’s portrait casts well-studied Whitman traits in a new light: his radical egalitarianism, he shows, was suffused with humor—to be a good citizen meant not taking yourself too seriously—and his famous powers of empathy resulted in darkly funny challenges to oppressive hierarchies.
Wilson tells Whitman’s life in dozens of brief, vivid segments, an innovative approach that reflects Whitman’s own existential and literary brio. Presenting the multitudinous Whitman with both stylistic gusto and scholarly rigor, I Contain Multitudes reads as much like a novel as the authoritative biography it is.
608 pages | 43 halftones | 6 x 9
History: American History
Literature and Literary Criticism: American and Canadian Literature
Table of Contents
1. Prologue
Spoiled Brain
Quiet Play of Pros with Cons
The Multitudes
2. A Child Went Forth
The Sound of Walking Barefoot
A Floor Laid with Your Own Hands
Flower of Her Temperament
Flashes and Specks
Packing, Carting, Unpacking, Repeat
Novel Sorties
Pallid Slivers
“Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking”
3. Brooklyn and Manhattan
Dark Green Curtain
Nimrod Wildfire
Electric Personal Idiosyncrasy
“O Me! O Life!”
Quick-Eyed and Wondrous Race
“Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”
4. Teaching School
The Great Fire of New York
Dirty-Faced Urchins and Moth-Eaten Desk
Kill the Teacher
“When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer”
Making Do
Locofoco
New Sermons
5. The Business of Writing
Genre Master
Franklin Evans
New York Aurora
Laying Out the Columns
Tammany Hall
6. Brooklyn Daily Eagle
The Mad Poet of Broadway
“The Sleepers”
My Boys and Girls
Heart Music
The Pleasantist Sit
Crime Reporting
Slavery
7. New Orleans
Strange Vivacity and Rattle
Miss Dusky Grisette
I Sing the Body Electric
I Become Any Presence
Dots
8. Irony
The West
Real Estate
Dough-Face
Jack Engle
9. Foreground
Copious Bookman
Phrenology, Wunderkammers, Hieroglyphs
Daguerreotype
American Painting
Slang
Notebooks
Give the Real Thing
Summer Duck
Body and Soul
10. Leaves of Grass (1855)
Damned Flamboyant
Humor and Democracy
Wit and Wisdom
Buffalo Strength
11. Leaves of Grass (1856)
Touches a Man
Sage and Satyr
Like Two Beasts
12. Quicksand Years
To Stir First for Money
Manly Health and Training
Too Much Procreation
Fred Vaughan
“Live Oak, with Moss”
The Talk of Those Turning Eyeballs
13. Leaves of Grass (1860–61)
Bohemia
Counter Jumper
I Am Walt Whitman!
A Man at the Door
Quivering Jelly of Love
Fresh, Aquatic, Pungent
Better to Have People Stirred Against You
Go-to-Hell-and Find-Outativeness
14. The Civil War
War Is Inaugurated
Amputated Feet
Wound Dresser
Washington
Andrew and Jesse
Bread and Molasses for Supper
Hospitals
15. Drum-Taps
The Real War Will Never Get into Books
Tom and Lewy
Death Is Nothing Here
Convulsiveness
16. Good Gray Poet
A Disagreeable Head
Lincoln
“When Lilacs Last in the Door-Yard Bloom’d”
Peter Doyle
The Blue Book
Hagiography
17. Reconstruction
Leaves of Grass (1867)
Democratic Vistas
The Whites Are My Brothers
Ethiopia Commenting
An American in England
Killed in a Railroad Accident
Leaves of Grass (1871–72)
“Passage to India”
18. Stroke
Paralysis, on My Left Side, and Especially the Leg
Great Dark Cloud of My Life
Camden Columbus
Poor-Mouthing
Two Rivulets
Behind the Mask
Harry Stafford
Anne Gilchrist
Cosmic Consciousness
19. Leaves of Grass (1881–82)
Lincoln Lecturer
World Literature
Confessions of a Half-Paralytic
The Prairies
Consecutiveness and Ensemble
Comstockery
Specimen Days
Oscar Wilde
Bram Stoker
20. The Herald Poems
Harleigh Tomb
Horace Traubel
Mickle Street
Happenings, Nothing More
November Boughs
Six Children
Johnstown Flood
Good-Bye My Fancy
The Strongest and Sweetest Songs
21. Epilogue
The Mind Wanders
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Notes
Bibliographical Note
Works Cited
Index