Walt Whitman on Fire: Brian Selznick\u27s <i>Live Oak, With Moss</i>.

Review of Brian Selznick\u27s Live Oak, With Moss. Abrams ComicArts, 2019. 192 pp

Whitman in Art: The Case of Paul Peter Piech

Over thirty years ago, I readily accepted an invitation from Paul Piech (1920-1996)and duly made my way to a small bungalow on an estate on the outskirts of Porthcawl. His interest in Whitman, he explained, dated all the way back to his youth, and originally owed something to the fact that he himself was not only a New Yorker but a Brooklyn boy, whose working-class background chimed with that of Whitman, as did the values he had imbibed from that background broadly correspond to those he felt he encountered in the poet’s work. As an artist, his specialty was linocuts and, realizing that 1992 would mark the centenary of Whitman’s death, he was engaged in an ambitious project to produce a series of images to mark that occasion. Since Piech’s aims as an artist were, like Whitman’s, crusading ones, his only concern was that his images reach as wide an audience as possible, so that they could do their work. To this end, he insisted that should his prints be framed, those should be cheap to maximize circulation. When I happened to mention I was due to return to Harvard as Visiting Professor in the autumn of 1991, his eyes immediately lit up. “I’ll give you a set of my Whitman prints for distribution over there,” he exclaimed. “But what should I charge for them?” I cautiously asked. “Nothing,” he replied. “Just give them to the kids.” He was as good as his word. When I did duly arrive in Harvard, I found a generous selection of his prints awaiting me—sent entirely at his own expense. And give them to the kids of course I did, little realizing that some of Piech’s prints were so highly valued that they were held at the prestigious Victoria and Albert Museum in London. The eminent Victoria and Albert Museum in London owns 2,000 of his prints and in 2016 it published a fascinating monograph of him. Today a print fetches some $600: Paul Piech would be at once amused and appalled

Dara Barnat. <i>Walt Whitman and the Making of Jewish American Poetry</i>.

Review of Dara Barnat. Walt Whitman and the Making of Jewish American Poetry. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2023. 202 pp

Allen Crawford Image Gallery

oai:wwqr:id:33969A gallery of images from Allen Crawford\u27s Whitman Illuminated Collection, courtesy of Cataloging, Metadata, &amp; Digitization and Special Collections and Archives, University of Iowa Libraries

Walt Whitman: A Current Bibliography, Summer/Fall 2024

Walt Whitman: A Current Bibliography, Summer/Fall 2024

Filaments of Word and Image: A Fragmented Reflection on Allen Crawford’s <i>Whitman Illuminated: Song of Myself</i>

A fragmented reflection on the engagement with and teaching of Allen Crawford’s Whitman Illuminated. Necessarily so. As Whitman stated, "There can be no theory of any account unless it corroborate the theory of the earth." If I were to set forth a reflection upon the Earth, it would involve a series of fragmented glimpses from the atom (and smaller) all the way up. That is, I’d attend to several parts pointing toward their relationship to the whole. The challenge, of course, is that every part is its own universe unto itself; one could spend a lifetime and never move from the atom to the molecule. A reflection on Allen Crawford\u27s Whitman Illuminated: Song of Myself is an equally daunting task. Every detail of every illumination is its own part. Often, these parts correspond to phrases from Whitman\u27s poem in surprising ways. And as each phrase, word, and sound from Whitman is its own universe, the complexity of relationships compound with a vertiginous velocity. And so, with every figure and passage I include in this reflection, I provide discussion, but 22 years of teaching has shown me that the discussion is woefully incomplete. I have spent over an hour with students their corresponding text, not unlike a cellular biologist who spends just as much time exploring the mitochondria with students. Here, I deemed it best to include multiple illuminations to better give a sense of the whole. Concerning wholes, the parts of this reflection cohere toward what Whitman may have meant by "original energy," toward Eros, and toward the poiesis of the ever reaching tirelessly spinning words and images launched forth by Whitman and Crawford

Delphine Rumeau. <i>Comrade Whitman: From Russian to Internationalist Icon</i>.

Review of Delphine Rumeau. Comrade Whitman: From Russian to Internationalist Icon. Academic Studies Press, 2024. 376 pp

F. W. Dobbs-Allsopp. <i>Divine Style: Walt Whitman and the King James Bible</i>.

Review of F. W. Dobbs-Allsopp. Divine Style: Walt Whitman and the King James Bible. Cambridge, U.K.: Open Book Publishers, 2024. xxiii + 386 pp. Available to read and download online at openbookpublishers.com

An Undetected Echo of Tennyson's "Ulysses" in Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass"

This discovery article explores the previously unrecognized semantic resonance between the concluding verses of Alfred Lord Tennyson's poem "Ulysses" and Walt Whitman's poem "The Untold Want." The English and American poets were not only contemporaries but also friends who admired each other's work and corresponded over the course of two decades. In pursuing a daring Ulysses-like voyage "to seek and find," Whitman was paying tribute to his fellow poet's questing spirit.&nbsp

Whitman's Fourth Known Self-Review of Leaves of Grass (1855)

Unknown to scholars of Whitman, a fourth self-review of Whitman's first edition Leaves of Grass has been hiding in newsprint since 1855. This short piece, published in August 1855, not only provides another early glimpse of Whitman’s views of his own poetry and its need for public curation, but also hints at previously unknown journalistic writing or editorial work Whitman may have produced during this period. This self-review, titled “A Poet Showing the New York Muscle,” made its original appearance in the New York Sunday Dispatch, a literary weekly, for August 26, 1855, page 4. It is reprinted here for the first time since 1855, and finally under the poet’s own name