Kenneth M. Price

Periodical literature in nineteenth-century America

Covering the decades from the 1830s through the end of the century, as well as the eastern, southern, and western regions of the United States, these essays, by a diverse group of scholars, examine a variety of periodicals from the well-known Atlantic Monthly to small papers such as The National Era. They illustrate how literary analysis can be enriched by consideration of social history, publishing contexts, the literary marketplace, and the relationships between authors and editors.

Debating Manliness: Thomas Wentworth Higginson, William Sloane Kennedy, and the Question of Whitman

In 1908 William Sloane Kennedy, one of Walt Whitman’s close allies in his final years, wrote a barbed essay entitled ‘‘Euphrasy and Rue for T. W. Higginson,’’ heretofore unpublished. Intriguingly, Kennedy noted at the top of the first manuscript leaf: ‘‘N.B. not written for publication during the present generation . . . or the next—.’’ This restriction on publication allowed for outspoken criticism of Whitman’s antagonist Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a longtime acquaintance of Kennedy himself. Surprisingly, the restriction also emboldened Kennedy to attack Whitman’s ‘‘dearest friends’’ —William Douglas O’Connor and Horace Traubel—as actually the poet’s ‘‘greatest enemies.’’ 3 ‘‘Euphrasy and Rue’’ (Kennedy’s title quotes Paradise Lost to suggest a failure of vision) would deserve publication if it were only a lively and insightful document shedding light on Whitman’s reputation. But this essay has further value because it illuminates in stark fashion the politics of late-nineteenth-century literary criticism: in this case, how literary judgments intervened in and were influenced by contested discursive constructions of gender identity, sexual predilections, and class status. Kennedy, a minister’s son from Oxford, Ohio (1850–1929), graduated from Yale University in 1875 and attended Harvard Divinity School, leaving without taking a degree. In 1879 he joined the staff of the Philadelphia American and began a career as a journalist and literary figure; in the 1880s he worked for the Boston Evening Transcript. During his Boston years, he developed a friendship with Whitman that led to many visits and an extended correspondence. He became a prolific writer, publishing biographies of Longfellow and Whittier, studies

Ordering Chaos: An Integrated Guide and Online Archive of Walt Whitman's Poetry Manuscripts

In order to organize the widely dispersed manuscripts of Walt Whitman, The Walt Whitman Archive, in partnership with the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries, has utilized the power of Encoded Archival Description (EAD) to create a single, scholarly enhanced guide to Whitmans poetry manuscripts. This integrated finding guide to Whitmans poetry manuscripts includes item-level description, links to repository guides that provide both location information and collection context, links to digital images of the manuscripts, and links to Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) transcriptions. In creating such a guide, we had to work cooperatively across disciplines and institutions, expand the use of EAD, and address how best to integrate description and transcription (EAD and TEI files). This essay describes our procedure as we created the integrated guide. From collecting finding aids and creating partnerships with other institutions, to developing a proper encoding standard and establishing good cross-department working relations, our project has embodied many of the benefits and challenges of digital work in the humanities. By identifying our procedures, and by laying out our future hurdles, we hope we can advance knowledge about Whitman and about how scholars and archivists can collaborate effectively to advance research, improve access, and realize the potential of EAD.

Sixty-Eight Previously Uncollected Reviews of Walt Whitman

the story of walt whitman’s reCePtion history grows more fascinating as additional documents gradually come to light. we have listed here all reviews identified since the publication of Walt Whitman: The Contemporary Reviews (1996), edited by Kenneth m. Price, including a handful that have been posted on the Walt Whitman Archive in the meantime. in the following pages, we reproduce in full or in part those reviews that seem to us most illuminating. (all of the listed new reviews will be made available in their entirety on the Whitman Archive shortly after publication in the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review.) the reviews collected here span the entire range of whitman’s writing career, from his temperance novel Franklin Evans (1842) to the so-called deathbed edition of Leaves of Grass (1891-1892), and they address every edition of Leaves as well as “a child’s reminiscence,” As a Strong Bird on Pinions Free, Two Rivulets, Memoranda During the War, November Boughs, Specimen Days & Collect, Good-Bye My Fancy, william michael rossetti’s 1868 British edition (Poems by Walt Whitman), and Ernest rhys’s 1886 British edition (Leaves of Grass: The Poems of Walt Whitman). these reviews also represent the views of critics on both sides of the atlantic (and include irish and Scottish perspectives). whitman’s long-term critical reception has its roots in the reviews that were published during his lifetime. many of the same ideas and themes that emerged in other previously collected contemporary reviews—as well as in the critical debates that continued after whitman’s death—are evident in the reviews collected here. for example, many of the american reviews tended to take an extreme view, either proclaiming whitman to be the american homer or Shakespeare or condemning him for being obscene and vulgar. in an early 1860 review, “umos” unequivocally declares that whitman’s work is not poetry: “my private opinion expressed to you confidentially is, that whitman found a lot of dictionary-pi going on at auction, bought it for a song, employed a chinese type-setter from the Bible house to set it up in lines of unequal length, and then sold it to you as an original Poem.” reviewers attacked both the form and content of Leaves of Grass. “a more scandalous volume we never saw,” declares The Springfield Daily Republican in June of 1860. “it ought to be enough for walt whitman, if

Tolerance and Elimination in Whitman's "Land of all Ideas": A Complex Prose Manuscript and a Previously Unknown Letter Fragment

Reproduces a previously unpublished Reconstruction-era Whitman prose manuscript, with, on one side, two paragraphs of a partial draft of the first installment of Whitman’s New York Weekly Graphic series, “’Tis But Ten Years Since,” and on the other side a fragment of a previously unknown letter; analyzes ways that the manuscript allows us to understand Whitman’s attack on extremism, whether it originated in the North or South.

Be radical-be radical-be not too damned radical!: The Origins and Resonance of Whitman's Signature Expression

Examines Whitman’s fondness for “putting forth two assertions followed by a negation cutting against the grain of emphasis” and tracks the source of this pattern to Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Qveene, then suggests the larger ramifications of what Whitman called ”the not-too-damned sure spirit.”