The Evolution of Walt Whitman - The Walt Whitman Archive PDF
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The Evolution of Walt Whitman THE EVOLUTION OF Walt Whitman AN EXPANDED EDITION By Roger Asselineau Foreword by Ed Folsom University of Iowa Press Iowa City University of Iowa Press, Iowa City 52242 Copyright© 1999 by the University of Iowa Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America http://www.uiowa.edu/~uipress No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, without permission in writing from the publisher. All reasonable steps have been taken to contact copyright holders of material used in this book. The publisher would be pleased to make suitable arrangements with any whom it has not been possible to reach. Printed on acid-free paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Asselineau, Hoger. The evolution of Walt Whitman I by Hoger Asselineau; foreword by Ed Folsom.-An expanded ed. p. em. Originally published: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1960-1962. Contents: The creation of a personality-The creation of a book. ISBN o-87745-682-8 (paper) 1. Whitman, Walt, 181g-1892. 2. Poets, American- 19th century-Biography. I. Title. PS3231.A833 1999 811' .3-dc21 [B] 99 00 01 02 03 p 4 3 2 The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press originally published The Evolution of Walt Whitman: The Creation of a Personality in 1960, followed by The Evolution of Walt Whitman: The Creation of a Book in 1962. To the memory of my parents and Paule, my wife CONTENTS Foreword by Ed Folsom Introduction The Creation of a Personality The Creation of a Book FOREWORD By Ed Folsom This reprinting of Roger Asselineau's classic critical work is a culminating moment in the University of Iowa Press's ongo ing commitment to Whitman scholarship. In the late 198os, when I began to work with the University of Iowa Press to gather a group of outstanding books about Walt Whitman, one goal was to mingle the several active generations of Whitman scholars. I wanted-through the process of review, through collections of essays, and through the publishing of books by both established and beginning critics-to bring promising young scholars into contact with the still-active group of se nior scholars who had written the standard biographies, edited the definitive collections of texts, and written the criticism that had opened the field of modern Whitman studies. The first book in the informal Iowa series was by one of the venerable senior scholars, Edwin Haviland Miller, who had col lected and edited Whitman's correspondence and had written the first detailed psychological study of Whitman. For the Iowa series, he produced Walt Whitmans "Song of Myself": A Mo saic of Interpretations (1989), in which he culled over a century of commentary on Whitman's great poem and offered a kind of variorum of criticism on the poem, joining recent controversial interpretations with established standard readings. Miller also produced for Iowa the first selected volume of Whitman's let ters, Selected Letters of Walt Whitman (1990). Then, as the centennial of Whitman's death approached in 1992, Robert K. Martin gathered a collection of essays under the title The Con- FOREWORD X tinuing Presence of Walt Whitman: The Life after the Life (1992), bringing together distinguished poets and critics from several generations to discuss Whitman's influence, especially on the homosexual tradition in American literature. My own collection, Walt Whitman: The Centennial Essays (1994), put three generations of Whitman scholars in conversation with each other, including the distinguished senior group of Gay Wilson Allen, Roger Asselineau, C. Carroll Hollis, and James E. Miller Jr. Allen and Asselineau reappeared in Walt Whitman and the World (1995), which I edited with Gay Allen and for which Roger Asselineau compiled the sections on Whitman's impact on French, Belgian, Portuguese, and Italian cultures. The Iowa Whitman series continued to explore Whitman's in ternational impact with Walter Griinzweig's groundbreaking Constructing the German Walt Whitman (1995), and recently Joann P. Krieg's invaluable Whitman Chronology (1998) joined the cluster. Roger Asselineau's book underscores and forwards the goal of the Iowa series, which has from its beginnings sought to remind readers of the complex weave of the traditions of Whit man scholarship. The reprinting of Asselineau's magisterial work of criticism makes it available again to younger scholars and perpetuates a proud tradition in the Whitman scholarly community, where different generations of scholars have col laborated rather than competed with each other. The new Iowa edition of The Evolution of Walt Whitman should now occupy a prominent place on any scholar's shelf of Whitman criticism. It is a publication that is at once retrospective and prospective, taking us back to the origins of modern Whitman scholarship at the same time that it continues to influence emerging scholarship. To call a critical work "magisterial" today probably sounds naive or at least quaint, but it is the right adjective for Asseli neau's book. It is one of those massive critical accomplish-
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