[Richard Wakefield]

The current New York Review of Books has a big article on Whitman and the 150th anniversary of Leaves of Grass. I'd like to know how people line up in the preferences for the first (1855) edition versus the more familiar 1889 (or thereabouts) edition. There's a more general question concerning concision versus expansiveness in poetry, but it's impossible to separate that question from the particular poem that's being considered in its longer and shorter versions. There's a good more-or-less variorum edition of Leaves of Grass available, by that way -- but reading it can be like wallowing through every thought ever gleaned from Walt's teeming brain.
Richard

[nyctom]

From the www.nypl.org website:

“I Am With You”: Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (1855–2005)

From September 9, 2005 through January 8, 2006
Sue and Edgar Wachenheim III Gallery (First Floor)
Humanities and Social Sciences Library, 5th Avenue and 42nd Street, New York, NY 10018-2788


This exhibition commemorates the 150th anniversary of the publication of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. Whitman revised and added to his great poem throughout his life, and the exhibition will feature first and rare editions of the major versions, as well as manuscript drafts, books, and trial proofs annotated in the poet’s hand. The exhibition will also indicate Whitman’s influence on the Beats, his most obvious literary heirs, through manuscripts and rare books containing works by Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and others. Enhancing the exhibition’s visual appeal will be fine press and livre d’artiste imprints, as well as photographs of the poet and of the American countryside and cityscapes whose grandeur he praised.

The items on view will be drawn primarily from the holdings of the Library's Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, with additional material from other New York Public Library collections. The exhibition’s title is taken from a phrase in the section of the poem called "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry."


--That's the library with the beloved lions out front.

[Robert J. Clawson]

Originally posted by nyctom

"--That's the library with the beloved lions out front."

Oh, I remember it well. I think I'd just turned 17 and had asked a librarian if I could read the first edition of Hart Crane's "The Bridge."

This is NOT a fantasy. She took me to the rare books room and placed a first edition on a pedestal, where I read it, lit by a shaft of sunlight pouring from a skylight.

Down Fifth noon leaked,
Riptooth of a ripe imagination.

I shall never forget it. What a beautiful librarian.

Bob



[This message has been edited by Robert J. Clawson (edited September 10, 2005).]

[Robert J. Clawson]

Originally posted by nyctom

"--That's the library with the beloved lions out front."

Oh, I remember it well. I think I'd just turned 17 and had asked a librarian if I could read the Black Sun edition of Hart Crane's "The Bridge."

This is NOT a fantasy. She took me to the rare books room and placed a first edition on a pedestal, where I read it, lit by a shaft of sunlight pouring from a skylight.

Down Fifth noon leaked,
Riptooth of the ripe imagination.

I shall never forget it. What a beautiful librarian.

Bob

[Richard Wakefield]

Tom, speaking of WW's influence on the Beats, I have heard that Ginsberg invested great energy and time into researching a sequence of possible sexual contacts that linked him to Whitman, proving that at a remove of half a dozen so degrees, he had had sex with the great sage. If anyone knows of documentation of Ginsberg's quest, I'd like to know about it.

Bob, your experience is a poem all by itself.
RPW

[nyctom]

Actually Truman Capote used to play a game with his high society friends called "Daisy Chain," where you would link one person to someone completely, let's just say, disparate, though their sexual partners. It's in one of the bios. Very fascinating.

Bob, oh librarians can be the nicest people. When I was doing research on Victorian pornography for one of my senior theses (the other one, ironically, was on shamanism in Walt's "Drum Taps" poems), I went to Princeton to see their collection of Victorian pictoral porn (lots of libraries have them--you just have to ask!). Well, the librarian there said, "I just found a book a few weeks ago about children's portraits in the Victorian era, and I remember there being some kiddie porn in there." She ended up spending about five hours looking for it--and indeed there were some shots of kiddie porn, the most heartbreaking of which was an early photo, about 1860s or so, of a ten year-old prostitute who was about seven months pregnant. Pretty appalling.

[Richard Wakefield]

I'll look for the Capote passage, although I'm not sure I actually want to read very many detailed Daisy Chains -- on the other hand, it could be funny.
Your account of the Victorian kiddie porn is appalling and heartbreaking, indeed, but also a useful reminder that the supposed decline in morals didn't begin with the end of the Chatterly ban and the Beatles first LP. I think most people feel the world has grown more coarse and crass, and if pressed they'd date the decline from a time that happens to coincide with their own sexual awakening, that time when one discovers that others -- even and especially those we've admired and depended upon -- are motivated by dark or at least very private, primitive urges. And that brings me back to Whitman. Way back in the middle of the nineteenth century he declared those urges not dark and sinister but luminous and holy. He is probably no more congenial to pornographers than to Puritans. I do wish sometimes that he could preach his gospel more succinctly, though.
RPW