In responding to my last post, “Voice of the turtle,” Jonathan Langford wrote:
It’s interesting that in your reading, Whitman — who was all about “voice” — is actually print-oriented, while Joseph Smith (source of some of our most striking scriptural quotes about the importance of written records, including but not limited to scriptures) is oriented toward [the] speaking voice.
I was, myself, surprised to learn that Matt Miller, in Collage of myself : Walt Whitman and the making of Leaves of grass, apparently argues that Whitman speculated that Leaves of grass might be a novel or a play as late as 1854, the year before the first edition was published.[i] But then I had never heard before what Miller claims to have discovered examining Whitman’s manuscripts: that Whitman was cutting up and re-working his texts, and many others, in search of a form.[ii] He had the title; he hadn’t yet discovered the form. But it throws a new light on his use of “leaves” in the title.
Langford then asks a question of me that deserves clarification before I move on:
Harking back to your posts on the text of Joseph Smith’s epistle from Liberty Jail: is it your sense that the revelations in the Doctrine and Covenants excerpted/edited from that letter have all the speaking voice removed from them? Or is some of it still there?
I answered that, as regards Joseph Smith, I believe that it would be impossible to edit out the voice from Joseph Smith’s revelations. Even reading them aloud from Doctrine and Covenants in the verse structure that has been imposed on them by analogy with the Bible, I hear the rhythms of the speaking voice, especially the long, rolling sentences and the movement between topics by association. I’ve always heard that voice, muted; I trained myself to hear it more clearly largely by formatting several of the texts as long-line free verse, not so much on the model of Whitman as on the model adapted by Royal Skousen for The Book of Mormon : the earliest text,[iii] what Skousen calls “sense lines.” Since these revelations were dictated by Smith, the punctuation in the original mss. is that of his scribes. Skousen goes even further, concluding from his work with the original and printer’s manuscripts of the Book of Mormon that
[h]is dictation did not indicate punctuation, sentence structure, or paragraphing. These he left, ultimately, to the discretion of the printer. Consequently, The Earliest Text constitutes a scholarly effort to present to the reader a dictated rather than a written text. To that end, I have decided to adopt a sense-line format.[iv]
Skousen defines his sense-line format as “the way the lines of text are broken up according to phrases and clauses.”[v] I agree with Skousen in this endeavour. Volumes so far released in the Joseph Smith Papers Project actually reinforce my sense of Smith’s voice, given the care with which the mss. are transcribed.
As regards the further irony of Smith’s verbal concern for written records, his dictations were writing, as far as he was concerned — he was dictating to scribes. But then there’s that lovely letter to William W. Phelps of 27 Nov 1832, which he dictated to Frederick G. Williams, then in part copied out in his own hand, in which he says “Oh Lord God deliver us in thy due time from the little narrow prison almost as it were totel darkness of paper pen and ink and a crooked broken scattered and imperfect language”[vi] {that’s verbatim from the re-write in his own hand — no punctuation}. If I break that into lines, it comes out:
Oh Lord God deliver us in thy due time
from the little narrow prison almost as it were
totel darkness of paper pen and ink
and a crooked broken scattered and imperfect language
Not strictly sense lines, but the way I think they read best. By this time in his career, it’s pretty clear to me that Smith’s writing and spelling are good for a man of his education. According to the introduction to this letter in the second Documents volume of the Joseph Smith papers, “Record keeping was of great concern to JS at this time. … Probably only a few months before writing this November letter to Phelps, JS composed his first history.”[vii] On the same day he composed this letter, he began his first journal.[viii] I wonder whether the attempt to write those items in his own hand might not have led to the frustration expressed above.
Smith was not a poet, a novelist, a dramatist. Whitman apparently wasn’t sure what he was, at first. But Whitman presents an interesting example of a strain of literature in English that had been growing for about 150 years, since Daniel Defoe started publishing: the introduction of journalism into fiction. Defoe published The life and adventures of Robinson Crusoe, A journal of the plague year, and The fortunes and misfortunes of the famous Moll Flanders as genuine personal histories, not as the novels they were. Richardson published Pamela, or, Virtue rewarded and Clarissa, or, The history of a young lady… as true accounts of the lives of working-class women. On the title page of the latter, he claims the book was “Published by the editor of Pamela, Samuel Richardson.” These were books written by businessmen as ventures to attract a new audience, one of middle-class merchants like themselves, and of literate tradesmen, people who had both the education and leisure to read.
So, how did this translate into verse for Walt Whitman? I thought you’d never ask.
According to Betsy Erkkila, Whitman fits squarely into this lineage. In her preface to Whitman the political poet she writes “In tracing Whitman’s development from his early work as a journalist and popular writer to his later work in poetry and prose, I shall be concerned with the interactive relation of writing and history, politics and art.” I can find many passages in Leaves of grass that reflect that “interactive relation.” Here is one, selected almost at random, from the 1855 edition. It comes from what he would later call “Song of Myself,” although none of the poems in that first edition had titles. “Song of Myself” begins the collection; its opening lines are probably the most famous in all his corpus: “I celebrate myself, / And what I assume you shall assume, / For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.” So this selection is part of the poet’s role, part of his being, part of his bearing of witness, an atom belonging to him. (The ellipses are Whitman’s punctuation; they do not represent editorial omissions by me.)
I tell not the fall of Alamo …. not one escaped to tell the fall of Alamo,
The hundred and fifty are dumb yet at Alamo.
Hear now the tale of a jetblack sunrise,
Hear of the murder in cold blood of four hundred and twelve young men.
Retreating they had formed in a hollow square with their baggage for breastworks,
Nine hundred lives out of the surrounding enemy’s nine times their number was
the price they took in advance,
Their colonel was wounded and their ammunition gone,
They treated for an honorable capitulation, received writing and seal,
gave up their arms, and marched back prisoners of war.
They were the glory of the race of rangers,
Matchless with a horse, a rifle, a song, a supper or a courtship,
Large, turbulent, brave, handsome, generous, proud and affectionate,
Bearded, sunburnt, dressed in the free costume of hunters,
Not a single one over thirty years of age.
The second Sunday morning they were brought out in squads and massacred ….
it was beautiful early summer,
The work commenced about five o’clock and was over by eight.
None obeyed the command to kneel,
Some made a mad and helpless rush …. some stood stark and straight,
A few fell at once, shot in the temple or heart …. the living and dead lay together,
The maimed and mangled dug in the dirt …. the newcomers saw them there;
Some half-killed attempted to crawl away,
These were dispatched with bayonets or battered with the blunts of muskets;
A youth not seventeen years old seized his assassin till two more came to release him,
The three were all torn, and covered with the boy’s blood.
At eleven o’clock began the burning of the bodies;
And that is the tale of the murder of the four hundred and twelve young men,
And that was a jetblack sunrise.[ix]
This narrative later became section 34 of “Song of myself,” but in the first edition the sections were not numbered, just as the poems were not titled. Large stretches of this sound very much like a news account, and could have been cut and pasted from one. And Whitman presents the details as a reporter, not as a witness. According to Blodgett and Bradley, the event reported here “is the tale of the massacre by the Mexican enemy of Captain Fannin and his company of 371 Texans after their surrender at Goliad, March 27, 1836,”[x] at which time Whitman was 18 and working as a printer in New York City, or as a teacher on Long Island. This fits the pattern that Sean Cole reported from Kenneth Price, who “says Whitman got his real education from newspapers – working for them, I mean, setting type, and then later, reporting.”[xi]
When he printed the final edition of Leaves of grass in 1891-92, Whitman made mainly changes in punctuation to section 34. But he revised the opening lines to assert his status as a witness:
Now I tell what I knew in Texas in my early youth
(I tell not the fall of Alamo,
Not one escaped to tell the fall of Alamo,
The hundred and fifty are dumb yet at Alamo,)
’Tis the tale of the murder in cold blood of four hundred and twelve young men.[xii]
The other major changes he made seem almost contradictory: he replaced “second Sunday” with “second First-day,” using a Quaker term to heighten the contrast between the setting and the horror.[xiii] And he strained to keep the pretense of being a detached observer, to which end he eliminated the two lines about a “jetblack sunrise.”
I said earlier that Whitman represents a strain of writing emerging in literature in English: the injection of journalism into literature. Let me cite four exemplars: Defoe, Whitman, Twain, Stephen Crane. You can map this strain into the twentieth century on your own.
It seems to me that they represent the displacement of a performance literature in English, as exemplified by Shakespeare, Milton, Poe (who was undoubtedly a journalist, but practiced a very conventional poetry, one definitely intended to be heard).
Those poets began or ended as outsider artists. In Whitman’s day, what you could call the mainstream poetry, the Brahmin poetry, the poetry of the academy but not the court, the insider poetry, was practiced by writers like Whittier, Lowell and Longfellow, and carrying into the twentieth century, Eliot in America and Hardy in the United Kingdom.
And there is at least a fourth strain developing since Defoe, one of private poetry: Blake, Dickinson, Hopkins; I would add to that the Pound of the Cantos, a construct of mythology at least as rich as any of Blake’s fantasies.
But what’s that I hear you say? (Besides “Those are mostly men,” which is true.) “What about [supply your own example, please]?”
Your turn.
[i] Amazon blurb of the book, found at http://www.amazon.com/Collage-Myself-Whitman-Making-Leaves, accessed 25 December 2014. I say “apparently” based on that blurb; I ordered the book but the seller sent a different one; I’ve ordered again from a different seller, but it hasn’t come yet.
[ii] This cut-up method is described in a program aired on Studio 360 in its series American Icons. The segment on Leaves of Grass — originally aired Friday, September 27, 2013, is available at http://www.studio360.org/story/american-icons-leaves-grass/, accessed 19 December 2014. When my copy of Collage of myself arrives, I can evaluate Miller’s findings — I hope in my next post.
[iii] The Book of Mormon. — The earliest text / edited by Royal Skousen. — New Haven ; London : Yale University Press, c2009.
[iv] Ibid., p. xlii.
[v] Ibid.
[vi] As found in Personal writings of Joseph Smith. — Revised edition / compiled and edited by Dean C. Jessee. — Salt Lake City : Deseret Book ; Provo, Utah : Brigham Young University Press, c2002, p. 287.
[vii] This letter was published in the Joseph Smith Papers series in 2013, in Documents, volume 2. July 1831-January 1833 / Matthew C. Godfrey, Mark Ashurst-McGee, Grant Underwood, Robert J. Woodford, William G. Hartley, volume editors. — Salt Lake City : Church Historian’s Press, c2013, on pp. 315-321. The quote above appears on p. 316.
[viii] Ibid.
[ix] from Complete poetry and collected prose : Leaves of grass (1855) ; Leaves of grass (1891-92) ; Complete prose works (1892) ; Supplementary prose / Walt Whitman. — New York : Literary Classics of the United States, c1982. — (Library of America ; 3), pp. 66-67.
[x] from Leaves of grass / Walt Whitman. — Comprehensive reader’s edition / edited by Harold W. Blodgett and Sculley Bradley. — New York : Norton, 1968, p. 68, note to line 875.
[xi] From that American Icons production discussed in note ii, and in last month’s post.
[xii] Complete poetry and collected prose, p.226.
[xiii] Blodget and Bradley, op. cit., p. 68, note to line 885.
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