"It Might Be Us Speaking Instead of Him!": Individuality, Collaboration, and the Networked Forces Contributing to "Whitman"

HABITUALLY ENLISTING FRIENDS as he navigated the complex media landscape of his time, Walt Whitman was anything but the author as solitary genius. In the years since Gay Wilson Allen's biography The Solitary Singer and the steadfastly author-centered edition of The Collected Writings of Walt Whitman Allen helped compile, postmodern theory and digital technology have both contributed to a gravitational shift away from the sole author to a greater appreciation of networked forces. If scholars once strove to discover the true Whitman, we now are more inclined to recognize how we both find and create "Whitman," adhering to the records of the past even as we inflect them with our own personal and cultural preoccupations. In our era, Whitman is emerging less as the sole creator of his various publications than as an extraordinary writer engaged in innumerable collaborative acts. Throughout his career Whitman shaped the initial reception of his key writings, most famously in 1855 when he acted in concert with his journalistic friends to seed the world with three anonymous reviews of the first Leaves of Grass.1 Whitman turned again to his associates in the newspaper business to influence his reception in 1859, with the appearance of "A Child's Reminiscence" (ultimately titled "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking") and the exchange of reviews he apparently orchestrated between the New York Saturday Press and the Cincinnati Commercial;2 in 1875, he took a slightly different tack, again with the Cincinnati Commercial by placing selections of the soon-to-be-published Memoranda During the War in the newspaper (an arrangement marked "Private" in Whitman's letter to the editor).3This essay establishes that he also jump-started the critical conversation about the 1881 Leaves of Grass by contributing to the first known review of that edition: "'Leaves of Grass'. The Complete Poems of Walt Whitman. As Published by a Famous Boston House. A Friendly Characterization of the Poet's Work," Boston Sunday Herald (October 30, 1881: 3). In what follows, we discuss Whitman's collaborations with his friend Sylvester Baxter of the Herald and also two key contexts: first, Edmund Clarence Stedman's essay "Walt Whitman" (Scribner's Monthly, November 1880) and, second, the correspondence between Whitman and Thomas W. H. Rolleston, an Irishman living at this time in Germany.Baxter was a long-time employee of the Herald, a versifier who published two books of poetry, an urban planner in the Boston area, and, later in life, author of a book on Spanish colonial architecture in Mexico. He had first come to know Whitman when the poet visited Boston to give one of his lectures on Abraham Lincoln on April 15, 1881. Baxter published an unsigned piece for the Herald on April 18, "Walt Whitman. His Second Visit to the New England Metropolis," praising Whitman and taking issue with Stedman's important essay.4 When the poet decided to return to Boston that autumn to oversee printing of the 1881 edition, he asked Baxter to help him find a "plain boardinghouse or good furnished room."5 In a short period of time, then, Baxter and Whitman had become friends and Whitman regarded him then and later as a key ally as he made clear to Horace Traubel: "certainly, Horace, Sylvester is our man-I am sure of it- ain't you?-he belongs to us, we to him."6 On another occasion he described the rapidity of their developing friendship: "Baxter jumped right in: was enthusiastic from the start-was what they have called a Whitmaniac."7One day after the appearance of the Sunday Herald review, Whitman sent a letter to Baxter, responding with "thanks & love" for his "fervid and stirring criticism."8 He did not mention his own help with the review. However, a manuscript in the Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman, Library of Congress, suggests that Whitman had provided Baxter with draft language (see Figure 1) and perhaps further instructions.9Whitman followed a similar pattern a year later: his October 8, 1882 letter provided Baxter with a paragraph for a review of Specimen Days. …