Walt Whitman's Selected Journalism. Ed. Douglas A. Noverr and Jason Stacy [review]

Walt Whitman's Selected Journalism. Ed. Douglas A. Noverr and Jason Stacy. Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press, 2014. xxxvi + 281 pp.Looking back on the numerous editions of Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman exclaimed to his friend Horace Traubel in 1889, "Editions! Editions! Editions! Like the last extra of a newspaper: an extra after an extra: one issue after another." The poet's analogy effectively captures not only the iterative nature of the book's publication-his on-going attempt to fit his body of work to his particular historical moment-but it also points to the considerable influence Whitman's early experience writing for the antebellum press had on his life and writing. As Douglass A. Noverr and Jason Stacy's welcome new volume Walt Whitman's Selected Journalism reminds us, Whitman was a prolific writer well before the publication of Leaves of Grass in 1855. This outstanding collection, covering writing from 1839 to 1865, demonstrates that far from representing a radical departure from his early journalism, Whitman's poetry in many ways expands on ideas and issues that had interested him for many years, offering him another way of expressing his sentiments and forging connections with his readers. The editors have organized the material thematically into four sections: "Democracy and Politics," "Moral Suasion," "The Arts," and "Come Closer to Me." Each features selections ordered chronologically, and, as the headings indicate, treat both the subject matter or, in the case of the final section, the style of the poet's journalism. In their introduction to the volume, Noverr and Stacy not only trace the ups and downs of Whitman's early career as a writer and editor, but they also provide an overview of the twentieth-century publication history of and scholarship on Whitman's journalism, providing helpful context for this latest collection.The selections in the first section present a picture of the roughand-tumble political world the young Whitman inhabited, the local and national controversies that fueled his journalism and that in some cases, as with the Wilmot Proviso, presaged the Civil War to come. Noverr and Stacy provide important context and thoughtful analysis for these pieces, particularly those responding to people and disputes that may now be long forgotten. In doing so, the editors also effectively address the disturbing nativist rhetoric of some of the poet's earliest journalism, without dismissing it. In their discussion of Whitman's editorials criticizing a push to fund Catholic schools in the early 1840s, for example, the editors note, "though Whitman claimed to be a universalist against religious bigotry, he was also a proponent of cultural assimilation," and that in some of his early editorials, Whitman used "terms that make us cringe today." The portrait of Whitman that emerges from these early works is complex and at times troubling; however, later selections demonstrate the emergence of the poet's more inclusive democratic vision as the years passed.Indeed, one of the primary strengths of this collection is the opportunity it provides for exploring the relationship between the more familiar "Walt Whitman" of Leaves of Grass and the "Walter Whitman" of such papers as the Brooklyn Daily Eagle or the New York Aurora. Whitman's enthusiasm regarding the laying of the first trans-Atlantic telegraph cable, for example, expressed in a series of editorials in August 1858 and collected in the "Moral Suasion" section, reflects the poet's fascination with technology and its ability to connect people, and the series foreshadows his celebration of these topics in numerous poems. In "The Cable Laid! …