Miller, Matt. Collage of Myself: Walt Whitman and the Making of Leaves of Grass [review]

Matt Miller. Collage of Myself: Walt Whitman and the Making of Leaves of Grass. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2010. xviii + 295 pp.One bemused visitor to Whitman's cluttered dingy den during his most fertile period remarked on a peculiar phenomenon. Suspended from the ceiling was a piece of string. And to that string were attached scraps of paper, of several colors, each featuring fragments of writing. The whole therefore somewhat resembled the colorful tail of a kite. Responding to his caller's puzzled question, Whit- man explained that this was the poem on which he was currently working. The scraps of paper were potential parts of the poem. And their loose attachment in this form to a piece of string allowed him to untie and retie them at will, thus allowing him constantly to review and revise his text in exactly the way he, a highly experienced printer, was used to doing when dealing with movable type. The anecdote offers us a vivid glimpse into Whitman's compositional method, confirming Matt Miller's contention that his poems can be fruitfully viewed as assemblages.Miller's book is as valuable a publication on Whitman's poetry as any to have appeared for some time. Collage of Myself is also avowedly a product of our digital age. Miller's researches into the vast tangled litter of Whitman's surviving papers and manuscripts have been enabled by the great online archive of materials assembled by Ed Folsom and Kenneth Price, and his insights are very much the product of a culture in which word-processing, cutting and pasting, spatial composition of web pages and the like have reawakened and sharply focussed those of Whitman's compositional practices that now seem so to resemble these modern features as to have been uncannily prophetic and indeed positively proleptic.In what is a beautifully written study, Miller challengingly proposes that Whitman became a poet rather belatedly and unexpectedly (although he had theorized the poet's role in advance) when, possibly as late as the spring of 1855, he discovered, via increasingly intensive experiments with poetic prose, the omnivorous potentialities of the long line. This discovery was as liberating as it was revelatory: it suddenly provided a form that could hospitably include all the different scraps of writing (both his own and the work of others) he had for so long been assembling with no clear view of their eventual use. It also encouraged him to fly in the face of every established literary convention and to regard every form of language, without exception, as his personal poetic "estate": prose was grist for this mill every bit as good as what had previously conventionally passed for poetry. Hence the astonishing variety of discourses deployed in the restlessly shifting texts of his early poetry.These are arresting claims, persuasively supported by Miller's assiduous and perceptive combing of the manuscript materials and sensibly modified by his concession that other factors may also have been at work in the rather sudden emergence of Whitman as a poet. And these arguments neatly dovetail with the further contention that this serendipitous mode of composition rhymed with Whitman's personal nomadic circumstances as he constantly changed jobs and moved from one temporary home to another. One might further speculate that they also rhymed with other features of his case, such as his chronic fear of any settled self-identity and, of course, his political convictions. The politics of Whitman's syntax is another related subject that remains to be explored. Anticipating William Carlos Williams and others, he was ever anxious to avoid, as far as possible, the subordination of any one element of a sentence to any other and to respect the autonomous value of every single word. For him, the sentence should be treated as a democratic unit, a society of equals, and so, in turn, should the sentence entire be allowed its own space and not made dependent on those by which it was preceded or followed. …