Buinicki, Martin T. Walt Whitman's Reconstruction: Poetry and Publishing between Memory and History [review]

Martin T. Buinicki. Walt Whitman's Reconstruction: Poetry and Publishing between Memory and History. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2011. xiv + 174 pp.In his poem "To a Historian," published in the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass but titled so pointedly only in 1867, Whitman chided his subject for treating "man as a creature of . . . aggregates." It is no mystery why historical writing proved so troubling for the poet who marked eternity through his self-celebrating book: historians, working in "aggregates" and seeing by epistemological necessity men and women as "dreams and dots," transformed people into creatures of externalities and contexts-subject to the world, rather than heroic agents who, by being themselves a kosmos, made it. The historian, a chronicler of "creatures," threatened Whitman's own melding of the nation and the individual, the Many in One. When John William Draper published his History of the American Civil War in 1867 and promised to "handle our species in masses," the war lay behind him, there to analyze. Whitman's war, conversely, resided within him, there for communion. His 1867 title "To a Historian" sounded the opening salvo against rival recorders of the past.This struggle with history and the dilemmas posed by memory are the subjects of Martin Buinicki's welcome new book. As Buinicki notes, many scholars have argued that the American Civil War and Whitman's experience both during and after the conflict ruptured the life of Leaves of Grass. Luke Mancuso, in "The Strange Sad War Revolving": Walt Whitman Reconstruction, and the Emergence of Black Citizenship, 1865-1876, explores Whitman's evolving writings on black emancipation, while M. Wynn Thomas, in The Lunar Light of Whitman's Poetry, offers a "subtle reading" of the ways in which Whitman became "the prophet of the past." For Buinicki, however, these critics sometimes overlook the poet's struggle with the transience of living memory, especially when, for Whitman, viscerally charged recollections proved to be the real stuffof the war. To preserve and record this living history became the goal of the poet's "backward glances" and the defining feature of his revisions of Leaves of Grass after 1865.Taking a cue from critics like Amanda Gailey, Buinicki notes that the growth in periodical subscriptions after the war gave Whitman a forum to transform his prose persona from the journalist, whose voice, though personified as an eye-witness to events, nevertheless spoke from the anonymity of the newspaper article, to the essayist, who appeared authoritatively under a byline. In this regard, Whitman's well-known work as a nurse in Washington D.C.'s hospitals, popularized by William Douglas O'Connor's "The Good Gray Poet" in 1866, made him something of a known character of the war years and offered him the opportunity to revise his poetic and prose personae in periodicals like Harper's Monthly Magazine, the Atlantic, and David G. Croly's New York Daily Graphic where, as an author of works on "noncontroversial themes," like his "Song of the Redwood-Tree" and "Prayer of Columbus," Whitman appealed to the growing population of middlebrow consumers of print. During this same period, the Graphic published Whitman's "A Biographical Sketch-An American Poet Graduating from a Printer's Case" and some portions of what became Memoranda During the War. Other postwar writings also reflected this self-domestication. Buinicki reminds us of the disappearance of the enraged slave of the "Lucifer" poem in the 1881 edition of Leaves, a change first explored, as Buinicki notes, by Ed Folsom and Kenneth M. Price, as well as the deletion of a passage against the protective tarifffrom Democratic Vistas when reproduced in Specimen Days and Collect. But the postwar additions to Leaves proved more profound than the deletions. In tandem with his growing acceptance as a popular American poet whose recollections of the war proved compelling to a readership contending with the war's memory, Whitman sought to incorporate the conflict into his revisions of Leaves of Grass in ways that preserved the immediacy of the conflict and the integrity of the book. …