Specimen Days

by Walt Whitman

This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.

Genres: Poetry, Nonfiction, Classics, Essays, Memoir, Philosophy, Biography

228 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1882

About the author

Walter Whitman Jr. was an American poet, essayist, and journalist. He is considered one of the most influential poets in American literature. Whitman incorporated both transcendentalism and realism in his writings and is often called the father of free verse. His work was controversial in his time, particularly his 1855 poetry collection Leaves of Grass, which was described by some as obscene for its overt sensuality.
Whitman was born in Huntington on Long Island, and lived in Brooklyn as a child and through much of his career. At the age of 11, he left formal schooling to go to work. He worked as a journalist, a teacher, and a government clerk. Whitman's major poetry collection, Leaves of Grass, first published in 1855, was financed with his own money and became well known. The work was an attempt to reach out to the common person with an American epic. Whitman continued expanding and revising Leaves of Grass until his death in 1892.
During the American Civil War, he went to Washington, D.C., and worked in hospitals caring for the wounded. His poetry often focused on both loss and healing. On the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, whom Whitman greatly admired, he authored two poems, "O Captain! My Captain!" and "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd", and gave a series of lectures on Lincoln. After suffering a stroke towards the end of his life, Whitman moved to Camden, New Jersey, where his health further declined. When he died at the age of 72, his funeral was a public event.
Whitman's influence on poetry remains strong. Art historian Mary Berenson wrote, "You cannot really understand America without Walt Whitman, without Leaves of Grass... He has expressed that civilization, 'up to date,' as he would say, and no student of the philosophy of history can do without him." Modernist poet Ezra Pound called Whitman "America's poet... He is America."

Reviews

[Eric Byrd · Rating 5 out of 5]

1.

Literature flies so high and is so hotly spiced, that our notes may seem hardly more than breaths of common air, or draughts of water to drink. But that is part of our lesson. (Specimen Days, “New Themes Entered Upon”)

Intensely artful, intensely vernacular—some draughts of the tipsy-making water Emerson talks about in the essay by which young Whitman was called (“The Poet”). But Whitman’s waters do not flow in the clear stream of a style that refuses to call attention to itself—the bizarre ideal of those dismayed at the demanding perceptual detours and little linguistic renewals that constitute “good” writing, truly readable writing, “poetry”—in any case, “language in its aesthetic function.” (Jakobson’s definition will always serve.) Whitman recoiled from what he called “the sickliness of verbal melody,” and the prose of Specimen Days is among the most casual and colloquial in English—but the style still calls and holds one’s attention. Because that’s the point. Style, Flaubert insisted, is an “absolute way of seeing,” and Whitman wants to see what he sees, in the way he sees, with all the corporeal contours and spiritual subtleties apparent to him.

And did he see! The guy was everywhere. Metropolitan man of ferried crowds, omnibus flaneur and opera-goer in the booming Astoria of midcentury New York City—an ink-stained bohemian, arguing politics over sudsy steins in rowdy fireman taverns—a stroller of Broadway, where he sees Andrew Jackson, Dickens, and “the first Japanese ambassadors.” In 1861 he goes down to fort-belted wartime Washington (“her surrounding hills spotted with guns”) to nurse the wounded and watch over the dying—meets the bloody boatloads down at the wharf, dresses wounds, reads the Bible at bedsides, loans books, distributes money, stamped letters and writing paper—soda water and syrups when Lee is repulsed at Gettysburg—and pens letters home for the illiterate and the too-weak. He doesn’t know how much good he does but he cannot leave them, stays on in the embattled, cemetery- and hospital-environed capital through the four years of carnage. When not in the wards, he loafs in army camps, observes and notes the goings-on, chills with the pickets through their watches, and clerks part-time in a government bureau until its indignant head realizes he’s employing an “indecent poet.” He stands in the street all night as the endless columns file past to the front, savoring unseen the jokes and songs that waft through the dark. He and Lincoln nod to each other when they pass in the street. He chats with Rebel prisoners and Union deserters; compares eastern and western, northern and southern soldiers, speculates about regional types, local moldings, the looks of future Americans. The war—“the most profound lesson of my life,” with “the marrow of the tragedy concentrated in those Army Hospitals”—breaks his health, and the lusty rambler is confined paralyzed for a time. He regains much of his strength later, enough to resume “gaddings-about in cities” and even to manage “a long jaunt west”—to the “distances join’d like magic” by the railroad—and there to eyewitness the course of empire, to see America planting the prairies with world-feeding wheat, tunneling railways through mountains, feeding forests into steam-powered sawmills, the sublime statistics of this titanic industry yet dwarfed by the continent itself, by the tinted canyons and empyrean peaks, the melted snows thundering through gorges.



2.


Whitman on Abraham Lincoln:

Earlier in the summer I occasionally saw the President and his wife, toward the latter part of the afternoon, out in a barouche, on a pleasure ride through the city. Mrs. Lincoln was dress’d in complete black, with a long crape veil. The equipage is of the plainest kind, only two horses, and they nothing extra. They pass’d me once very close, and I saw the President in the face fully, as they were moving slowly, and his look, though abstracted, happen’d to be directed steadily in my eye. He bow’d and smiled, but far beneath his smile I noticed well the expression I have alluded to. None of the artists or pictures has caught the deep, though subtle and indirect expression of this man’s face. There is something else there. One of the great portrait painters of two or three centuries ago is needed.


On New York harbor:

…the mast-hemm’d shores—the grand obelisk-like towers of the bridge, one on either side, in haze, yet plainly defin’d, giant brothers twain, throwing free graceful interlinking loops high across the tumbled tumultuous current below—(the tide is just changing to its ebb)—the broad water-spread everywhere crowded—no, not crowded, but thick as stars in the sky—with all sorts and sizes of sail and steam vessels, plying ferry-boats, arriving and departing coasters, great ocean Dons, iron-black, modern, magnificent in size and power, fill’d with their incalculable value of human life and precious merchandise—with here and there, above all, those daring, careening things of grace and wonder, those white and shaded swift-darting fish-birds, (I wonder if shore or sea elsewhere can outvie them,) ever with their slanting spars, and fierce, pure, hawk-like beauty and motion—first-class New York sloop or schooner yachts, sailing, this fine day, the free sea in a good wind. And rising out of the midst, tall-topt, ship-hemm’d, modern, American, yet strangely oriental, V-shaped Manhattan, with its compact mass, its spires, its cloud-touching edifices group’d at the centre—the green of the trees, and all the white, brown and gray of the architecture well blended, as I see it, under a miracle of limpid sky, delicious light of heaven above, and June haze on the surface below.



3.

Specimen Days made me think of Nabokov—Whitman’s attempt to discover the germs of his individual consciousness and destiny in ecological phenomena, historical patterns, and the designs of fate reminded me of Speak, Memory. Also, Whitman is an arch-aesthete guised as loafer, near-bum, democratic mingler and perceiver; a common narrator of Nabokov’s Russian novels and stories is the down-at-heel but delicately dreamy émigré poet (or poet manqué) whose exuberant consciousness cannot but perceive inspiriting marvels and fated correspondences in the grimy Berlin and Prague districts to which he is relegated. The narrators of “A Guide to Berlin” and “The Letter That Never Reached Russia,” as well as Fyodor in The Gift, might say with Whitman,

The glories strung like beads on my smallest sights and
hearings, on the walk in the street and the passage over
the river…

(“Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”)

Whitman felt the import of, and renovated English poetry to sing, the democratic transformation and ungenteel energy of nineteenth century America (particularly the boom and rush of 1850s New York City), and Nabokov was similarly concerned with Russian literature’s assimilation of the hitherto unhallowed realities encountered by its now-wandering poets (he found translating Lolita into Russian very difficult because not even his inclusive and flexible literary Russian, forged in the 1920s-30s, could at first accommodate all the gadgets and devices invented since then; if there was going to be a Russian word for jukebox, he had to coin it). A recurring theme of Nabokov’s letters to his younger brother Kirill, an aspiring poet, and of his polemical sparring with Georgi Adamovich and the “Paris School” of émigré Russian poetry, is an insistence that the poet’s removal to an exilic, demotic-industrial landscape isn’t the end of the Russian poetic tradition born amid neoclassic palatial façades. He tells Kirill not to shun warehouses and factories, blasts with scorn and contradicts with the example of his own classically grounded modernism (so darting, filmic) Adamovich’s gripe that Pushkin is useless to the émigré writer and the Pushkinian tradition of verbal artistry powerless to accommodate the political and nervous dislocations of interwar Europe.

Once in America, Nabokov fell out of the Russian milieu partly because he did not, could not as an evolving artist with a new tongue and a new milieu to master, share the easy, enclaved contempt many émigrés felt for “barbaric” America. They were worn out, he tired but ever-responsive; and with butterfly net in one hand, and a stack of note-cards penciled with the germs of Lolita and Speak, Memory in the other, he hit the road—Véra behind the wheel, of course—to net and name new species, to clamber the continent’s mountains and immortalize its roadside humanities. Updike said Nabokov had every excuse for exhaustion once he reached these shores—but as he had poetically assimilated Europe, he set about doing the same for America. Think of the first two chapters of Lolita’s second part, the Whitmanesque catalogue that begins, “It was then that began our extensive travels all over the States.”

Whitman and Nabokov are superb landscape colorists; spooky naturalist-animists; all-perceiving enchanters sensually-primitively attuned to and obsessed with birdsong, light effects, arboreal personalities, stars, mountains, sex; and Whitman is really into butterflies, too. Both mark the point at which the highest artistry grades into mysticism and gnosis. The New World, they recognized, was not to be dismissed, especially its landscape, flora and fauna. The Rocky Mountains were a fascination to both. Whitman fell in love with Colorado’s “delicious atmosphere” and mountain tops “draped in their violet haze,” thought it "the most spiritual show of objective Nature [he:] ever beheld," and even conceived a wish to spend his last years there; while Nabokov wrote Edmund Wilson that some part of him must have been born in Colorado, for while butterfly hunting on its slopes, he was “constantly recognizing things with a delicious pang”—the Baltic contrast of “the dark velvet of fir trees against a blue of extraordinary intensity,” the appearance of the Boloria freija, a circumpolar species he had pursued as a boy through the bogs on his family estate.



We follow the stream of amber and bronze brawling along its bed, with its frequent cascades and snow-white foam. Through the cañon we fly—mountains not only each side, but seemingly, till we get near, right in front of us—every rood a new view flashing, and each flash defying description—on the almost perpendicular sides, clinging pines, cedars, spruces, crimson sumach bushes, spots of wild grass—but dominating all, those towering rocks, rocks, rocks, bathed in delicate vari-colors, with the clear sky of autumn overhead...I get out on a ten minutes’ stoppage at Deer creek, to enjoy the unequal’d combination of hill, stone and wood. As we speed again, the yellow granite in the sunshine, with natural spires, minarets, castellated perches far aloft—then long stretches of straight-upright palisades, rhinoceros color—then gamboge and tinted chromos.

(Specimen Days)


Distant mountains. Near mountains. More mountains; bluish beauties never attainable, or ever turning into inhabited hill after hill; south-eastern ranges, altitudinal failures as alps go; heart and sky-piercing snow-veined gray colossi of stone, relentless peaks appearing from nowhere at a turn of the highway; timbered enormities, with a system of neatly overlapping dark firs, interrupted in places by pale puffs of aspen; pink and lilac formations, Pharaonic, phallic, "too prehistoric for words" (blasé Lo); buttes of black lava; early spring mountains with young-elephant lanugo along their spines; end-of-the-summer mountains, all hunched up their heavy Egyptian limbs folded under folds of tawny moth-eaten plush; oatmeal hills, flecked with green round oaks; a last rufous mountain with a rich rug of lucerne at its foot.

(Lolita)

[robin friedman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Whitman's Specimen Days

Walt Whitman's "Specimen Days" is an unusual work consisting of many short paragraphs, diary entries, or memorandums of moments in the poet's life, beginning with some vignettes about his ancestors and about his early life in Long Island and Brooklyn. Each of the many sections of the book opens with a heading describing its theme. In '"Specimen Days" opening paragraph, "A Happy Hour's Command", Whitman described the book as "incongruous and full of skips and jumps", moving from his Civil War memorandums to nature notes, to observations of Canada and the West "all bundled up and tied by a big string." With his customary hype, Whitman described "Specimen Days" as "the most wayward, spontaneous, fragmentary book ever penned."

In this 1882 book's concluding paragraph, Whitman looked back at the work and summarized its purpose in a beautiful passage about the diversity of the United States. "I have wanted, before departure, to bear special testimony to a very old lesson and requisite. American Democracy, in its myriad personalities, in factories, work-shops, stores, offices, -- through the dense streets and houses of cities, and all their manifold sophisticated life -- must either be fibred, vitalized by regular contact with out-door light and air and growths, farm-scenes, animals, fields, trees, birds, sun-warmth and free skies or it will certainly dwindle and pale." Whitman combined this broad picture of American democracy with the intimate, momentary character of the moments he described in order to suggest the value of living in and cherishing one's daily experiences. Thus "Specimen Days" concludes: "Perhaps indeed the efforts of the true poets, founders, religions, literatures, all ages, have been and ever will be, our time and times to come, essentially the same -- to bring people back from their persistent strayings and sickly abstractions, to the costless average, divine, original concrete".

In the best-known and longest part of "Specimen Days" Whitman describes his experiences from 1862 -- 1865 mostly in Washington, D.C., during the Civil War. Whitman spent much time as a volunteer in military hospitals offering comfort to wounded, sick, and dying soldiers. The book is poignant in its many brief depictions of individual heroic soldiers and of Whitman's ministrations. The book also offers Whitman's thoughts on the issues of the War. It shows a close observation of the Washington, D.C. of the Civil War, naming streets and places and offering many glimpses of Abraham Lincoln. As a resident of Washington, D.C. I enjoyed the immediacy of Whitman's account and of his depiction of particular places and streets I have come to know. Whitman has a unique vision of the War and he describes what he knows as a witness. Among many other things, he describes Lincoln's assassination. The Civil War section of "Specimen Days" is invaluable for students of the Civil War. In his final paragraph on the Civil War, Whitman observed that "The Real War Will Never Get In the Books." He amplified his thought as it related to his experience with the wounded.

"Such was the war. It was not a quadrille in a ball-room. Its interior history will not only never be written -- its practicality, minutae of deeds and passions, will never be even suggested. The actual soldier of 1862 -- '65, North and South, with all his ways, his incredible dauntlessness, habits, practices, tastes, language, his fierce friendship, his appetite, rankness, his superb strength and animality, lawless gait, and a hundred unnamed lights and shades of camp, I say, will never be written -- perhaps must not and should not be."

Following the depiction of his Civil War experiences, Whitman skips over the years from 1867 -- 1873 when he worked for the Office of the Attorney General. In 1873, Whitman suffered a stroke which left him bedridden for several years. When "Specimen Days" resumes, Whitman is living in Camden, New Jersey, and he is able with difficulty to move around. In exquisite detail, Whitman describes incidents of his life when he communes with nature, in fields, forests, and near the river. The Civil War section of "Specimen Days" describes life in a busy city at a hectic time. The following section is a dramatic about-face as Whitman communes with nature in solitude. Whitman offers many word-paintings of nature, birds, fish, insects, flowers, trees, in his many quiet moments during his recovery from illness.

In the following sections of "Specimen Days" Whitman again becomes more active. He takes several trips to New York City and Brooklyn, Canada, and Denver and the prairies of the West. Whitman describes with great enthusiasm his train trips, the people he knows and meets, and the places he visits. He is enamored of the West and of its people and of the promise he finds in it for the United States. He is also moved by change in the New York City he knew when young. With all the depictions of nature and of solitude in "Specimen Days", Whitman's heart remains with the city, with wandering, and with new places.

Whitman discusses in the final sections of "Specimen Days" his feelings about his contemporaries. He discusses Lincoln and lectures he delivered on Lincoln's assassination. He also discusses philosophy, including some highly complimentary and insightful observations about Hegel. But most of the people he discusses are literary figures, Whitman's predecessors and contemporaries including Longfellow, Bryant, Poe, Carlyle, and most of all Emerson. Whitman discusses the influence of these writers upon him, his meetings with them, and their deaths. He offers absorbing comments on his predecessors and on his hopes for a broad-based American literature to come based on Democracy and unity.

I enjoyed this book a great deal, and it will interest readers who know Whitman only as a poet. Whitman has a vision for America and a vision for himself, in enjoying the specimen moments of his life and in being present spontaneously and immediately for his experiences, which he combines somehow and shares with the reader. The book is available in several editions as well as in the Library of America volume "Walt Whitman: Complete Poetry and Collected Prose".

Robin Friedman

[Karen · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’ve researched dozens of articles on various Civil War topics for my job, and over the course of writing them, I’ve come to view the war with an impartiality courtesy of the long lens of history. Battles and their casualties are facts and figures, the armies a faceless mass of blue or gray, and even amusing anecdotes don’t always seem to be about real people rather than characters in a book. But Whitman’s “Specimen Days” changed that for me. If in the past I looked at the war telescopically, trying to see the big picture, Whitman’s book has been like a magnifying glass, focusing my gaze on small, quiet moments that gently urge me to feel something about the war rather than just know something.

Part of “Speciman Days” recounts Whitman’s visits to the many military hospitals in Washington, where he did his best to distract injured and sick soldiers from the pain and monotony of hospital life. He wrote letters for them to their loved ones, distributed fruit and sweets, and most of all, spent countless hours simply talking with them. And while Whitman never goes into extensive detail about his experiences, somehow his brief observations manage to show me the war in a way I’ve never seen it before. Like this short passage, for instance, which describes a young hospitalized Wisconsin soldier who is near death due to a hemorrhage: “The poor young man is struggling painfully for breath, his great dark eyes with a glaze already upon them, and the choking faint but audible in his throat. An attendant sits by him, and will not leave him till the last; yet little or nothing can be done. He will die here in an hour or two, without the presence of kith or kin. Meantime the ordinary chat and business of the ward a little way off goes on indifferently. Some of the inmates are laughing and joking, others are playing checkers or cards, others are reading, &c.”

Something about that image of one man dying virtually unnoticed while life goes on for the others around him struck me in a way that knowing the vast numbers of battlefield deaths never has. It’s in scenes like this that Whitman manages to make the war personal instead of just an interesting chapter in a history book. I look at the Civil War with 150 years of perspective, and from that vantage point, one dying soldier from Wisconsin doesn’t seem significant when viewed against the backdrop of an estimated 620,000–750,000 total war deaths. He’s just one drop in a rather depressing bucket. But Whitman, writing at the time of the soldier’s death or a few years after doesn’t have the benefit (or perhaps detriment) of that century and a half to consider whose deaths are relevant in the grand scheme of the war. Where I see the dying man as a statistic from a bygone era, Whitman sees an individual whose imminent death is still a raw reality to be grappled with. To Whitman, the death of this solitary unnamed lieutenant is significant, and seeing his death through Whitman’s eyes has shown me that the impartiality of my telescopic view isn’t the only—or even necessarily the best—way to view the war.

Sorry if I’ve gone on too long about this, but “Specimen Days” really made an impact on me. Obviously.

Book Light Graveyard

[Illiterate · Rating 2 out of 5]

Whitman’s memories rarely rise above description. He says little about his ideas and emotions, let alone their origins and reasonableness.

[Johan Thilander · Rating 4 out of 5]

Så himla märklig liten bok! Små infall, anteckningar och anföranden.
Älskar särskilt Whitmans tilltal, som av någon anledning påminner mig om Bellman, med inflikar, plötsliga duanden och brasklappar.

En stor behållning med boken är också mötet mellan Whitman och Gunnar Harding (som alltså står för översättningen). De är verkligen tvillingsjälar, och Gunnar går så lätt in i Walt! Tycker f.ö. nästan bäst om Gunnar som översättare, hans tidigare trilogi om de engelska romantikerna är t.ex. jättefina.

[Mark · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read Whitman in high school and instantly fell in love with Leaves of Grass. But this one has stayed with me longer--more spontaneous, more intimate. Basically a series of journal entries, a large portion of which detail his experiences during the civil war, Specimen Days comes as close as any book I've ever read to conveying what it was like to be that particular author--to see the world through his eyes. The most magical moments for me are his musings by the creek, his gentle descriptions of the effervescent happenings of a sunset, the comings and goings of all manner of life, with himself perfectly at rest and at peace among them. I always feel when reading this that time and space have no meaning and that there by the creek I have found a long-lost friend.

[Maryellen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not necessarily reading in order. More enjoyable to open to random sections.

[Ferre Wyckmans · Rating 3 out of 5]

De bijdragen over de bezoeken aan militaire hospitalen ten tijde van de burgeroorlog en de strijd tussen de Noordelijke en Zuidelijke Staten lezen niet “aangenaam” maar zijn wel indrukwekkende getuigenissen. De reisbeschrijvingen zijn aangenaam op lezen. De natuurbeschrijvingen (vogels, bloemen, bomen, insecten...) zijn me soms te langdradig en verveelden me op de duur. Zijn bedenkingen omtrent de democratie interessant. Een cultuurminnaar aan het woord.
Toch fijn om stukken die meer dan 160 jaar oud zijn te lezen.

[Emily · Rating 5 out of 5]

After reading this book, I know that if I could go back in time and spend the day with one historical figure… it would be Walt Whitman… and we would spend the day hiking for wildflowers.

Specimen Days is a series of diary entries about Whitman’s life, from his boyhood days at Rockaway Beach, to his nursing days in Washington D.C during the Civil War, and finally to his time in Camden New Jersey. His account of the Civil War Hospitals is painful to read, but his kindness and ministrations to the wounded soldiers (writing them letters home and giving them horehound candy) are really touching. He estimated that visited between 80,000 and 100,000 young men. My great grandfather was in one of those hospitals, so I like to think that Walt stopped by to give him some candy and talk. After the war, Whitman came down with an illness and was partially paralyzed. He moved to Camden and spent his afternoons outside in nature. He attributes his rebound in health to this time and wrote many essays about the outdoors and the nature around him. He loved wildflowers and bathed naked in the streams wearing only his broad brimmed hat. Whitman also writes about the events of the day, praising Abraham Lincoln, mourning the loss of Longfellow, and visiting Walden Pond with Emerson.

I really enjoyed this book. Now I’m off to re-read Leaves of Grass.

[Andrew Sydlik · Rating 4 out of 5]

I paid most attention to the first part of this, which details Whitman's tending to wounded and sick soldiers during the Civil War. (It also begins, strangely, with a genealogy of Whitman's family.) His observations are filled with compassion and an almost spiritual sense of connection with the men he visited, some of whom survived, many who did not. Not that he romanticizes the war or being a soldier - one of his first descriptions before even entering a hospital is seeing a pile of amputated feet, hands, arms, and legs.

The second half, which I more or less skimmed, recounts his meditations from 1875-76 while living in the woods of Camden, NJ after suffering a paralyzing stroke (he calls himself a "half-paralytic"). Most of these are beautiful, often poetic descriptions of his natural surroundings. He does not comment much on his condition. While interesting, this part was not as gripping as the first, and for the sake of time (read this for exams), I had to move on to another work.

[André · Rating 5 out of 5]

Citaat : Rond geen enkel sterfbed in hospitaal of lazaret heb ik ooit vals sentiment of geweeklaag ervaren, maar integendeel serene onverschilligheid.
Review : Walt Whitman ( 1819 – 1892) wordt wel de meest typisch Amerikaanse dichter van de negentiende eeuw genoemd. In zijn grote bundel Leaves of Grass Grashalmen, bezingt- en vereert hij de Amerikaanse natuur, de Amerikaanse mens en de democratische samenleving als de culminatie en het absolute hoogtepunt van de schepping. Hij is wat de Amerikanen een 'self-made' man noemen: hij begon als loopjongen in een advocatenkantoor, werkte dan in een drukkerij, werd vervolgens dorpsonderwijzer, richtte verschillende tijdschriften op, bouwde huizen en plande en schreef onderwijl verder aan zijn magnum opus, Leaves of Grass. Whitman trouwde nooit, verliet nooit Amerika, streefde nooit bezit en rijkdom na, behoorde tot geen enkele vereniging en ging liever om met gewone mensen dan met rijken, en hij was altijd optimistisch en vrolijk. Hij was een aparte, imposante verschijning, groot van gestalte, traag bewegend, tolerant, democratisch, ontvankelijk, en tegenover iedereen vrijgevig en van goede wil. Op de leeftijd van twaalf verliet Whitman de public school in Brooklyn en begon het drukkersvak te leren, en werd zo verliefd op het geschreven woord. Grotendeels autodidact, was hij een gretig lezer, en zo kwam hij in aanraking met de werken van Homerus, Dante, Shakespeare, en met de Bijbel. Whitman richtte een wekelijks verschijnende krant op, de Long-Islander, en gaf later een aantal kranten uit in Brooklyn en New York. In 1848 verliet Whitman de Brooklyn Daily Eagle (toen een vrij belangrijke krant in de regio) om uitgever te worden van de New Orleans Crescent. Het was in New Orleans dat hij getuige was van de wreedheid van de slavernij op de slavenmarkten van die stad. Bij zijn terugkeer naar Brooklyn in de herfst van 1848, richtte hij een "Free soil"krant op, de Brooklyn Freeman, en bleef zijn unieke stijl van poëzie ontwikkelen, die later Ralph Waldo Emerson zo zou verbazen.



Walt Whitman werkte aan verschillende romans getuigen de vele notities die ervan zijn overgebleven. Uiteindelijk verscheen in de zomer van 1855 de eerste editie van Leaves of Grass, een klein in kwarto gedrukt boekje van 94 pagina's, dat eerst door de critici vrijwel genegeerd werd, tot een lovende brief van de dichter Ralph Waldo Emerson het in de New York Tribune 'the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet produced' noemde. De belangstelling was gewekt en het kleine boekje begon aan een onverwachte 'wonder'carrière. Als basisidee (mother-idea) van zijn gedichten noemt hij democratie. Leaves of Grass brengt de lezer in intiem en uitvergroot contact met fundamentele menselijke kwaliteiten: met seks, liefde, vrijgevigheid, naastenliefde, geloof, eigenwaarde, oprechtheid, zuiverheid van lichaam en geest. Hij waarschuwt de dichter (en zichzelf dus) om niet slechts afbeeldingen van de natuur te maken, maar gedichten die ontstaan door spiritueel contact met de dingen zelf.



Die verering voor Amerika en de Amerikaan komt ook tot uiting in deze verzameling dagboekaantekeningen, herinneringen en bespiegelingen. Oud ben ik en jong ben ik, nu voor het eerst in vertaling, biedt een hoogstpersoonlijk doorkijkje op het leven, de wereld en het denken van een uniek mens, dichter, filosoof en profeet van zijn bewonderde Amerika. De auteur trok na het uitbreken van de Amerikaanse Burgeroorlog (1861–1865) naar Washington, waar hij als vrijwilliger zijn dagen doorbracht in de vele militaire hospitalen. Whitman beschrijft de nu onvoorstelbare toestanden in de barakken en ziekenzalen, en de buitengewone moed van de zieke, gewonde en stervende militairen die hij morele en materiële steun verleende. Na een zware beroerte beschrijft Whitman zijn langzame herstel in Camden, New Jersey, met hoogstpersoonlijke indrukken van de natuur in zijn omgeving en van diverse reizen – naar New York, Boston, Canada, het Midden en Verre Westen van de VS en enkele van de Zuidelijke staten. De laatste aantekeningen zijn uit 1882, toen Specimen Days verscheen, tien jaar voor Whitmans dood. Dat is nu onder de titel Oud ben ik en jong ben ik, nu voor het eerst in Nederlandse vertaling verschenen en het biedt een hoogstpersoonlijk doorkijkje op het leven, de wereld en het denken van een uniek mens, dichter, filosoof en de schepper van Leaves of Grass,een mijlpaal in de geschiedenis van de Amerikaanse literatuur!

[Liam · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Always something novel or inspiriting, yet mostly to me the hurrying and vast amplitude of those never-ending human currents." (of Broadway, 30-1)

"If there were nothing else of Abraham Lincoln for history to stamp him with, it is enough to send him with his wreath to the memory of all future time, that he endured that hour, that day, bitterer than gall -- indeed a crucifixion day -- that id did not conquer him -- that he unflinchingly stemmed it, and resolved to lift himself and the Union out of it." (of Bull Run, 41)

"Doubtless in the course of the following, the fact of invalidism will crop out (I call myself a half-paralytic these days, and reverently bless the Lord that it is no worse) between some of the lines -- but I may get my share of fun and healthy hours, and shall try to indicate them. (The trick is, I find, to tone your wants and tastes low down enough, and make much of negatives, and of mere daylight and the skies.)" (114)

"The soil, too -- let others pen-and-ink the sea, the air (as I sometimes try) -- but now I feel to chose the common soil for theme -- naught else." (137)

"Nature was naked, and I was also." (143)

"I am not so sure but that the prairies and plains, while less stunning at first sight, last longer, fill the esthetic sense fuller, precede all the rest, and make North America's characteristic landscape." (203)

"... so many fine-looking gray-haired women." (of Boston, 242)

"Perhaps the best is always cumulative. One's eating and drinking one wants fresh, and for the nonce, right off, and have done with it -- but I would not give a straw for that person or poem, or friend, or city, or work of art, that was not more grateful the second time than the first -- and more still the third." (253)

[W.S. Luk · Rating 4 out of 5]

"I have once or twice fear'd that my diary would prove, at best, but a batch of convulsively written reminiscences. Well, be it so. They are but parts of the actual distraction, heat, smoke and excitement of those times."

While this diary's fragmentary musings lack the torrential scope of Whitman's verse, which I'm currently reading in Walt Whitman( The Complete Poems) WALT WHITMAN THE COMP POEMS Paperback , they're a digestible exploration of his work's key themes and the political and cultural worlds he inhabited. From harrowing descriptions of the Civil War to meditative travelogues, this diary sees Whitman sketching out a vibrant, fractious, ever-shifting vision of American nationalism.

[Supertramp · Rating 5 out of 5]

Aside from his literary eloquence and meditative, masterful way to elaborate the most nondescript of situations, I feel about the same while reading Whitman as I do when I take a casual look at an alien artwork: Most of it seems untranslatable, yet it pours into my thirsty soul like a glass of water. His poems in Songs of Myself and Leaves of Grass are absolutely indispensable, but Specimen Days is where his natural prose writing really comes into its own.

"With the sentiment of the stars and moon such nights I get all the free margins and indefiniteness of music or poetry, fused in geometry's utmost exactness."

[Will · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic and unique autobiography that stitches together the scraps of writing that Walt took down through his life. The first third is primarily his experiences as a nurse in the Civil War and offer fantastic insight into the carnage of frontline hospitals in the CW. The middle and last portion are dedicated first to nature reminisces and travel throughout the later part of his life, interspersed with political and social comments he made throughout time. It makes a beautiful portrait of a uniquely American individual. If Walt can appreciate my love of his “scattered jottings” wherever he’s currently resting, I hope he does.

[Josiah Adams · Rating 4 out of 5]

I just wanted him dead by the end of it. Whitman suspects himself all along of being a grand voice that will endure. He chews up his observations and baby-birds it all to us, explaining with a full mouth that this chunky slush is nourishment. It’s a shame it tastes as good as it does, this mama bird is right. 4 stars for the times in which Whitman best disguises his well-crafted rants as innocent revelation and not “look-at-the-beauty-I-can-notice-for-you.”

["Robert Ekberg" · Rating 2 out of 5]

Eftersom amerikanska invärteskriget samt andra naturskildringar lämnar mig tämligen kall (död) vill jag hellre kommentera Gunnar Hardings nyliga medverkan i Lundströms Bokradio. Det är kanske mer en notis än en kommentar, mer ett hej än ett tjosan. Kommentaren är att Harding föreföll mycket fnittrig. Jag vet inte hur jag ska förhålla mig till det, men du sitter väl inne på alla svaren som vanligt.

"Omkring två tredjedelar av tiden mår jag ganska bra" (s. 81).

[jm · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some interesting insights into life in 19th century America, but also a lot of lists of bird names, a very repetitive section about the Civil War, and gushing observations of things that Mr. Whitman got very excited about which got a bit tedious after a while.

[Will Simpson · Rating 4 out of 5]

DNF

An interesting look at the carnage of the Civil War. And we think we have it hard now?

[Bea Bezmalinovic · Rating 4 out of 5]

A diary of sorts Whitman's shares periodic prose descriptions of his days spanning several decades including civil war and post-war.

[Jeanne · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another favorite from my college days. Heartbreakingly sad.

[Casey Sanders · Rating 5 out of 5]

Specimen Days is a vehicle through which Walt Whitman exhibits boundless curiosity and zest for life, whether on the sidelines of the battlefield or on a walk through the forest. Given his profound affinity to nature, it is no wonder that Mary Oliver cites W.W. as an influence; as such, it only feels right to read most of the entries of this collection while sitting under a tree.

“The forenoon leaden and cloudy, not cold or wet, but indicating both. As I hobble down here and sit by the silent pond, how different from the excitement amid which, in the cities, millions of people are now waiting news of yesterday's Presidential election, or receiving and discussing the result—in this secluded place uncared-for, unknown.”

[Owen Martin · Rating 4 out of 5]

I started reading this book after Jack Kerouac mentioned it as his prime influence for On The Road. The first part of the book gives a first hand account of the Civil War - some of the accounts are very harrowing and disturbing. We get great descriptions of his brief meetings with Abe Lincoln and Edgar Allen Poe. I was left wishing he had wrote more about his meeting with Poe in the latter's office in New York. The description of Lincoln as he traveled with his wife without any security give us an enduring insight into someone truly unique. During the war, Whitman spent his days in hospitals helping the injured men out as much as he could, for many of them their last memory of this world was Walt talking to them.

The second half of the book is about Walt's travels around America, in towns where coal furnaces and steam trains dominate the landscape, and in forests, mountains and canyons in the mid-West. Whitman is at home sitting among the trees observing the creatures around him. He jots down ideas for poetry all the time. He spends many nights just observing the night sky (he knew all the stars and constellations by name) where he is at one with his surroundings and his writing takes on a transcendental nature. There is an unforgettable experience in the forest when Walt and his friend come upon a tramp family, the sense of poverty hits you right out of the pages.

He mourns the death of his fellow writers - Carlyle, Emerson etc. Although Thomas Carlyle had different political views to Walt, he spends 10 pages writing about his importance to 19th century literature and culture where he calls him the most essential writer of his generation for his gritty and uncompromising style of writing. You couldn't see this happening today.

Whitman admits he didnt want to edit the book or put some kind of form on it, it is made up of a couple of hundred small essays and notes, perhaps an inspiration for the formless style used in On The Road.

[Josh Boggs]

What revelations here! To all who read Leaves of Grass and find there the world universal, I push Specimen Days on you. Here is Walt the reminiscer, the scriblerian revisiting his scraps wiled away for future poems. Here is America of the 19th century, through the eyes of a New York youth who rubbed shoulders with John Jacob Astor and Edgar Allen Poe, of a middle-aged man who gave up everything to tend to the Civil War wounded ("those three years I consider the greatest privilege ... and, of course, the most profound lesson of my life"), of an elderly exile who sat awestruck and smiling in a parlor next to Ralph Waldo Emerson. Walt's recollections of the New York theater scene of the 1840s or the turbulence in Washington after Bull Run are so immediate that they practically send one running for archives. Just as remarkable is his late-life turn toward the majesty of nature. His words on bird watching, backwoods rambling, and mountain climbing match John Muir for vigor, despite the attacks of paralysis through which Whitman wrote them. A sensitive, open, utterly suitable memoir from one of the great humanitarian poets.

[Yan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dit boek past prima in mijn verzameling bespiegelingen op de Amerikaanse samenleving. Whitman, schrijver van het beroemde Leaves of grass, laat in dit boek zien waar dat lang uitgesponnen gedicht wortel heeft geschoten.
De uitdrukking 'wortel schieten' gebruik ik niet zomaar: Whitman verblijft graag in de natuur en legt veel dingen in het leven (architectuur, emotie, krijgskunst en zelfs democratie) langs de meetlat 'natuur'.
Ik heb daarvan genoten en me eraan geërgerd. De eerste helft van het boek is een beschrijving van wat hij in ziekenhuizen vol gewonden uit de Burgeroorlog meegemaakt heeft. Vijf sterren waard. Daarna komt zoveel detail uit de natuur dat ik het nog maar drie sterren waard vond. Ik bedoel, waarom zou ik willen weten hoeveel verschillende soorten bomen hij kent?
Maar naar het einde toe trekt hij het boek weer vlot en ontdek ik eigenlijk hoezeer ik op hem lijk als het gaat om mijn kijk op de wereld, op mijzelf en wat ik zou willen bereiken in het leven.

[Hansen Wendlandt · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not the quality that you might expect from an American legend, but there are some real gems in the journal. Whtiman's account of Lincoln riding a horse to the White House, early morning, stress and responsibility wrinkles that no painter could ever portray--that's a fantastic entry. Also, after some good travel entries in 1879, "The Silent General" (about U.S. Grant coming home), 28 Sept 1879 is great. Perhaps what most struck me was that and how Whitman served as a war-time hospital chaplain. He could be so tender, writing a dead man's family, or giving a healing man 50 cents; but how on earth, right after the war ends, could he return so seamlessly to writing about nature, unfazed, indifferent to most of Leaves? Was it hiding from what he dealt with (no evidence of that), or a singular focus on literature (no, he's too free a thinker), or a subtle disconnect from people (unlikely)?

[Torben Carlsen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Den danske udgave "Fuldkomne dage" er en forkortet udgave; den mangler Whitmans optegnelser om barndom og opvækst samt hans indtryk fra Den amerikanske Borgerkrig. Men der er rigeligt at tage af: Hans naturbetragtninger (ofte førstehånds indtryk) er meget interessante og fascinerende og giver indtryk af et menneske i total harmoni med sig selv (han kunne bruge en hel dag på at betragte humlebier eller gå ture ved stranden) selv om der til sidst går lidt for meget Kaptajn Jespersen i det. Hans litterære indfald (om Thomas Carlyles, Emerson og Poe) er velskrevne personlige betragtninger på godt og ondt. En lille tynd sag, jeg sikkert vil vende tilbage til fra tid til anden for at blive lidt klogere.

[Ori Fienberg · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm just assuming this will be stunning. I wish I had one of the fake blood and pine resin coated facsimiles. Instead I have this yellow and white affair that looks like it was glued together in a basement, but at least it was affordable.

Update: Stunning? Well, it's no Leaves of Grass, but it's certainly worthwhile,