Every Hour, Every Atom: A Collection of Walt Whitman's Early Notebooks and Fragments

by Walt Whitman, Zachary Turpin (Editor), Matt Miller (Editor)

Some of the dimmest years in Walt Whitman’s life precede the advent of Leaves of Grass in 1855, when he was working as a jour­nalist and fiction writer. Starting around 1850, what he’d begun writing in his personal notebooks was far more enigmatic than anything he’d done before. One of Whitman’s most secretive projects during this timeframe was a novel, Life and Adventures of Jack Engle ; serialized anonymously in the spring of 1852, and rediscovered and properly published in 2017. The key to the novel’s later discovery were plot notes Whit­man had made in one of his private notebooks. Whitman’s invaluable notebooks have been virtually inacces­sible to the public, until now. Maintaining the early notebooks’ wild, syncretic feel and sample illustrations of Whitman’s beauti­ful and unkempt pages, scholars Zachary Turpin and Matt Miller’s thorough transcriptions have made these notebooks available to all; sharing Whitman’s secret space for developing his poetry, his writing, his philosophy, and himself.

410 pages, Paperback

Published July 1, 2020

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

[Tiffany · Rating 3 out of 5]

Turpin and Miller's transcription of Whitman's early notebooks provides the public with insight into the writing method and inner workings of Whitman as he added to and formulated his style and person. It is interesting to see the beginnings of works that sometimes appeared in published works but later disappeared, as well as getting to read bits that have never been fully published before. I do take what Whitman wrote with a grain of salt since it has been speculated that in later notebooks he edited his words later because he knew the books would be read, but never the less, this is worth the read (though maybe not in ebook format). I would recommend this to anyone with an interest or enjoyment of Whitman's works. I think this would also make a great companion book for any class teaching the works of Whitman.

Thank you to NetGalley and the University of Iowa Press for the DARC of this work in exchange for my honest review.

[AcademicEditor · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a fantastic resource for anyone studying Whitman or even just researching the creative process. You can see some traces of his more famous works, as well as other exercises in writing that didn't quite make the cut. Really interesting, even for a casual fan of Walt.

Thanks to the publishers and NetGalley for a digital ARC for the purpose of an unbiased review.

[Joseph Spuckler · Rating 4 out of 5]

Every Hour, Every Atom: A Collection of Walt Whitman’s Early Notebooks and Fragments
by Walt Whitman and edited Matt Miller and Zachary Turpin. Miller is an Associate Professor of English at Yeshiva University’s Stern College. He holds a Ph.D. in English literature from the University of Iowa and an M.F.A. in creative writing from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Miller is a founding member of the Walt Whitman Initiative, an international collective bringing together all people interested in the life and work of Whitman, and currently serves on the board of directors. Turpin researches nineteenth-century periodical culture, digital humanities, textual recovery, and the history of epistemology and the sciences. His interests are in American poetry, particularly Walt Whitman. He has earned a Ph.D. in English Language and Literature from the University of Houston.

The work presented is a collection of poetry and notes of Whitman’s early writing. Turpin’s expertise in document recovery is particularly useful, as many of the pages have not aged well. Even so, there are portions that are unreadable in the original. The work is recreated in standard printed text with more modern editorial markings. There is a legend for the editing markings. Miller was one of the few responsible for digitally recording the original documents at the Library of Congress. He and his group were among the last to touch the frail notebooks.

This collection presents what has been previously only seen by a few and presented in a very readable format. Every Hour, Every Atom is a book for fans and scholars of Whitman’s work. These early works show the development of his poetry and his thinking. As with many notes and drafts, a great deal has been crossed out (but still readable) and abandon in final drafts. An excellent collection with introductions by both editors. Although available both in paperback and ebook format, the paperback will allow for notes in the margins and a cleared look at the prints of the original text. Extremely well done.

[Anne · Rating 4 out of 5]

I do love reading other people’s notebooks and diaries - only when invited, of course. Writer’s notebooks are particularly interesting if they give little glimpses into the creative mind and how snippets become poems or stories. This book is a true insight into the mind of Walt Whitman. But because it is elucidated by Whitman scholars, it is also accessible and easy to follow.

There are snatches of poetry and writings on people he has met - usually men - and descriptions of places and things that he wants to capture for future work. There are sentences, paragraphs and occasional pages and all of it allows us to see the workings of a great mind. It reads like you're looking over the shoulder of the great man as he scribbles down something that has just occurred to him in the middle of lunch. I found it fascinating. Any Whitman scholar must own it but even a casual reader of his poetry will get something extra from it.

I was given a copy of this book by Netgalley in return for an honest review.

[Annika · Rating 5 out of 5]

Every Hour, Every Atom is a collection of most of Walt Whitman's notebooks written before the Civil War. The editors recommend not reading it straight through, but I'll admit I did. (However, I savored it in small chunks over many nights.) Any Whitman fan will have a ball perusing this book and then going to look at the original images in Whitman's hand on the Walt Whitman Archive.

Whitman's notebooks swing wildly from topic to topic. Lines of his most famous poems are sandwiched between notes from games of 20 questions, political and philosophical thoughts are next to addresses of friends or notes he took from books on animals, plants, history, and poetry. It's like the prose version of the mundane and material being tied to the spiritual than runs through so many of his poems. It's fascinating to read multiple versions of poems that we know so well in their final form and to read his manifestos of what he wanted his poetry to accomplish.