Walt Whitman, God’s Kisses, And The Fraudulent Butterfly.
Whitman’s Butterfly (Bottom View)1
The Missing Walt Whitman Notebooks2
Following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, the Library of Congress sent almost 5,000 crates of historic documents (equivalent to 26 freight car loads) to repositories in Virginia and Ohio for safekeeping.3 In 1944, one of those crates, which should have contained 24 of Walt Whitman’s notebooks and the butterfly pictured at top of post, was returned to Washington. When the seal was broken and the crate unpacked, only 14 notebooks (and no butterfly) were found. A ten year internal search was unrequited and, at that time (1954), acting on advice from the FBI, the Library of Congress circulated a description of the missing goods to book and antiquities dealers, archives, and other likely individuals and institutions, asking that a watch be kept for the missing items.
Forty-one years passed without a response. Then, in 1995, a New York lawyer turned up at Sotheby’s to ask them to appraise four of the lost notebooks and the cardboard butterfly, which he reported were given to his father, who had held them for 30 years before his death. The other six notebooks are still missing.
Prodigal Notebooks Now Online
In addition to those four notebooks being found, there is more good news. Those once-lost and now-found Walt Whitman Notebooks and the butterfly have been scanned and are available online at Poet at Work: Walt Whitman Notebooks 1850s -1860s
The conservation of the notebooks in general and the methodology of scanning and preserving these documents in particular are also part of this online exhibition and deserve attention in their own right.
Why I Like Whitman More Now Than I Did Friday Morning
Before I happened onto this online exhibition of Whitman’s Notebooks Friday afternoon, I harbored a few small resentments toward the man. His prose is a tad florid for a steady diet. His free verse never grabbed me. Heck, I was even put off by Ezra Pound’s claim that “Mentally I am a Walt Whitman,” although, I suppose, that was hardly Walt’s fault. I also have the unfortunate habit of occasionally confusing his writing with Emerson’s, again something for which one really shouldn’t blame Whitman.
A more significant issue, however, has been my assumption that Leaves Of Grass and the rest of his literary corpus flowed from his brain through his hand and pen onto paper with trivial effort. This supposition, I suspect, was the result of learning that the man wrote in free verse, which is – well, it’s free verse and that sounds pretty easy compared with composing, say, an Italian sonnet. And he was a transcendentalist4 and adhered to that school’s emphasis on intuition over scientific and empirical knowledge. Well, if you’re writing from intuition rather than doing the heavy lifting of working out a rational idea, how hard can that be?
I don’t claim my resentments are well considered, let alone justified.
In any case, a glance at these notebooks wiped out my preconceived notion that Whitman’s writing was the unedited, unexpurgated transliteration of his spontaneous thoughts. To the contrary, there are many pages completely X’d out and many more on which only a few words or a phrase here and there survived the onslaught of erasures and marking-outs. The appearance of his notebook pages, in fact, bears a striking resemblance to my own. Consider page 12 from the “Perceptions or Senses” Notebook:
Or page 20 of that notebook:
I feel much better.
Delicious As The Kisses Of God
The first page I randomly selected for viewing (the notebook contents are not searchable) was Page 22 of the “Perceptions or Senses” Notebook.
And it was at the top of that page that I happened onto that felicitous phrase, Delicious as the kisses of god
Is that cool or what?
So What’s With The Butterfly?
You may have seen this photograph of Whitman, which has been popular since it was first printed in the 1883 Miami Herald. It has since appeared in several settings, most famously as the frontispiece of the so-called “Birthday Edition” of Leaves of Grass in 1889.
Did you notice that butterfly on his finger?
Did you notice it was made from cardboard?
The current best guess by academicians is that Whitman, well-known during his own lifetime as a vigorous self-promoter, wanted to present himself as a man of nature. Real butterflies being notoriously uncooperative with the notion of sitting for a portrait, Walt apparently procured this inanimate stand-in which was originally produced in large quantities as part of an Easter celebration.
What Else Is In The Notebooks?
My first answer was “Beats me.” There is no table of contents or index.
Now, however, I’ve found a handy-dandy Resources For Educators page which includes lots of annotated links to specific notebook pages. For example, one set of links goes to specific pages (pages 97, 99, 101, 103, 106-108, 111, 114, 117, 119, and 120) identified as “Whitman’s accounts of the 51st regiment of New York.”
This page of resources can be found at Collection Connections
_____________________- From Whitman’s Cardboard Butterfly [↩]
- The information about the disappearance and recovery of the notebooks and butterfly is taken from LC’s Missing Whitman Notes Found in N.Y. and Walt Whitman and Thomas Harned [↩]
- Denison University in Granville, Ohio, the Virginia Military Institute and Washington and Lee University in Lexington, and the University of Virginia in Charlottesville [↩]
- OK, one can make an argument about whether or not Whitman was a transcendentalist, and if so, just what kind of sexed-up transcendentalism he had in mind, but I was taught in high school that he was a transcendentalist so I’m stuck with that [↩]
Loved this post. It countered a rainy Monday, first day back to work, and the discovery that the state computer grading program ate half of my first nine week’s grades, which are to be posted again forthwith.
It really did.