Whitman in Washington: Becoming the National Poet in the Federal City

During Walt Whitman's decade in Washington, DC, 1863-1873, he labored intensely, at times seeming to have three lives at once. He wrote the most distinguished journalism of his career; came into his own as a writer of letters; crafted memorable Civil War poetry, Drum-Taps and Sequel to Drum-Taps and later folded it into heavily revised and expanded versions of Leaves of Grass; and produced his searching but also flawed critique of American culture, Democratic Vistas. Whitman's work through the first three editions of Leaves often receives the highest praise, yet his writing in the Washington years is exceptional, too, by any reckoningEDand is all the more remarkable given that he also cared for thousands of wounded and sick soldiers in Washington hospitals, serving as an attentive visitor. In addition, he served as a government clerk in various positions, most notably in the attorney general's office when much was accomplished on the road toward a multi-racial democracy including efforts to suppress the Ku Klux Klan, and much was also missed (both by the attorney general's office and by Whitman) in the efforts to advance a more just and vibrant union. Kenneth M. Price analyses Whitman's integrated life, writings, and government work in his urban context to re-evaluate the writer and the nation's capital in a time of transformation. Drawing on an expanded Whitman corpus, including nearly 3,000 Whitman documents Price recently identified in the National Archives, Whitman in Washington demonstrates that the power of Whitman's Civil War and Reconstruction writing emerges, more fully than previously imagined, from his intimate knowledge of the capital city, its bureaucracies, and its tumultuous post-war history.

Table of Contents:
1: Whitman, Washington, and the Convulsiveness of Civil War 2: Whitman as a Paradoxical "Missionary to the Wounded" 3: Strayed Cattle: Anti-Pastoralism in Whitman's War Writings 4: Social Calamity, Personal Perturbations, and Office Decorum: How Leaves of Grass Grew Pensive 5: Multi-racial Democracy and Black Democratic Vistas

About the Author :
Kenneth M. Price, Hillegass University Professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, has co-directed The Walt Whitman Archive since 1995. He is a founding co-director of the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities at Nebraska. His previous books include Whitman and Tradition: The Poet in His Century (Yale, 1990); To Walt Whitman, America (North Carolina, 2004) and, with co-author Ed Folsom, Re-Scripting Walt Whitman (Blackwell, 2005). He has served as President of both the Society for Textual Scholarship and the Association for Documentary Editing.

Review :
Review from previous edition Price works to untangle Whitman's complex, often contradictory, racial attitudes, showing . . . how his views of African Americans during slavery changed once emancipation occurred, [and] how he was able to support the freeing of slaves but balked at the consequences of such freedom, in particular as it extended to civil rights. But even as the crucial matter of race threads through the book, it is by no means the only issue or paradox that Price confronts. . . . Price manages to bring Washington vividly alive as he maps Whitman's personal and professional enactments in it. Kenneth M. Price makes the most comprehensive and compelling argument to date for putting the US capital at the center of our understanding of the poet during and after the Civil War. . . . With insightful textual analysis and groundbreaking archival research, Whitman in Washington is essential reading for those seeking to understand Whitman's life and politics during the Civil War, and the troubling disjunction between the democratic egalitarianism of much of his poetry and his personal and political views. Written with clarity and impressively researched, this study offers a remarkable picture of a key period in Whitman's life.