| Using breakthroughs afforded by digital technology and the online Walt Whitman Archive, Walt Whitman and the Invention of Literary Collage provides the first comprehensive overview of the poet's earliest literary notebooks. While most scholars have assumed that Whitman was drafting poetic lines long before the 1855 publication of the first Leaves of Grass, I use the notebooks to demonstrate that until about 1854, Whitman---who once speculated that Leaves would be a "spiritual novel" or a play---was unaware that his literary ambitions would assume the form of poetry at all. I detail how, around that time, he discovered a remarkable new creative process that allowed him to transform a diverse array of text, including diary-like personal observations, reading notes, clippings from newspapers and scholarly articles, and language stolen or paraphrased from books, into breakthrough poems such as "Song of Myself" and "The Sleepers." Whitman's manuscripts express the mobility and adaptability of both their author's lifestyle (Whitman lived a nomadic, peripatetic existence while composing these poems) and his ideas. His copious notes from the mid-1850s reveal a forward thinking conception of the social role of literary writing and the authorial relation to language and cultural production. I show how Whitman embraced an art of fragments that encouraged him to "cut and paste" his lines into ever evolving forms based on what Whitman called "spinal ideas" of order and function. This approach to language, I argue, represents the first major use in the Western arts of the creative technique later known as collage, an observation that holds significant ramifications for our reception of subsequent artistic and cultural practices. Long before the modernists, Whitman integrated found text and readymade language into a revolutionary formulation of artistic production that anticipates not only modernist collages like Picasso's "Still Life with Chair Caning" and T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land but also the conceptual provocations of Marcel Duchamp and later post-modernists. |
