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Description

In 1879, when Walt Whitman was sixty, he made a trip to the West—first to Kansas to attend the quarter-centennial celebration of Kansas settlement, then on to Denver and the Rockies. Biographers have only briefly reported this trip, if they have dealt with it at all; here for the first time is a thorough reconstruction of Whitman’s western experience. From his own extensive research in newspapers of the period, as well as from Whitman’s published daybooks and notebooks and his collected correspondence. Walter H. Eitner is able to piece together a well detailed itinerary, and to compare the record of the actual journey with Whitman’s imaginative account in Specimen Days. This study in part constitutes a criticism of the sections of Specimen Days dealing with the West by examining the ways in which Whitman reordered his experiences to have them support a bardic pose he wished to maintain. For the first time Whitman’s three journalist traveling companions—whom Whitman did not even mention in Specimen Days—are fully on record. This account also shows Whitman very much his own press agent, engaging in a wide range of self-promoting activities such as writing his own interviews and sending back to the press in the East accounts of his whereabouts, his health, and his plans. Description Walter H. Eitner was a professor of English at Kansas State University, where he taught early American literature and nineteenth-century American poetry, and directed seminars on Whitman. This Kansas Open Books title is funded by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Humanities Open Book Program.

ISBN

978-0-7006-3088-2

Publication Date

5-20-1981

Publisher

University Press of Kansas

Format

xvi, 124 pp.

DOI

https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv1p2gmhq

Rights Statement

© 1981 by The Regents Press of Kansas. © 2020 University Press of Kansas. All rights reserved. First Edition in 1981. Reissued in 2020. The text of this book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International Public License.

Rights Status

Open Access

Walt Whitman's Western Jaunt
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