Divine Style

A bibliography of Whitman’s prose writings from the three-plus-year period between the time of the 1850 poems and the late summer of 1853.

A table tallying the most readily apparent biblicisms from Whitman’s anonymously published novella, “Life and Adventures of Jack Engle: An Auto-Biography.”

In Chapter Two, my focus is primarily on Whitman’s allusive practice as it pertains to the Bible in the lead-up to the 1855 Leaves. The larger topic of biblical quotations, allusions, and echoes in Whitman’s writings more broadly remains a desideratum and deserves a sustained study, especially one that is interested in something more than tallying mere occurrences and is informed as much form the Bible side of things as from the Whitman side. As a means of gesturing to what is possible, here I offer two worked examples from the period of the “New Bible” and the death of Lincoln. They are worked from slightly different angles. In the first, I move from the Bible to Whitman with a specific biblical text in view as I explore the nature of the poet’s debt to the Song of Songs (Whitman’s love poetry is specifically in view here). In the second, I take the opposite tack. I consider the possibility of biblical inflections in a single poem, Whitman’s moving elegy for Lincoln, “When Lilacs Last of the Door-Yard Bloom’d.” Love songs and laments are among the “fountain heads of song” that form part of the (Hebrew) Bible’s poetic bequest to Western literary culture. That these “divine and primordial” (generic) structures—“adjusted entirely to the modern”—should “survive” and “dominate” at times in Whitman’s poetry is very much in keeping with the Bard’s broader poetic theory.

In Chapter Two, my focus is primarily on Whitman’s allusive practice as it pertains to the Bible in the lead-up to the 1855 Leaves. The larger topic of biblical quotations, allusions, and echoes in Whitman’s writings more broadly remains a desideratum and deserves a sustained study, especially one that is interested in something more than tallying mere occurrences and is informed as much form the Bible side of things as from the Whitman side. As a means of gesturing to what is possible, here I offer two worked examples from the period of the “New Bible” and the death of Lincoln. They are worked from slightly different angles. In the first, I move from the Bible to Whitman with a specific biblical text in view as I explore the nature of the poet’s debt to the Song of Songs (Whitman’s love poetry is specifically in view here). In the second, I take the opposite tack. I consider the possibility of biblical inflections in a single poem, Whitman’s moving elegy for Lincoln, “When Lilacs Last of the Door-Yard Bloom’d.” Love songs and laments are among the “fountain heads of song” that form part of the (Hebrew) Bible’s poetic bequest to Western literary culture. That these “divine and primordial” (generic) structures—“adjusted entirely to the modern”—should “survive” and “dominate” at times in Whitman’s poetry is very much in keeping with the Bard’s broader poetic theory.

The two tables found here tally lines of eight words or more from the three 1850 poems (Table 1) and really long lines (seventeen words or more) from two of the early notebooks (Table 2).

More than 300 possible examples of internally parallel lines from the 1855 Leaves are gathered here.

In the following I offer an extended, close-up look at one spectacular example of Whitman’s evolved, mostly un-biblical staging of parallelism in the opening “Pre-Verse” of “A Child’s Reminiscence” (after 1871, “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking”).

Here I consider a further example of Whitman’s practice of collage, his culling of poetry out of prose.