Walt Whitman's Specimen Days

This week, Slate presents an excerpt from Leslie Jamison's introduction to Walt Whitman's Specimen Days and Collect, published by Melville House in November 2014. From Slate:

What is Specimen Days? It doesn’t sit easily in any genre. It’s restless in its recounting. Structurally, it’s a collection of prose fragments written across two decades of Walt Whitman’s life: his hospital visits during the Civil War, his recovery from a paralyzing stroke, his jaunts through the broad western states of America, his delight at trees and moths and glowworms, his disappointment at the posturing of prairie women. In his own words, it’s a “mélange of loafing, looking, hobbling, sitting, traveling—a little thinking thrown in for salt, but very little— ... wild and free and somewhat acrid—indeed more like cedar-plums than you might guess at first glance.”

This is signature Whitman, deploying the rhetoric of explanation to make everything more mysterious: more like cedar-plums than you might guess at first glance. He’s right, of course: I hadn’t imagined this book like cedar-plums at all. After helpfully describing what cedar-plums are (bunches of “china-blue” berries that grow along the cedar’s “thick woolly tufts”), Whitman explains that they resemble the book in “their uselessness growing wild— ... thin soil whence they come—their content in being let alone—their stolid and deaf repugnance to answering questions.” Questions like the one that opened this introduction: What ARE you, anyway? We are invited to imagine the cedar-plums hanging there, blank-faced, refusing our inquiries.

Much of the bliss of this book lives in its particulars: watching kingfishers with their milk-white necks splashing water into jets of diamonds, appreciating the “sea-prairies” of salt-grass meadows on the Jersey shore or a field of “malachite green” cabbages, watching a squirming flotilla of red worms wriggling out of the soil after a rainstorm, finding the white-flowering wild carrot, appreciating the “doubled brightness” of nighttime fishermen’s candles floating on the sea.

Whitman’s democratic awe is distinctive not simply for its range and its exuberance and its surprise, but for its willingness to dwell—to unfurl a pleasure fully. [...]

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