Chapter 2 explores accounts by Civil War nurses and surgeons – first-person nonfiction, lightly fictionalized narrative, sensationalized memoir, and fiction. The central texts in this chapter are Walt Whitman’s Memoranda after the War, Louisa May Alcott’s Hospital Sketches, John Brinton’s Personal Memoirs, Susie King Taylor’s Reminiscences of My Life in Camp, and S. Weir Mitchell’s “The Case of George Dedlow.” These narrators represent amputation in different ways, especially the scene of amputation itself, the image of a basket or trough of dismembered limbs, and amputee reflections on the relationship between their remaining bodies and their absent limbs. However, for all the narrators in these texts, amputation is part of a meditation on the meanings of intact and amputated bodies, and their role in making sense of the Civil War. The chapter ends with a discussion of the Army Medical Museum, in which amputated limbs were catalogued, stored, and displayed as examples of the damage done by gunshots and shells. This dovetails with a reading of George Dedlow, in which the protagonist’s legs, stored in alcohol at the Museum, return to him briefly during a séance, absurdly marrying hopes for bodily resurrection with spiritualism’s belief in a humanized heaven.

This chapter examines the aesthetic and imaginative significance of sound play, taking for its case study the poems of George Oppen. The chapter proposes that poetic sound play offers poets a way to explore value, whether it be a single vowel's sound value, a poet's preoccupation with certain subject matters, or that poet's particular political commitments. Through close readings of poems from across Oppen's career, and especially of Oppen's assonance and alliteration, the chapter argues that sound play becomes a social allegory, registering political possibilities which, on occasion, go beyond the poems’ explicit representations of social life. The chapter also shows how, as each sonic value is born afresh in each new usage, this sound play extends beyond the single poem to multiple poems. In the case of Oppen, sound play's continual production of the new through recombination promises, even as it cannot achieve, a future beyond capitalist reproduction.

Vivian Pollak begins with Whitman’s reputation as a sodomite and pederast in his time and ours. She traces the development of this reputation in his early fiction and in the first editions of Leaves of Grass. Although many of Whitman’s contemporaries agreed that the poet had a “sex handicap,” they disagreed about its nature. Pollak argues such “sex handicaps” open a space for thinking about queer community. She offers a close reading of three Dickinson poems that variously engage the concept of sex handicaps and shows that the heteronormative “Master” motif shrunk Dickinson’s erotic range. Eventually, however, even Robert Frost addressed the search for a historical “Master.” Pollak notes Frost’s early interest in “fairies,” describes his disidentification with his self-destructive father, and highlights his bond with his writerly mother, Belle Moodie Frost. Pollak reads Frost’s 1913 poem “Mowing” as a brilliant analysis of erotic conflict and its partial resolution. Although Frost is not usually recognized as a queer writer, Pollak suggests that a collective struggle with “sex handicaps,” however queerly defined, constitutes an important tradition in American poetry and poetics.

This essay revisits Emerson’s iconic transparent eyeball passage to rethink it as a moment of crossing over into queer embodiment and sensory expansion. If “trans” is “to move across” and “scandre” to climb, the point is not to rise above the physical world, but to move into it in such a way as to be in touch with its divine energies. To do so was to climb out of the enclosure and isolation of subjectivity and inhabit something much more capacious. Expanding the scope of Transcendentalism proper, the essay tracks this queer “I” into a number of other texts in which a similar experience or phenomenon of ecstasy opens onto novel social, sexual, and gender understandings. Margaret Fuller, Margaret Sweat, women trance writers, Walt Whitman, and Harriet Jacobs animate the “trans-” in Transcendentalism in their critical crossings and dynamic reassemblages of body and soul, self and other, and sex, gender, and race.

No country outside Britain has embraced Vaughan Williams’s music more warmly and extensively than the USA. The composer first visited in 1922 (extended stays followed in 1932 and 1954), but he had earlier developed a sympathy for American democratic ideals through intense involvement with Walt Whitman’s poetry. Vaughan Williams’s stature in America grew steadily from around 1920, when major works, most notably A London Symphony, began to be performed regularly, and it reached a zenith in the 1940s and 1950s, when he was widely regarded as a major international figure in the same league as Stravinsky or Bartók. While his American reputation echoed the deepening Anglo-American ‘special relationship’ that developed during the alliances of the Second World War and the Cold War, advocacy from a wide range of European émigrés such as Serge Koussevitzky and Bruno Walter indicates a broad appeal reaching well beyond any narrow notion of Anglo-Saxon kinship. Vaughan Williams’s profound engagement with folk song, modality, Whitman, and the symphony aligned particularly closely with prevailing trends in American music c. 1930–60, and his impact can be felt in the work of composers like Samuel Barber and Roy Harris; more recently, the admiration of John Adams, among others, indicates continuing relevance.

Drawing upon their respective expertise in early twentieth-century literature and music, Matthew Ingleby and Ceri Owen explore the centrality of literature within Vaughan Williams’s work and career, demonstrating that his literariness was not simply an outgrowth of his personal artistic proclivities, but rather was mediated by several institutions that were key to the production of a new sense of English national identity during the first half of the twentieth century. By contextualizing Vaughan Williams’s literary tastes and choices for musical settings – including his interest in historically remote, non-contemporary, and Anglophone writers and texts – it is argued that such choices should be read less as evidence of the reactionary, conservative nationalism with which he has often been associated, and more as an indication of his participation in forward-looking currents within twentieth-century literary culture. Ingleby and Owen conclude by proposing that, while the nation may have been the frame through which Vaughan Williams often articulated a complex relation to modernity, his powerful interest in internationalist figures such as Walt Whitman and William Blake suggest that his cultural nationalism formed part of a broader humanitarian aspiration, one that was implicitly indebted to his literary imagination.

In Chapter One, I outline a brief history of the representation of US transiency from the postbellum period into the early twentieth century. I explore how the term ‘tramp’ developed as a term of moral and legal exclusion to describe the mobile poor, who were felt to be opting out of the capitalist work ethos. I show that while the tramp had been a figure of mockery in popular culture, during the late nineteenth century the problem began to be treated more seriously by a range of proto-sociological figures. In the early twentieth century, investigators increasingly accepted a connection between vagrancy and unemployment, and representations became less hyperbolic as a result, although no less tainted by class bias. Finally, the chapter shows how the term ‘hobo’, constructed to mean a transient wage-worker, was developed by the IBWA, the IWW and others to fight back against the cultural meaning and legal implications of the term tramp, creating what I call the ‘frontier defence’ of transiency. However, this defence had problematic connotations and exclusions based on gender and race.

A friend and follower of Walt Whitman’s, John Johnston loved the countryside for many reasons. In one sense he was an Adherer like Hallam and Cresswell: the landscape he loved most of all was that of his native Annan with its river, bridge and meadows. He was also an Explorer, whose careful observations of nature were prompted by a quest for spiritual more than scientific knowledge, and a Withdrawer, who repeatedly turned his back on dirty, smoky Bolton to find refuge in nature. Yet more than he was Adherer, Explorer or Withdrawer, Johnston was a Restorer. He went to the countryside to recompose something that was impaired and disordered by the constant turbulence to which his very active life exposed him. ‘Loafing’ quietly in secluded rural locations played a crucial role in sustaining the ethical and spiritual framework he drew on to endure professional difficulties and personal losses.

This chapter illuminates the irreplaceable value of poetry in cultivating a cosmopolitan and democratic imagination. The authors contend that poetry evokes unanticipated or overlooked ideas, emotions, and possibilities; it provokes people to look beyond their settled views. Poetry uniquely fuels their ability to engage new thoughts, values, and practices. This ever-renewing quality of mind can, in turn, help people reimagine the nature and value of education continuously as circumstances and the needs they call out evolve. The authors suggest that these imaginative capacities are significant given the cosmopolitan and democratic challenges, and prospects, generated by an intensifying process of political, economic, and cultural globalization. The chapter features a reading of Walt Whitman’s well-known epic poem, “Song of Myself” (first published in 1855), which the authors show both articulates and enacts the most profound promise in a cosmopolitan and democratic imagination.

This chapter provides an introduction to poet and composer Ivor Gurney’s responses to war, predominantly in poetry, but also in his music.It explores the strategies used by Gurney in the face of war; his sense of fate; his use of, and response to, place; his representation of the ordinary soldier; and his responses to the conflict through the lens of writings by Walt Whitman and Leo Tolstoi.

That David Foster Wallace designed his fiction to serve a therapeutic function for readers is, at this point, axiomatic. Timothy Aubry (Reading as Therapy) has effectively demonstrated how it serves this function, as well as how his fiction’s contingent relation to addiction and recovery stories enabled Wallace to reinject what he saw as a dispassionate and exhausted postmodern form with moral and affective urgency. Rob Short (Big Books) has thoroughly documented how Wallace’s own adherence to the twelve-step recovery program of Alcoholics Anonymous (1939) shapes the aesthetic practice of his novels. Wallace also frequently used the text to stage “the production and elision of intimacy between the (male) author and the (male) reader.” In conversation with this sections other chapters on gender and sexuality, this chapter explores the ways in which Wallace’s writing occupies queer spaces in its representation of the fractured contingency of the addicted self in recovery. Specifically, the chapter draws a comparison with Whitman, through his first and only novel Franklin Evans or The Inebriate: A Tale of the Times (1842), by far his largest commercial success during his lifetime despite being generally forgotten and, like Wallace, a first novel he would often disavow. For Whitman, masking his exact intention to connect with the reader in his poetry, as well as through this addiction and recovery novel, was the very mechanism by which he could construct the queer intimacies socially and politically foreclosed during his lifetime. As scholars like Michael Warner (“Whitman Drunk”) and Michael Moon (Disseminating Whitman) have documented, Whitman too attended alcohol recovery meetings in part to listen to “dirty” stories about same-sex encounters. Through this connection, I hope to accomplish two goals: first, to recontextualize the fantasy of pre-postmodern and even pre-realist novels imagined to be better suited to the aesthetic project of therapy and recovery in a post-postmodern America, and second, to bring Wallace’s aesthetic practice in closer contact with issues of sexuality that the universalizing gesture of fiction-as-therapy can too often elide. While the chapter does not argue that Wallace was a queer writer, it elucidates the disruptive potential of queer readings within the context of late postmodernist constructions of self.

The chapter examines Walt Whitman’s and Frances Harper’s engagements with vernacular forms, especially ballad stanza and dialect verse, in their Reconstruction-era poetry. For both poets, using such forms marked a departure from usual practice. Whitman turned to the familiar ballad form in moments of national uncertainty, particularly addressing the president’s assassination and issues of race during Reconstruction. The ballad’s conventional racialization of voice, however, represented a challenge for Harper. Before the war, Harper worked primarily in the elevated register of standard written English. Her Aunt Chloe poems, originating in her tour of the south during Reconstruction, mark an important divergence from her earlier work and an important intervention into the ballad tradition. Here she brought a new vernacular voice to an old vernacular form.

From the heightened civil strife of the late antebellum years through the Reconstruction era, Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass underwent significant expansions and redactions across numerous editions. Historically informed literary criticism has become highly attuned to the political connections and implications of even minor formal adjustments to Whitman’s masterwork. Yet through all Whitman’s alterations, Leaves of Grass maintained a prophetic vision of an American nation reconstructed around a more egalitarian core than the current political system supported. This chapter shows how each of the revised 1860, 1867, and 1872 editions of Leaves consistently presented itself as a central component of the more democratic version of the United States that Whitman sought to articulate and enact. As the postbellum challenges of federal Reconstruction became central to national politics, Whitman attempted to leverage the venerable reconstructive impulse behind Leaves of Grass, which gained a more concrete relevance as he adopted his postbellum persona of the Good Gray Poet.

In September 1862, readers of the short-lived Continental Monthly might have encountered the following prediction by prominent editor and sometime politician Horace Greeley: The United States of the future will be no constrained alliance of discordant and mutually repellant [sic] commonwealths, but a true exemplification of “many in one” – many stars blended in one common flag – many States combined in one homogeneous Nation. Our Union will be one of bodies not merely, but of souls.1

This essay focuses on the year 1855, which saw the publication of the first edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and Herman Melville’s Israel Potter. In looking at how these two publications present American history, the essay deemphasizes the relation of these two authors to what is coming (the Civil War, and their poetry on it) and instead considers the whole of the period not as an antebellum period but a bellicose period, marked by continual warfare.

In one of the reviews of the 1855 Leaves of Grass, an anonymous reviewer for the Swedenborgian Christian Spiritualist conceives of Whitman’s poetry (and poetry more broadly) as aligning with a tradition of spiritual mediumship.1 The great poets, that is, possess a medial capacity to channel and develop a “spiritual intercourse” with the muse, who is herself part of the transcendent realm. Having distinguished between the “two permanent types” of media – those singular agents who are lucky enough to receive “direct influx” from the divine source of love and wisdom, and a “second class of media” that channel “individual Spirits” and “societies of Spirits” – the reviewer proceeds to outline what is happening to the idea of mediumship as society transitions into a new and disorienting phase. “Many varieties of Mediumship,” the reviewer argues, “must be expected” in this moment of social and political turmoil, and not all of them either savory or desirable. The present age now produces imitators who merely “pour forth as Divine Revelations the froth and scum of a receding age”; confidence men who give “false notions of the state of man after death”; as well as other suspect figures who merely “come in contact with the outmost portion of the Spirit-life.” Then there are those more exceptional beings, best exemplified by Ralph Waldo Emerson, who “receive influxes from the upper mind-sphere of the age” and “[see] the future of truths as our Spirit-seers discern the future of man.”2

Readers of American literature increasingly already know something about the career of Cherokee writer and editor John Rollin Ridge. In the preface to his 2018 breakout novel There There, Tommy Orange offers readers his version of Ridge’s claim to fame: “The first novel by a Native person, and the first novel written in California, was written in 1854, by a Cherokee guy named John Rollin Ridge.”1 The novel Orange references is Ridge’s The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta: The Celebrated California Bandit, a semifictional story of a Mexican war veteran driven to vengeance by the cruelty of white settlers. Although it did not sell well in Ridge’s lifetime, Penguin Random House’s new addition suggests that Ridge’s importance to college syllabi and American literary scholarship will only deepen in the years ahead. As Ridge’s biographer notes, while it failed to provide Ridge with the financial security he desired, the novel birthed a public interest in Joaquín Murieta’s story that has been with us ever since.2

The link between warfare and morality in American culture is an originating one. The United States’ founding document, its Declaration of Independence, makes clear that a people’s natural right to be free and rule themselves begets the responsibility for acquiring and defending the same. This essay examines how American literature has and continues to adjudicate the three most pressing historical threats to the possibility of the United States warring justly: the Civil War, the World Wars, and the forever war. Relevant to each period, this essay explicates works of American literature with an eye toward exposing, rather than resolving, the central ethical problems of the times at the levels both of state and individual action.

Rounding out the previous chapter’s treatment of Victorian narrative with the early modernist prose of Henry James, analysis returns to the ontology of language in Agamben, leading on to a more philologically oriented history of prose – pivoted on the Enlightenment rise of the “plain style” – in research by John Guillory. Such is a mode of discourse whose potential stranglehold on future developments in literary writing is contrasted with a recovered premium on the densities of rhythm and sonority. Literary examples extend from Whitman’s insurgent lexical poetics, through D. H. Lawrence’s grammatically impacted style, to the stripped-down phrasal ironies of Kazuo Ishiguro – before returning to Friedrich Kittler on the ideologies of speech as medium in the post-Enlightenment century. Discussion closes with an adapted Heideggerian model for the present-at-handness of language itself in medial disclosure – rather than just in scriptive use.

Whitman adopted photography as a model for literary practice. By emulating the immediacy effects and truth claims of photography, Whitman developed an innovative style that aimed to endow his poems with the same qualities he valued in the new medium—particularly directness, accuracy, naturalness, and inclusiveness of representation—and the cumulative experience of these qualities by the beholder as a sense of authenticity, media transparency, and immediate encounter. Comparing the representational powers of photography and literature helped Whitman to gauge the spiritual, cultural, and political function of literature. The chapter presents Whitman’s turn towards immediacy as part of his attempt to renew and democratize American poetry. It argues that Whitman’s engagement with photography led him to create a poetic style that allowed him to address the particulars of time and place, to take the details of everyday life as his subject matter, and to invest them with an egalitarian ethos by staging the dynamics of literary communication as a model for democratic social interaction. In Whitman’s work, the appeal to immediacy thus gains a decidedly political momentum.