Reviews for Specimen Days

The average rating for Specimen Days based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2010-03-02 00:00:00 Carmon Thompson 1. Literature flies so high and is so hotly spiced, that our notes may seem hardly more than breaths of common air, or draughts of water to drink. But that is part of our lesson. (Specimen Days, "New Themes Entered Upon") Intensely artful, intensely vernacular'some draughts of the tipsy-making water Emerson talks about in the essay by which young Whitman was called ("The Poet"). But Whitman's waters do not flow in the clear stream of a style that refuses to call attention to itself'the bizarre ideal of those dismayed at the demanding perceptual detours and little linguistic renewals that constitute "good" writing, truly readable writing, "poetry"'in any case, "language in its aesthetic function." (Jakobson's definition will always serve.) Whitman recoiled from what he called "the sickliness of verbal melody," and the prose of Specimen Days is among the most casual and colloquial in English'but the style still calls and holds one's attention. Because that's the point. Style, Flaubert insisted, is an "absolute way of seeing," and Whitman wants to see what he sees, in the way he sees, with all the corporeal contours and spiritual subtleties apparent to him. And did he see! The guy was everywhere. Metropolitan man of ferried crowds, omnibus flaneur and opera-goer in the booming Astoria of midcentury New York City'an ink-stained bohemian, arguing politics over sudsy steins in rowdy fireman taverns'a stroller of Broadway, where he sees Andrew Jackson, Dickens, and "the first Japanese ambassadors." In 1861 he goes down to fort-belted wartime Washington ("her surrounding hills spotted with guns") to nurse the wounded and watch over the dying'meets the bloody boatloads down at the wharf, dresses wounds, reads the Bible at bedsides, loans books, distributes money, stamped letters and writing paper'soda water and syrups when Lee is repulsed at Gettysburg'and pens letters home for the illiterate and the too-weak. He doesn't know how much good he does but he cannot leave them, stays on in the embattled, cemetery- and hospital-environed capital through the four years of carnage. When not in the wards, he loafs in army camps, observes and notes the goings-on, chills with the pickets through their watches, and clerks part-time in a government bureau until its indignant head realizes he's employing an "indecent poet." He stands in the street all night as the endless columns file past to the front, savoring unseen the jokes and songs that waft through the dark. He and Lincoln nod to each other when they pass in the street. He chats with Rebel prisoners and Union deserters; compares eastern and western, northern and southern soldiers, speculates about regional types, local moldings, the looks of future Americans. The war'"the most profound lesson of my life," with "the marrow of the tragedy concentrated in those Army Hospitals"'breaks his health, and the lusty rambler is confined paralyzed for a time. He regains much of his strength later, enough to resume "gaddings-about in cities" and even to manage "a long jaunt west"'to the "distances join'd like magic" by the railroad'and there to eyewitness the course of empire, to see America planting the prairies with world-feeding wheat, tunneling railways through mountains, feeding forests into steam-powered sawmills, the sublime statistics of this titanic industry yet dwarfed by the continent itself, by the tinted canyons and empyrean peaks, the melted snows thundering through gorges. 2. Whitman on Abraham Lincoln: Earlier in the summer I occasionally saw the President and his wife, toward the latter part of the afternoon, out in a barouche, on a pleasure ride through the city. Mrs. Lincoln was dress'd in complete black, with a long crape veil. The equipage is of the plainest kind, only two horses, and they nothing extra. They pass'd me once very close, and I saw the President in the face fully, as they were moving slowly, and his look, though abstracted, happen'd to be directed steadily in my eye. He bow'd and smiled, but far beneath his smile I noticed well the expression I have alluded to. None of the artists or pictures has caught the deep, though subtle and indirect expression of this man's face. There is something else there. One of the great portrait painters of two or three centuries ago is needed. On New York harbor: …the mast-hemm'd shores'the grand obelisk-like towers of the bridge, one on either side, in haze, yet plainly defin'd, giant brothers twain, throwing free graceful interlinking loops high across the tumbled tumultuous current below'(the tide is just changing to its ebb)'the broad water-spread everywhere crowded'no, not crowded, but thick as stars in the sky'with all sorts and sizes of sail and steam vessels, plying ferry-boats, arriving and departing coasters, great ocean Dons, iron-black, modern, magnificent in size and power, fill'd with their incalculable value of human life and precious merchandise'with here and there, above all, those daring, careening things of grace and wonder, those white and shaded swift-darting fish-birds, (I wonder if shore or sea elsewhere can outvie them,) ever with their slanting spars, and fierce, pure, hawk-like beauty and motion'first-class New York sloop or schooner yachts, sailing, this fine day, the free sea in a good wind. And rising out of the midst, tall-topt, ship-hemm'd, modern, American, yet strangely oriental, V-shaped Manhattan, with its compact mass, its spires, its cloud-touching edifices group'd at the centre'the green of the trees, and all the white, brown and gray of the architecture well blended, as I see it, under a miracle of limpid sky, delicious light of heaven above, and June haze on the surface below. 3. Specimen Days made me think of Nabokov'Whitman's attempt to discover the germs of his individual consciousness and destiny in ecological phenomena, historical patterns, and the designs of fate reminded me of Speak, Memory. Also, Whitman is an arch-aesthete guised as loafer, near-bum, democratic mingler and perceiver; a common narrator of Nabokov's Russian novels and stories is the down-at-heel but delicately dreamy émigré poet (or poet manqué) whose exuberant consciousness cannot but perceive inspiriting marvels and fated correspondences in the grimy Berlin and Prague districts to which he is relegated. The narrators of "A Guide to Berlin" and "The Letter That Never Reached Russia," as well as Fyodor in The Gift, might say with Whitman, The glories strung like beads on my smallest sights and hearings, on the walk in the street and the passage over the river… ("Crossing Brooklyn Ferry") Whitman felt the import of, and renovated English poetry to sing, the democratic transformation and ungenteel energy of nineteenth century America (particularly the boom and rush of 1850s New York City), and Nabokov was similarly concerned with Russian literature's assimilation of the hitherto unhallowed realities encountered by its now-wandering poets (he found translating Lolita into Russian very difficult because not even his inclusive and flexible literary Russian, forged in the 1920s-30s, could at first accommodate all the gadgets and devices invented since then; if there was going to be a Russian word for jukebox, he had to coin it). A recurring theme of Nabokov's letters to his younger brother Kirill, an aspiring poet, and of his polemical sparring with Georgi Adamovich and the "Paris School" of émigré Russian poetry, is an insistence that the poet's removal to an exilic, demotic-industrial landscape isn't the end of the Russian poetic tradition born amid neoclassic palatial façades. He tells Kirill not to shun warehouses and factories, blasts with scorn and contradicts with the example of his own classically grounded modernism (so darting, filmic) Adamovich's gripe that Pushkin is useless to the émigré writer and the Pushkinian tradition of verbal artistry powerless to accommodate the political and nervous dislocations of interwar Europe. Once in America, Nabokov fell out of the Russian milieu partly because he did not, could not as an evolving artist with a new tongue and a new milieu to master, share the easy, enclaved contempt many émigrés felt for "barbaric" America. They were worn out, he tired but ever-responsive; and with butterfly net in one hand, and a stack of note-cards penciled with the germs of Lolita and Speak, Memory in the other, he hit the road'Véra behind the wheel, of course'to net and name new species, to clamber the continent's mountains and immortalize its roadside humanities. Updike said Nabokov had every excuse for exhaustion once he reached these shores'but as he had poetically assimilated Europe, he set about doing the same for America. Think of the first two chapters of Lolita's second part, the Whitmanesque catalogue that begins, "It was then that began our extensive travels all over the States." Whitman and Nabokov are superb landscape colorists; spooky naturalist-animists; all-perceiving enchanters sensually-primitively attuned to and obsessed with birdsong, light effects, arboreal personalities, stars, mountains, sex; and Whitman is really into butterflies, too. Both mark the point at which the highest artistry grades into mysticism and gnosis. The New World, they recognized, was not to be dismissed, especially its landscape, flora and fauna. The Rocky Mountains were a fascination to both. Whitman fell in love with Colorado's "delicious atmosphere" and mountain tops "draped in their violet haze," thought it "the most spiritual show of objective Nature [he:] ever beheld," and even conceived a wish to spend his last years there; while Nabokov wrote Edmund Wilson that some part of him must have been born in Colorado, for while butterfly hunting on its slopes, he was "constantly recognizing things with a delicious pang"'the Baltic contrast of "the dark velvet of fir trees against a blue of extraordinary intensity," the appearance of the Boloria freija, a circumpolar species he had pursued as a boy through the bogs on his family estate. We follow the stream of amber and bronze brawling along its bed, with its frequent cascades and snow-white foam. Through the cañon we fly'mountains not only each side, but seemingly, till we get near, right in front of us'every rood a new view flashing, and each flash defying description'on the almost perpendicular sides, clinging pines, cedars, spruces, crimson sumach bushes, spots of wild grass'but dominating all, those towering rocks, rocks, rocks, bathed in delicate vari-colors, with the clear sky of autumn overhead...I get out on a ten minutes' stoppage at Deer creek, to enjoy the unequal'd combination of hill, stone and wood. As we speed again, the yellow granite in the sunshine, with natural spires, minarets, castellated perches far aloft'then long stretches of straight-upright palisades, rhinoceros color'then gamboge and tinted chromos. (Specimen Days) Distant mountains. Near mountains. More mountains; bluish beauties never attainable, or ever turning into inhabited hill after hill; south-eastern ranges, altitudinal failures as alps go; heart and sky-piercing snow-veined gray colossi of stone, relentless peaks appearing from nowhere at a turn of the highway; timbered enormities, with a system of neatly overlapping dark firs, interrupted in places by pale puffs of aspen; pink and lilac formations, Pharaonic, phallic, "too prehistoric for words" (blasé Lo); buttes of black lava; early spring mountains with young-elephant lanugo along their spines; end-of-the-summer mountains, all hunched up their heavy Egyptian limbs folded under folds of tawny moth-eaten plush; oatmeal hills, flecked with green round oaks; a last rufous mountain with a rich rug of lucerne at its foot. (Lolita)

Review # 2 was written on 2020-05-15 00:00:00 Jeffrey Ward Whitman's Specimen Days Walt Whitman's "Specimen Days" is an unusual work consisting of many short paragraphs, diary entries, or memorandums of moments in the poet's life, beginning with some vignettes about his ancestors and about his early life in Long Island and Brooklyn. Each of the many sections of the book opens with a heading describing its theme. In '"Specimen Days" opening paragraph, "A Happy Hour's Command", Whitman described the book as "incongruous and full of skips and jumps", moving from his Civil War memorandums to nature notes, to observations of Canada and the West "all bundled up and tied by a big string." With his customary hype, Whitman described "Specimen Days" as "the most wayward, spontaneous, fragmentary book ever penned." In this 1882 book's concluding paragraph, Whitman looked back at the work and summarized its purpose in a beautiful passage about the diversity of the United States. "I have wanted, before departure, to bear special testimony to a very old lesson and requisite. American Democracy, in its myriad personalities, in factories, work-shops, stores, offices, -- through the dense streets and houses of cities, and all their manifold sophisticated life -- must either be fibred, vitalized by regular contact with out-door light and air and growths, farm-scenes, animals, fields, trees, birds, sun-warmth and free skies or it will certainly dwindle and pale." Whitman combined this broad picture of American democracy with the intimate, momentary character of the moments he described in order to suggest the value of living in and cherishing one's daily experiences. Thus "Specimen Days" concludes: "Perhaps indeed the efforts of the true poets, founders, religions, literatures, all ages, have been and ever will be, our time and times to come, essentially the same -- to bring people back from their persistent strayings and sickly abstractions, to the costless average, divine, original concrete". In the best-known and longest part of "Specimen Days" Whitman describes his experiences from 1862 -- 1865 mostly in Washington, D.C., during the Civil War. Whitman spent much time as a volunteer in military hospitals offering comfort to wounded, sick, and dying soldiers. The book is poignant in its many brief depictions of individual heroic soldiers and of Whitman's ministrations. The book also offers Whitman's thoughts on the issues of the War. It shows a close observation of the Washington, D.C. of the Civil War, naming streets and places and offering many glimpses of Abraham Lincoln. As a resident of Washington, D.C. I enjoyed the immediacy of Whitman's account and of his depiction of particular places and streets I have come to know. Whitman has a unique vision of the War and he describes what he knows as a witness. Among many other things, he describes Lincoln's assassination. The Civil War section of "Specimen Days" is invaluable for students of the Civil War. In his final paragraph on the Civil War, Whitman observed that "The Real War Will Never Get In the Books." He amplified his thought as it related to his experience with the wounded. "Such was the war. It was not a quadrille in a ball-room. Its interior history will not only never be written -- its practicality, minutae of deeds and passions, will never be even suggested. The actual soldier of 1862 -- '65, North and South, with all his ways, his incredible dauntlessness, habits, practices, tastes, language, his fierce friendship, his appetite, rankness, his superb strength and animality, lawless gait, and a hundred unnamed lights and shades of camp, I say, will never be written -- perhaps must not and should not be." Following the depiction of his Civil War experiences, Whitman skips over the years from 1867 -- 1873 when he worked for the Office of the Attorney General. In 1873, Whitman suffered a stroke which left him bedridden for several years. When "Specimen Days" resumes, Whitman is living in Camden, New Jersey, and he is able with difficulty to move around. In exquisite detail, Whitman describes incidents of his life when he communes with nature, in fields, forests, and near the river. The Civil War section of "Specimen Days" describes life in a busy city at a hectic time. The following section is a dramatic about-face as Whitman communes with nature in solitude. Whitman offers many word-paintings of nature, birds, fish, insects, flowers, trees, in his many quiet moments during his recovery from illness. In the following sections of "Specimen Days" Whitman again becomes more active. He takes several trips to New York City and Brooklyn, Canada, and Denver and the prairies of the West. Whitman describes with great enthusiasm his train trips, the people he knows and meets, and the places he visits. He is enamored of the West and of its people and of the promise he finds in it for the United States. He is also moved by change in the New York City he knew when young. With all the depictions of nature and of solitude in "Specimen Days", Whitman's heart remains with the city, with wandering, and with new places. Whitman discusses in the final sections of "Specimen Days" his feelings about his contemporaries. He discusses Lincoln and lectures he delivered on Lincoln's assassination. He also discusses philosophy, including some highly complimentary and insightful observations about Hegel. But most of the people he discusses are literary figures, Whitman's predecessors and contemporaries including Longfellow, Bryant, Poe, Carlyle, and most of all Emerson. Whitman discusses the influence of these writers upon him, his meetings with them, and their deaths. He offers absorbing comments on his predecessors and on his hopes for a broad-based American literature to come based on Democracy and unity. I enjoyed this book a great deal, and it will interest readers who know Whitman only as a poet. Whitman has a vision for America and a vision for himself, in enjoying the specimen moments of his life and in being present spontaneously and immediately for his experiences, which he combines somehow and shares with the reader. The book is available in several editions as well as in the Library of America volume "Walt Whitman: Complete Poetry and Collected Prose". Robin Friedman