Skip to main content

Kenneth M. Price

Kenneth M. Price is the Hillegass Chair of American Literature at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. He is author of Whitman and Tradition: The Poet in His Century (Yale, 1990), To Walt Whitman, America (North Carolina, 2004), and co-editor of the Whitman Archive.

Author

Whitman in Selected Anthologies: The Politics of His Afterlife

Spring 2005 | Essays

One extraordinary feature of Whitman's legacy is the variety of causes to which he has been summoned to lend support. The treatment of Whitman in mainstream academic anthologies aimed at U.S. high school and college students is a subject worthy of discussion on another occasion. Here I focus on the political uses of Whitman in anthologies intended for audiences outside U.S. schools and colleges—anthologies intended for workers and farmers, for soldiers, for children, for international students, and for a general American audience traumatized by the attacks on New York and Washington on September 11, 2001. There are five publishing efforts in particular I wish to examine: first, several Whitman publications from the early 1920s in the "Little Blue Books" series brought out by the socialist publisher Emanuel Haldeman-Julius (1889–1951); second, the Armed Services Editions (ASE) volume A Wartime Whitman (n.d. [1945]) and the accompanying ASE version of Henry Seidel Canby's biography of Whitman (n.d. [1944]); third, Langston Hughes’s anthology for children, I Hear the People Singing (1946), which I contextualize by considering also his Poetry of the Negro (1949); fourth, a United States Information Agency (USIA) booklet, Walt Whitman: Poet of Democracy (1970); and fifth, a post-9/11 anthology, I Hear America Singing: Poems of Democracy, Manhattan, and the Future (2001). These five publishing efforts offer us a way to highlight central issues about Leaves of Grass and the public and—given the variety of political purposes underpinning them—about Whitman’s malleability. They clarify how Whitman has become a touchstone for addressing questions regarding the nature of the future and of democracy.