1955/11/01 by Edgeley W. Todd · 10 citations
Arts and Humanities · #Art #Caribbean and African Literature and Culture #Hermeneutics and Narrative Identity #History #Literature #Poetry #Poetry Analysis and Criticism
paper · doi:10.2307/3816527
published in Huntington Library Quarterly 19(1), 1-11 (University of Pennsylvania Press)
openalex publication_date 1955/11/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2025/11/06
OT LONG after becoming acquainted with Walt Whitman in N 1 877, Edward Carpenter wrote of Leaves of Grass: I began to see that all that he had written there was matter of absolute personal experience. . . ' The wide variety of human experience reflected in Whitman's poetry makes it evident, however, that a statement like Carpenter's cannot be taken as literal truth. The question of where an artist gets his material is always of vital interest; frequently it can be answered only in complex ways. But when exact sources are known, this complexity disappears, and the creative process becomes less mysterious than is sometimes assumed. No writer is wholly original nor is expected to be, and Whitman's intellectual indebtedness to other writers and thinkers has often been pointed out.2 The extent, however, to which he went outside his own personal experience for concretely detailed descripdions of places and events has not been fully explored. Two instances of this borrowing to be examined here-one taken from the beginning of his poetic career, the other from near the end-suggest that this may indeed have been a characteristic method throughout Whitman's years as a poet.