What Ben wants to know about Whitman
I’m going with my constant preoccupation with voice on this one, but as Professor Emerson would say, sometimes it’s best to stick to your obsessions (loosely paraphrased, but the gist is there). We have spent so much time in class discussing Walt Whitman as this or Walt Whitman as publisher or Walt Whitman as critic or Walt Whitman as prophet, and I just kind of want to know what Whitman was like to his friends. We see so much of the public Whitman, that I’m not sure what the private Whitman is like at all.
Ben, you may want to see the comment I just made on Erin’s blog. I think the letters of Whitman that we will be reading this month will also be illuminating.