Though London’s Evening Mail [GK9]declared that “‘The Civil War in the United States affects our people more generally even than the Indian Mutiny’” (August 22, 1862), prominent British writers avoided the topic. The sole canonical poet to represent the US Civil War in Britain was American Walt Whitman in W. M. Rossetti’s British edition (1868). Though this chapter considers working-class and feminist writers’ depiction of the war, its principal focus is the underlying causes of major writers’ persistent silence. These causes included President Lincoln’s reluctance to name slavery as the war’s fundamental issue in hopes of bringing the South back, which led many Britons to suspect economic self-interest as the North’s principal motivation; declining abolitionist sympathy based on moral complacency; Conservatives’ sympathy for the Confederacy based on shared commitment to social hierarchies; and increased racism fueled by anthropology and stereotypes of Black Americans circulated in popular minstrel shows.

This chapter examines a lesser-studied element of Wallace’s intertextual engagement: his engagements with poets, poetry and poetics. Although he once claimed that he was “not talented enough” to be a poet, Wallace’s writing was deeply immersed in and often concerned with questions to do with the nature of poetry and the figure of the poet. Some of his titles refer or allude to specific poems – from “Westward the Course of Empire Takes its Way” (George Berkeley) to The Pale King (John Keats) – while other texts, such as the short story “Here and There,” use the idea of poetry to explore the relationship between language and experience, expression and form. In his longer works, too, Wallace uses particular poets in interesting (often entertaining) ways – W. H. Auden in The Broom of the System, for example, and Emily Dickinson in Infinite Jest. In interviews and essays, Wallace declared an interest in a wide range of poets, from W. B. Yeats, Marianne Moore and Philip Larkin to Bill Knott and Stephen Dobyn. Taken together, these and further examples suggest that a more detailed account of Wallace’s writing on and about poetry will fill a particular gap in the understandings of his work.

The chapter provides an overview of literary predecessors whose influence is evident across Mailer’s work, but perhaps most notably in his early work: John Dos Passos, James T. Farrell, William Faulkner, D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, Theodore Dreiser, Herman Melville, John Steinbeck, Thomas Wolfe, and Leo Tolstoy, among others.

All the more telling for being an arbitrary and often intimate historical record, poetry provides the primary source for this chapter’s account of nineteenth-century medicine. Poems by John Gibson, Thomas Fessenden, George Crabbe, William Wordsworth, and Humphrey Davy disclose that the practice of medicine, whether by quacks or the learned, was so ineffectual at the start of the century as to allow the Romantics to plausibly argue for the curative effects of poetry and the imagination, both of which became integral to a new science of life. The professional medicine that sprang from this science, however, asserted its autonomy from poetry, most effectively by pathologising such poets as John Keats and Oscar Wilde, who in turn offered their own verse ripostes. Its positivism and ‘hands-on’ diagnostics yielded new conceptions of the body and touch that Alfred Tennyson, G. M. Hopkins, and Walt Whitman each reflect upon in their poetry. Finally, the growing acceptance of the germ theory of disease enabled pathologies of art as illness that are variously elaborated upon and joked about by Edward Lear, Henry Savile Clerk, Wilde, and Ronald Ross, who also reaches for poetry to record his sublimely momentous discovery of the malaria pathogen in 1896.

Commenting on the findings of the previous two chapters on Emerson’s and Whitman’s reflections on photographic immediacy, this chapter stresses the social, political, and media cultural context of their work. It argues that Emerson’s and Whitman’s romantic quest for immediacy was not an escapist endeavor that aimed to keep literature aloof from larger social and technological transformations. Instead, both writers creatively responded to the reshaping of American society under the pressures of budding industrialization and halting democratization processes by developing a poetics that sought to connect literary and social practices. Emerson’s and Whitman’s poetics of immediacy ground literary communication in the lived experience of writers and readers, make literature relevant to the concerns of everyday life (including social and sexual relations, spirituality, work, and politics), and seek to strengthen their readers’ active participation in the world.

This chapter on Whitman’s 1856 edition of Leaves of Grass combines an analysis of its materiality as a commodity with readings of its textual content, arguing that both attempted to position Whitman’s poetry and persona within a simultaneously local and global literary marketplace. The edition’s double function of sales-pitch and self-commodification is highlighted by Whitman’s inclusion of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s reprinted letter, a bragging answer to it, his self-written reviews, and an international advertisement note alongside his first globalist text, “Poem of Salutation.” The imprint of the nineteenth century’s expanding global market is evaluated through Whitman’s ambitions to elevate his authorial status to worldwide recognition seemingly instantaneously with marketing techniques appearing across all genres in the 1856 edition. In this Whitman anticipated contemporary methods for manufacturing fame, as his model of the self-made poet tried to manifest success, measured by reader response, into reality before the fact.

The first time Walt Whitman ever left the New York area and experienced the wide-open countryside of the United States in the late 1840s, he did so with the objective of arriving in New Orleans, where he lived and worked for three months for a newspaper. The rumor that Whitman had a child out of wedlock in New Orleans first took hold and held sway among the poet’s readers as the earliest iterations of the legend of his life took shape. Even more importantly, Whitman experienced in New Orleans such an extraordinary diversity of peoples mingling on the streets that he began to devise a new aesthetic of urban democracy, of strangers from radically different worlds mingling if only for a moment on crowded streets, a vision that would shape his poetry ever after and become a towering monument in American poetry in general.