Collage of Myself
presents a groundbreaking account of the creative story behind
America’s most celebrated collection of poems. In the first
book-length study of Walt Whitman’s journals and manuscripts,
Matt Miller demonstrates that until approximately 1854 (only a single
year before the first publication of Leaves of Grass),
Whitman—who once speculated that Leaves would be a novel or a
play—was unaware that his ambitions would assume the form of
poetry at all.
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Collage of Myself details
Whitman’s discovery of a remarkable new creative process that
allowed him to transform a diverse array of texts into poems such as
“Song of Myself” and “The Sleepers.” |
Whitman embraced an art of fragments that encouraged
him to “cut and paste” his lines into ever-evolving forms
based on what he called “spinal ideas.” This approach to
language, Miller argues, represents the first major use in the Western
arts of the technique later known as collage, an observation with
significant ramifications for our reception of subsequent artists and
writers. Long before the modernists, Whitman integrated found text and
ready-made language into a revolutionary formulation of artistic
production that anticipates much of what is exciting about modern and
postmodern art.
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Collage of Myself
Walt Whitman and the Making of Leaves of Grass
by Matt Miller
University of Nebraska Press, 2010
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