THE NONESUCH WHITMAN
Walt Whitman. Complete Poetry and Selected Prose and Letters. Edited by Emory Holloway. (The Nonesuch Press. 125. 6d.) THE NONESUCH Whitman has been, to all appearances, compiled with so much care, by a scholar of acknowledged reputation, that the reviewer is left with no option other than to write an essay on Whitman, which is a popular but unfair evasion, or describe the volume. (Professor Emory Holloway has been working on Whitman for some twenty-five years, and so in- corporates in this volume the fruit of a lifetime of research. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1926 for his Walt Whitman: an Interpretation in Narrative, has edited Leaves of Grass (1924),
and is collaborating in what will certainly be the most elaborate and may be the final bibliography of Whitman's writings, at present in the Press.) It is an edition in the true sense of the word. We may accept the text of the poetry, further amplified by the notes, Professor Holloway being the editor of the " Inclusive " edition of Whitman's verse, which gives the variorium readings from 0. L. Triggs. The notes also indicate and sometimes amplify the original prose-text. The letters have been, " where possible," collated with the manuscripts, and several hitherto unpublished letters are given—not all of any great import, but some, like Letter xxxix, of genuine interest. In this letter, for example, Whitman repeats his preference for Drum
Taps, as against Leaves of Grass, saying : " I probably mean as a piece of art, and from the more simple and winning nature of the subject, and also because I have in it only succeeded to my satisfaction in removing all superfluity from it, verbal superfluity I mean. I delight to make a poem where I feel that not a word but is indispensable part thereof, and of my meaning."
Every effort, especially, is made to put the reader right on chronology (most of the poems have two dates—that of first writing, and that of the final revision) ; to relate the sequence of poems, letters and prose ; while the biographical summary at the beginning brings the bibliography further into relation with the text.
Only two things occur to me. It is a serious blemish that we should be given no index of first lines. This is really tire-
some, and if it was a question of space something else should, surely, have been sacrificed to it. And is there a worth- while unpublished Diary of Whitman's available ? The diary was referred to last year by Edgar Lee Masters in his Whitman, as being still unpublished, and the excerpts he gave suggested a highly personal document.
Apart from this diary, possibly not so interesting after all, it is impossible to think of this edition of Whitman's poems,
letters and prose, as other than virtually complete. The so-called Complete Writings, published by Whitman's executors in 1902, was, as Professor Holloway points out in his preface, far from complete. He himself published an Uncollected Poetry and Prose of Walt Whitman in 1914, and has since
been reading further uncollected material. It is true that there is, even at this date, a good deal of unpublished Whit-
maniana in manuscript, and every year the American periodicals, such as even the popular Saturday Review, publish some further `' unpublished letter," and will, no doubt, do so for many years to come. We may, however, agree that there is a reason- able certainty that no future publications of this sort will qualify
in any worth-while way the essential completeness of this
book. For a one volume edition—there 'are over a thousand pages—it must represent the limit of saturation. Even it. let us suppose, the family of John Addington Symonds could reveal further what he may have wrung out of Whitman with regard to the possible Uranian significance of Calamus- Symonds badgered him for sixteen years on this matter ; or if some evidence should settle the matter of those " six chil- dren " whom the " good, grey poet " declared he had fathered, but whom nobody has located, there is here such a mass of material—a truly amazing compression for a comparatively light, and I need hardly say comely, book which slips easil into the pocket—that not even these interesting, but unlikely, discoveries can be much more than footnotes to the Nonesuch
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