Collage of Myself: Walt Whitman and the Making of Leaves of Grass

by Matt Miller

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.

 

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.

 

Using the Walt Whitman Archive’s collection of digital images to study what were previously scattered and inaccessible manuscript pages, Miller provides a breakthrough in our understanding of this great American literary icon.

320 pages, Hardcover

First published December 1, 2010

About the author

Matt Miller is an assistant professor of English at Yeshiva University. His articles have appeared in Arizona Quarterly, Book History, and Walt Whitman Quarterly Review.

Reviews

[Annika · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've been obsessed with Whitman and Leaves of Grass since I was in high school. Leaves is still usually sitting on my night stand. I've even been a long-time fan and peruser of the marvelous Walt Whitman Archive website, which Miller states is one of the reasons why his re-examination of the creation of Leaves is possible. Previous scholars simply couldn't look at the original images of all of Whitman's manuscripts in the way that is now possible. (As a digital archivist myself, I love hearing how digital archives are making new kinds of scholarship possible!)

Any Whitman fan will get a lot out of this book. It explores how Whitman's literary theory and approach to writing poems shaped Leaves of Grass, including how his "spinal ideas" and notes for potential poems involved into his famous lists, what exactly Whitman meant by some of his peculiar vocabulary, including "dilation" and "kosmos" (both words I'd always wondered at in his poetry), and how poems should give people the materials they need to shape their lives (a beautiful sentiment!). Miller also argues quite convincingly that Whitman composed Leaves incredibly quickly in only a year or two, rather than over many years as was previously thought.

[Connor · Rating 4 out of 5]

Exemplary research and thoughts on Whitman's creative process (spinal ideas)! Miller himself is a clear and beautiful writer. Great insights into some of Leaves of Grass's central motifs—dilation, sensuality, and rebellion against convention—and structural devices—anaphora, use of vernacular, and catalog.