Walt Whitman’s Baby Talk
"In the spring of 1875, the poet Walt Whitman, then living in Camden, New Jersey, received an unusual piece of fan mail from the South..." With wry understatement, so begins Matt Cohen's commentary on this artifact, bizarre even by the standards of Weird Americana. With a commitment to a close examination of the original, unregularized text, Cohen connects Johnson's engagement with Whitman's poetics of Democracy to the revanchist Southern nationalism that emerged after the Civil War, our contemporary wrestling with the problematics of commemoration, and his own experiences of the Tennessee River valley and Northern condescension to ideas of Southern literacy - Walt Whitman's Baby Talk.
Matt Cohen teaches English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and is a Faculty Fellow at the Center for Digital Research in the humanities there. He is the author or editor of five books, including Whitman’s Drift: Imagining Literary Distribution (University of Iowa Press, 2017). Cohen is also a contributing editor at the Walt Whitman Archive and co-editor, with Stephanie Browner and Kenneth M. Price, of the Charles Chesnutt Digital Archive.
