Walt Whitman's Apostroph

Walt Whitman's Apostroph (1860 Leaves of Grass), image courtesy Walt Whitman Archive.

In my most recent peer-reviewed publication (Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 34.1 [Summer 2016]: 35-54), I seek to offer an explanation for Whitman’s forceful connection between apostrophization and the O sound-symbol as he makes their relationship constitutively apparent in the 1860 Leaves. It is my contention that Whitman’s use of the apostrophe in the immediate foreground of the Civil War is neither a rhetorical accident nor simply a poetic cliché, for where Whitman invokes the trope of the apostrophic O—a visual symbol of wholeness in its O circularity—he optatively envisions and prefigures a unitive and democratic future in the face of his nation’s dividing crisis. Whitman’s apostrophic invocations—particularly exhortations preceded by and through the declamatory O—endorse urgent epideictic messages in the years immediately preceding the Civil War while also carrying with them the hallmarks of lyrical address. Far from offering a poetry of insincerity or solipsism—the accusations often waged against lyricism and apostrophization—Whitman’s poetic impulse sought to capture the spirit of his young nation and to defend the experiment of American democracy, and it is through the trope of the apostrophe that he rallied, championed, and exhorted his American audience toward that “national spirit” about which he so often wrote. Further, Whitman’s use of the apostrophic O elevates the trope of the apostrophe beyond rhetorical and lyrical modes of expression and into a political if not religious domain of optative hopefulness for American unity, democratic fullness, and national cohesion in the ensuing threat of national fragmentation.