Writing Process Reflection for Whitman Research

When I first began my work for Dr. Dinius’ class, I actually intended to write

about Emily Dickinson. Her poems had always intrigued me, and I enjoyed playing with

the ambiguities and deciphering her dashes. However, reading Whitman’s Children of

Adam series immediately changed my mind. As I have mentioned a few times already in

this portfolio, Paradise Lost is a work that has stuck with me. At this point, any text that

even vaguely alludes to Genesis post-Milton has me instantly searching for signs of him,

and I am thoroughly fascinated by the thought that much of the religious imagery that has

seeped into our cultural consciousness in the years since Paradise Lost actually comes

from that work rather than actual scripture. With that in mind, I began looking for traces

of Milton in Whitman’s poems within the series, and I found them everywhere. My ideas

were cinched when I read the line about Adam “walking forth from the bower refresh’d

from sleep” in the final poem in the series, “As Adam Early in the Morning.” Adam’s

bower is a decidedly Miltonic image – nowhere in the biblical account do the first couple

get any sort of housing whatsoever.

As I began work on my research, I was also intrigued by the idea of Whitman

commenting on and revising himself, and so I began reading as much of this commentary

as I could, both in our anthology and on the Whitman digital archive. In his reflective “A

Backward Glance O’er Travel’d Roads,” I found both a direct connection to Milton and a

discussion on his vision for American democracy, and my research took off from there.

By the time I finished the course, I was pleased with my work, and felt my hard work

rewarded when Dr. Dinius suggested my line of inquiry would be worth attempting to

publish.

As I returned to this essay, I had several key goals in mind. I wanted to expand

my close readings, to clarify distinctions between my original ideas and support from

secondary material, and to use the one word that all my formal academic training had

previously forbidden: “I.” My first goal I easily accomplished; each new reading of the

series unfolded new images and language that helped build my argument, and even after

adding substantially to my original reading I am still left with notes that I that did not

make it in to this revision. For example, I wanted to compare Whitman’s discussion of

the female form in the fifth section of “I Sing the Body Electric” to Milton’s description

of Eve, examining the ways in which Whitman reimagined the blazon, and I think I could

devote at least an entire page more to the mentions of “primitive apples” and “chaste

love” in “Spontaneous Me,” but my attempts to include those discussions ended up

disrupting the unity of the essay in its current form, so I ended up cutting them for now.

Next, I returned to the specific feedback Dr. Dinius gave me about establishing

my authority in the essay. She noted that in several instances in my original essay, the

wording of my sentences that included support from secondary material made the

relationship between my claims and the other critics’ claims unclear. To resolve this, I

went back to reread my sources, and was happy to discover that the claims I was

obscuring with the secondary material were, in fact, my own. In revision, I expanded on

my claims and separated them from the supporting material, and added clarification about

where my argument diverged from other those of other critics.

Finally, it may seem insignificant, but this is the first essay I which I have ever

used the first person pronoun. Over the course of graduate school, the more I was

exposed to current scholars who asserted their arguments using this technique, which,

particularly as a high school teacher, I had always been taught was taboo. However, the

more I found myself digging in to this research, the more I found myself wanting to just

say it: I think this! It is my idea! I even remember throwing it out to my social media

network, and the overwhelmingly negative reactions I received from colleagues in that

format actually did deter me from using it in my original draft. First person has no place

in academic writing, they said. However, Dr. Dinius’ feedback confirmed my impulse,

and she even suggested a few areas where it would help to signal how my argument

differed interpretatively from what other scholars had written. At the end of my graduate

school career, I claimed the “I.” After all, what better place than in an essay about

Whitman to take the opportunity to sing of myself?