Chapter V: Specimen Days and Collect

Whitman’s prose in the definitive edition makes a stout volume of more than five hundred closely printed pages. The title, _Specimen Days and Collect_, gives an imperfect hint of the contents. Here are extracts from journals kept through twenty years. Many bear a resemblance to Hugo’s _Choses Vues_. Largely autobiographical and reminiscent, they are vivid, picturesque, and far better in their haphazard way than a good deal of formal ‘literature.’ Here are reprints of prefaces to the several editions of _Leaves of Grass_, together with papers on Burns, Tennyson, and Shakespeare, a lecture on Lincoln, a paper on American national literature, and yet more ‘diary-notes’ and ‘splinters.’ He who loves to browse in a book will find the volume of Whitman’s prose made to his hand. The prose is of high importance to an understanding of what, oddly enough, his poetry imperfectly reveals--Whitman’s character. To know the man as he really was we must read _Specimen Days and Collect_.