Extraordinary Discourse 109
A Cocktail Party Of Gurus, Pundits, Poets And Hecklers "This is the city… and I am one of the citizens; Whatever interests the rest interests me… politics, churches, newspapers, schools Benevolent societies, improvements, banks, tariffs, steamships…" Whitman’s Specimen Days, which he described as “the most wayward, spontaneous, fragmentary book ever printed,” is a moving scrapbook of clippings and jottings from the whole span of his life, including his years as a volunteer nurse in Union hospitals. While conceding that “the real war will never get into the books,” in Specimen Days Whitman tried to get at what he called the “interior history” of the war. Unlike more conventional scrapbookers with their impersonal digests of clippings from the distant battlefront, Whitman (who famously boasted, “I am large. I contain multitudes”) wrote himself into the proceedings. ... A hyperactive cutter and paster, Emily Dickinson also repurposed scraps and clippings for ori...