Filaments of Word and Image: A Fragmented Reflection on Allen Crawford’s Whitman Illuminated: Song of Myself

A fragmented reflection on the engagement with and teaching of Allen Crawford’s Whitman Illuminated. Necessarily so. As Whitman stated, "There can be no theory of any account unless it corroborate the theory of the earth." If I were to set forth a reflection upon the Earth, it would involve a series of fragmented glimpses from the atom (and smaller) all the way up. That is, I’d attend to several parts pointing toward their relationship to the whole. The challenge, of course, is that every part is its own universe unto itself; one could spend a lifetime and never move from the atom to the molecule. A reflection on Allen Crawford's Whitman Illuminated: Song of Myself is an equally daunting task. Every detail of every illumination is its own part. Often, these parts correspond to phrases from Whitman’s poem in surprising ways. And as each phrase, word, and sound from Whitman is its own universe, the complexity of relationships compound with a vertiginous velocity. And so, with every figure and passage I include in this reflection, I provide discussion, but the discussion is woefully incomplete. I have spent over an hour with students discussing just one or two of the illuminations with their corresponding text, not unlike a cellular biologist who spends just as much time exploring the mitochondria with students. Here, I deemed it best to include multiple illuminations to better give a sense of the whole. Concerning wholes, the parts of this reflection cohere toward what Whitman may have meant by "original energy," toward Eros, and toward the poiesis of the ever reaching tirelessly spinning words and images launched forth by Whitman and Crawford.