The Ever-Changing Nature of the Sea: Whitman's Absorption of Maximilian Schele de Vere

Abstract

in recent yearS, Betty Barrett and Ted Genoways have discovered that Whitman lifted entire images and phrases from newspaper articles and rearranged them into some of his Civil War poems. 1 This "found poetry" aspect of Whitman's poetry is not, however, confined to the Whitman of the Civil War era.Instead it began earlier and stemmed from a long-lasting fascination with a fellow writer whose influence on Leaves of Grass remains largely overlooked: Maximilian Schele De Vere, author of Stray Leaves from the Book of Nature, 2 which appeared in 1855, sharing with Whitman's first edition of Leaves not only a publication date but a green cover blind-stamped with flowery ornaments and sporting a golden title.Stray Leaves has so far found its way into Whitman scholarship as nothing more than a curious footnote, 3 though Schele De Vere himself has been increasingly gaining critical notice.But even though it is unlikely that this book influenced the 1855 Leaves of Grass (Stray Leaves would have been published at most only a few months before the first edition of Leaves of Grass) and the striking physical similarities between the books do appear to be coincidental, such is not the case with the 1856 and (especially) the 1860 editions of Leaves, which are significantly influenced by Schele De Vere's thinking, and which include an almost word-by-word copy of a whole paragraph from Stray Leaves-the first known instance of Whitman copying and rearranging somebody else's words into his own poetry.Born "in a grim old mountain castle" 4 in Sweden and raised in Prussia, baron Maximilian Schele De Vere (1820-1898) emigrated to the United States in his early twenties after receiving a degree in philosophy from Berlin's Friedrich Wilhelm Universität.In 1844, he became the youngest faculty member in the history of the University of Virginia, where he taught a variety of subjects and even volunteered as a drill sergeant during the Civil War.He published several books on natural science, comparative literature, American history, and linguistics, and he translated French and German works of fiction into English.While

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