SOURCE: Philippon, Daniel J. “‘I only seek to put you in rapport’: Message and Method in Walt Whitman's Specimen Days.” In Reading the Earth: New Directions on the Study of Literature and Environment, edited by Michael P. Branch, Rochelle Johnson, Daniel Patterson, and Scott Slovic, pp. 179‐89. Moscow, Idaho: University of Idaho Press, 1998.

In the following essay, Philippon examines the notes on nature in Walt Whitman's Specimen Days, claiming that Whitman turned to nature for therapy and arguing that the author aimed to represent nature to his readers despite thinking that it could not be expressed or interpreted.

Perhaps “the most wayward, spontaneous, fragmentary book ever printed,” Walt Whitman's Specimen Days (1882) consists of three parts: a short, autobiographical essay, written by Whitman for a friend in 1882; memoranda from Whitman's Civil War notebooks, written in and around Washington, D.C., from 1862 through 1865; and a combination of Whitman's nature notes and...