America

Whitman was fascinated by the beauty and power of the human voice from an early age.  As he confessed to his friend Horace Traubel four years before his death, he had had dreams of becoming an orator—a grand nineteenth-century profession exemplified by the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher, actors like Junius Brutus Booth, and politicians including his “redeemer president”, Abraham Lincoln.  His interest in orality is noticeable in his poem titles (many of which are “Songs”) and celebrated in memorable moments in Leaves of Grass.  “I hear the train’d soprano,” he exclaims in “Song of Myself”, perhaps thinking of his favorite opera diva Marietta Alboni, “She convulses me like the climax of my love-grip.”

He therefore might have been delighted with the prospect of being recorded by Thomas Edison, who in the late 1880s and early 1890s recorded a number of prominent figures (including P.T. Barnum and the poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson) to demonstrate his new invention of the phonograph.  Edison had developed the wax cylinder in West Orange, New Jersey, less than one hundred miles from Whitman’s home in Camden.  And two letters at the Thomas Edison National Historic Park at West Orange indicate Edison’s interest in “obtaining a phonogram from the poet Walt Whitman.

There is no direct evidence that this 36-second wax cylinder recording of Whitman’s poem “America” is actually Whitman’s voice.  The whereabouts of the original wax cylinder remain unknown.  It was supposedly part of the collection of a retired elevator operator and collector of such recordings, Roscoe Haley of New York, who died in 1982.  The recording of the cylinder exists on a taping of a 1951 NBC radio program, in which narrator explains that technicians had transferred the wax cylinder recording to tape.

Nevertheless, many recording experts, historians, and critics have written support for the claim that this is indeed a recording of Walt Whitman.  They have pointed to the similarity of this recording with other Edison recordings of this period; the unusual, location-specific accent of the speaker and the consistency between the voice and Traubel’s description of the poet’s “strong and resonant tenor”; and the friends in common between Whitman and Edison who may have facilitated or even helped record the session.  Additionally, the choice of an obscure and lately written poem (“America” was first published in 1888) may have been an odd one for anyone except Whitman himself.

The recording offered here is a 2018 remaster of the taped “Whitman recording”, clarified using the latest technology.  Note how the speaker has cut the poem to end, with a flourish, on the word “love.”

Karen Karbiener