Walt Whitman, Daniel Garrison Brinton, and the Poetics of an “American” Ethnology

Abstract This essay graphs the intellectual partnership and corresponding careers of Daniel Garrison Brinton and Walt Whitman against the discursive development of anthropology in the United States. Over the course of their friendship, Brinton delivered numerous public lectures and published myriad articles and books on Native American folklore and languages as well as the methods of ethnology at large. He also served as president of the Walt Whitman Fellowship, and published articles linking Leaves of Grass to anthropological concepts in venues as various as the flagship American Anthropologist and the Whitman fanzine The Conservator. Despite the overlap between his roles in both anthropology and the Whitman societies, scholars have made only casual reference to Brinton. Filtering their alliance back into their respective works revives the adjoining projects of these nineteenth-century “Americanists,” who collected images, stories, and languages in an effort to restore and expand distinctive conceptions of national and racial identity.