January 15th, Day 15

Leaves of Grass - pages 11-23 (13 pages)

Goal - 2 books 35 pages

Total - 1 book 239 pages

Result - 56 pages to reach goal

I have met my match in Leaves of Grass. And this one I voted for! This is the January selection for the literary club I'm a part of, the month being poetry. Luckily, the one I voted for this time won, though all the choices were interesting to me in this vote.

I found that there were so many different versions of Leaves of Grass available, as Walt Whitman expanded and revised it numerous times until his death. It went from being about 95 pages to over 400! It seems the two most available though are the first short one and the last longest one.

I went with the longest. Of course it would've been great to go with the shorter one and I considered it, but I would've been annoyed thinking that I'm not reading the final version and wondering what I'm missing. So, from what I've read, though there are many great, great poems there, some are forgettable and skippable. But, I plan to read the whole thing anyway as Whitman meant it as a whole I think. Also, many recommend not reading the whole thing the first time one reads it (it being too much) but I can't help it...it's the selection for the month and I want to be thorough!

So yes, I've given myself a challenge here harder than it necessarily needed to be. Onto the reading!

First was the introduction and this time I did read it, thinking you can't really "spoil" poetry like you can a book's plot. That consisted of ten of the pages I read.

Next was the actual poetry. It started off well enough. Of the first few I particularly liked "In Cabin'd Ships at Sea". Then I got to Eidolons. Oh Lord, what have I got myself into? The poem was only a few pages long and I kept falling asleep trying to read it!

I found that poem very hard to understand so I had to google around about it. First I found an eidolon is actually an ancient Greek idea (funny that since I'm also reading the Iliad!) of a spirit or a copy of oneself, and it's the word that our present "idol" came from. But it can also mean a perfect idea or inspiration, and this seems to be what Whitman is talking about. I'll give you a flavour of the poem, the first stanza:

I met a seer,

Passing the hues and objects of the world,

The fields of art and learning, pleasure, sense,

To glean eidolons.

And continues on in that fashion for many more stanzas, each one ending somehow in "eidolons". Googling, I've found that it's about putting aside science and learning to receive true inspiration, that science can't explain everything, such as eidolons.

Or something like that. I have a hard time making it out myself because the language is confusing, as poetry sometimes is meant to be. I do wonder - was this considered one of his better ones? So far I haven't found any list by anyone of what are considered his "better" or his "lesser" ones so I have no idea.

By the way, the version I ended up buying to read is the "death-bed" edition published by Bantam Classics with the intro by Justin Kaplan. Someone had recommended another "death-bed" edition with annotations but it was only available in Amazon, not on Sony, and I am afraid to "convert" a poetry ebook because I don't want the formatting messed up. So I had to see what was available on Sony.

I really wanted to go with a "150th anniversary" edition because it had lots of ancillary material, but unfortunately it goes with the first much shorter version of the book. The of the rest available on Sony (about seven), most didn't say which version they were, and of the one or two others that did, they said they were the first edition. This was the only one saying it was the "death-bed" edition on Sony, so I was forced to go with it.

It did say though in the Sony reader store website that it comes with notes, which I figured would be something like annotations. Well, it doesn't. It does come with the introduction but I've checked and there are no notes either within the text, before it, or at the end. So that sucks and means more time-consuming googling for me if I have questions.

Well, so be it! It's not the end of the world and luckily the formatting seems very well done for the most part (the table of contents is odd though - it does list each and every poem with a link which is good, but oddly the fonts are all different sizes and such and the different sizes and such don't correlate to anything; they're just random). And it was only $1.99 - a good price for nicely formatted poetry.

So anyway, I only made it a ways past Eidolons yesterday. I have realised that this will probably be my biggest challenge of the entire year - even more so than Ulysses which is on my TBR list for this year (which is the only book I've ever put down before for being too perplexing).

I don't think reading it per se will be the challenging part, but reading it in a way to keep up with my challenge will be the hard part. I already take my time reading, but with this I'll really want to take my time, to such an extent that I know it will be a challenge for the challenge.

Well, what is a challenge but something to be met? I am prepared to give it my best and see what happens!