Whitman at Pfaff's: Personal Space, a Public Place, and the Boundary-Breaking Poems of Leaves of Grass (1860)

Karbiener discusses the imagery concerning urban public space in the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass. She “attempts to construct the ambiance of Pfaff’s” and seeks to establish its importance in Whitman’s work. She argues that this space, which included Pfaff’s at its center, affected a shift from the more public edition of 1856 to the more personal 1860 edition. This shift seems ironic given Pfaff’s roles as a space of camaraderie; however, Karbiener argues that although Whitman’s fellow Bohemians at Pfaff’s were often cordial to Whitman himself, they were not always welcoming of his work. In essence, Pfaff’s essentially enabled Whitman’s “intimacy and connectivity” as displayed in poems like “Calamus 29.”

Karbiener stresses the role of place in Whitman’s creative process, specifically how Pfaff’s “encouraged and even enabled” the “intimacy and connectivity” found in some of the Calamus poems. She connects Whitman’s fondness for Pfaff’s to his personal struggles for literary fame and popular acceptance, arguing that the bar’s Bohemians, even though they were critical of Whitman’s style, served to comfort the lonely writer through uncertain and disappointing years. The article provides a detailed analysis of the architecture at Pfaff’s and seeks to connect its different spaces to the experiments in structure Whitman included in Leaves of Grass (1860). Indeed, Karbiener contends that Pfaff’s odd divisions of rooms may have inspired Whitman’s notion of poetic individuality.