Tweet of the Week: Barnum's American Museum

P.T. Barnum’s American Museum, located in lower Manhattan from 1841 to 1865, housed a wide range of entertainment on its five floors, from the trashy to the intellectual, and attracted people from nearly every social class in Manhattan. Whitman interviewed Barnum for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, and he must have been affected by the encounter, in addition to the eccentric museum. Donald D. Kummings in A Companion to Walt Whitman writes that section 31 of "Song of Myself" alludes to the museum and that "the lines also contain what is likely an intentional and rather direct comparison between the poet and Barnum's Museum." We can think of "Song of Myself" as almost being like the museum in a number ways, in the sense that the poem was less bookish and formal for the time, considered an uncivilized, homo-erotic rant by some, but nonetheless, sophisticated, wise, and probably appealed to people of different social classes.