As I sheepishly confessed at the end of our excellent July 6 discussion of Michael Cunningham's Specimen Days, I had no idea that the novelist had borrowed his title from none other than Walt Whitman himself. Whitman's Specimen Days & Collect is a sort of commonplace book consisting of short vignettes and poems, notes on his travels, diary entries and other memoranda of moments in the poet's life, collected over several decades and published in 1882. The poet (never burdened with crippling amounts of modesty) described it as "the most wayward, spontaneous, fragmentary book ever penned."
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