Although Fowler does describe silvae, it's more so to provide a datum for questions about temporal variation in genre, than to describe the silva genre. Although describing it introduces the thought that '[w]e tend to take for granted the idea of a collection of poems on various subjects and in different forms, without reflecting that such collections constitute a specific genre. It seems almost as if the genre were too dominant, too nonpareil, to have a name' (Kinds of Literature, p. 135).

('… one may speculate further that Beethoven's sketches were necessary both because not all ideas are ready for use upon their appearance (because not ready ever in any but their right company), and also because not all are usable in their initial appearance, but must first, as it were, grow outside the womb. What must be sketched must be written. If what is in a sketch book is jotted down just for saving, just to await its company, with which it is then juxtaposed as it stands, you may say the juxtaposition, or composition, is that of the lyric. If it is sketched knowing that it must be, and gets in time, transformed in order to take its place, you may say that its juxtaposition, or composition, is essentially stratified and partitioned; that of the drama; the drama of the metaphysical, or of the sonata. Here are different tasks for criticism, or tasks for different criticisms.')

'We return to the puzzle with which we began: Specimen Days, what is it? Midway through the book Whitman has another go at describing it:

A melange of loafing, looking, hobbling, sitting, traveling—a little thinking thrown in for salt, but very little—not only summer but all seasons—not only days but nights—some literary meditations—books, authors examined, Carlyle, Poe, Emerson tried (always under my cedar-tree, in the open air, and never in the library)—mostly the scenes everybody sees, but some of my own caprices, meditations, egotism—truly an open air and mainly summer formation—singly, or in clusters—wild and free and somewhat acrid—indeed more like cedar-plums than you might guess at first glance. (884)

"Cedar-Plums Like" was an alternative title that he toyed with using. He notes about thirty others he gave at least passing thought to, "Maise-Tassels… Kindlings," for example, or "Scintilla at 60 and after," or "Only Mulleins and Bumble-Bees" (886). Most of the titles are no more appealing than the descriptive Specimen Days. But the list reveals the difficulty Whitman had in choosing a title, and he concludes, "Let us be satisfied to have a name—something to identify and bind it together… without bothering ourselves because certain pages do not present themselves to you or me as coming under their own name with entire fitness or amiability" (885). What Whitman himself seems apologetic about are the discontinuities in the text, its fragmentary, discursive nature.

Generic classification can help sometimes. Alastair Fowler reminds us of a kind of verse collection called a silva. "Silvae or 'bits of raw material' were occasional pieces, rapid effusions on the model of Statius' Silvae, in a great variety of forms." Quintilian, the contemporary of Statius, complained about their "deliberate roughness." "He regarded it as a fault," Fowler tells us, "that certain writers 'run over the material first with as rapid a pen as possible, extempore, following the inspiration of the moment.'" The form has its history. "Politziano called his verse lectures of 1480–90 Silvae, perhaps with the same implication (roughness, miscellaneousness)." Scaliger made the term current. Ben Johnson's Timber and Forest and Under-wood are all examples. Phineas Fletcher, Cowley, and Dryden all wrote silvae. So, too, Coleridge's Sibylline Leaves and Robert Lowell's Notebook work within that generic form—and Leaves of Grass. In all of these, Fowler stresses "their variety and their appearance of spontaneity" (135). The titles suggest some gathering from nature. It occurs to me that Whitman might have called his prose work Leaves of Grass, and we would certainly not have objected. He might have called his poetic collection Specimen Days, and we might well have applauded the aptness of that title.

The term silva has its use. "When we investigate previous states of the type, it is to clarify meaningful departures that the work itself makes," Fowler reminds us. Whitman seems to have sensed he was composing a prose version of some such form by the list of titles he had flirted with. It is a matter of gathering up what might otherwise be lost. Alexander Solzhenitsyn is doing this in The Oak and the Calf, trying to reconstruct from notes and memory his cat-and-mouse game with the police even as the events continue to unfold. He did it as well in The Gulag Archipelago, especially in the third volume, bundling together other people's letters, notes, and memories as well as his own, preserving a record of specimen days of another order entirely. And, too, we have Paterson. However certain critics may be of the thematic or other artistic unity of that "long poem," William Carlos Williams more candidly admits the odd medley that Paterson is. Inside the title page of "Book One," Williams attempts to describe what is to follow:

: a local pride; spring, summer, fall and the sea; a confession; a basket; a column; a reply to the Greek and Latin with the bare hands; a gathering up; a celebration;
    in distinctive terms; by multiplication a reduction to one; daring; a fall; the clouds resolved into a sandy sluice; an enforced pause;
    hard put to it; an identification and a plan for action to supplant a plan for action; a taking up of slack; a dispersal and a metamorphosis.

This is a list of titles, of metaphoric characterizations, of what approaches descriptions of the lyrics. The list recalls Whitman casting about for a title for Specimen Days. It sounds like Williams is telling us intuitively that what we have here is rather a silva. In any event, stretching a generic term need not be an extravagance; it can be an exercise un useful literary tolerance.

Moses Hades observes that silva "denotes… in Latin writers a hasty draft for later polishing and elaboration." But "elaboration" by whom? Hades intends by the writers themselves, of course. Whitman, however, had a more original departure in mind than Hades or the Romans. The "elaboration" he foresees is to be our own. "Suggestiveness" is Whitman's word for it. In "A Backward Glance o'er Travel'd Roads" he says, "I round and finish little, if anything; and could not, consistently with my scheme. The reader will always have his or her party to do, just as much as I have mine. I seek less to state or display any theme or thought, and more to bring you, reader, into the atmosphere of the theme or thought—there to pursue your own flight" (666–7). Such "suggestiveness" has its counterpart in architecture and music. In "A Song for Occupations" Whitman proposed that "All architecture is what you do to it when you look upon it" and, similarly, "All music is what awakes from you when you are reminded by the instruments" (359). "Suggestiveness" is related to and consistent with comradeship, the perfect equality of friends along the open road. The very occasional and fragmentary style of Specimen Days is a gesture of Whitman's reaching out to us, a gesture of spiritual equality.'

'Does film criticism still exist?'

Seventy-five.

'We could also say: Convention as a whole is now looked upon not as a firm inheritance from the past, but as a continuing improvisation in the face of problems we no longer understand. Nothing we now have to say, no personal utterance, has its meaning conveyed in the conventions and formulas we now share. In a time of slogans, sponsored messages, ideologies, psychological warfare, mass projects, where words have lost touch with their sources or objects, and in a phonographic culture where music is for dreaming, or for kissing, or for taking a shower, or for having your teeth drilled, our choices seem to be those of silence, or nihilism (the denial of the value of shared meaning altogether), or statements so personal as to form the possibility of communication without the support of convention—perhaps to become the source of new convention. And then, of course, they are most likely to fail even to seem to communicate.'

'So far, we have discussed the destruction of the older character of uniqueness of the work of art by mechanical reproduction in terms of space alone. We must add, however, that in a more indirect sense this destructive tendency holds good beyond the concept of space. Here is an example which, although it does not belong to physiognomics, certainly influences radio’s physiognomic expression. It is the repetition of standard works. By being repeated again and again some of them, for instance the Beethoven symphonies which we mentioned in Part I, not only lose their »here« but also their »now«. Even if they used to be repeated at certain specific intervals, the quasi-ritual dignity attributed to them as long as they appeared at one particular hour vanishes. Now, when they are played again and again, they can no longer uphold the dignity of the occasion. They are losing their aura because they no longer keep their distance from the listeners. They show, instead, a tendency to mingle in his every day life because they can appear at practically every moment, and because he can accompany brushing his teeth with the Allegretto of the Seventh.'

'In addition, it might seem that song and dance have always been part of everyday life, and that everyday life is itself a transhistorical phenomenon. However, if everyday life is, as social theorists from Henri Lefebvre on have argued, a modern invention, the consequence of the capitalist division of workplace and household, of “making a living” and “living,” then the songs and dances of vernacular phonograph music—forms radically distinct from earlier art songs and work songs, court dances or folk dances—were, I would suggest, the first great medium that articulated and constituted the “everyday.” The songs and dances on the “record” evaded the terms of musicology’s classic dichotomy of functional and absolute music. They were neither functional, deeply embedded in social activities at specific times and places, the way work songs, sacred songs, or wedding dances were, nor were absolute, the object of an autonomous aesthetic contemplation, disconnected from the world of utility, like the modern art musics. Records simply inhabited modern daily life, an omnipresent soundtrack to household and neighborhood. They were, to borrow Walter Benjamin’s way of understanding the arts of daily life (his examples were architecture and film), musics for distraction rather than contemplation, musics that one lived with rather than musics that separated themselves from daily life.'

'This image of early radio devoted in significant proportion to European art music might prompt an enduringly fixed and real resentment in contemporary American readers, as if that was a moment when high still thought it could lord it over low. But in the early and genuinely class-conscious decades of American radio, when questions of the equitable redistribution of wealth and privilege were actually discussed – as they now are not – and an end was sought to much openly acknowledged resentment, the broadcast of European art music was a model of possible democratization. Contrary to what might be guessed at today, the distinction between popular and classical was loosely synonymous with what in those decades was discerned as the distinction between light – or light popular – and serious music. In the manuscripts of Current of Music Adorno himself regularly deals with these two sets of categories as being easily interchangeable in the assumptions of the age. The significance of this is in what the now mostly forgotten pair light and serious music contributed to the synonymity. The distinction it drew indicates that the idea of amusement had not yet subordinated music entirely. Although the exclusivity of music as amusement was ascendant, a contrary seriousness of listening was commonly acknowledged as legitimate and valued. When high and low were invoked, the thinking involved was complex in a way that is now unfamiliar, since in the minds of many what was high was often valued as what ought to become the possession of all.'