Lives of Two Poets

...Apparently the marriage did not become passionate until the increasingly unstable Dorothy began to lose her hold over her brother...

...a compound of the New England transcen-dentalist and New York rowdy...

...The press reflected both a profound skepticism about our system of government and feelings of inferiority about our literary tradition...

...Charles Eliot Norton, for example, deemed it "preposterous yet somehow fascinating...

...Eschewing the radical principles of his youth, he became an ardent Tory, obtained a local civil service job, and died at 80, Poet Laureateof England, crowned with glory and honors...

...The orthodox view also has it that without Coleridge's support, Wordsworth would have lacked the confidence and resolve to persevere...

...Kaplan records the fastidious distaste of prominent critics for the early editions of Leaves of Grass...

...He calls into question the common opinion that Dorothy and Coleridge were good for the poet...

...But Davies observes that the great literary critic "overdid it...

...Whitman was supported only by his unquenchable genius that could transmute the basest metals into gold...

...Matthiessen hailed as "The American Renaissance"—Hawthorne, Emerson, Thoreau, Melville, Whitman—were creating their works...

...Davies does not commit himself on the mooted incest, but he does argue that the loving sister was hysterical, possessive, sharp tongued, cruel in her judgments, and at fault for prejudicing many Wordsworth biographers against members of her brother's circle...

...But thereof come in the end despondency and madness," wrote Wordsworth, pessimistically, in his mid-30s...

...J ike Wordsworth, Walt Whitman was his own historian, claiming to reveal himself fully to his readers: "I spring from these pages into your arms," he cried in "Song of Myself," " I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world...

...Calling him a genius at every opportunity, and saying he was so ahead of everyone else that he was out of sight, naturally caused resentment, creating expectations which couldn't be met, especially as Coleridge was well aware that in Wordsworth's greatness there was always the possibility of banality, the possibility that he could be ridiculous instead of revelatory...

...Leaves of Grass was much more than an evocation of national character...

...Wordsworth was sustained in adversity by his loving family and friends...

...Unlike Davies, Kaplan really does understand the poetry, and he has a superb sense of period...

...It was an awesome celebration of American spirit, and a vindication of Whitman as its chief priest—a role he always knew he would play...

...Biographers in this century have wondered for some time if the brother/sister relationship might possibly have been incestuous—Wordsworth was evidently a passionate man, capable of having an affair with a French girl during the Reign of Terror and fathering a child by her...

...Max Beerbohm neatly parodied this exuberance in his cartoon, "Walt Whitman Inciting the Bird of Freedom to Soar": A pudgy man with a Santa Claus beard—typical of the bums one sees in train stations—stands on one leg with arms outstretched in front of a grumpy eagle slouching on its perch...

...Its purpose was, in Kaplan's happy phrase, "to celebrate the conquest of loneliness through the language of common modern speech...

...His work was radical enough to incur the enmity of the literary establishment...

...For many years, Wordsworth wrote his verse in conjunction with his beloved sister, Dorothy, in one of several homes in England's beautiful lake district...

...25.00), Justin Kaplan has captured the man behind the bizarre popular facade...

...Hunter Davies, a British professional biographer, has decided to remedy the situation with William Wordsworth (Athe-neum, 367 pp., $17.95), the first recent popular account to span the poet's entire career...

...Whitman's frank descriptions of sexuality (based on little first-hand knowledge, Kaplan surmises), plus his relentless self-publicizing earned him many enemies in the literary establishment—some of whom were almost convinced that he was an imposter...

...Well, almost...

...He is not above telling us that his subjects were "absolutely thrilled," or resorting to patronizing remarks: "It is hard not to smile at the idea of it all, though if you happen to be young and idealistic and radical, you perhaps won't smile but think it perfectly wonderful —the sort of thing you might at this very moment be looking for...

...Although Davies interprets Wordsworth's life well, even thoughtfully, he is always an outsider looking in...

...I've seen bad reviews in my time," Davies confesses, "but I don't think I've ever read anywhere such vicious reviews as the ones Wordsworth received...

...Still, Wordsworth did not suffer unduly from this galling onslaught...

...The result is a fascinating life of one of America's self-made prophets against the background of that tumultuous era before, during and after the Civil War...

...His homoerotic impulses drove him to pursue unresponsive young laborers, while women who were excited by his frank talk about sex tried unsuccessfully to court him...

...Whitman had been released from —perhaps shocked out of—the stilted legacy of "suitable" forms and words that hampered so many 19th-century poets...

...A recently discovered trove of letters has led Davies to believe that Wordsworth eventually derived his inspiration from his wife...

...When, in his late 30s, Wordsworth married a childhood sweetheart, Mary Hutchinson, Dorothy continued to live with the couple, and many admirers gathered round so that the poet was always "the heart of a circle of friends...

...More important, he found a way to reconcile his divided soul...

...He need not have worried...

...An old man who never married and had no heart's companion now except his books," Whitman nonetheless achieved his apotheosis, dying content after a life fully lived, having produced a work that has enabled others to feel the complexities of human experience more fully...

...Since no one is apt to write a more readable or entertaining biography of this poet for a long time to come, however, this book should not be missed...

...He embarrassed Wordsworth with his praise...

...Nevertheless, Wordsworth's story is well told, and Davies has spiced it up with some iconoclastic interpretations...

...Pseudo-sciences, like phrenology and animal magnetism, and contemporary equivalents of a Dale Carnegie course really did release his untapped potential...

...Wordsworth was his own biographer in his poetry...

...Justin Kaplan's magnificent biography is a fitting tribute to an American genius...

...In 1825, when he was six years old, Whitman attended an open-air speech given in his hometown, Brooklyn, by the elderly Marquis de Lafayette, and the great hero of the Revolution embraced him...

...His life was long and so full of incident that biographers in the past have preferred to concentrate on a brief period or single aspect of it...

...From this experience, he acquired a sense of mission—the assurance that he was destined to be the bard of America's democratic tradition...

...But in 1887, on the 22nd anniversary of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, the 68-year-old Whitman delivered a spellbinding lecture on the martyred President in Madison Square Theater, New York, to an audience of his former detractors...

...He invented a kind of "confessional" poetry that dealt not with received classical or orthodox impressions of the world, but with the poet's own feelings and sensibilities...

...He had the absolute devotion of his sister as well as the friendship of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who devoted much of his theoretical writing to the advancement of Wordsworth's cause...

...Dorothy has always been considered her brother's muse...

...Davies, who has written an "authorized" biography of the Beatles, makes no bones about his intended audience—those who care more about the lives of poets than their poetry...

...Out of such seemingly unpromising material he sang "the Body Electric" in a voice that revivified Romantic poetry, here and abroad...

...It is hard for us to remember today that the country was undergoing a loss of belief in its identity at the very time when the writers F.O...

...She lived for her brother, pined for him when he was away, and sacrificed her considerable talents to his...

...It makes one feel protective toward him, sorry for an honest man made to suffer in such a way...

...The picture painted by Davies is more complex than the received account of Wordsworth's life...

...Hetriumphed ultimately...

...The Prelude is the story of his youth, and the influence it had upon his life and outlook...

...For all his invocation of camaraderie—his self-wrought myth of the lusty sire of many illegitimate children, the Good Gray Poet boundlessly healthy, earthy and energetic—Whitman actually was a private, painfully isolated man, "furtive as an old hen," he once admitted...

...Once, when she was ill, he wrote, "Were she to depart, the Phases of my Moon would be robbed of light to a degree I have not the courage to think of...

...Critics were indeed a rabid lot in the 19th century, perfectly capable of wishing in print that an author would not live to complete another book, or of impugning his sanity and morals simply because they disliked his poetry...

...He lacks a deep understanding of the power of the verse at its strongest...

...In Walt Whitman: A Life (Simon and Schuster, 432 pp...

...The sublime boldness that triumphed in verse often faltered sadly in a life much burdened by guilts, paralyzing strokes and continual rebuffs...