Recasting Our Icons

...When, as a young man, he failed at one career after another, he was sustained by grandiose fantasies of future recognition...

...Later in life he actually carried on a few affairs with women, but for the most part seems to have remained celibate...

...Descriptions of sensual love between the sexes, though, even in marriage, were condemned as pornographic, or nearly so...

...Kaplan, Zweig and Allen each sought to convince Americans that poetry and transcendental philosophy had the power to inspire the discouraged, challenge lies and pretense, and tell us how to be good in evil times...

...Consequently, Whitman's erotic "Calamus" poems did not raise an eyebrow when they first appeared, but his heterosexual "Children of Adam" sequence was considered indecent...

...Similarly, Richardson's portrayal of Emerson's cultural milieu—unlike Reynolds' more vivid delineation of Whitman's—fails to uncover his subject's hidden features...

...Reynolds' compulsively readable biography demonstrates that "by fully absorbing his time"—capitalism and all—Whitman "became a writer for all time...

...But Richardson does show the impact of the former clergyman's transcendentalism—described by one contemporary as Brahma crossed with Poor Richard—on a country that still believed its natural resources to be limitless and wanted to hear that unlimited opportunities awaited its citizens...

...He presented the Sage of Concord as a philosophical thinker able to behave with integrity under all circumstances and triumph over loss and disappointment...

...Often there is a stifled quality to the book, as if the author has inherited Emerson's reluctance to reveal certain things and is hiding his true meaning between the lines...

...He recorded both incidents in his journal without comment...

...Reynolds sees Whitman's progress as fundamentally sad, because over the years the poet lost faith in his ability to change people...

...Successive generations have reinterpreted the works of these forebears in seeking to lay claim to them, with the result that every new biography tends to tell as much about the concerns and esthetic ideals of the period in which it is written as of the times described...

...He does not slight the musical, literary and artistic energy of Whitman's environment, however...

...The left side of the familiar face is hidden in shadows...

...Flashes of effective writing alternate with ponderous density...

...Recent books on Emily Dickinson have discarded the frustrated spinster of the past and replaced her with a self-sufficient and victorious artist...

...The dualism that comes across in his account is captured by artist Barry Moser's dust jacket etching of the sage...

...Taken as a whole, though, his overly long volume smokes and smolders without shedding enough heat or light...

...Along the way he immerses us in the culture of pre-Civil War America, re-creating it around Whitman's triumphs and decline so effectively that we willingly travel back to those tumultuous days...

...Emerson himself, reacting to a copy Whitman sent him, wrote: "I give you joy of your free and brave thought...

...I greet you at the beginning of a great career...

...Richardson, in any event, cannot bring it off...

...Perhaps it would take someone with Emerson's genius for reconciling opposites to fully explicate the relationship of his life to his work...

...The trauma of being driven from a town as a young school teacher for his reported improprieties with male students, brought to light here, made Whitman especially careful to avoid misunderstanding in this area...

...He even produced more conventional works, like the maudlin "O Captain, my Captain," the weakest of his many tributes to Abraham Lincoln...

...By the 1880s and '90s tastes changed...

...In the same self-doubting era, Gay WilsonAllen's 1981 life of Emerson addressed those whose faith in human nature had been shaken by the revelations of corruption in the Oval Office...

...Apparently the age of heroes is over—at least for dead white males...

...In the end, to win sales, Whitman authorized expurgated editions of his verse...

...No longer "a roughly dressed carpenter who sneered against politicos and looked for redemption among the common people," he eventually stooped to penning odes to Queen Victoria and Kaiser Frederick Wilhelm, and proto-greet-ing card sentimental verses like "My Canary Bird...

...The hyperactive Whitman's life is well suited to satisfying the current interest in the artist's private world...

...In fact, I wish I had spent the time it took to read Richardson's book enjoying Emerson's essays once again, or scanning the knotty rhythms of his homely verse...

...he tries to bring us closer to the inner man...

...RALPH WALDO EMERSON, who helped launch Whitman and others, was himself an elusive, cerebral figure...

...Scholars focusing on particular facets of Richardson's painstaking research will no doubt find The Mind on Fire useful...

...He became a "performance artist," retelling the last hours of the martyred President to packed houses...

...Reynolds plots a different trajectory, in which youthful optimism and radical ideals ultimately erode into compromise...

...Certainly, as we know from Reynolds, the philosophy lit a fire under Whitman...

...Paul Zweig's 1984 study, by contrast, saw him as a rebel, the ancestor of the Beats, hippies and anti-war protesters...

...That his orientation, unquestionably gay to us, seemed anything but to readers in the middle of the last century, illustrates how deeply cultural presuppositions affect understanding...

...Those who would illuminate his life for us must therefore reconstruct dramas that were essentially intellectual...

...No wonder his "Crossing the Brooklyn Ferry" describes the city "from the improving distance of the East River," Reynolds remarks...

...and the loss of his four-year-old firstborn, Waldo...

...Reynolds tells us "that Whitman had long tried, both in his private relationships and public statements, to make his homosexual urges conform as much as possible to permissible same-sex behavior...

...Previous Whitman treatments have cast his story in the Horatio Alger mode: A poorly educated newspaper reporter from a dysfunctional family manages, through a combination of genius and positive thinking, to make himself the Great American Poet...

...Thus we encounter the sights, sounds and smells of the poet's native Brooklyn—ill-lit, loud with the clatter of wooden-wheeled omnibuses, and filthy with the droppings of horses and of livestock being driven through the streets to nearby pastures...

...They also must plumb emotions Emerson kept so tightly controlled that it can only be guessed how he was affected by the tragedies he experienced: the death at 20 of his adored first wife, Ellen...

...With the publication of the first edition of Leaves of Grass in 1855, at age 36, he was certain his poems would help to bring Americans together and enable them to realize their Emersonian potential for greatness...

...The deep-set eyes are black holes...

...Then as now, people responded to what the biographer terms "the sometimes bizarre yoking of the erotic and mystical in [Whitman's] poems," his elevating the sexual to a quasi-religious pitch...

...the premature demise of two of his favorite brothers...

...Indeed, the cultural and moral climate was so fluid that same sex friendships verging on the erotic were considered wholesome and edifying, and were a powerful theme...

...Not surprisingly, early books about Emerson concentrated on his public persona, on analyzing his philosophy and well-known poems...

...Reynolds and Richardson, abandoning the notion of an exemplary subject, show their titans to be as full of inner confusion and pretension as any of us...

...In his journalism, Whitman often rendered this Brooklyn in a hellish light, as fertile ground for pickpockets and prostitutes...

...As the modern concept of homosexuality evolved, sophisticated readers began to wonder about Whitman's paeans to "manly love," and what they revealed about their author...

...Previous biographers have not noticed the degree to which Whitman in his last years became both financially and ideologically entangled with capitalists," Reynolds observes tartly...

...Robert Richardson rightly sets himself a far more difficult task...

...Richardson has trouble seeing into them...

...Although one of Whitman's aims was to create an American style devoid of European influences or speech cadences, the public still preferred Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and William Cullen Bryant, despite their being steeped in British conventions...

...Writers & Writing RECASTING OUR ICONS BY PHOEBE PETTINGELL WALT WHITMAN and Ralph Waldo Emerson are two members of a 19th-century New England trinity (Emily Dickinson is the third) that continues to influence American poetry to this day...

...Contemporary psychology predisposes him—and us—to wonder what moved Emerson to open Ellen's grave more than a year after her death, not to mention why, after his other children were almost grown, he dug up the coffin of little Waldo to look at the skeleton...

...Typically, Whitman used this private letter to advertise subsequent editions of Leaves, but the general public proved less enthusiastic than Emerson...

...We learn that the country's craze for mass entertainment embraced minstrel shows and opera, farce and Shakespeare, sermons and political stump oratory, and that the devotees of these genres were often the same people...

...In the wake of the divisive Vietnam War and Watergate, for example, Justin Kaplan's 1980 biography of Whitman portrayed a misfit and loner who transformed himself into the bard of a union torn by civil war, a healer of schism who helped restore the nation's patriotism...

...But in the case of quiet types like Emerson, this emphasis only reinforces the adage that the day to day existence of supreme stylists is usually less interesting than their prose...

...Yet disappointing as the closing years of his life were, Whitman's best work continues to shape the dialectic of Americans...

...And no matter how deeply the biographer probes, they remain inscrutable, along with much else concerning the man...

...A little more than a decade later, David S. Reynolds' Walt Whitmans America: A Cultural Biography (Knopf, 671 pp., $35.00), and Robert D. Richardson Jr.'s Emerson: The Mind on Fire (California, 671 pp., $35.00) offer new readings of these men, making them more complex, less triumphant characters...

...The mouth may be smiling slightly or grimacing...