Bard of America

...The extent of Whitman's transformation from hack journalist to revolutionary bard can be measured by the poet's early estimation, in 1839, of his potential as a writer: "Who shall say that it might not be a very pretty book...

...But it is Whitman the man whom we have not known well enough before Justin Kaplan's exhaustively researched biography...

...I supposed the letter was meant to be emblazoned," argued Whitman, and emblazon that line he did—in gold, on the spine of the second edition of Leaves of Grass—without ever seeking Emerson's consent...

...A literary controversy began when Whitman used Emerson's words quoted above ("I greet you at the beginning of a great career . . .") as a pirated puff to sell his books...

...resume: From nowhere s comes Cosmic Walt...

...Tends the sick during the Civil War...

...Walt Whitman (1819-1892) may be the greatest of American poets, and he is certainly one of the most often misunderstood...

...Elegizes Lincoln...

...As Kaplan dryly notes, "pretty" and "respectable" were the last adjectives most of his contemporaries would eventually assign to his poetry...

...the lost years during which Whitman's great themes—democracy, inclusiveness, sexuality—came to possess him...

...Whitmaniacs will not like being reminded that the poet of cosmic harmony was a superhawk on the Mexican War and...

...Rather, he answers the question implied by Emerson in the most famous laying on of hands in American letters...

...Kaplan finds other skeletons in the Whitman closet...

...Branson Alcott saw in him "the very god Pan...

...Has some problems with bluenoses, but metamorphoses, sanctified and sanitized, as the Good Gray Poet of the anthologies...

...Such legends fostered by Whitman and his cultists are far from the more accurate picture Kaplan renders of Whitman's growth as an artist and the genesis of that most American book, Leaves of Grass...

...In short, a veritable clean slate befitting the New Adam singing his songs of the new land...

...Kaplan's biography is unsparingly honest, but it is no hatchet job...

...Thoreau may have come closest to the modern reading of Whitman with his comment that the poet "occasionally suggests something more than human...

...True, his meaning is clear enough in his poetry—too clear, at least in sexual matters, for most of his contemporaries...

...Kaplan gives us that "long foreground...

...Kaplan keeps us aware of such ironic contradictions, but he refuses to dwell on the moral blind spots of the youthful Whitman, or to use the boy's words to discredit the man...

...The most surprising aspect of Whitman, given the nature of much recent biography, is Kaplan's muted treatment of Whitman's bisexuality ("ama-tiveness" in the jargon of his beloved phrenology...

...Patrick's Cathedral and the bishop's residence in New York...

...Loafs, invites his soul...

...I dwell so long on the often checkered "long foreground" because the rest of Whitman's story is so well known...

...Of every hue and caste am I, of every rank and religion," Whitman would write in "Song of Myself...

...he protested to one homosexual admirer that such interpretations of his work were "morbid inferences . . . which are disavowed by me and seem damnable...

...The "long foreground" stretched from about 1836, when Whitman began to contribute to Long Island newspapers, until 1855, when Leaves of Grass first appeared...

...He planted newspaper articles about himself, cajoled friends into wilting favorable reviews, and even reviewed himself if the need arose...

...He makes clear that Whitman's titanic ego was more than matched by his talent, and his generous quotations from Whitman's poetry, reviews, and essays force one inescapable conclusion: If Whitman was not the poet of America he longed to be, we may never have one...

...Edward Carpenter, Edmund Gosse, Bram Stoker, and others applauded "Calamus" and other Whitman poems celebrating "athletic love," but the poet never joined their ranks...

...If Kaplan spotlights some of Whitman's weaknesses as a man, it is only to show how he transcended them as a writer, how "his life had to be partial in order for his work to be whole...

...Kaplan maintains that much of the Whitman corpus can only be understood as "homoerotic" and hints that Whitman himself never came to terms with the full gamut of his democratized sexual response...

...He insists we go beyond the familiar, truncated Whitman v...

...a hypocritical Northerner who opposed both black slavery and black equality...

...only a handful of Whitman's poems are examined...

...Whitman's abuse of "Catholics and ignorant Irish" helped to incite mob violence on election day, 1842, and Whitman editorially applauded a gang of bigots who stoned St...

...Some confusion as to the nature of the "real" Whitman ("1 am various...

...His contemporaries seem to have used him as a sort of Rorschach, each projecting onto Whitman the satanic or angelic qualities one's own reading of his poems revealed...

...Whitman worked toward making his masterpiece, Leaves of Grass, seem a "sourceless" document and toward making himself appear free of dead husks of past traditions...

...Thanking Whitman for a gift copy of the first edition of Leaves of Grass, Emerson wrote: "I greet you at the beginning of a great career, which must yet have had a long foreground somewhere, for such a start...

...When we consider his continent-sized dreams and the colossal scale of his ambition in building Leaves of Grass, the territories claimed by our modern writers seem petty indeed...

...Kaplan's biography succeeds because Kaplan refuses to settle for the legend (self-created) of Whit-j man as the self-made poet, the myth-sized New Adam sprung ready to write from the Statue of Liberty's flame...

...Chris Tucker teaches literature at Brookhaven College in Texas and is a frequent reviewer for the Dallas Morning News...

...Kaplan makes clear that that is just how canny Walt Whitman wanted it...

...Kaplan presents another Whitman avatar: besides Cosmic Walt and the Good Gray Poet, there was Whitman the shameless self-promoter, ready to go to any lengths to publish his "barbaric yawp...

...It is thought," wrote a sympathetic friend, "that you are not sufficiently ashamed of your reproductive organs...

...on the "Negro question...

...As the twenty-two-year-old editor of Aurora, Whitman pumped up circulation with a series of anti-Catholic tirades, decrying a bill that would allow public funds to be used in parochial schools...

...Kaplan's essential task in Whitman is not explication...

...Biographer and disciple Richard Bucke proclaimed Whitman "the Christ Likeness...

...Who knows but that I might do something very respectable...

...I contain multitudes") is understandable...