Walt Whitman: The Song of Himself
From AwardAnnals
| Book: | Walt Whitman: The Song of Himself |
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| Author: | Jerome Loving |
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| Publisher: | University of California Press |
Loving brings to life the elusive early Whitman, detailing his unhappy teaching career, typesetting jobs, quarrels with editors, and relationships with family and friends. He takes us through the Civil War—with Whitman’s moving descriptions of the wounded and dying he nursed, the battlegrounds and camps he visited—demonstrating why the war became one of the defining events of Whitmans life and poetry. Loving’s account of Whitman’s relationship with Ralph Waldo Emerson is one of the most complete and fascinating available. He also draws insights from new material about Whitman’s life as a civil servant, his Lincoln lectures, and his abiding campaign to gain acceptance for what was regarded by many as a ‘dirty book.’ He examines each edition of Leaves of Grass in connection with the life and times that produced it, demonstrating how Whitman’s poetry serves as a priceless historical document—marking such events as Grant’s death, the completion of the Washington monument, Custer’s defeat, and the Johnstown flood—at the same time that it reshapes the canon of American literature.
The most important gap in the Whitman record is his journalism, which has never been completely collected and edited. Previous biographers have depended on a very incomplete and inaccurate collection. Loving has found long-forgotten runs of the newspapers Whitman worked on and has gathered the largest collection of his journalism to date. He uses these pieces to significantly enhance our understanding of where Whitman stood in the political and ideological spectra of his era.
Loving tracks down the sources of anecdotes about Whitman, how they got passed from one biographer to another, were embellished and re-contextualized. The result is a biography in which nothing is claimed without a basis in the factual record. Walt Whitman: The Song of Himself will be an invaluable tool for generations to come, an essential resource in understanding Leaves of Grass and its poet—who defied literary decorum, withstood condemnation, and stubbornly pursued his own way.
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Reviews
Amazon.com
Despite the general resistance to his work on the part of his literary contemporaries, and their disapproval of his homoeroticism, Walt Whitman experienced incredible success during his lifetime. After the 1855 publication of Leaves of Grass (the first of nine editions of the book he personally saw through the press), he fast became America’s national poet. He was asked to write poems commemorating the victims of natural disasters and was offered a free burial plot in exchange for a poem lauding the cemetery’s beauty. Millionaire Andrew Carnegie was one of his vigorous supporters.
Whitman’s success is most likely the result of the approachability—he wrote often of the immediate: the sounds of the city, men bathing in the river, the mystery around the next corner—and sheer beauty of his poems. He was also an expert self-promoter. Long before the advent of the blurb in contemporary publishing, Whitman would include reviews of his books in the appendices. Many of these were actually written by him and a few were even critical, in order to maintain a sense of objectivity. He carefully controlled his public image, but assiduously guarded his private realm, which is why, more than a century after the poet’s death, debate still rages about his sexual proclivity—there simply isn’t enough proof one way or another. The Song of Himself, the first comprehensive biography of Whitman in 20 years, is rich with details of its subject’s life and times and cogent analysis of his poetry—a book that is sure to increase readers’ understanding of the great poet and reinvigorate their interest in his work. —Anna Baldwin
