Walt Whitman’s America: A Cultural Biography

I really liked the way this book was structured. It was part biography and part history of the United States in the 19th century, which Whitman's life, more or less, spanned. Walt Whitman's American is a very dense read, but worthwhile. It's full of very interesing bits about his life and the times in which he lived. It's easy to see why it won the Bancroft Prize in 1996.

Whitman was a difficult man and poet. Obviously, if it were not for the poetry, no one would think about him at all today, but oddly what makes this book so good is its long look at 19th century America through Whitman's life experience rather than his words. There are not many quotes from the poems and they're not really missed, in fact some of the best are not even mentioned. It's interesting to compare the life work of a poet and the age he lived in, especially someone like Walt Whitman, so sensitive and hopeful, at the same time living in the what is, for most of us, alternate universe of same sex attraction. Anyway, one's liking or disliking of Whitman does not affect one's enjoyment of this book, which is, as the title tells us, about America during Whitman's life. All of the major topics of the book: politics, homoeroticism, intellectual and religious movements, the growth of the cities, family life, have infinite possibilities and Reynolds does a good job of presenting an appetizing amount of information. He has a very balanced approach to topics quite liable to unbalance an author, I'm thinking especially of homosexuality and politics of the 1850s. And it was very interesting to know that censorship of Whitman was directed at the heterosexual images in the poems. One tends to forget how frigid society was in the Victorian age, how far it is from then to now and Howard Stern.Reynolds also does a good job of describing Whitman's own ambitions and efforts at persona management. Poets are now so unpopular and so much in a realm of their own that we are surprised that the father of modern poetry hoped to be quoted frequently and by all types. It wasn't unreasonable: Longfellow was immensely popular and so was Whittier, but Whitman who, at least took up topics that still interest us, willfully insisted on a style that made his work very difficult to memorize. His one so to say singable verse, "Oh Captain" was popular and memorized. It was still included in old high school poetry textbooks when I was young - forty-five years ago - but I think has been now forgotten. And Reynolds depicts the aging Whitman trying to patch up and sustain a consistent public image. This too is interesting because this really did work. Whitman was the American image of a poet for quite a while. Nobody knows what Longfellow looked like, Poe certainly doesn't fit the part, and jumping to the 20th century, T. S. Eliot, though great, looks too constipated, in other words that avuncular Face easily confused with Santa meant uplifting and benevolent poetry to people who had never read and never would read a word of it.All in all, highly recommended.

A biography always to some degree has to set the book’s subject into his or her cultural context but it is unlikely a book ever does that better than this biography of Walt Whitman. Reynolds puts the reader into New York in the mid-1800’s and does it in a way that never appears as “filler.” Whitman is given full context as a poet and as a 19th century American. All the issues surrounding Whitman, from his sexual orientation to the change in his poetry over his lifetime to his public and private images, are handled by Reynolds by putting Whitman completely into his time and place. We tend to judge historical figures by our contemporary way of dividing up and conceptualizing human experience. This book forces the reader to put away his or her current cultural understanding of Whitman and gives us a different social reality by which to see the poet. This is a well-written and engaging book that will both enlighten and challenge the reader. The book can change the way we see American history not only for Whitman but for his contemporaries in the mid-19th century. An excellent biography.

Walt Whitman wrote that a poet fails "if he does not flood himself with the immediate age as with vast oceanic tides * * * if he be not himself the age transfigured." By that standard, Walt Whitman most certainly did not fail, as David S. Reynolds shows in this "cultural biography". Reynolds takes his theme from Whitman's pronouncement, and he shows how Whitman was a man and a poet of his age and of his country. Thus, in WALT WHITMAN'S AMERICA we get not only a fine biography of Whitman (1819-1892), but also an edifying portrayal of the culture of the United States over his lifetime.Walt Whitman was fiercely democratic, he was egalitarian, he was a populist, and he was protean. Above all he was American, probably the most American poet ever. He championed a new form of verse, exploding conventional patterns of rhyme and meter and freeing the poetic line to follow the organic rhythms of feeling and voice. In his poetry he challenged "boundaries between author and reader, between poetry and music and oratory, between high diction and slang, between different religions and social classes". He celebrated working men and women, and later in his career he celebrated technology and industry. He explored erotic themes, thereby contributing to the candid discussion of sex in the larger culture. No matter how one responds to his poetry (I myself am not a big fan), he is a poet to be reckoned with, and not just in the United States.Still, Whitman was very much a product of the young United States, a country that came of age with the Civil War, which was the central event of his life. (Whitman spent about a decade in Washington, D.C. working in various posts for the federal government; during the years 1863 to 1866 he spent his free time visiting and tending to wounded soldiers, seeing as many as 80,000 of them.) Whitman absorbed his country as one breathes air, and the strength of Reynolds's book is to show this phenomenon in countless instances. I was familiar with some of the influential people of nineteenth-century American culture whom Reynolds discusses, but many others were new to me -- such as Elias Hicks, McDonald Clarke, Mike Walsh, George Lippard, the Hutchinsons, Marietta Alboni, Justus Liebig, William Sidney Mount, and Anthony Comstock. I also learned about some of the intellectual movements or fads that influenced Whitman to varying degrees, such as phrenology, mesmerism, and Swedenborgianism.One example of the interesting sidebars with which the book is filled: Whitman and Henry David Thoreau were contemporaries. Both "Walden" and "Leaves of Grass" were strong reactions of disgust with the social and political status quo of the 1850s. Whitman and Thoreau, who met several times, "viewed each other with mutual fascination and suspicion". Whitman valued the "anarchist side" of Thoreau, his "going his own absolute road let hell blaze all it chooses" (to quote Whitman). But he also thought Thoreau elitist. He later commented: "Thoreau's great fault was disdain--disdain for men (for Tom, Dick and Harry): inability to appreciate the average life."WALT WHITMAN'S AMERICA has its flaws, however. Even allowing for the fact that Reynolds covers a vast amount of material, the book is too long, in part because there is some unnecessary repetition; on occasion Reynolds's repeated hammering of a particular point passes from annoyance to insult. For my tastes, Reynolds overdoes the theme of the "Walt Whitman Myth" (the public image that Whitman carefully constructed of himself) and he gives too much attention to the matter of Whitman's homoerotic tendencies and whether they ever were manifested in homosexual encounters. On at least five occasions he introduces a point with the preface that previous biographers had underestimated it or ignored it altogether; such repeated self-back-patting is rather unseemly. Finally, although this complaint is directed at the publisher rather than the author, in my paperback copy there are at least eight instances in which several lines of type or even an entire page are printed so faintly as to be barely readable.

This book is a thoroughgoing analysis of not only Whitman's poetry, letters, and essays, but a look into the political and social situation of America during his lifetime. It is very well written, giving an objective assessment of Whitman's vast work and influence. The bibliography is extensive. This book is the definitive insight into Whitman's mind and literary achievements.Sue Drott