Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography

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 was born in Long Island New York in 1819. He came from a large and dysfunctional family. Whitman held many jobs in his life; carpenter, newspaper editor, columnist , clerk in Washington during the Civil War where he also visited hospitals tending to the wounded soldiers. He is best known for his Leaves of Grass collection of poems first published in 1855 and running through several edition in which he continued to add poems. He loved Lincoln as a redeemer POTUS and remembered him in his poems O Captain My Captain and When Lilacs in the Dooryard Last Bloomed. Whitman was a bohemian and rebel who was nourished by various trends in democratic pre-Civil War America. Reynolds gives us not only a fine biography of the iconoclastic poet but a serious and detailed look at various trends in American society during the nineteenth century. We learn about spiritualism, free love movements, the rise of abolitionism and women's right, Swedenborg philosophy and the birth of the Republic antislavery party. Walt Whitman was a strong Democrat party member and was bisexual. He developed many close friendships with men. Whitman never married and lived with family members for most of his life. He spent ten years in Washington and lived in Camden New Jersey following the war. He was a brilliant renaissance man and is arguably the greatest American poet of the nineteenth century. He died in 1892 but he is still widely read and quoted influencing many poets through his use of free verse. He was a good man who believed in the glory of the common person, loved nature and believed in human equality. Dr. David S. Reynolds is a renowned scholar who has written on such diverse topics as William Faulkner, Henry James and America in the Age of Jackson. His research is impeccable and this rich book is destined to become a classic of biography.

Multitudes is a one-man play about the life and times of Walt Whitman. My wife and I wrote the play and it has been performed nationally and internationally. The play deals with Walt’s sexuality, slavery, the Civil War and Lincoln. Walt Whitman’s America was a joy to read and provided me with new contextual information that is invaluable as a self-taught student and actor/channeler of Walt Whitman.

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.

I originally ordered this book as a resource for a research paper, but found myself drawn into this fascinating insight into Whitman the man. It was also a very revealing insight into the prevailing attitudes and mores of 19th century America, especially leading up to and following the Civil War. It gave me perspective into the difficulties the country had in emancipation get slaves. A fascinating insight!

It gives us a feel for his time - especially his early years. It shows him as he was - a very imperfect being. .