From Booklist
Like Dickens, the most influential nineteenth-century English-language novelist, Whitman, the most influential nineteenth-century English-language poet, wasn't educated in literature or much interested in it. As Reynolds demonstrates, he was inspired by almost everything else in his busy, progressive era: politics; theater; singing (popular and operatic); oratory; photography; science (especially phrenology, the pseudoscience of descrying character and intelligence from the conformations of the skull); religion (nonsectarian and universalistic); and new (phrenological) thinking about sex, gender, and friendship. Reynolds emphasizes that Whitman was not homosexual or gay as that is now understood, despised the pornography of his time, feared masturbation and "impure" thoughts, and held what now would be called, at best, a very benighted view of blacks, despite his hatred of slavery. Unfortunately, Reynolds doesn't much account for Whitman's innovative poetic style besides calling it biblical and based on prose jottings, nor does he consider the dark, totalitarian implications of Whitman's egalitarianism and his often baleful influence on American poetry. Nevertheless, a good, enlightening introduction to a still-controversial figure. Ray Olson
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Book Description
From the great events of the day to the patient workings of a spider, few poets responded to the life around them as powerfully as Walt Whitman. Now, in this brief but bountiful volume, David S. Reynolds offers a wealth of insight into the life and work of Whitman, examining the author through the lens of nineteenth-century America. Reynolds shows how Whitman responded to contemporary theater, music, painting, photography, science, religion, and sex. But perhaps nothing influenced Whitman more than the political events of his lifetime, as the struggle over slavery threatened to rip apart the national fabric. America, he believed, desperately needed a poet to hold together a society that was on the verge of unraveling. He created his powerful, all-absorbing poetic "I" to heal a fragmented nation that, he hoped, would find in his poetry new possibilities for inspiration and togetherness. Reynolds also examines the influence of theater, describing how Whitman's favorite actor, the tragedian Junius Brutus Booth--"one of the grandest revelations of my life"--developed a powerfully emotive stage style that influenced Leaves of Grass, which took passionate poetic expression to new heights. Readers will also discover how from the new medium of photography Whitman learned democratic realism and offered in his poetry "photographs" of common people engaged in everyday activities. Reynolds concludes with an appraisal of Whitman's impact on American letters, an influence that remains strong today. Solidly grounded in historical and biographical facts, and exceptionally wide-ranging in the themes it treats, Walt Whitman packs a dazzling amount of insight into a compact volume.
Walt Whitman FROM THE PUBLISHER
"In this brief but bountiful volume, David S. Reynolds offers a wealth of insight into the life and work of Walt Whitman, examining the author through the lens of nineteenth-century America." "Reynolds shows how Whitman responded to contemporary theater, music, painting, photography, science, religion, and sex. But perhaps nothing influenced Whitman more than the political events of his lifetime, as the struggle over slavery threatened to rip apart the national fabric." Readers will also discover how from the new medium of photography Whitman learned democratic realism and offered in his poetry "photographs" of common people engaged in everyday activities. Reynolds concludes with an appraisal of Whitman's impact on American letters, an influence that remains strong today.
FROM THE CRITICS
Kirkus Reviews
A concise and well-considered summary of the forces-biographical, social, cultural-that combined in fashioning our most original and democratic poetic voice. Reynolds (English and American Studies/CUNY) is eminently equipped for the task of reducing to a sonnet the epic of Whitman's life. A Bancroft winner for Walt Whitman's America (1995), Reynolds knows the historical period (and the details of Whitman's life) so thoroughly that he can find the essence-the quintessence, really-of a vast complexity. After an opening chapter sketching the peripatetic poet's life (1819-92), the author examines clusters of influences that made Whitman Whitman. Among these are the Temperance Movement (Whitman published a novel on the subject, Franklin Evans, in 1842), the swirl and chaos and cacophony of urban life, the popular arts (especially the theater, oratory, painting, and photography), science and its next of kin (phrenology and mesmerism), philosophy (he read Swedenborg), religion, sex, war, and Lincoln. Whitman loved to hear the preaching of Henry Ward Beecher (who didn't?) but wouldn't permit any particular creed to circumscribe him. Reynolds properly credits the poet for his innovations in style and technique (poetry after Whitman no longer looked or sounded the same) and for his ambitious, surely quixotic, desire to encompass all experience in a word, a phrase, a poem. But Reynolds is no mere press agent for Whitman. He recognizes the ambiguities in the man, quoting, for example, a nasty social-Darwinist passage about race (from later in his life) that flatly contradicts the poet's earlier egalitarian views. And there are other troubling contradictions. Whitman believed, on balance, that theCivil War was a good thing (it cleared the air!) but did see, in grim and red detail (as a volunteer nurse), the horrors of this air-clearing. (Another Dec. 2004 volume from Oxford, Memoranda During the War, a selection from Whitman's journals during the war, edited by Peter Coviello, shows the range and capacity of the poet's sensibility.)Precise and provocative, learned and lucid. (12 b&w illustrations)
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