Walt Whitman and his writing

Walt Whitman's stature rests largely on two major contributions to the literature of the United States. First, although detractors are numerous and the poet's organizing principle is sometimes blurred, Leaves of Grass stands as the most fully realized American epic poem. Written in the midst of natural grandeur and burgeoning materialism, Whitman's book traces the geographical, social, and spiritual contours of an expanding nation. It embraces the science and commercialism of industrial America while trying to direct these practical energies toward the “higher mind” of literature, culture, and the soul.

Finally, Whitman broke taboos with his extensive use of sexual imagery, incorporated not to titillate or shock, but to portray life in its wholeness. He determined to be the poet of procreation, to celebrate the elemental and primal life force that permeates man and nature. Thus, “forbidden voices” are unveiled, clarified, and transfigured by the poet's vision of their place in an organic universe.

Whitman himself said he wrote but “one or two indicative words for the future.” He expected the “main things” from poets, orators, singers, and musicians to come. They would prove and define a national culture, thus justifying his faith in American democracy. These apologetic words, along with the early tendency to read Whitman as “untranslatable,” or barbaric and undisciplined, long delayed his acceptance as one of America's greatest poets. In fact, if judged by the poet's own test of greatness, he is a failure, for he said the “proof of a poet is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it.” Whitman has not been absorbed by the common people to whom he paid tribute in his poetry. Today, however, with recognition from both the academic community and such twentieth century poets as Hart Crane, William Carlos Williams, Karl Shapiro, and Randall Jarrell, his Leaves of Grass has taken its place among the great masterworks of American literature.

Whitman's concern with health and appearance is a vital thread in the making of the mythic figure of Walt Whitman and of the poems that verify him. Beginning in mid-1849, when he paid his first visit to the Fowler & Wells Phrenological Cabinet, Whitman maintained a growing interest in the relationship between soma and psyche. Zweig's treatment of this portion of the Whitman puzzle is engaging and convincing. The reader sees a man ready to find a bigger, fuller self in the image provided by a phrenological charting. The reader sees a man refashioning his appearance while working to project a new and distinctive personality. Fowler & Wells publications demonstrated that man was “morally and organically improvable” and that the two realms were linked. The firm's motto, “Self-made or never made,” was, in Zweig's words, “a huckster's version of Emerson's chaste virtue of self-reliance.” Here in the popular science of his day, Whitman found a resource for his ongoing program of self-making. Walt Whitman, the rough-and-tumble character who exuded a peculiarly American glow of well-being, is a living fabrication spun out of that ...