Walt Whitman and the Culture of American Celebrity

October 30, 2006
Smart without being dense, clever without being smarmy, this cultural history is an engaging, at times eye-opening read. Blake, an English professor at the College of New Jersey, views Walt Whitman and his work in relation to the rise of celebrity culture in the nineteenth century-the time of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Fanny Fern, and PT Barnum-paying particular attention to the emerging ideas of publicity, promotion, and society's changing conceptions of fame. But this isn't the story of Whitman's personal experience of fame; as Blake points out, that would make for a slim volume. Rather, he writes, "Whitman's relation to American celebrity is a story about how the poet's thinking responded to the culture he observed developing around him." While the book is emphatically not a work of literary criticism, it nonetheless offers new and enjoyable ways of reading Whitman's work, particularly when viewed through the prism of advertising and self-promotion. For example, according to Blake, the most significant antebellum advertisements came from the patent medicine trade, and "'Song of Myself' directly invokes the language of patent medicine advertising in describing the poet's astonishing impact." To the many critics and students who idolize Whitman, this may seem nothing short of blasphemous, but Blake insists this shouldn't be the case: "Whitman's immersion in publicity does not rival or compromise the aspects of his work that readers have praised since the nineteenth century." Indeed, this enlightening study elevates all involved, especially the dubious legacy of that perennial beast, the American idol.

November 1, 2006
This tightly written volume examines the trajectory of poet Walt Whitman's relationship to his dynamic 19th-century American society. When Whitman began writing "Leaves of Grass" in 1855, the new United States was just on the verge of becoming a culture of celebrity, and the young Brooklyn poet, located where the transformation was most evident, was eager to immerse himself in it. As Whitman witnessed the principles of his nation changing to include charismatic individuality and self-fulfillment, he began to see his reading public as his adoring patron and revised his great poem accordingly. After the war, he looked back at "Leaves of Grass" as a popular failure but of an ennobling kind. Whitman now cited his commercial failure as a sure sign of artistic integrity and a forecast of future acclaim. And so it has proved to be. We already have numerous studies of how Whitman's daring poetics changed modern poetry, but in this learned and highly detailed little volume from Blake (English, Coll. of New Jersey), we now have a clear discussion of how the dynamics of the new American society helped shape the poetics and ideas of its greatest poet. Highly recommended for all academic libraries.Charles C. Nash, Cottey Coll., Nevada, MO

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