Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography.

Walt Whitman said, "In estimating my volumes[,] the world's current times and needs [i.e., nineteenth century], and their spirit, must first be profoundly estimated." David S. Reynolds in Walt Whitman's America has done just this in an absorbing well-researched cultural biography of one of America's greatest poets. Reynolds demonstrates how Whitman gathered images from virtually every cultural arena and transformed them through his powerful personality into poetry.

Whitman's theory of poetry was based on the idea of the poet's social function. When he begins Leaves of Grass (1855) with the famous line "I celebrate myself" he is referring to the individual and the nation. He believed that his poetry could save the country from its pre-Civil War fragmentation and impending social collapse. Unfortunately, the Civil War proved him wrong but it also caused him to write two of his most famous poems - "O Captain! My Captain!" and "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd," which are encomiums to Abraham Lincoln.

Reynolds tries to present Whitman's totality, warts included. For example, Whitman never said much about black suffrage, but when he did his remarks were generally derogatory. His racism was informed by phrenology, an ethnological pseudoscience, which divided humanity into distinct races. This particular view is in marked contrast to the "radically egalitarian nature of his poems, particularly those he wrote in his rebellious phase in the fifties, which has consistently inspired progressives of all stripes."

Whitman said, "I think of art as something to serve the people - the mass: when it fails to do that it's false to its promises." His efforts to gain mass acceptance included supervising how his works were published and marketed and writing his own book reviews. Despite these efforts, in his own time, Whitman was appreciated by the educated elite but he remained, as one of his contemporaries put it "caviare to the multitude." That's too bad because history has given Whitman canonical status. As Reynolds puts it, "No writer is regarded as more indisputably American than Whitman, yet no writer has reverberated on the international scene to the extent that he has. His liberation of the poetic line from formal rhythm and rhyme was a landmark event with which all poets since have had to come to terms. His boundless love and all-inclusive language, reflected in his extraordinary intimacy with his contemporary culture, makes his writing attractive and exciting for practically all readers."