Walt Whitman: The Song of Himself / Edition 1

by Jerome Loving

Overview

Walt Whitman: The Song of Himself is the first full-length critical biography of Walt Whitman in more than forty years. Jerome Loving makes use of recently unearthed archival evidence and newspaper writings to present the most accurate, complete, and complex portrait of the poet to date. This authoritative biography affords fresh, often revelatory insights into many aspects of the poet's life, including his attitudes toward the emerging urban life of America, his relationships with his family members, his developing notions of male-male love, his attitudes toward the vexed issue of race, and his insistence on the union of American states. Virtually every chapter presents material that was previously unknown or unavailable, and Whitman emerges as never before, in all his complexity as a corporal, cerebral, and spiritual being. Loving gives us a new Poet of Democracy, one for the twenty-first century.

Loving brings to life the elusive early Whitman, detailing his unhappy teaching career, typesetting jobs, quarrels with editors, and relationships with family and friends. He takes us through the Civil War—with Whitman's moving descriptions of the wounded and dying he nursed, the battlegrounds and camps he visited—demonstrating why the war became one of the defining events of Whitman's life and poetry. Loving's account of Whitman's relationship with Ralph Waldo Emerson is one of the most complete and fascinating available. He also draws insights from new material about Whitman's life as a civil servant, his Lincoln lectures, and his abiding campaign to gain acceptance for what was regarded by many as a "dirty book." He examines each edition of Leaves of Grass in connection with the life and times that produced it, demonstrating how Whitman's poetry serves as a priceless historical document—marking such events as Grant's death, the completion of the Washington monument, Custer's defeat, and the Johnstown flood—at the same time that it reshapes the canon of American literature.

The most important gap in the Whitman record is his journalism, which has never been completely collected and edited. Previous biographers have depended on a very incomplete and inaccurate collection. Loving has found long-forgotten runs of the newspapers Whitman worked on and has gathered the largest collection of his journalism to date. He uses these pieces to significantly enhance our understanding of where Whitman stood in the political and ideological spectra of his era.

Loving tracks down the sources of anecdotes about Whitman, how they got passed from one biographer to another, were embellished and re-contextualized. The result is a biography in which nothing is claimed without a basis in the factual record. Walt Whitman: The Song of Himself will be an invaluable tool for generations to come, an essential resource in understanding Leaves of Grass and its poet—who defied literary decorum, withstood condemnation, and stubbornly pursued his own way.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520226876
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	12/06/2000
Series:	Director's Circle Book
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	582
Sales rank:	707,863
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.40(d)

About the Author

Jerome Loving is the author of Lost in the Customhouse: Authorship in the American Renaissance (1993), Emily Dickinson: The Poet on the Second Story (1986), Emerson, Whitman, and the American Muse (1982), and Walt Whitman's Champion: William Douglas O'Connor (1978). He is the editor of Frank Norris's McTeague (1995), Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass (1990), and Civil War Letters of George Washington Whitman (1975).

Read an Excerpt

FROM THE BOOK:
"Toward the end of 1862 Walt Whitman traveled to war-torn Virginia in search of his brother, George. The poet stepped off the train at Falmouth Station, near Fredericksburg, and climbed a hill overlooking the Rappahannock River and the previous week's battle site. One of the first scenes that grimly welcomed him, he told his mother on December 29, "was a heap of feet, arms, legs, &c. under a tree in front of a hospital."
-From Chapter One of Walt Whitman: The Song of Himself
"Silently and surely are the months stealing along. A few more revolutions of the old earth will find me treading the paths of advanced manhood. This is what I dread: for I have not enjoyed my young time. I have been cheated of the bloom and nectar of life. Lonesome and unthought of as I am, I have no one to care for, or to care for me."
-From Whitman's article "Sun-Down Papers No. 1"
printed in the Hempstead Inquirer, February 29, 1840

What People are Saying About This

Robert D. Richardson

A grand, comprehensive, rich, and satisfying biography of America's greatest poet.
— Author of Emerson: The Mind on Fire

Frederick Crews

Hats off to Jerome Loving, who combines lucidity and learning in equal measure!. . . The book is riveting from start to finish.

Editorial Reviews

Lovings biography succeeds in conveying much of what makes Whitman such an indispensable figure in our heritage.

Los Angeles Times Book Review

With careful research and a thorough command of prior biographies and Whitman criticism, Loving has written what will be the definitive critical biography for years to come. . . . A thorough and insightful work that adds significantly to our understanding of Americas greatest poet.

ForeWord Magazine

With careful research and a thorough command of prior biographies and Whitman criticism, Loving has written what will be the definitive critical biography for years to come.
— ForeWord

Erik Bledsoe

...[A] treasury of useful information...Loving is good on the history of Whitman's reception, on his Civil War service as a nurse in Washington and especially on his lifelong management of his own career...
—New York Times Book Review

Andrew DelBanco

...Loving's biography ably relates the life from which the poetry was made, and it is especially useful on the response to it by Whitman's contemporaries....[I]t is to the poetry that one should turn...For there one will find in abundance America's glory and hope...its worst along with some of its very best.
—Commentary

Algis Valiunas

For Whitman enthusiasts, Mr. Loving has provided a fine, thoroughly interesting, worthwhile biography with much new material.

Atlantic Monthly

Strikes a balance between substance and speculation; it is scholarly and precise while also leaving room for the reader's own conclusions...[Loving's] biography succeeds above all through its vivid evocation of its subject. Whitman's spirit is well preserved in this book.

Times Higher Education Supplement

In this critical biography, Loving describes Walt Whitman as "half New York journalist, half New England transcendentalist," and goes on to outline skillfully the complexities and contradictions of the poet's life and times. Loving begins with the Civil War, when Whitman, his racy reputation already established by the first edition of Leaves of Grass (1855), nursed the wounded and wrote, as both poet and journalist, of the atrocities of the war of brother against brother. Loving then backtracks to Whitman's life in New York--Long Island, Brooklyn and "Mannahatta" (as the poet called Manhattan)--taking us through his early years as a journalist and editor, didactic novelist and versifier in the European tradition. Whitman himself emerges as a kind of liberal puritan--relatively progressive politically, rather more conservative culturally. The book is light on criticism until a detailed account of "the central literary event of the nineteenth century," a close and revealing reading of the seminal Leaves of Grass. While Loving discusses intimate male friendship and homoeroticism, particularly in respect to the Calamus poems, he makes little of recent gender theory on Whitman (the work of, for example, Robert K. Martin and Michael Moon) and fails to provide the narrative charge of David S. Reynolds's acclaimed 1995 cultural biography of Whitman. While students of the great American bard will value this highly detailed and thoroughly documented biography (strengthened by recently unearthed Whitman journalism), the general reader may wish to start elsewhere.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

In this meticulous and resourceful account of Walt Whitman's life, Loving (Emily Dickinson: The Poet on the Second Story, 1987) has successfully captured many sides of the poet's well-researched yet still obscure character. Loving covers all aspects of Whitman's private and public life, thus unveiling the poet in all his glory. Themes discussed include Whitman's youth and relationships with family members, quarrels with editors, the Civil War years, and the intricate circumstances that surrounded each edition of Leaves of Grass. Loving challenges us to be more than just passive readers, especially when he quotes Whitman's poetry to support his arguments. He evidently rejects the traditional, chronological way of documenting events but doesn't overlook the importance of simple and accessible writing. Although this book is likely to be more useful and respected in academic libraries, it is strongly recommended for public libraries as well.--Mirela Roncevic, "Library Journal"

Library Journal

...[I]n our age, it has become harder and harder to read Whitman in anything like the proper spirit....The biography that we really need would tell us how Whitman learned to express that strange depth and grandeur of his....Who reads Whitman, becomes Whitman. Your eye follows his long-breathed lines across the page, and you vibrate...and if you read carefully enough, you might even cry sometimes....And you tremble, which is what, in our modern mood, we no longer want to do, and cannot explain, and do not even wish to discuss.
— The New Republic

Paul Berman

For Whitman enthusiasts, Mr. Loving has provided a fine, thoroughly interesting, worthwhile biography with much new material.

The Atlantic Monthly

Perhaps every age needs to reinterpret its icons, but this first full-length, critical biography of Walt Whitman in nearly 20 years, while perfectly serviceable and replete with modest insights and discoveries, is primarily for scholars. Though Whitman avidly sought to be a public poet, going so far as to supply newspapers with self-congratulatory reviews and blind items, much about his life remains elusive. Certain key portions of his early years, such as an extended sojourn in New Orleans, seem biographically and artistically important, but details are vague. And in an era which desperately wants to claim him as gay, or at least bisexual, the full range and breadth of his sexuality and sexual experiences are still hotly debated and hard to pin down. The upshot is that any account of the "good graybeard's" life tends to be rife with interesting but ultimately indecisive speculation and closely cloistered academic debate. Loving (Emily Dickinson: The Poet on the Second Story, not reviewed, etc.) stays further above the fray than most and puts to rest several of the wilder surmises, but doughty portions of this account feel more like an MLA colloquium than an engaged biography. However, the author does break some new ground in his analysis of Whitman's journalistic career, particularly how it shaped his politics and poetry. While he'd scribbled all kinds of ephemera as a journalist, including a forgettable temperance novel, Whitman enjoyed little success or acclaim until the self-published and self-promoted collection of poems, Leaves of Grass, in 1855. With its vers libre, democratic vistas, frank eroticism, and fixation on the self, it was an utterly original landmark.Though Whitman, despite a scandalous reputation, never became as famous in his lifetime as Longfellow or Whittier or Emerson, in death he has eclipsed all rivals as the father of modern American poetry. A useful academic biography, but not one to capture the imagination of the general reader. .

Kirkus Reviews