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| Worshipping Walt: The Whitman Disciples | 
 enlarge | Author: Michael Robertson
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Category: Book
List Price: $27.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  (1 reviews)
Sales Rank: 222508
Languages: English (Original Language), English (Unknown), English (Published)
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 368
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.4
Dimensions (in): 9.2 x 6 x 1.1
ISBN: 0691128081
Dewey Decimal Number: 811.3
EAN: 9780691128085
ASIN: 0691128081
Publication Date: March 23, 2008
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| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
Despite his protests, Anne Gilchrist, distinguished woman of letters, moved her entire household from London to Philadelphia in an effort to marry him. John Addington Symonds, historian and theorist of sexual inversion, sent him avid fan mail for twenty years. And volunteer assistant Horace Traubel kept a record of their daily conversations, producing a nine-volume compilation. Who could inspire so much devotion? Worshipping Walt is the first book on the Whitman disciples--the fascinating, eclectic group of nineteenth-century men and women who regarded Walt Whitman not simply as a poet but as a religious prophet. Long before Whitman was established in the canon of American poetry, feminists, socialists, spiritual seekers, and supporters of same-sex passion saw him as an enlightened figure who fulfilled their religious, political, and erotic yearnings. To his disciples Whitman was variously an ideal husband, radical lover, socialist icon, or bohemian saint. In this transatlantic group biography, Michael Robertson explores the highly charged connections between Whitman and his followers, including Canadian psychiatrist R. M. Bucke, American nature writer John Burroughs, British activist Edward Carpenter, and the notorious Oscar Wilde. Despite their particular needs, they all viewed Whitman as the author of a new poetic scripture and prophet of a modern liberal spirituality. Worshipping Walt presents a colorful portrait of an era of intense religious, political, and sexual passions, shedding new light on why Whitman's work continues to appeal to so many.
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| Customer Reviews:
A turning point for the field April 1, 2008
7 out of 7 found this review helpful
This is an innovative group portrait of Whitman's impassioned "disciples" (there is really no other word for them). It is restricted in scope to familiar figures who left us "copious letters and diaries and memoirs. . . All the disciples in this book are writers." Unfortunately, important allies who have gone begging in the existing Whitman biographies continue to go begging here--for example, Walt's right-hand man, Henry Clapp. With keen insight and a dedication to historical nuance, Robertson reassembles these ensemble actors against a freshly delineated backdrop. I must say, I learned something new and deeply satisfying in every chapter.
The key to the author's clarity is a willingness to avoid equivocation and to make concise assertions. That he succeeds for page after page is a measure of his uncommonly good judgment, and indeed, for the most part, the book runs like a well-kept engine firing on all cylinders. But the risk of being concise is to be reductionist. Take the treatment of spiritualism on page 10: "Unlike Spiritualism or Theosophy, Whitman's verse rejected all forms of supernaturalism, offering instead a pantheistic affirmation of the sacredness of the everyday." Obviously Robertson is essentially right about Walt's staunch insistence on the sacredness of the everyday. But Leaves of Grass was also a love letter to his potential allies in the abolitionist, free love, and suffragist movements, crafted to appeal to their spiritualist yearnings. One cannot succeed by seizing only one horn of the dilemma; we are constantly called to respond to Walt's own insistence that he contained contradictory multitudes.
Indeed, scholars in this field need to resist a rush to declare, "But Whitman was never X." Over the years, the various values of "X" have included "gay," "a Quaker," "a free lover," "a Bowery b'hoy," "a reformer," and, amazingly enough, even "a transcendentalist." On page 186, Robertson asserts that Whitman "steered clear of the American 'free love' movement." This may well have been true in 1889, but Whitman's famous Boston Commons debate with Emerson in 1860 can only be understood as Whitman's decision to throw his lot in with the antebellum Free Love movement--over the objections of his "Master."
Whitman's latter-day denunciations of the Free Love and Spiritualist movements are properly viewed as one among countless instances of his circle's deliberate historical revisionism. As shown by Ann Braude in Radical Spirits, the same kind of historical revisionism was simultaneously being conducted by that one historical figure whom I believe Whitman most resembles--the lesbian Quaker human-rights champion, Susan B. Anthony.
The ultimate test of the book is whether Robertson can fully portray the intense passion of these disciples without committing character assassination. (Even Walt was regularly, and deeply, embarrassed by Richard Maurice Bucke's view of the reformer-poet as a cosmic messiah.) This can be done, as shown by Artem Lozynsky in 1977; likewise, Worshipping Walt shows Robertson to have that singular degree of empathy and sophistication needed to do justice to this history.
What could possibly be more gripping than the mixture of eroticism, mysticism, scandal, faith, and ardent activism which characterized the nineteenth-century Whitman movement--heady passions which still motivate Whitman's partisans today, as Robertson shows. (In the interest of full disclosure, this writer is one of those mentioned as the modern equivalent of the "Whitmaniacs.")
The breathtaking climax of Worshipping Walt is actually tucked away as something of a throwaway in the middle of the chapter on Horace Traubel. Traubel, the bookish boy who grew to be Walt's principal torch-bearer, spent part of his life writing bad poetry. But his entire wrongheaded poetic career was redeemed by the single impassioned prayer-poem he wrote the day Walt died. It may be a minor criticism, but I regret that Robertson did not reserve this ecstatic utterance as his book's spectacular valedictory.
I view Worshipping Walt as a welcome turning point for the entire field--I see it as just that vital. Whether your interest is in the power of poetry, American Studies, the sociology of religion, radical reform, gay history, or Walt Whitman himself, start here; you'll be rewarded.
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