| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 96.1

You have not been recognized as a subscriber to JAH online. About 193 words from this article are provided below; about 453 words remain.

If you are a individual member of the Organization of American Historians, you may:: • login here if you have already registered for online access.; • Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
• Set up your online account for the first time.
If you are not a member of the Organization of American Historians, you can:: • Join the OAH and receive many member benefits including print and electronic issues of the Journal of American History.
• Purchase a research pass to gain two-hour access to the entire History Cooperative web site. You will have full access to current issues of the Journal of American History (86.1-present). Note: the Research Pass does not provide access to JSTOR's holdings of the Journal of American History.
Instititutions can:: • Subscribe to this journal and receive print and electronic issues.
• Activate your existing subscription so that we recognize your IP number ranges.

| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 96.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Walt Whitman and the Culture of American Celebrity. By David Haven Blake. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006. xviii, 251 pp. $35.00, ISBN 978-0-300-11017-3.)

Few readers would be surprised by the suggestion that Walt Whitman's dream of a new public poetry for America might have been shaped by the dynamics of an emergent mass-cultural world of "publicity." The poet's contemporaries saw him as a strangely hybrid figure: part guru and part con-man; part on-the-road messiah and part traveling salesman; part Orphic seer and part P. T. Barnum—with a voice made up of equal parts Bhagavad-Gita and New York Herald. Like Mark Twain decades later, Whitman did not shrink from conceiving of the writer as a businessman avidly working the literary marketplace, or of his poetic self as a charismatic, superstar celebrity legitimized through his collaborative interactions with a giant popular audience. We might even sense the strong influence of Whitman's fascination with the culture of celebrity in his most important pronouncement about the ultimate measure of poetic success: "The proof of a poet is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it" (p. 59).

. . .

There are about 453 more words in this article. Please log in (or, if you are not yet an authorized user, please go to the User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.