Book Review

Walt Whitman made his way under the skin of his country as no other American poet has managed to do. High schools, road stops, parks, clubs, and movie and book titles routinely dignify their own presence with his name and words. T. S. Eliot High School sounds strange; "Walt Whitman High" endures as common record. The value of Jerome Loving's Walt Whitman: The Song of Himself lies here, in its description of the skin that made the poet. Better than any previous study, this book captures the milieu of Whitman's understanding and self-creation as a writer. Scholars will also benefit from Loving's careful winnowing judgment of just about every academic controversy of the life and work.

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The seeming familiarity and availability of Whitman—"What is commonest and cheapest and nearest and easiest is Me"—is also misleading, and Loving sees as much. The poet warned future biographers against the futility of their enterprise: "And so will some one when I am dead and gone write my life? / (As if any man really knew aught of my life, / Why even I myself I often think know little or nothing of my real life, / Only a few hints, a few diffused faint clews and indirections, / I seek for my own use to trace out here.)" Whitman registers a threefold problem: no one else can know; the inner life remains a mystery even to the self; the conscious self will fabricate its own understanding ("I seek for my own use"). And Whitman did fabricate shamelessly in each successive creation of his crafted persona from the young rough, to the wound dresser, to the good gray poet, to the sage of Camden.

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