Walt Whitman Critical Assessments

When Ralph Waldo Emerson declared, in his seminal letter of 1855 to Walt Whitman, :E greet you at the beginning of a great career," be was both prophetic and unknowingly ironic. Walt Whitman remains one of the greatest American poets, an exemplary figure whose work is key to understanding the culture of the 19th century. And yet Whitman's career was hardly "great" in the way Emerson suggested. Although he did become a celebrity in his own lifetime, he hardly approached the position of the poet he imagined in thePrefaceto the 1855 edition ofLeaves of Grassor the prophetic stature he suggested in his central autobiographical poem "Song of Myself". Recent studies show that the private Whitman was a very different man from the mythic public figure he constructed of himself. The response to Whitman has been extreme and diverse. For instance, in the 19th century, he was admired by Emerson and Rossetti but rejected by Henry James and Swinburne. Even now the consensus on Whitman both as apoet and as a person is for from settled. His poetry underscores the writing of Ezra Pound and the imagists; it is seminal to the work of William Carlos Williams, Hart Crane, Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, and Allen Ginsberg. Indeed, Whitman remains at the heart of any understanding of American literature and culture--a touchstone for its myths, ideals, a key to its continuities and contradictions. This critical assessment is divided into four sections: The Man and the Myth, The Response to the Writing, Writers on Whitman's Writing, and Walt Whitman in the 20th Century: A Chronological Overview.Clarke, Graham is the author of 'Walt Whitman Critical Assessments', published 1994 under ISBN 9781873403167 and ISBN 187340316X.