Walt Whitman and New Biographical Criticism

Pollak, Vivian R. 2000. The Erotic Whitman. Berkeley: University of California Press. $50.00 hc, $18.95 sc; xxiv + 261 pp.

Krieg, Joann P. 2000. Whitman and the Irish. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. $39.95 hc, $19.95 sc; xvii + 273 pp.

Where is biographical criticism going? Studies of Walt Whitman could be excellent places to ask this question. The exemplary poet of the self, whose self moves so insistently out toward the world, arguably provides perfect grounds for rethinking how we might use biography as a portal for understanding literature, and perhaps culture, and perhaps the self itself. Indeed, Whitman invites such rethinking—and waits somewhere for us, we might say, to catch up. Now that the death of the author has become a cliché, as has the glib student's quick satisfaction with an easy biographical interpretation, it is certainly time to ponder again what biography can do for us. So little rethinking has been done, even as the theoretical denunciations of biographical interpretation have subsided, and as literary biography and biographical criticism (along with psychoanalytical criticism) have moved persistently along in their furrows.

Here are two books that speak to the current state and the possibilities of biographical criticism. They both have great virtues, and they provide estimable contributions to scholarship about Walt Whitman—Pollak staking out well-worked territory but making a strong argument that she carefully distinguishes from previous work, and Krieg informing us about a timely concern as our understanding of the nature of ethnicity sharpens. Whereas they address rather different topics, the books relate to each other, and form a kind of salient contrast in method, because each undertakes an essentially biographical kind of study. The difference in what they understand biographical study to be can help us see both the virtues and the shortcomings of these books—as well as the way their biographical intentions both enable and obscure what they have to offer. I'll venture that their differences can also suggest to us something about the possibilities of current biographical criticism.

Vivian R. Pollak's The Erotic Whitman is, she says, a blend of biography and criticism. There is nothing methodologically new about her blend, and, indeed, the book resonates strikingly with Pollak's Dickinson: The Anxiety of Gender (1984), her previous work of self-avowedly biographical criticism. Many of the concerns of the Dickinson book resurface almost twenty years later in the Whitman book: the poet's crisis of sexual and gender identity, family relationships as the grounds for understanding the literature, the idea that the art is a response to psychosexual anxieties, the idea that the poetry provides a critique of gender roles under patriarchy. The familiarity of the themes doesn't take away from the accomplishment of the book. Like the Dickinson book, the Whitman book's value lies in Pollak's critical sensibility, especially in her attunement to the complicated ambivalences of the poets, and to the correspondingly complex contradictions and paradoxes in their poetry. But the familiar shape of the kind of biographical criticism used here generates familiar kinds of quibbles. While the mix of biography and criticism is often skillfully blended, for example, the proportions of the ingredients sometimes get out of balance. At times the biographical detail becomes too full, and the biographical story takes off on its own trajectory, veering so much into life narratives (of Whitman's father, his mother, himself) that we lose sight of any critical argument. At other times too much about Whitman and his writing is subsumed under the main critical argument—that in his early life, and in his early fiction, Whitman wrestled with his relationships with his parents, and with patriarchal and matriarchal forms of the family, only to reject the competition and cruelty of patriarchy and the helplessness of feminine domesticity for comradeship, a different model of "family" that found expression in his poetry. To remedy the imbalances in Pollak's study, in each...