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Criticism 43.3 (2001) 365-368



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Book Review

The Erotic Whitman


The Erotic Whitman by Vivian R. Pollak. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. Pp. xxiv + 261. {50.00 cloth; &18.95 paper.

By staying attuned to Walt Whitman's anxieties and insecurities, Vivian Pollak presents a study of the poet that is—perhaps at first paradoxically seeming—always at the quick of his poetic inspiration. Though not altogether new to discern that Whitman experienced grave tensions at the same time that his persona claimed robust physical and psychological health, nonetheless Pollak finds a fresh approach because she provides in a book-length study an examination of the spiritually replete Whitman of the poetry, tracked concomitantly along the faultlines of the actual Whitman's emotional tensions. To put it succinctly, and to quote Pollak, Whitman "is less generous and more aggressive than he purports to be" (xv). The Erotic Whitman, however, is not a biography per se, even though it utilizes biographical materials—some of them, such as the letters from Whitman's mother, groundbreaking material. Instead the project tends simultaneously to the double helixes of biographical anxiety and poetic ecstasy as they illuminate each other. For example, Whitman could experience profound anxiety about emotional intimacies that would become converted in the poetry to his speaker's espousal of American closeness and union. Pollak locates at the heart of Whitman's poetic urges the exquisite tension between the fear of intimacy and the desire to unite the nation. [End Page 365]

Given the lapse between The Erotic Whitman and the appearance of previous works, such as Harold Aspiz's 1980 Walt Whitman and the Body Beautiful and M. Jimmie Killingsworth's 1989 Whitman's Poetry of the Body: Sexuality, Politics, and the Text, it is time for another book about Whitman and the erotic body, especially if we acknowledge that the body is Whitman's primary topic. Certainly Pollak brings to her task a multiplicity of perspectives not so readily available in the previous books. The Erotic Whitman proceeds in the wake of an enormous recent outpouring of historically based scholarship that allows the author to include in her discourse on the body detailed analyses of class, race, social history, feminism, psychology, and American history. Because of these intercalated disciplines, the work is textured and rich, with many over-lays that still manage to generate what seem like insights not produced but found. That is to say, the text offers freshness of insight at every turn. Pollak provides the delightful abundance of detail one finds in a biography with the sharp clarity of the most acute literary criticism. In addition, for all its erudition, the text is a basically accessible study, with an authorial tone that invites the reader to join in with her as she negotiates the problems of intellectual investigation, as for example in the aside after discussing Whitman's mother's powerful though potentially sentimentalizing description of the Indian squaw in the poem, "The Sleepers." Pollak interjects, "Romantic racialism? Yes"—and then proceeds to reenter the complications of interpretation of this passage which includes at the same time a love for domesticity and a love for artistic freedom. There are many such instances of accessibility in the midst of perspicacity, and the tone remains throughout one I find refreshing and direct.

Specifically, Pollak's study of the figure of the mother provides one of the major contributions to Whitman scholarship afforded by the book. She not only investigates in depth the role played by Louisa Van Velsor Whitman in her son's life, but also extrapolates to argue for the presence of a "mother-muse" (172) throughout the corpus of Whitman's poems. In doing so, Pollak provides a needed antidote to the overwhelming majority of previous books concerning Whitman (with perhaps only Sherry Ceniza's 1998 Walt Whitman and 19th-Century Reformers an exception) that understandably have accentuated his phallic imagination. Pollak includes the previously underexamined reliance by the poet on paradigms of the mother, and describes such mother figures to be "oppressive as well as empowering" (172). Especially useful to Pollak's biographical examination...

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