Walt Whitman and the Culture of American Celebrity (review)

During my undergraduate days a professor advised me against referring to "the poet" to mean the voice narrating verse. When I asked why, he explained the word had become tired and conjured a hackneyed image in readers' minds. "An image like," he said—"Whitman!" I interjected—as he simultaneously completed his thought with "Wordsworth."

This professor was British, but I American, thus explaining our differing pictures of "the poet." It is the particular hold that the image of Walt Whitman exercises over the American imagination that David Haven Blake explores superbly in his thorough, engaging and valuable new study, Walt Whitman and the Culture of Celebrity. Blake approaches Whitman's career—poetry and biography—against the backdrop of an emergent American fascination with fame, to better understand the poet's tireless self-promoting and carefully constructed. Along the way, the volume lights upon touchstone moments of American popular culture and consumer capitalism during Whitman's lifetime, reading these and Whitman in dialogue. Blake's work should thus become not only a touchstone in Whitman studies, but also a useful resource for critics and scholars wanting a sophisticated look at nineteenth-century America's culture of self-promotion.

The study adroitly begins—both its opening chapter and its cover do—with an iconic photo of Whitman, bearded, be-hatted, and buttoned into a cardigan, butterfly perched on outstretched fingers. "The 'Good Gray Poet,' ventures into nature and is fondly greeted by one of its most blatantly poetic creations," writes Blake (1). Of course, the photograph has long been understood as a staged claim to authenticity, and thus allows Blake to riff on the particular kind of wink-wink-nudge-nudge showmanship dear to Americans during an age of Barnum. Situating Whitman thus leads Blake to view the famous democracy of Whitman in terms of celebrity culture and propose that Whitman's writings, unlike those of his recalcitrant peers Poe and Dickinson, "maintain a deep respect for the public's interest in the famous" (53).

These readings, penetrating and persuasive, constitute a major strength of the book. By contrast, when Blake delves more deeply into issues of fame his writing loses a bit of focus, for example taking for granted a relationship between generic self-promotion and historical celebrity culture, and passively accepting Leo Braudy's distinction between fame and celebrity (the latter cast as a "democratization" of the former). In a section concerning the commemorative In Re Walt Whitman, a volume that pays "sacramental attention to Whitman's body" (140), Blake misses an opportunity to consider the ways that the material book becomes a substitute for Whitman's body—a move that would have suggested a link between Whitman and the modernists who followed. Indeed, the slightly undertheorized aspect of the book might have been mitigated had Blake incorporated more of the penetrating readings of celebrity and literature from recent years. He addresses major figures such as Braudy and P. David Marshall but makes little use of the theoretically rigorous Jennifer Wicke and Loren Glass, no use of Aaron Jaffe. The specificity of Blake's concerns might have been clearer had he engaged with these critics; as it stands, it is not always clear in what way Blake's reading of Whitman differs from work on later figures such as Stein and Eliot. At the same time, Blake's strong contribution should provoke the many current scholars of celebrity within modernist literature to rethink their ideas in order to articulate the differences and passages from mid–nineteenth-century America to their field.