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MoneM A Call in the Midst of the Crowd From Rowdy to Bartleby in november 1861, the ‹rst article on Whitman to appear in France was published in the Parisian literary journal La Revue européenne. The article was entitled “Walt Whitman, poëte, philosophe et ‘rowdy.’” Baudelaire ’s poem “Recollection” (Recueillement) appeared in the same issue of the journal. It is impossible to imagine that Baudelaire, who went to extraordinary lengths to make sure that each of his published poems appeared exactly as he wanted them, did not take some interest in this American poet, philosopher, and “rowdy.” But the impression of Walt Whitman he would have received is a distinctly repugnant one. The author of the article, a conservative critic named Louis Étienne, concluded that Whitman was a lawless and immoral charlatan—a worshipper of brute force and an apologist for homosexual love.1 Denouncing Leaves of Grass as a “triumph of confusion, a religion of chaos and an apotheosis of disorder,” Étienne ridiculed Whitman for his chameleon-like identity and panoply of voices: “He is the carpenter in the wilderness and the poet of the city, the adventurer in California and the bourgeois in New York . . . the friend of Methodist missionaries and the ›aneur on Broadway . . . with his arms around two of his fellow ‘rowdies.’”2 Taking Whitman at his own word, the French critic blamed what he perceived to be Whitman’s aesthetic failure on the American’s irrational desire to be too many things at the same time. Even the title of the article points to the absurdity of combining in one person a poet, a philosopher, and a “rowdy” (in English). Étienne explained to his readers that an American rowdy was “a loudmouth and a troublemaker” (un homme de tapage et de 13 désordre). But to anyone living in New York, the word “rowdy” had a far more speci‹c meaning, and even more pejorative connotations. Like “roughs” and “loafers,” “rowdies” were gang members and petty criminals who made a living from stealing and had a reputation for extreme violence.3 Whitman himself was partly to blame for the fact that he was perceived by many of his contemporaries as a loud, vulgar, and violent New Yorker. Steadfastly refusing to be identi‹ed as a man of letters, he cultivated his image as a man of the streets—un homme de tapage et de désordre. In a self-written review published anonymously in the Brooklyn Daily Times in 1856, he claimed to be “a man who does not associate with literary people,” but who “loves the streets—loves the docks—loves the free rasping talk of men.”4 Deriding the existing rogues’ gallery of American poets as “a few little silly fans languidly moved by shrunken ‹ngers,” Whitman , who had boasted in the ‹rst three versions of “Song of Myself” that he was “an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos,” set out to break the withered ‹ngers and fragile fans of his effeminate contemporaries.5 Although he complained in a letter to a friend that “personally the author of Leaves of Grass is in no sense or sort whatever the ‘rough,’ the ‘eccentric ,’ ‘vagabond’ or queer person that the commentators . . . persist in making him,”6 his posture as the embodiment of plebeian virility, exaggerated to the point of self-parody, was the weapon he used to take the world of letters by force. Whitman has long been blamed for being excessive in everything—at once too raw and too ambitious, too barbaric and too histrionic, too sensual and too spiritual. His unwillingness to discriminate or to reject, his resistance to order, and his lack of measure have been perceived as incompatible with the classical notion of poetry as a patient, selective, and methodical craft. His choice of topics was considered scandalous, but his treatment of them shocked just as much. Taking an interest in the lives of whores, opium addicts, and roughs was bad enough. Describing such subjects in a neutral, matter-of-fact way instead of turning them into allegories of despair was a radical novelty. What made things even worse, however, was the obvious fact that Whitman’s verse was as lawless as his subjects. Baudelaire also shocked his contemporaries with his depictions of the most sordid aspects of city life. But the polished and distant perfection of his verse in Les Fleurs du mal stands in deliberate contrast with the prosaic subjects of the poems, creating a rich...

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