Walt Whitman and the Civil War: America’s Poet during the Lost Years of 1860–1862 (review)

In Walt Whitman and the Civil War Ted Genoways focuses on print culture to offer a riveting story of Whitman’s life, writing, and publishing just prior to and during the early years of the Civil War. Genoways concentrates on the dates 1860–1862 for the express purpose of filling in the perceived lacuna in Whitman’s biography and literary output. Many Whitman critics have asserted that Whitman’s literary activities dropped off the record during these years, some suggesting that his unavailability showed ambivalence concerning the war. Offering a corrective to these perceptions, Genoways researches the period afresh to find new letters, previously undocumented publications, and a plethora of written materials fallen by the wayside of critical attention. With contemporaneous book promotions, reviews, and articles he backs his tightly framed history which he states is “an effort to fill a crucial gap in the biographical record and, in so doing, to debunk the myth that Whitman was uninvolved in and unaffected by the country’s march to war.”

Genoways’ lively approach to a brief albeit essential historical time will appeal to aficionados of both Whitman studies and Civil War studies in general. The emphasis on print culture allows for a kind of suspense story about Whitman’s print reception and involvement. A good storyteller, Genoways allows well-placed if at first disparate-seeming bits of information to quicken into a cultural narrative that ultimately illustrates the near collapse of the American print industry as the country became embroiled in conflict. After averring that early editions of Leaves of Grass serve as a litmus test to show differing tastes of readers in the North and South in corresponding book sales, Genoways proceeds to show that the political rise of Abraham Lincoln, little known at the time, started to send United States publishing into a tailspin. Genoways tracks Whitman’s interactions with the men of letters of his day, such as Henry Clapp, William Thayer, Charles Eldridge, James Redpath, and W. D. Howells, whose involvements with newspapers, magazines, and books of the time shaped and were shaped by opinions regarding the Civil War; their business and social ties with Whitman proved crucial, as for instance in the case of his publishers, Thayer and Eldridge. These publishers, who had already given Whitman an advance on a forthcoming book, The Banner at Day-Break, reversed their decision in 1861 and directed Whitman to return the advance check. Whitman, unable to afford to buy back the plates for his canceled book, even at a discounted rate, wrote a series of Brooklyniana magazine articles, an action sometimes seen as disaffected, but in this context seen as a way to provide for his family and reassert the American character in the face of national chaos.

The study of print culture includes reviews as an important part of the perspective. While readers of Whitman may be aware that Leaves of Grass garnered its share of unfavorable reviews, some may not be cognizant of the degree to which many of them expounded vituperative criticism, as did, for instance, one that called attention to Whitman’s “omnubilate, incoherent, convulsive flub-drub.” Because they feared charges of indecency would harm sales, Thayer and Eldridge actively solicited positive reviews from women readers; for instance, they courted Juliette Beach, sympathetic to Whitman’s work, to write a review, but Beach’s husband unexpectedly commandeered the task to write a negative response based on his desire to protect women from the poet. Genoways presents countless such nuggets in the many reviews, literary promotions, parodies, and other print responses to Whitman’s work that were used by editors to attempt to manipulate opinion. Consider, for instance, this line from a parody of Whitman that appeared in both the Saturday Press and Vanity Fair: “I descend to the pavement, I swerve with the crowd, I roar exultant, I am...