Worshipping Walt: The Whitman Disciples (review)

"Do you suppose a thousand years from now people will be celebrating the birth of Walt Whitman as they are now the birth of Christ?" (9). Both Christ and Whitman still sell well in multiple editions, though their reputations as spiritual leaders have had their ups and downs. By the date of this question, 1890, there were already answers in print, and Michael Robertson's account of some of Whitman's more committed disciples during the poet's lifetime makes an instructive study of literary fandom taken to the level of religious fervor. Great writers, romantics, feminists, socialists, theosophists, sex radicals—the more passionate pages of Whitman's reception are nothing if not a colorful and inviting cross-section of the sexually and politically eccentric on both sides of the Atlantic. Worshipping Walt is a sympathetic study by one of their own. While it makes no great intellectual strides and is never much encumbered with new archival discoveries, the appeal of this book is its appreciation for the shameless effusion as a neglected genre of literary criticism. To read Whitman closely, as this book consistently eschews, may be to miss the true inspiration of his most ardent admirers.

Whether we are Whitman scholars or not, we have met some of these worshippers before. William Michael Rossetti indulged his own passion for Whitman's poetry by publishing it in a popular, if bowdlerized, edition that introduced the poet to British readers. Oscar Wilde took time from his American tour to pay homage to Whitman in person, and we can only marvel at that moment in the history of homosexuality when one great paradigm shift met the other. John Addington Symonds and Edward Carpenter, still in print more as gay apologists than Victorian sages, hung on his every word, especially the more equivocal ones about sex between men. Robertson has nothing surprising to relate about these literary connections, which have been treated at length elsewhere, but they are always a pleasure to revisit. More intriguing is the compendium of lesser lights, some quite prolific in their own time and still in print, who cultivated Whitman's flame with admirable, if perhaps sometimes delusional, dedication. We read of Anne Gilchrist, the English writer who decided, after a less than encouraging exchange of letters with Whitman, that she was destined to be his wife and soul mate and emigrated to America with that purpose in mind; R. M. Bucke, the Canadian psychiatrist, mystic, and best-selling author of Cosmic Consciousness (1901), who had a vision of Brahmic Splendor in a hansom cab after an evening's conversation about Whitman and felt that God is the universe, the universe is God, and Whitman is "the Saviour, the Redeemer of the modern world" (qtd. in Robertson 115); and of Horace Traubel, a kissable secretary and amanuensis to the poet in his declining years, who dutifully recorded and endeavored to publish his every memory of Whitman and who served as the guiding light of the quasi-Christian Walt Whitman Fellowship after the master's death. The temptation to irony must have been overwhelming in the writing of this book, but Robertson's critical sympathy and generosity are impeccable.

One reliable source of humor in this book is the portrayal of Whitman himself, who never quite lives up to the praise addressed to him. As a writer, he came of age after forty, and by the time he had gathered disciples around him he appears, in this account, somewhat too advanced in cranky oldmanishness, too politically ambivalent, too manipulative, self-promoting, lusty, and parsimonious—in short, far too flawed in character to be confused with a mystic of Christ-like proportions. He was embarrassed at times by the religious zeal in certain accounts of him. "The character you give me is not a true one in the main," he wrote to Bucke, with admirable understatement. "I am by no means that benevolent, equable, happy creature you portray—but let that pass" (118). Yet...