Whitman the Political Poet [Paperback]

Recent critical studies have emphasized the formal, mystical, and psychological dimensions of Walt Whitman's art, dwelling mainly upon his Emersonian and Transcendental sources. This study is the first book to undertake a detailed analysis of Whitman's entire work in relation to the political struggles of the 19th century. Erkkila repairs the split between the private and the public, the personal and the political, the poet and history, that has in the past defined the analysis and evaluation of Whitman's work. Her approach combines close reading and historicist analysis, examining his poems as both products and agents of the political culture of his time. Among the topics explored are the ways in which the politics of race, class, gender, capital, technology, western expansion, and war enter into the poetic design of Leaves of Grass ; the relation between Whitman's (homo)sexual body and the body politic of his poems; and the ways in which the Civil War and its aftermath affected Whitman's artistic ordering and reordering of his work.

Simply one of the best books ever written on Whitman. Virtually every page of it is persuasive and much is entirely original.... Without question, it will be one of the books on Whitman that every reader should own. --Eric Sundquist,University of California, Berkeley

Erkkila presents an extraordinary account of how Whitman's political purposes informed the most fundamental choices of his life and career, and in so doing she has written what is surely one of the two or three most valuable one-volume studies of Whitman ever produced. --South Atlantic Review

A welcome attempt to show Whitman as writer and man living in and reacting to the political environment of his age....Her book is thorough and convincingly argued, and makes an important contribution to the study of American literature and culture. --Choice

She always has something to say about the larger inferenceslƒ‘