Whitman's Critics

To start with I could barely stomach the narcissism spewing from Walt himself in his own reviews. I know this was for publicity, but have a little self-respect. Aren't you basically undermining yourself and your, albeit, brilliant work with this shameless self-promotion? With that said I decided to focus on two of the reviews that were the most balanced in their treatment of Leaves of Grass and the one that reiterated my own views as to Whitman's ego parade. It is so succinct that it makes its point very well and I thought I would just paste it onto this post. It basically gives him no credibility due to his self-promotion:

Under the title "Walt Whitman and his Poems," the United States Review recently published the following article. We take it to be a smart satire upon the present tendency of authors to run into rhapsody and transcendentalism; and therefore its main fault in a literary point of view—that it suggests the notice of a man reviewing his own work—is not of much importance. ¹

 My god, even in the most fundamental poetry classes we are instructed not to explain our work. Let the words/the work speak for itself, never mind a complete stroking of the ego that Whitman does in "Walt Whitman and his Poems" and even worse in "Brooklyn Boy"where he spends countless lines just talking about his physical appearance. I know that his dress and healthfulness is imperative to the poem, but this going on and on is excessive and I would have stopped reading had it not been an an assignment for class. I believe that the review of Whitman's review printed above from United States Review was warranted and actually restrained. They could have really put him through the wringer for his excessive narcissism. 


I want to know how many "anonymous" reviews were Whitman himself writing. After all one of the anonymous reviews was even in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. One such anonymous review, "A Curious Title" I enjoyed reading, whoever happened to write it, because it made allowances for people to either like or dislike it claiming that "respectable people would pronounce perfect nonsense, but which free-souled persons, here and there, will read and chuckle over with real delight, as the expression of their own best feelings." This is the most down to earth statement I encountered among the high literary prosody of the rest of the reviews.


I also enjoyed George Eliot's (is this the Eliot of Middlemarch? because it says "or George Henry Lewes." I'm confused, but if it is, how wonderful to hear from such a prominent author!) because it also took an intellectual, balanced approach. Rather than claiming him a genius or declaring the work as rubbish it very, very eloquently puts praise where praise is due stating that Whitman 


passionately identifies himself with all forms of being, sentient or inanimate; sympathizes deeply with humanity; riots with a kind of Bacchanal fury in the force and fervour of his own sensations; will not have the most vicious or abandoned shut out from final comfort and reconciliation; is delighted with Broadway, New York, and equally in love with the desolate backwoods, and the long stretch of the uninhabited prairie, where the wild beasts wallow in the reeds, and the wilder birds start upwards from their nests among the grass; perceives a divine mystery wherever his feet conduct or his thoughts transport him; and beholds all beings tending towards the central and sovereign Me.


At the same time this reviewer[s] holds him accountable for the more "uncouth" subjects he tackles, but rather than calling him perverse, he/she again eloquently criticizes (for isn't that what a critic is supposed to do, not simply ignorantly dismiss as does the reviewer who wrote "A Strange Blade") writing:


There are so many evidences of a noble soul in Whitman's pages that we regret these aberrations, which only have the effect of discrediting what is genuine by the show of something false; and especially do we deplore the unnecessary openness with which Walt reveals to us matters which ought rather to remain in a sacred silence. It is good not to be ashamed of Nature; it is good to have an all-inclusive charity; but it is also good, sometimes, to leave the veil across the Temple.


Nicely put!


Maybe that's why the the "Thrusters" were scratched from later editions, hahaha...