Walt Whitman and the Culture of American Celebrity

Smart without being dense, clever without being smarmy, this cultural history is an engaging, at times eye-opening read. Blake, an English professor at the College of New Jersey, views Walt Whitman and his work in relation to the rise of celebrity culture in the nineteenth century-the time of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Fanny Fern, and PT Barnum-paying particular attention to the emerging ideas of publicity, promotion, and society's changing conceptions of fame. But this isn't the story of Whitman's personal experience of fame; as Blake points out, that would make for a slim volume. Rather, he writes, ""Whitman's relation to American celebrity is a story about how the poet's thinking responded to the culture he observed developing around him."" While the book is emphatically not a work of literary criticism, it nonetheless offers new and enjoyable ways of reading Whitman's work, particularly when viewed through the prism of advertising and self-promotion. For example, according to Blake, the most significant antebellum advertisements came from the patent medicine trade, and ""'Song of Myself' directly invokes the language of patent medicine advertising in describing the poet's astonishing impact."" To the many critics and students who idolize Whitman, this may seem nothing short of blasphemous, but Blake insists this shouldn't be the case: ""Whitman's immersion in publicity does not rival or compromise the aspects of his work that readers have praised since the nineteenth century."" Indeed, this enlightening study elevates all involved, especially the dubious legacy of that perennial beast, the American idol.