Walt Whitman and the Culture of American Celebrity

Abstract

Few readers would be surprised by the suggestion that Walt Whitman's dream of a new public poetry for America might have been shaped by the dynamics of an emergent mass-cultural world of “publicity.” The poet's contemporaries saw him as a strangely hybrid figure: part guru and part con-man; part on-the-road messiah and part traveling salesman; part Orphic seer and part P. T. Barnum—with a voice made up of equal parts Bhagavad-Gita and New York Herald. Like Mark Twain decades later, Whitman did not shrink from conceiving of the writer as a businessman avidly working the literary marketplace, or of his poetic self as a charismatic, superstar celebrity legitimized through his collaborative interactions with a giant popular audience. We might even sense the strong influence of Whitman's fascination with the culture of celebrity in his most important pronouncement about the ultimate measure of poetic success: “The proof of a poet is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it” (p. 59).