Around 1913, in a speech given to a gathering of the Whitman Fellowship at the Brevoort Hotel in New York, the poet and critic Max Eastman distanced himself from Whitman's “unchurchly religiousness.” Although he, too, had once tasted of the “drunkenness of Whitman's poetry,” it longer appealed to him: he had just discovered Marxism. Betsy Erkkila's new book seems as if written to convince apostates like Eastman that there's political value still in Whitman's vision of universal comradeship, both in practice (she delightedly recalls asking the members of the Transatlantic Whitman Association to hold hands) and in theory. In nine interlinked essays, written over the course of several decades, brilliantly blending scholarship and advocacy, Erkkila traces what she deems Whitman's dream of an idiosyncratic “homosexual republic,” with Thomas Paine and, yes, Karl Marx as its tutelary spirits. Having previously exposed the chinks in Whitman's poetic armor, notably his questionable views on race, women, and empire (see her Whitman the Political Poet, 1989), Erkkila now wants us to embrace the “more positive” Whitman. The topics of her essays range from Whitman's re-invention of America as a sexually charged “federal mother” and muse to his celebrations of male intimacy to the ways in which his revolutionary aims connect with those of Marx, Melville, and Dickinson. A final chapter, on Whitman's “public love,” asserts the central importance of same-sex love to Whitman's concept of democracy.According to Erkkila, the many examples of men loving men in Leaves of Grass may tell us how to practice “interchange . . . with strangers“ (“Song of the Open Road“) and thus a viable path forward for a divided nation. Erkkila's Walt is a determined social and sexual revolutionary, chanting his joyful gospel of same-sex intimacy from the beginning to the end of his poetic career. Arguing against biographical consensus, Erkkila claims that Whitman never sought to chasten and channel his longings into the tamer roles of the selfless “wound-dresser” or “the good gray poet.” In fact, his late-in-life “family” portraits with a variety of younger men, from Harry Stanford to “Warry” Fritzinger, flaunt Whitman's continuing interest in challenging gender norms.Thanks to her decades-long preoccupation with Whitman, Erkkila is better poised than most to highlight overlooked continuities in Whitman's work. Yet she is also a master explainer of details, as when she addresses Whitman's puzzling habit of sprinkling French phrases (“O Democracy . . . ma femme,”) into his otherwise brashly American poem as a nod to France's revolutionary tradition. (Perhaps they may also be seen as Whitman ecstatic acknowledgment that new forms of togetherness require new modes of poetic expression.)Erkkila is a spirited, fluent writer, with a gift for pithy phrases, asking us to visualize, in one particularly memorable passage, to visualize the former printer Whitman's “inky fingers” meddling in every stage of the production of his poems. Her chapters present a remarkably coherent argument, despite the occasional overlap and repetition. There are some inevitable methodological drawbacks: Erkkila's quest for the revolutionary Walt compels her to treat his writings less as literary performances than as versified calls to action, leaving the reader longing for more attention to the poetry itself. And notwithstanding her well-documented commitment to the transatlantic study of Whitman, Erkkila's book sports only sundry references to scholarship not made in U.S.A. For example, Erkkila's search for scholarship linking Whitman and Marx could have led her to the Soviet scholar Maurice Mendelson who, for all his vast blind spots, still has some good things to say about precisely that topic. Finally, one might quibble with Erkkila's definition of “revolutionary.” Erkkila's Whitman is exclusively concerned with human society; there's is no trace, in this book, of Whitman the wild lover of animals roaming the landscape “stucco'd with quadrupeds and birds all over” (“Song of Myself”). Arguably, Melville, whose poetry Erkkila considers more “conventionally literary” than Whitman's, is often bolder at imagining a world in which humans aren't all that matters—a salutary antidote to our ongoing infatuation with progress (which was shared by Whitman, too). But The Whitman Revolution is not intended to elicit full-throated approval from its readers. Like only the very best scholarship, Erkkila's book encourages reflection as well as disagreement. The last thing Whitman would have wanted in his intimate republic is uniformity of opinion.
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Jan 1, 2023
Fatma Ender + 6
Open Access
