David S. Reynolds takes as his starting point for his of Walt Whitman the poet's concluding sentence in his preface to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass: proof of a poet is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it.' This is precisely the Whitman conceit that his literary admirer Ezra Pound reviled for its making the artist, as Pound wrote in his 1914 exchange over the maxim with his editor Harriet Monroe, dependent upon the multitude of his listeners. . . . This rabble, this multitude-does not create the great artist. They are aimless and drifting without him. They dare not inspect their own souls.2 It is the signal achievement of Reynolds's biography to demonstrate historically how Whitman could very well have thought such a popular dependence artistically vital in ways that the early twentieth-century, high modernist Pound could never have imagined. Reynolds also reveals what Whitman did to make his country live up to its half of his imagined pact. Whitman would seem to be the ideal candidate for Reynolds's style of literary historicizing. Unlike most of the classic nineteenth-century American writers Reynolds surveyed in his previous book, Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville (1988)whose popular cultural roots he sought to uncover as a counterweight to their high aesthetic contexts seminally defined in E O. Matthiessen's American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (1941)Whitman was both professedly and self-consciously popular-minded. Also the Whitman scholarly winds have been lately blowing very much in Reynolds's direction. In place of the predominantly psychological interpretations of Whitman in the monumental biographies of Roger Asselineau and Gay Wilson Allen, or such brilliant archetypal literary portraits as those of Richard Chase and R. W. B. Lewis, the overwhelming bulk of Whitman scholarship of the past decade has been unabashedly culturalist.3 What these often valuable political, sexual, and other postmodern Whitmans lack, however, is an historical dimension through which they might transcend