Walt Whitman and the Culture of American Celebrity [Hardcover]

David Haven Blake (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 1, 2006

What is the relationship between poetry and fame?   What happens to a reader's experience when a poem invokes its author's popularity?  Is there a meaningful connection between poetry and advertising, between the rhetoric of lyric and the rhetoric of hype?  One of the first full-scale treatments of celebrity in nineteenth-century America, this book examines Walt Whitman's lifelong interest in fame and publicity.  
Making use of notebooks, photographs, and archival sources, David Haven Blake provides a groundbreaking history of the rise of celebrity culture in the United States.  He sees Leaves of Grass alongside the birth of commercial advertising and the nation's growing obsession with the lives of the famous and the renowned.  As authors, lecturers, politicians, entertainers, and clergymen vied for popularity, Whitman developed a form of poetry that routinely promoted and, indeed, celebrated itself.  Walt Whitman and the Culture of American Celebrity proposes a fundamentally new way of thinking about a seminal American poet and a major national icon.

(20080901)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

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.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review

“This rich and engaging book locates Walt Whitman in an expanse of popular culture that stretches from patent medicines to presidential politics, revealing the poet''s complicated, often inconsistent views on poetry, commerce, and celebrity.”—Wes Davis, Yale University    

(Wes Davis )

“To date the most sustained look at Whitman in the context of celebrity and self-promotion.  Blake’s scholarship and writing are both exemplary.” —Wes Davis, Yale University

(Wes Davis )

"This is an elegantly written and original book that has much to teach us about Whitman''s life and work and the culture of celebrity in which he lived and wrote."—Betsy Erkkila, author of Whitman the Political Poet   

(Betsy Erkkila )

“Using rich archival material, David Blake shows us a Whitman ''celebrating'' American democracy and dreaming of the mass applause that alone proves a poet''s worth.”—Wai Chee Dimock, Yale University

(Wai Chee Dimock )

"Anyone interested in America''s celebrity culture will want to read Blake''s revelatory study of how Whitman tried to build a democratic poetry on the basis of personality, publicity, and public intimacy—and how, for a few decades in the last half of the nineteenth century, it was possible to imagine celebrity itself redeeming a nation."—Ed Folsom, author of Walt Whitman''s Native Representations

(Ed Folsom )

"[A] very fine and readable study. . . . A detailed and impressive array of materials about the culture from which Whitman''s work sprung."—Harold K. Bush Jr., American Literature

(Harold K. Bush Jr., American Literature )

"This is a fascinating, thought-provoking study of one aspect of this multifaceted poet, breaking ground for valuable work to follow."--Peter Gibian, Journal of American History

(Peter Gibian Journal of American History )

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: Yale University Press (November 1, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0300110170
• ISBN-13: 978-0300110173
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.9 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,572,905 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars An Overdue Critique ...by a Certain Civilian, September 20, 2011

By 

Mitchell S. Gould "Mitchell Santine Gould" (Portland, OR) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Walt Whitman and the Culture of American Celebrity (Hardcover)

Every student of Walt Whitman will benefit from David Haven Blake's book on celebrity, but every one will also harbor, even if unconsciously, a certain anxiety while reading it. Blake's bold and perceptive analysis of Whitman as a huckster and (almost literally) a purveyor of snake oil has been badly needed for at least a century. The reader's anxiety, however, comes from instinctive misgivings about just how cynical one can afford to become. When does this view of Whitman's strategies approach character assassination? These feelings are all the harder to sort out, because so many of Blake's damning judgments are plainly documented, well-argued, and downright irrefutable.

Whitman scholarship so often exerts a fatal attraction for scholars who cannot tolerate ambiguity that I now call this Gould's Law. As much as any man who ever wrote, Whitman is deeply paradoxical. Unless one seizes both horns of the dilemna du jour and courageously refuses to relinquish either one of them, Whitman's warning will itch at your ears till you understand them: "Already you see I have escaped from you." Does the poet warn us that he very well contradicts himself? No matter; it is the way of the English professor to winnow out the multitudes and groom specific traits. These scholars are passionately interested not only in book-making, but book-selling the completed work, too. Therefore, unfortunately, Gould's Other Law can and will always apply: Our Whitman, ourselves. Like Procrustes, the Lit Prof gladly cuts a giant off at his knees and brings him down to our size--small enough to enter the mousehole of the lowly book author. Cue the inevitable cliche about the "shameless self-promoter."

There are two reasons to recognize that Whitman was simultaneously a snake-oil hawker and a clarion voice of authentic spirituality. The first one is that to open a Whitman biography at almost any page reveals that Whitman's core "sympathy"--characterized by Blake as merely a contemporary literary trope, so cynically co-opted--was radically genuine. The famous story of Whitman driving an omnibus for a week to rescue an injured driver from ruin is just one example; Whitman's heroic Civil War nursing career is even more impressive.

The second reason is at least as important: Whitman constantly speaks of his devotion to "the Cause." Why can't Blake appreciate that there is a universe of difference between potboiler impresario Stephen King's ability to attract crazy stalkers and Whitman's ability to attract the likes of Edward Carpenter (another five-star general in the same Cause)? It's because Blake shows scant regard for either gay rights or spirituality. On page 158, he practically sneers all over "homosexuality... the manipulative kinds of social display common today." Accordingly, Carpenter's example never even merits Blake's notice. Whitman seems to have had Blake firmly envisaged when he addressed "a Certain Civilian."

Ultimately, Blake's celebrity theme acts more as a narrow peephole to snipe at acts of shameless publicity and less as a lens to focus a broad and deep grasp of Victorian America. Because the word "spiritualism" does not belong in Blake's vocabulary, he didn't bother to devote the four minutes that it took me in a Google search to identify that the hymn written on Walt's pasteboard butterfly was nominally Christian, but thoroughly spiritualist. The cultural implications of this fact alone are enormous. He is also tone-deaf to the profound meaning of a "sea captain's widow" serving as Walt's last caretaker--unable to see the reality of two fossils from The Age of Sail caring for each other, long after their era is gone with the wind. By the same token, we can't expect him to see this same vanished world is what Whitman meant when he referred to "the latter half of the Nineteenth Century" (page 13).

In sum, knowing that this book presents a vital and telling view of the trees and an exceedingly naive and cynical view of the forest, I think it's imperative to read it thoughtfully and appreciatively--and I hope you will.