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Walt Whitman's Native Representations (Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture)

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Hooray for Walt Whitman! Hooray that he found such an interpreter as Ed Folsom. Through a historical exploration of American dictionaries (words, words, words), baseball, American Indians and photography, Ed Folsom demonstrates how Walt Whitman makes American democracy his own in Leaves of Grass. Through five such studies, he helps the reader deepen his understanding of Walt Whitman's art. One sees Walth Whitman as a dictionary reader who sifts through the meaning of words as a geologist does through layers of soil. In the chapter on baseball, one sees how America's game was Walt Whitman's and how Walt reacts to its professionalism. In the chapter on American Indians, we see how Walt Whitman's poetry reflects his ambivalence about Native Americans who were displaced physically as a result of American progress in the nineteenth century. In his last two chapters, Ed Folsom shows how Walt Whitman adopts the use of photography. Walt Whitman is probably one of the first persons who documented his life in photos. We learn about photography in its infancy. We see what we take as familiar was unfamiliar and how it captured the imagination since a photograph was democratic, capturing an entire image rather than the image the painter painted. We see how it opens up memory since it captured a moment of the past.

Ed Folsom brings it all alive. He writes clearly and lively. His love of Whitman is clearly infectious. A great book about a great American poet.