Gary Schmidgall

This study explores Walt Whitman's contradictory response to and embrace of several great prior British poets: Shakespeare, Milton, Burns, Blake, and Wordsworth (with shorter essays on Scott, Carlyle, Tennyson, Wilde, and Swinburne). Through reference to his entire oeuvre, his published literary criticism, and his private conversations, letters and manuscripts, it seeks to understand the extent to which Whitman experienced the anxiety of influence as he sought to establish himself as America's poet-prophet or bard (and the extent to which he sought to conceal such influence). An attempt is also made to lay out the often profound aesthetic, cultural, political, and philosophical affinities Whitman shared with these predecessors. It also focuses on all of Whitman's extant comments on these iconic authors. Because Whitman was a deeply autobiographical writer, attention is also paid to how his comments on other poets reflect on his image of himself and on the ways he shaped his public image. Attention is also given to how Whitman's attitudes to his British fore-runners changed over the nearly fifty years of his active career.

It is now difficult to imagine that, in the years before Whitman's death in 1892, there was real doubt in the minds of Whitman and his literary circle whether ""Leaves of Grass"" would achieve lasting fame. Much of the critical commentary in the first decade after his burial in Camden was as negative as that in Boston's Christian Register, which spoke of Whitman as someone who ""succeeded in writing a mass of trash without form, rhythm, or vitality."" That the balance finally tipped toward admiration, culminating in Whitman's acceptance into the literary canon, was due substantially to the unflagging labor of Horace Traubel, famous for his nine volumes of Whitman conversations, but less well-known for his provocative monthly journal of socialist politics and avant-garde culture, the ""Conservator"". ""Conserving Walt Whitman's Fame"" offers a generous selection from the enormous trove of Whitman-related materials that Traubel included in the 352 issues of the ""Conservator"". Among the revelatory, perceptive, and often entertaining items presented here are the most illuminating of the ""Conservator's"" more than 150 topical essays on Whitman and memoirs, by many of his friends and literary cohorts that shed new light on the poet, his work, and his critical reception. Also important is the richer understanding these pages afford of Horace Traubel's own sophisticated, deeply humane, and feisty views of America.