The new and more socially-inclusive character of Whitman's poetry has often been cited as contributing to his greatness. Reynolds, in whose book on the relationship of the American Renaissance to popular culture-Beneath the American Renaissance -die poet figures centrally.
Recently, Whitman's relationship to the popular has been reinterpreted by David S. These are the kinds of texts likely to have been carried around in the hip pockets of workingmen's jeans, one of the ideal sites in which Whitman would have placed copies ofhis Leaves. Whitman himself thought that his poetry ought to have popular appeal of a sort not unlike that which, since his day, has been enjoyed by-for example-the western and the detective story.
They alone are "personalities." That Whitman's 1855 portrait ofthe bardic personality should seem congruent with the values of contemporary popular culture reveals one of the ironies of his canonization as a great poet: the definition ofhis work as "literature" obscures the ways in which it aspires to be something other than an object of academic study. This kind of representative character is also basic to present-day popular culture, which deploys images ofthe famous as métonymie representations of (all) value: the famous thus seem to enjoy a greater degree of personhood than the rest ofus do. In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:ĭANA PHILLIPS Whitman and Genre: The Dialogic in "Song of Myself" i: "fusion," literature, AND OTHER DISCOURSES In the preface to the first edition ofLeaves ofGrass, Whitman attributes to the poet a special character: only the poet possesses all the traits which define Americans as a people.
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