Reviewing the Reviewer

I have chosen three essays from three different countries: the United States, Canada, and Ireland. I do wish I knew more about the journals and papers where these reviews appeared, because it would seem that their respective audiences would be the real determining factor for either severly condemning these “raving of a drunkard” or celebrating them.

What I find particularly interesting about each of the reviews, especially the more unfavorable ones, is how hypocrtical they are. They lambaste Whitman, this “nameless bard” according to The New York Daily Tribune, for what they describe as “ravings” “full of egotism,” but the reviews themselves are malicious, egotistical rants. The supioriety that each of the writers conveys, their self-righteousness, is absurd. Moreoever, one can gather just how undemocratic and oppresive the cultures are that these writers come from (as though loafing in the grass were a crime, as though a lack of meter suggested a lack of morality).  Whitman wasn’t merely attacking the opression that prevailed in conventional poetry, but the oppresive culture that created such poetry. Leaves of Grass acts almost like a manifesto in this respect, one that is calling for real American democracy and the end to the tyranny wielded by religious groups, the upper classes, high culture, pseduo-moralists, and others.  

Something else that’s interesting is the reasons these reviews give for detesting Leaves of Grass, are the very reasons why the book is brilliant: “His words might have passed between Adam and Eve in Paradise, before the want of fig-leaves brought no shame; but they are quite out of place amid the decorum of modern society” (New York Daily Tribune). What? Who wouldn’t be dying to know the words passed between Adam and Even in Paradise before the “fig-leaves,” or what the nature of those words were? I think it’s a true and lovely description of Leaves of Grass, only the metaphor is invoked here to suggest something abhorrent. But he’s more or less saying that Whitman has brought to life that moment in Paradise before shame, and that simply wonderful. “Without shame the man I like knows and avows the deliciousness of his sex. Without shame the woman I like knows and avows her” (Children of Adam).

What speaks to how radical Whitman was for the time is the great difficulty that the reviewers actually have as they try to write about Leaves of Grass. They aren’t really sure what passages to quote, they cannot find representative passages (probably because they do not know what it represents, but also because it’s impossible to sum up the immensity of the book with a few lines). The reviewers, especially D.W. for the Canadian Journal, ultimately ends up placing the decision on the reader, more or less undecided himself: “And so we leave the reader to his own judgment, between the old-world stickler for authority, precedent, and poetical respectability, and the new-world contemner of all authorities, laws, and respectabilities whatsoever.” D.W.’s review similarly demonstrates that Leaves of Grass was pushing people to reconsider their ideas about poetry, and about culture.