American Bards: Walt Whitman and Other Unlikely Candidates for National Poet

by Edward Whitley

Walt Whitman has long been regarded as the quintessential American bard, the poet who best represents all that is distinctive about life in the United States. Whitman himself encouraged this view, but he was also quick to remind his readers that he was an unlikely candidate for the office of national poet, and that his working-class upbringing and radical take on human sexuality often put him at odds with American culture. While American literary history has tended to credit Whitman with having invented the persona of the national outsider as the national bard, Edward Whitley recovers three of Whitman's contemporaries who adopted similar personae: James M. Whitfield, an African American separatist and abolitionist; Eliza R. Snow, a Mormon pioneer and women's leader; and John Rollin Ridge, a Cherokee journalist and Native-rights advocate.

These three poets not only provide a counterpoint to the Whitmanian persona of the outsider bard, but they also reframe the criteria by which generations of scholars have characterized Whitman as America's poet. This effort to resituate Whitman's place in American literary history provides an innovative perspective on the most familiar poet of the United States and the culture from which he emerged.

264 pages, Hardcover

First published October 11, 2010

Reviews

[Nanette · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a valuable look at three under represented poets paralleling and perhaps even rivaling the celebrated Walt Whitman as American bard. The poet of interest for me is Eliza R. Snow. Whitley’s analysis of Snow as a poet and prophet, compared and contrasted to Whitman, works to recover her from the margins and move her into the canon of American literature and the history of feminist rhetoric.