Whitman and His Detractors (Feb 18th work)

I was reading the Murison piece for the extra part of my work, and I found myself fascinated by the notion of Whitman’s outraged critics fumbling for their pens to write something like “THIS IS AN OUTRAGE! YOU CAN’T TALK ABOUT WOMEN LIKE THAT!!!”

I did some research on some Whitman critics, and I found this passage in a collection of early Leaves of Grass criticism.

“We can describe him perfectly by a few suppositions. Suppose that Mr Tupper had
been brought up to the business of an auctioneer, then banished to the backwoods,
compelled to live for a long time as a backwoodsman, and thus contracting a passion for
the reading of Emerson and Carlyle? Suppose him maddened by this course of reading,
and fancying himself not only an Emerson but a Carlyle and an American Shakespeare
to boot when the fits come on, and putting forth his notion of that combination in his
own self-satisfied way, and in his own wonderful cadences? In that state he would write
a book exactly like Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass.”

(Martin Tupper, Walt Whitman, and the Early Reviews of Leaves of Grass (uiowa.edu))

And so I discovered the creativity behind 19th century literary critics. Here’s another one I found:

“Here, however, is a book with many
respectable associations—respectable publishers—the author a writer for the Atlantic
Monthly—“for sale everywhere” on respectable bookshelves—in very respectable type
and binding—advertised in respectable papers—and yet it has page after page that no
man could read aloud to a decent assembly without being hooted out of it, and that could
not be published in the columns of a daily newspaper without disgusting and outraging
a virtuous community. The dangers of the book lie in its claiming to be a respectable
book—in its claiming to be a pure book, and in the fact that there are lecherous fools
enough in the world to allow this claim, if not to maintain it.”

(Sixty-Eight Previously Uncollected Reviews of Walt Whitman (uiowa.edu))

And I found these supremely entertaining. If any of you find more criticism along these lines, I’d love to read it.