Content area
Full text
JOHN MARSH, In Walt We Trust: How a Queer Socialist Poet Can Save America From Itself. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2015. 248 pp.
In the late pages of In Walt We Trust-a lively and incisive appeal to revisit our national (queer and socialist!) poet in light of the crises facing American democracy today-John Marsh poses the vital ques- tion: "what kind of person would you be if you read Whitman's poetry?" (203). The answer for Marsh is that any "careful reader of his poetry" could become "an ideal democratic citizen" (203). After all, it was Whitman who, while engaging the gravest threats to nineteenth century democracy (slavery, war, and monopoly), staked the future of the republic and Leaves of Grass on the cultivation of strong and inventive readers. Now, in 2015, confronted with the largest gap between wealthy and poor citizens since Whitman's era, those future Americans have justifiably lost faith in a polity paralyzed by corporate influence, financial trusts, and the dogged culture wars. Weaving personal anecdotes with Whitman biography, literary analysis, and political philosophy, Marsh turns Leaves of Grass into a self-help guide for our New Gilded Age, complete with lessons on "how to die," "how to have better sex, what to do about money," and how to "survive our fetid democracy" by becoming better people and readers (16).
These themes, spanning Whitman's thoughts on mortality, economy, love, and governance, structure the book's four chapters. Marsh provides instructive context in each through first-person accounts of his pilgrimages, Leaves of Grass in hand, to a variety of Whitman-related sites. He hops the ferry from Brooklyn, seeking contact with the hereafter; he roams Occupy Wall Street, reflecting on work and money. In a Pennsylvania strip club, he questions America's lingering shame about sexual desire. While in Washington, D.C., he visits former Civil War hospitals and recreates the scenes of communion Whitman forged with soldiers amid national fratricide. And Marsh's conversion to Whitmanism is as personal as it is political. Once a young "fire-breathing socialist," Marsh confesses to have fallen on the tenure track (22). A disaffected professor, self-medicating with alcohol and harboring doubts "about the meaning of life and the purpose of our country," he weds personal crisis to national calamity, a testament to...