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Schmidgall, Gary. Containing Multitudes: Walt Whitman and the British Literary Tradition. New York: Oxford University Press. 386 pp.
Gary Schmidgall's ambitious study provides the most thoroughgoing treatment yet of Walt Whitman's relationship to British literary predecessors, primarily poets. Other Anglophone writers, including Whitman's compatriots William Cullen Bryant, Edgar Allan Poe, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Fanny Fern were closer at hand, but Schmidgall implies (by making them outside the pale) that they were less engaging and less pressing. Highlighting the potent force of British writing in the nineteenth-century U.S., Schmidgall devotes a chapter each to connections between Whitman and William Shakespeare, John Milton, Robert Burns, William Blake, and William Wordsworth and then treats more briefly a group Whitman called other "big fellows": Walter Scott, Thomas Carlyle, Oscar Wilde, Algernon Swinburne, and Alfred Tennyson. Like Harold Bloom, Schmidgall is ultimately interested in Whitman's "gymnast's struggle" with strong predecessors. He also makes the shrewd observation that Whitman "read no other poet's works as intensely as he read, reread, and revised his own" (xx).
Schmidgall observes that an effort to tie Whitman "umbilically to the British literary tradition is bound to seem a contradictory and counterintuitive project-a fool's errand" (xiii). But that's only if one takes Whitman at face value, as many have. The inspiration for Leaves of Grass, Whitman often claimed, came not from other writers but from first-hand experience. In an unpublished manuscript, probably drafted prior to 1855, Whitman insisted "there is something better than any and all books, and that is the real stuff whereof they are the artificial transcript and portraiture" (NUPM...