1 - Introduction

Summary

“Let America therefore celebrate its poets”was Herman Melville's way in 1850 of articulating the problematic situation of the poet and poetry in America just a few years before the appearance of Walt Whitman as a selfproclaimed national poet. Melville's words probably sounded shrill even then, and today, given the general reception by the country of its poets ever since it has become possible to talk of American poets, they barely manage to resonate. Both Melville and Whitman knew well that the situation of the poet and of letters in American society was an issue - and a complicated one, at that - in their time. For Whitman, in fact, it was a crucial issue, one to which he devoted his fullest energies from his days as a young journalist in the 1840s and as a brash young poet in the first edition of Leaves of Grass (1855) until the end of his life in 1892.

In this context, the widespread commemoration and celebration of Whitman, both in the United States and abroad in the centennial year of 1992, were themselves a phenomenon invested with intriguing cultural significance. One of the most interesting aspects of the centennial was the degree to which it passed from an act of commemoration to one of genuine celebration. It is one thing that academic conferences honoring Whitman were held from coast to coast; it is quite another - and one befitting Whitman himself, lover of the spoken word - that they were all surpassed by the marathon public readings of Whitman, and of poems inspired by or written in imitation of him, that went on for days in New York.