Receiv'd with plaudits in the capitol: Whitman's readers and the politics of the canon

The context of nineteenth-century American literature, often heavily imitative of British traditions, would seem to be inhospitable to both the production and reception of the radically innovative poetry of Walt Whitman. The process of Whitman's inclusion in the canon of American literature demonstrates the various ways he proved useful to readers in various contexts, demonstrating what Shoshana Felman terms the "performativity" of criticism. Whitman himself is not as unambiguously radical as later-twentieth-century readers have depicted him, and chapter one of this study explores the ways in which some of Whitman's revisions can be seen as conventionalizations. In particular, this chapter focuses on how three sets of revisions--the excision two passages from "The Sleepers," the addition of "Song of the Banner at Daybreak," and the removals of three poems from "Calamus"--can be read by an imagined Northern, male reader as denials of the problems of consensus in the wake of the Civil War. Chapter two explores the readings of Whitman by three prominent British Victorian critics, John Addington Symonds, George Saintsbury, and Edward Dowden, and their conflicted states around Whitman regarding modernity and the homosocial and the homoerotic. British notice of Whitman called for significant American response, but chapter three argues that more than the acknowledgment of Whitman's British fame is at work in his American response. Throughout the nineteenth century, American readers were carving out a masculinist high-culture canon of American literature against the popular feminine sentimental culture. Chapter three shows Whitman's growing use to this masculinist project, including such readers as Edmund Clarence Stedman, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Charles Richardson, Bliss Perry, and Vida Dutton Scudder. If the nineteenth-century American readers were interested in reinforcing gender divisions in their construction of American literature, many twentieth-century American critics sought a nostalgically androgynous culture, often figured as a reunion with the maternal. Chapter four examines the efforts of twentieth-century critics Van Wyck Brooks, George Santayana, Vernon Parrington, Newton Arvin, and F. O. Matthiessen to use Whitman to bring unity to American culture.