Word: whitmans
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Kaplan's ability to establish Whitman's relationship with America, the only continuous union in his unmarried life, gives his biography an Emersonian twist. Covering the terrain of Whitman's life in about 400 pages, Kaplan repeatedly and judiciously quotes his subject's poems, prose, letters and diaries to lend his biography not only authenticity but a Whitmanesque spirit that a historical and strictly narrative book would have lacked. Thus, much of Walt Whitman: A Life is interior, approaching Whitman's experience through his own descriptions...
...JUST AS WHITMAN spent a lifetime reordering words and poems in his own work, so Kaplan's biography seems marked by rearrangement. The author devised a scheme highly appropriate to the life of his subject. The book opens in the spring of 1884 with a tired and white-bearded Whitman, who has just purchased a house in unlovely (Kaplan's word) Camden, N.J. This is the Whitman who splashes in the bathtub, sleeps late, and depends on a cane to move around. In the second chapter, Kaplan describes Whitman's last days. The rest of the biography takes Whitman...
...large man, six feet tall and about 200 pounds, Whitman's body was "rosy and soft, like a child's," and he liked "to keep a bowl of flowers by him." Kaplan illuminates the multifaceted personality of this husky and gentle man. The author depicts the 12-year-old apprentice printer in Brooklyn, the intinerant newspaperman, the Long Island country school teacher, and America's first urban poet, sharing many secrets along the way--including Whitman's taste for buckwheat cakes, beefsteak, ovsters, and strong coffee...
...Kaplan does not recede from the question of Whitman's sexuality. With the tools of the psychohistorian, the author recognizes the significance of Whitman's search for his sexual identity. Still, he doesn't overemphasize this side of the poet. While Kaplan unobtrusively reminds us that the "I" of Leaves of Grass is almost as often as woman as a man, on the other hand, he later analyzes Whitman's masterpiece in more universal terms. Kaplan sees the centerpiece of Whitman's life as both a "Whitman at his best, and when he is at his awful worst--windy, repetitious...
This is by far the most analytical the author becomes, and it bespeaks the enthusiasm of the biography. Kaplan believes that Whitman must be understood on his own terms, and this recognition allows the poet and his voice to emerge naturally out of the biographical narrative. Whenever Kaplan does choose to intervene, he enhances his portrait with appropriate comparisions, or soft-spoken but astute analysis. In one case, Kaplan contrasts a friendship between Whitman and an intimate acquaintance, Peter Doyle, to Bloom and Stephen Dedalus in the cabmen's shelter in Ulysses, and Nathanial West's own "Peter Doyle" holding...