Abstract

The Words of the Poet

This article talks about several books. "Walt Whitman's Poems," is edited by Gary Wilson Allen and Charles T. Davis, "Walt Whitman's Secret," by Ben Aronin and "Walt Whitman's Concept of the American Common Man," is written by Leadie M. Clark. Before the turn of the century, William Dean Howells was complaining about the curious and lamentable tendency of English critics to emphasize the quality of a writer rather than the quality of his work. In the case of poet Walt Whitman, one cannot see that the advent of "new" critics and techniques since Howells's simpler day has succeeded in turning attention markedly to the literary achievement of America's central literary figure. Aronin invites an impressive number of problems involved in the writing of a biographical novel and solves none of them. Clark's book belongs to the scholarly class. Its thesis involves a triad of suppositions about the case of Whitman.