Schmidgall, Gary. Containing Multitudes: Walt Whitman and the British Literary Tradition [review]

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 In an unpublished manuscript, probably drafted prior to 1855, Whitman insisted "there is something better than any and all books, and that is the real stuff whereof they are the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 1: 188). He even audaciously declared that his own book functioned differently than others, that Leaves of Grass provided unfiltered experience itself: "You shall possess the good of the earth and sun" rather than "spectres in books." Yet at other times-especially late in life-Whitman was more candid about the importance of reading to his writings. In a conversation with Horace Traubel recounted in With Walt Whitman in Camden, he discussed the minor poet John Sterling, a friend of Thomas Carlyle:"It is interesting-even odd-how many things come into, stay in, a man's mind which he cannot account for!" Then they would "pop up" after awhile, "a man thinking he owned them himself." ... "What a strange make-up of beginnings and ending and appropriations we are!" (WWWC 3:119)For Whitman, a poet who often minimized his learning and sometimes posed as being rude, uncouth, and vulgar, one goal was to benefit from reading without appearing pedantic or derivative. He read voraciously and unpredictably, and as a poet he rarely seems imitative because of his extraordinary mixture of registers. Whitman owed a lot to British literary giants, though, as Containing Multitudes demonstrates so thoroughly. Especially enlightening is Schmidgall's ability to establish affinities between Whitman and Milton, a highly learned and allusive poet. Throughout the book Schmidgall is perceptive (and at times delightfully witty) in his comments on Whitman in connection with Wordsworth, Tennyson, and, of course, Shakespeare-the focus of one of his most extended discussions.Containing Multitudes is provocative in the best way, prompting questions that go beyond its scope. …