Marsh, John. In Walt We Trust: How a Queer Socialist Poet Can Save America From Itself [review]

JOHN MARSH, In Walt We Trust: How a Queer Socialist Poet Can Save America From Itself. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2015. 248 pp.In the late pages of In Walt We Trust-a lively and incisive appeal to revisit our national (queer and socialist!) poet in light of the crises facing American democracy today-John Marsh poses the vital ques- tion: "what kind of person would you be if you read Whitman's poetry?" (203). The answer for Marsh is that any "careful reader of his poetry" could become "an ideal democratic citizen" (203). After all, it was Whitman who, while engaging the gravest threats to nineteenth century democracy (slavery, war, and monopoly), staked the future of the republic and Leaves of Grass on the cultivation of strong and inventive readers. Now, in 2015, confronted with the largest gap between wealthy and poor citizens since Whitman's era, those future Americans have justifiably lost faith in a polity paralyzed by corporate influence, financial trusts, and the dogged culture wars. Weaving personal anecdotes with Whitman biography, literary analysis, and political philosophy, Marsh turns Leaves of Grass into a self-help guide for our New Gilded Age, complete with lessons on "how to die," "how to have better sex, what to do about money," and how to "survive our fetid democracy" by becoming better people and readers (16).These themes, spanning Whitman's thoughts on mortality, economy, love, and governance, structure the book's four chapters. Marsh provides instructive context in each through first-person accounts of his pilgrimages, Leaves of Grass in hand, to a variety of Whitman-related sites. He hops the ferry from Brooklyn, seeking contact with the hereafter; he roams Occupy Wall Street, reflecting on work and money. In a Pennsylvania strip club, he questions America's lingering shame about sexual desire. While in Washington, D.C., he visits former Civil War hospitals and recreates the scenes of communion Whitman forged with soldiers amid national fratricide. And Marsh's conversion to Whitmanism is as personal as it is political. Once a young "fire-breathing socialist," Marsh confesses to have fallen on the tenure track (22). A disaffected professor, self-medicating with alcohol and harboring doubts "about the meaning of life and the purpose of our country," he weds personal crisis to national calamity, a testament to how the disciple has absorbed his master (11).Indeed, Marsh is an insightful guide to Whitman's poetry. At the outset, he masterfully parses the opening lines of "Song of Myself," exhibiting the passage as the crux of Whitman's poetics: from his sense of human divinity and scientific inspiration to his faith in death-lessness and direct address to readers. Whitman situates the abstract ideas of life and death in the atomic matter redistributed eternally across time, space, and bodies. If "every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you," Marsh claims, then our identities are likewise "equal" and "interchangeable" (79), and Whitman, affirming egalitarianism through natural law, proves that we inhabit "a socialist universe, not a capitalist one" (60). At this moment, I was reminded of Horace Traubel in Camden relentlessly prodding the elderly Whitman on the question of socialism. Traubel, who galvanized a generation of American radicals under the banner of the Walt Whitman Fellowship, also published dozens of articles in his Conservator that are in the vein of Marsh's work-essays like "Whitman and Socialism," "Whitman's Significance to the Revolutionist," and "The Whitman Propaganda is Whitman." All could duly serve as subtitles to In Walt We Trust, which is steeped in Traubel's inheritance. Marsh, like Traubel, finally consents to Whitman's nimble evasions, deciding he was "with the socialists in the result" (107).The book's most rewarding section, to my mind, begins with Marsh trailing Whitman's presence around Zuccotti Park, the site of the 2011 Occupy Wall Street protests. …