Search >> Walt Whitman and the Culture of American Celebrity

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Bibliographic Information

Blake, David Haven. Walt Whitman and the Culture of American Celebrity. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006.

Type: book ; Genre: history, literary criticism

Abstract

This survey of Walt Whitman's career--in particular, the relationship between his poetry and the emerging culture of public celebrity in the nineteenth-century United States--contains an analysis of Whitman's unfinished poem about Pfaff's, "The Two Vaults," in which Blake interprets the images of the poem in the light of Ameican celebrity culture.

People Mentioned in this Work

Whitman, Walt [pages: 61-63]

Whitman is mentioned throughout the book, with his time at Pfaff's treated specifically in a section of chapter two.

Related Works

Whitman, Walt. New York Notebook. Thomas Biggs Harned Collection, Library of Congress, c. 1861-62. [more about this work]

Blake writes of the Pfaff's-inspired poem "The Two Vaults," "The poem expresses Whitman's frustration that he does not capture the attention of the passerby. Hidden in the vault, he cannot circulate among the crowds. Whether he envies the commodities or sees himself rightfully among them, his isolation is a kind of death, for to be alive in Leaves of Grass is frequently to be on display. The storefronts 'blaze', the fabrics 'vividly' attract the eye. The poet's eye moves from the objects to the people to the people's flitting interest in each other on Broadway. If thriving as a poet meant that one had been consumed by the people, then reaching these crowds would make both Whitman and his book complete. As long as he sat in the basement saloon, his identity as a poet would amount to an unsubstantiated claim" (62-63).