Walt Whitman & The Visual Arts Hardcover - 1991

From the publisher

Readers of Walt Whitman have long been aware of the visual qualities of his writing but there is no book that documents the actual influences on him, oras importantthe influence Whitman had on American art (painting, photography, architecture, sculpture). The contributors to this collection, the first full-length study of this topic, outline the influences of Jean-Francois Millet and Gustave Courbet on Whitman, showing the common purposes shared in their art in their attention to the working man and in their internationalist perspective--even in a rough comparability in styles across different media. Other essays discuss the relationship between Whitman and Thomas Eakins (who painted and photographed Whitman and who created the imageor iconography of Whitman as we know him); Whitman and Louis Sullivan and the development of a "naturalistic" vocabulary of decorative ornament; and on Whitman and the realists of the so-called Ash-Can School. There is also an essay on Whitman and the sculptor Mahonri Young. What these last essays (especially Matthew Baigell's on progressive artists of the early twentieth century) show us quite clearly is that like most myths, the myth of Whitman as the lone voice crying in the wilderness, will not stand up to scrutiny. No one who reads these essays can come away from them without being convinced that the poet's was a prominent and controversial voice among many, all crying out for the same thinga reassessment of what constitutes the American subject and the American style.