Walt Whitman, Yesterday & Today

This 1916 intellectual portrait captures a pivotal moment in American literary history: when Walt Whitman's radical poetry was still fresh enough to provoke, yet mature enough to warrant reassessment. Legler, a Chicago librarian and cultural historian, traces the arc of Whitman's public reception from the scandalized outrage that greeted 'Leaves of Grass' in 1855 through its gradual canonization as foundational American verse. The analysis delves into the specific charges leveled against Whitman, obscenity, indecency, democratic excess, and examines how a poet dismissed as crude became essential to understanding American identity. Legler's chronicling reveals how Whitman's bold assertions about sexuality, democracy, and the sacredness of the individual body clashed with Victorian sensibilities, then slowly reconquered the very critics who had condemned him. The book stands as a period document itself, capturing what it meant in the early twentieth century to take stock of Whitman's revolutionary achievement and to argue, persuasively, that his 'crudeness' was in fact his genius.