‘Whitmanian authority’ is a discursive space that regulates the enunciation of nationality within professionalizing sites of cultural production. In this heuristic sense, it first emerges in the nineteenth century, but is deeply shaped through the intervention of earlytwentieth-century appropriations of romantic culture models. Between the 1850s and 1870s, Whitman's professionalism is unsystematic enough – a string of moods rather than a fully worked-out theoretical framework. Whitman's modernist readers highlighted his cultural parallelisms and expanded his contradictory meditations on poetics to a full-fledged theory of national expression that twentieth-century critics reprojected on nineteenth-century discourse. This chapter seeks to reconstruct the heterogeneity of Whitman's contemporary reception – before the postbellum ‘Whitman myth’ (Reynolds 1995: 456) emerged and recombined with the modernist American Renaissance construction.

Whitman's Authenticity

Many nineteenth-century critics welcomed Leaves of Grass as a primitive rejection of literary style. If they had affinities to the Young America movement, which considered professionalized literary circles to be a foreign or highbrow imposition on the national soul, they saw Whitman's free verse as a liberating refusal to submit to the rules of élitist literary conventions. Edward Dowden's seminal Westminster Review essay on ‘The Poetry of Democracy’ (1871) suggests that Whitman's literary method ‘proceed[s] directly from the democratic tendencies of the world of thought and feeling in which he moves’ (1871: 49–50), whereas Irving, Bryant, Longfellow, Lowell, or Emerson were part of a European literary colony.