American Bards: Walt Whitman and Other Unlikely Candidates for National Poet - Tapa dura

This book is sure to influence scholarly discussions of Whitman's nationalism, and nineteenth-century nationalism more generally, for years to come.--Walt Whitman Quarterly Review

While American literary history has tended to credit Whitman with having invented the persona of the national outsider as the national bard, Edward Whitley recovers three of Whitman's contemporaries who adopted similar personae: James M. Whitfield, an African American separatist and abolitionist; Eliza R. Snow, a Mormon pioneer and women's leader; and John Rollin Ridge, a Cherokee journalist and Native-rights advocate. These poets not only provide a counterpoint to the Whitmanian persona of the outsider bard, but they also reframe the criteria by which generations of scholars have characterized Whitman as America's poet.