What is the relationship between poetry and fame?┬а┬а What happens to a reader's experience when a poem invokes its author's popularity?┬а Is there a meaningful connection between poetry and advertising, between the rhetoric of lyric and the rhetoric of hype?┬а One of the first full-scale treatments of celebrity in nineteenth-century America, this book examines Walt Whitman's lifelong interest in fame and publicity.┬а┬а
Making use of notebooks, photographs, and archival sources,┬аDavid Haven Blake┬аprovides a groundbreaking history of the rise of celebrity culture in the United States.┬а He sees Leaves of Grass alongside the birth of commercial advertising and the nation's growing obsession with the lives of the famous and the renowned.┬а As authors, lecturers, politicians, entertainers, and clergymen vied for popularity, Whitman developed a form of poetry that routinely promoted and, indeed, celebrated itself.┬а Walt Whitman and the Culture of American Celebrity proposes a fundamentally new way of thinking about a seminal American poet and a major national icon.