Some error occured while loading the Quick View. Please close the Quick View and try reloading the page.
Life in the United States today is shot through with uncertainty: about our jobs, our mortgaged houses, our retirement accounts, our health, our marriages, and the future that awaits our children. For many, our lives, public and private, have come to feel like the discomfort and unease you experience the day or two before you get really sick. Our life is a scratchy throat. John Marsh offers an unlikely remedy for this widespread malaise: the poetry of Walt Whitman. Mired in personal and political depression, Marsh turned to Whitman—and it saved his life. In Walt We Trust: How a Queer Socialist Poet Can Save America from Itself is a book about how Walt Whitman can save America’s life, too.
Marsh identifies four sources for our contemporary malaise (death, money, sex, democracy) and then looks to a particular Whitman poem for relief from it. He makes plain what, exactly, Whitman wrote and what he believed by showing how they emerged from Whitman’s life and times, and by recreating the places and incidents (crossing Brooklyn ferry, visiting wounded soldiers in hospitals) that inspired Whitman to write the poems. Whitman, Marsh argues, can show us how to die, how to accept and even celebrate our (relatively speaking) imminent death. Just as important, though, he can show us how to live: how to have better sex, what to do about money, and, best of all, how to survive our fetid democracy without coming away stinking ourselves. The result is a mix of biography, literary criticism, manifesto, and a kind of self-help you’re unlikely to encounter anywhere else.
"A beautiful, moving, and original book about our nations greatest poet."
— Mark Edmundson, University Professor, University of Virginia; author, Why Teach?
"A personal and engaging book based mainly on close reading of Whitmans poems and prose works placed alongside reflections on the state of contemporary America. Even if you do not buy into Marshs big idea that Whitman can save us all, you will find much to admire in this charming and intelligent book of essays on Americas foremost poet."
— Jimmie Killingsworth, author of Whitman’s Poetry of the Body and Walt Whitman and the Earth
"Marsh rises to the challenge of surveying the broad banks of Whitmans work. Prophetic, timely, and not nearly as impractical as he may sometimes seem (though just as flighty), Whitman is to Marsh just as much a poet for his time as for oursthough we have the benefit of hindsight to adopt the wisdom of his foresight."
"One of the most engaged and engaging books on Whitman that Ive read in many years. Once every generation or so, we need a book like this one to remind us why, in the twenty-first century, it is still so essential to keep Whitman close at hand."
— Ed Folsom ,Professor of English, The University of Iowa; editor
"Walt Whitman has been and remains our unacknowledged founder. Born as Thomas Jefferson was fretting that the revolutionary & Spirit of 76 was being lost, Whitman grabbed the twin standards of enlightenment and possibility and carried them across the bridge from the days of Tom Paine to the present. His radical journey is our radical journey, and John Marsh captures the very essence of Whitman, and America, in this brilliant book."
— John Nichols, Washington correspondent for The Nation