Why did Walt Whitman promote the concept that liberated, autonomous citizens could find political vigour in the “lawless music” of free verse? And in what ways has this concept been finessed by the modernist manipulators of Whitman's poetic bequest? Günter Leypoldt's new book addresses these key questions with theoretical rigour and emphatic assurance. While myriad critics have canvassed how Whitman's stylistic and generic experiments injected his poetry with political gravitas, Leypoldt's project also shows that Whitman's writing lent aesthetic prestige to vital political actions, such as his support for the development of democratic institutions. Leypoldt's early chapters gauge Whitman's cultural kudos from four standpoints: its links to transatlantic contexts; its searching engagement with Emersonian transcendentalism; its position within the conceptual fields of music, nature and democracy; and finally its refashioning during Whitman's “retrospective canonization” between the 1870s and the 1940s (247).

Whitman's richly textured fusion of poetic radicalism with the cultural nationalism of the Young American movement gave him “exceptional relevance” (viii) according to Leypoldt. This deeply pondered sociological thesis is sharpened by insights into a diverse array of nineteenth-century aesthetic credos. One of the most telling and trenchant sections calibrates Whitman's keen fascination with the grammar and syntax of classical music as a means of converting “cultural pluralism into beautiful song” (5). In this section Leypoldt demonstrates a subtle awareness of American transcendentalist music discourse and how it melds a “millenarian concern with social perfectionism” (138). Through this approach Leypoldt greatly amplifies both the chronological and the philosophical remit of scholarly enquiry into the transatlantic enterprise.

Leypoldt's signal achievement is to throw into bolder relief the modernist reinvention of Whitman's corpus as the triumphant distillation of a native avant-garde tradition. Chapter 9, “Whitman among the Moderns,” does a fine job of assessing, for instance, William Carlos Williams's canny repackaging of Whitman as the originator of a “new measure” that confronted and processed a distinctively American modernity. Leypoldt's discerning analysis permits us to view the similarities between Carlos Williams's impatient disavowal of T. S. Eliot's ethical or political vocabularies, and Whitman's rejection of Tennyson. Carlos Williams carefully situates his admired predecessor Whitman into a narrative where free verse is lauded as the technical innovation which proclaims radical democracy, the inspiriting and ebullient “Music of America.” By such repackaging Carlos Williams suggests that his own refinement of the “variable foot” in Paterson pays tribute to, even extends, Whitman's dissident difference and “lawless music,” thus making Eliot's The Waste Land seem like a “remnant of premodern times” (252) in comparison. Against Eliot's “failed courage” (252) as a poet and cultural commentator, Whitman emerges, in Carlos Williams's account, as both a historical happening of seismic significance and a complex retrospective construction, and it is this notion which lends Leypoldt's closing chapters a compelling momentum.