Whitman the Political Poet

"Simply one of the best books ever written on Whitman. Virtually every page of it is persuasive and much is entirely original.... Without question, it will be one of the books on Whitman that every reader should own."--Eric Sundquist, University of California, Berkeley
"Erkkila presents an extraordinary account of how Whitman's political purposes informed the most fundamental choices of his life and career, and in so doing she has written what is surely one of the two or three most valuable one-volume studies of Whitman ever produced."--South Atlantic Review
"A welcome attempt to show Whitman as writer and man living in and reacting to the political environment of his age....Her book is thorough and convincingly argued, and makes an important contribution to the study of American literature and culture."--Choice
"She always has something to say about the larger inferences of his work, about the assumptions behind it and the contradictions often hidden in those assumptions, and about the uneasy relation between Whitman's thought and the thought of his time....Will help most readers better to grasp the detail within the whole arc of Whitman's ideas."--Times Literary Supplement
"No other work has dealt so well and so fully with Whitman's political ideology or made so fine a connection between Whitman's sense of his artistic mission and his political-ideological orientation....Lucid, comprehensive, and well-reasoned, Professor Erkkila's book fills a serious need in Whitman studies both as a source book and as a orrective to other interpretations."--Journal of English & Germanic Philology
"Erkkila has written what will surely be both a major resource for Whitman scholars and an important contribution to the growing body of recent work investigating the relations between literary and political culture in nineteenth-century America....Extraordinary in its scope....A major achievement. It will permanently alter our sense of its subject and should remain one of the indispensable books on Whitman for many years to come."--Modern Philology
"A useful book for both the specialist and the student. It succeeds more fully than previous studies in placing the Whitman canon in a socio-political frame."--Lawrence Buell, Oberlin College