I Contain Multitudes: A New Life of Walt Whitman

Walt Whitman is not only one of the most influential and popular poets in American history but also a symbol of American character and independence, as important to our nation’s identity as Abraham Lincoln, Harriet Beecher Stowe, or Louis Armstrong. While his poetry and exuberant style still inspire writers today, our understanding of his life is due for an update. It has been over a quarter of a century since the last full-length biography of Whitman, and in that time several works by Whitman have been rediscovered—including a novel and a men’s health manual—that put Whitman in a new light. In I Contain Multitudes, Eric G. Wilson draws on these discoveries to give us a fresh life of Whitman, one that reveals him to be more playful, flexible, and pragmatic than we had known.

Whitman emerges here as an artist adept in almost every literary genre. Across these varied writings, he fashioned a comedic vision based on the multifariousness of the cosmos. In his life as well, he created a wide range of personae. Like an experienced actor, Whitman had many roles and selves at the ready: the urban dandy, the Broadway bohemian, the humble Civil War nurse. Wilson’s portrait casts well-studied Whitman traits in a new light: his radical egalitarianism, he shows, was suffused with humor—to be a good citizen meant not taking yourself too seriously—and his famous powers of empathy resulted in darkly funny challenges to oppressive hierarchies.

Wilson tells Whitman’s life in dozens of brief, vivid segments, an innovative approach that reflects Whitman’s own existential and literary brio. Presenting the multitudinous Whitman with both stylistic gusto and scholarly rigor, I Contain Multitudes reads as much like a novel as the authoritative biography it is.