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Title: Scattered and unorganized
Review: I looked forward to reading this book and learning a lot about what inspired Walt Whitman, hoping to discover what made him the representative poet of America. But the information is poorly presented. I found myself craving some sort of context, an axis. The author relies far too much on quotes from WW's books and letters to fill the page, rather than using those sources to back up some sort of theory. In short, this is a badly written sophomore English paper. There is no logical progression of his age/place/time and WW's writing. We learn that WW updated and reissued "Leaves of Grass" numerous times, but what informed those changes, for example? The text jumps from one year to another, but the reader is never quite sure where he is in the "story." It's a lot of disjointed notes and snippets that result in a fractured and unbalanced account of WW's life. I wish I'd started with a different WW biography.
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