Long a fan of Mark Doty's work, both poetry, and memoir so relished diving into this exploration, and loved the discussion of Whitman's [Leaves of Grass], along with some biographical context. To date I've only read verses in anthologies.

However, I felt the volume slightly ill balanced by the aspects of memoir, with particular focus on Doty's sex life, which didn't quite work for me. It isn't new in Doty's writing, maybe for me now it's just a bit old. That said, there were some moments in the memoir that really shone.

When Whitman wrote [Leaves of Grass] large numbers of the general population read it without noticing the homoerotic aspects of some poems. Something unlikely to be the case now. In some ways I felt that Doty was addressing this book to those long dead readers. Perhaps he intended a reverse echo of what Whitman was doing addressing readers of the future.

I have pulled [Leaves of Grass] from the shelf, ready to read the whole thing in the near future. ( )

I've always had a mixed relationship with Walt Whitman's poetry: there's a gloriously liberating quality in the way he digs out handfuls of names and trade-terms and idioms, formal and informal, and takes it for granted that there is a poem in there somewhere; there's his endless fascination with breaking down the barrier of skin between himself and the rest of humanity (especially beautiful working men...) — but there's also his brash self-promotion, his arrogant assumption of American primacy in the world, his Wordsworth-like descent into celebrity-prophet status in old age, and the way that so many of his best lines have been turned into clichés that make it difficult to read them afresh. And — perhaps above all — he's a poet who gave implicit permission to generations and generations of lesser imitators (especially, but not exclusively, in his own country) to rant endlessly in free verse.

Doty has a go at overcoming these problems, in a book that's a mixture of critical biography of Whitman, seminar-room close-reading of parts of "Song of myself" and "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry", and a confessional memoir of Doty himself as gay man, poet, teacher and Whitman-reader in the 20th century. He digs into the early editions of Leaves of grass and the circumstances of their production to help us see what was so radical and new about what Whitman was giving himself the authority to do: not only breaking away from strict forms and integrating vernacular language in ways that Coleridge and Wordsworth could only dream about, but writing directly and almost without evasion about sexuality and the physicality of our desire for other bodies (much of this got toned down in later editions). Doty reminds us of the relative freedom Whitman still had to write about love between men in the 1850s, before the medicalisation of same-sex desire made readers start looking in such texts for the criminal and perverted. Even then, I think you'd have to be very blind to coded messages not to see at least some of the queer sexual imagery Whitman thrusts at us...

I did find it a little bit disturbing how smoothly Doty switches between his blackboard voice and his bedroom voice. Obviously there's something deliberately Whitmanesque about that technique: he wants us to understand that reading a poem isn't just a matter of analysing the words in a classroom, you have to be able to find parallels in your own experience to project it onto as well, even if most of us aren't called upon to do that publicly. Sometimes hearing about Doty's life and the men in it and what they meant to him was interesting and wonderful, but sometimes it felt like being trapped with an embarrassingly confessional stranger in a railway compartment.

Still, a worthwhile book, and one that seems to deal very fairly with Whitman. ( )