Whitman's Journey into Chaos: A Psychoanalytic Study of the Poetic Process. By Stephen A. Black. Princeton:  Princeton University Press, 1975.  255 pp.

Black combines psychoanalytic, historical, and literary methods in this psychoanalytic investigation of Walt Whitman's poetic processes as they developed between 1855 and 1865. Pointing out that nearly all the important poems were composed before 1860 (the later editions of Leaves of Grass represent, in large part, revisions of these early poems), he maintains that the poems are not, as commonly assumed, chronicles of the events in the poet's life, but rather that they are themselves the events-“the crucial psychological activity of Whitman's life between 1855-65.”

Black is in frequent disagreement with other biographers and interpreters of Whitman, particularly with E. H. Miller (Walt Whitman's Poetry: A Psychological Journey, 1968), who contends that Whitman was overtly and actively homosexual and generally conscious of the sexual meanings of the poems. Black believes (and cites various symbolic indications of this in the poems) that Whitman was mainly autoerotic in his sexual expressions and that he “tended to keep hidden from himself both his homosexual impulses and his sexual confusions.”

While Miller and other scholars maintain that Whitman's psychological conflicts were in part released and resolved in his poems, Black asserts that the poems were often “journeys into chaos” and that they left Whitman's conflicts unresolved and his anxieties unrelieved. He feels that Whitman, though responding through the poems to conflicts deeply felt, did not actually understand them and attempted to avoid the anxiety these conflicts engendered by seeking psychological catharsis-“an ecstatic feeling that gave him the illusion that the conflicts had been resolved.”

Beginning with the premise that “the artistic process originates in and often expresses personal (usually unconscious) conflicts,