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As the title suggests, this is a literary explication, using psychoanalysis as a tool, of the major themes in Whitman's poetry. Regrettably, the emphasis is on Whitman's poems rather than on the life of the artist and its relationship to his art. Regrettably—because applying psychoanalytic technique to Whitman's work without giving a coherent personal picture of the writer makes it
difficult at best for the reader to reach a fuller understanding of Whitman. Black does provide biographical details and personal vignettes, but they appear more to support interpretations of the poems than to provide the necessary, coherent analytical picture of Whitman. The book reads as if it were written for an inner circle of Whitman scholars already fully acquainted with the esoterica of his life, or like a published doctoral thesis limited by the required format of the academic exercise for which it was prepared. Whatever the reason, it suffers from a lack of psychological sense of Whitman as man and poet.
Psychoanalyzing a poem at some distance from the poet is like analyzing a dream apart from the dreamer. It can be done as an academic exercise but its results are speculative, theoretical. There is a watery thinness to the intellectual soup that results from its preparation without the biographical flesh and bones of the artist. In a sense, a psychoanalytic study of poetry is, by its nature, a contradiction in terms. Psychoanalysis, above all, begins and ends with the person, the personality, and while it makes perfectly good sense to analyze an individual poem as you might a dream or a delusion, it is ultimately a mental event in the life of the author and must be understood as such.
Furthermore, this book is weak at what it does attempt to do: provide an extensive reading and explication of the poems from the psychoanalytic point of view. Too frequently the explications consist of little more than translations of poetic images into clumsy psychoanalytic jargon. For