Walt Whitman's Pose

In this literary biography of Whitman from the 1930s, Esther Shephard attempts to turn back the tide of a a burgeoning "Whitmaniana" (her term, which she uses on the first page of her preface) by exposing Whitman for having stolen his "pose" as a bohemian loafer from George Sand. Shephard writes, "The source of Leaves of Grass is, in spite of all of Walt Whitman's protestations to the contrary, in the fragment of a book, the epilogue of a French novel. The novel is The Countess of Rudolstadt, by George Sand" (140).

Shephard also refers to another Sand novel as a key to understanding Whitman's time at Pfaff's. She writes, "If Walt Whitman read [Sand's] The Mosaic-Workers, we have also a clue to his 'Pfaff period,' when he was a frequenter of Pfaff's restaurant, another paradox in his biography" (247). Specifically, Shephard refers to the character of Valerio from the novel, a young artist "whose opinions on art, health, lovers, mistresses, orgies and other recreations are so strangely like thos of Walt Whitman in his character as 'the prince of Bohemians'" (247).