Literary Modernity and the Problem of a National Literature: Understanding William Dean Howells' Critique of Walt Whitman

William Dean Howells, who met Walt Whitman briefly at Pfaff's, wrote a number of reviews of Whitman's work between 1860 and 1909. These reviews not only display a sophisticated understanding of the many aspects of the poet's career--from his self promotion to his desire to create a uniquely national poetics--but they also give insight into Howells' own sense of what an emerging modernist aesthetic practice should be.