This sumptuously illustrated volume examines the development of Whitman's portraiture from the famous frontispiece of the 1855 Leaves of Grass through to the depictions of the American modernist painters. More generally, it shows the interplay between Whitman's writings and the visual arts, which were a constant source of interest to him throughout his life. Indeed, it has been argued that the New York Crystal Palace Exhibition affected Whitman's invention of verbal “catalogues” in his poetry. The different images of Whitman are closely related to his constant self-invention during the serial composition of Leaves of Grass. In 1855 he comes across as a casual, outdoor type, in 1860 as rather more of a dandy, and after the Civil War there emerged more of a conflict between public and private selves.

The year 1881 was a key date in Whitman's developing conception of art because in that year he attended the Millet exhibition in Boston and was very impressed by that painter's direct immediacy and democratic choice of subjects. In that same decade Whitman's fortunes improved. As he became more of a celebrity, so he was mythologized in paintings like Dora Wheeler's 1887 portrait, where he resembles a patriarch with a flowing white mane. Although he welcomed Oscar Wilde warmly on a visit to America, Whitman remained hostile to aestheticism and also to any depiction of himself which overdid his elegance. One of his least characteristic appearances in oil was in Herbert Gilchrist's The Good Gray Poet's Gift (1885–86), where he participates in a group scene within a heavily detailed domestic interior. In contrast, Thomas Eakins's 1888 portrait, perhaps influenced by Whitman's writing on a sailor ancestor, shows him with a ruddy, vigorous complexion against a blank background, which does not contain him within any single role.

After his death in 1892, Whitman's writing and image were appropriated by a number of American modernists, starting with Marsden Hartley, whose early paintings “construct a coded narrative of Whitman's ideal of manly comradeship” (144). Whitman was also read as a mystic and an inspirational figure by Robert Coady, the gallery owner and editor of the art journal The Soil. It was further evidence of the modernists' perception of a verbal–visual continuum in Whitman that lines from his writings should appear as intertitles in the experimental New York film Manhatta and that his works should inspire Joseph Stella even before he moved to America. Looking into Walt Whitman not only traces the development of a famous American icon, it also documents the interaction between verbal and visual media.