As is the fate of any canonical author who was been thoroughly studied but remains relevant, the arc of Walt Whitman's career has been divided into increasingly smaller segments of responsibility by a devoted community of scholars. While his ascension to fame was not exactly rocket-like, the contributors to Whitman among the Bohemians expertly frame the tumultuous period of his life in which the first aspects of his latter status as cultural authority and celebrated poet started to materialize. Focussing on the years from 1858 to 1862, during which Whitman frequented Pfaff's beer cellar in downtown Manhattan and found an audience, supporters, and friends among the Bohemian crowd, the volume covers the pivotal time span that saw him regenerate from a perceived lack of public attention for the first two editions of Leaves of Grass; prepare, publish, and advertise his 1860 edition whilst becoming a presence in New York newspapers; and remake his persona, all before the Civil War finally dispersed this artistic urban scene.

As Mark Miller mentions in his review for the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, this volume indeed revolves more around the poet than around his poetry, mirroring contemporary reactions as interest in the former grew faster than in the latter. However, using Whitman as a panoptical focal point, the study is able to shine a light on all the aspects of cosmopolitan life with which he associated, from bars to theaters, to the lively publishing scene in which reviews, parodies, and caricatures of him appeared, to the bohemian artists and personalities with whom he socialized. Therefore the assembled essays manage to bring both Whitman's everyday life and his mid-nineteenth-century subcultural surroundings in urban New York closer to the reader than an ordinary study of poetry could.

Perhaps the best example of this personal window into the past of the poet is Karin Karbiener's “Bridging Brooklyn and Bohemia: How the Brooklyn Daily Times Brought Whitman Closer to Pfaff's,” which fittingly stands at the beginning of the collection. By taking the detailed logistics and economics of his employment as an editor at the Times into consideration, even focussing in on the specific ferry line he might have taken in relation to the location of the newspaper's office, Karbiener convincingly argues that it was convenient for him to frequent Pfaff's beer cellar during this period. She thus successfully makes Whitman's experience of commuting to his day job and patronizing a specific bar for a drink on his way home easily imaginable to the modern American public. Familiarizing himself with the behaviour of the democratic demographic he wanted to represent, the former author of a temperance novel now consumed alcohol with a crowd of aquaintances and thereby provided some flesh to the bone of his hitherto abstract claim to be the poet of the people.

Whitman among the Bohemians as a whole shows us a personal and physical poet who was indeed making connections to his fellow Americans, “drinking,” and while perhaps not “breeding,” finding intimate friends with whom he engaged in the newfound theme of his 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass: adhesiveness. As Stephanie Blaylock documents in her meticulously researched essay “‘Tell What I Meant by Calamus’: Walt Whitman's Vision of Comradeship from Fred Vaughan to the Fred Gray Association,” the poet recovered from losing a lover by joining an all-male group of friends that met at Pfaff's. By referring to Whitman's epistolary connections with these men, as well as his personal copy of a book Whitman received from Fred Gray, Blalock provides the historical material context for the claim that to Whitman's mind this group put into practice the ideal of manly attachment he had written on in his homoerotic Calamus cluster.

Likewise, each essay in the volume illustrates Whitman's contact with persons and scenes who overlapped at Pfaff's. In “Whitman, the Antebellum Theater, and the Cultural Authority of the Bohemian Critic,” Edward Whitley demonstrates how the poet was elevated to the status of “bohemian celebrity” by a social circle that transferred performative techniques to the page of the short-lived New York Saturday Press. Analyzing the same publication, Leif Eckstrom's excellent essay “On Puffing: The Saturday Press and the Circulation of Symbolic Capital,” proves how Whitman was, for the first time in his career, propped up in public by an ally with a similar sense for self-promotion, Henry Clapp. Tracing his presence in contemporary print and visual culture, Ruth Balon, in “Whitman and the ‘Picture Makers’,” digs beyond Whitman's well-known love for photographs and daguerrotypes, to show us the many caricatures of the poet circulating at the time. Taken together, the contributors succeed in presenting us with a more well-rounded and novel graphic portrait of the artist as a middle-aged, mildly popular, surprisingly influential, and already controversial man.