The extensive Whitman scholarship of the last half-century has enriched our understanding of his multifaceted relationship with the culture of his New York and America, and has also augmented appreciation of his reception abroad. But since such advances in scholarship have mostly been predicated on a recognition of his extraordinariness, they have resulted in the scanting of attention to him as, in several revealing respects, also offering ordinary examples of wider trends in his period. Whitman can, of course, appear in this guise only if we overlook the exceptional – indeed revolutionary – character and quality of his poetry. But that such an approach can prove strategically advantageous is demonstrated by Edward Whitley's admirable study.

It deals with the life and work of three other social outsiders who, like Whitman, had aspirations to become the poet laureate of the United States: the African American abolitionist James M. Whitfield, the Mormon proto-feminist Eliza R. Snow, and the crusading Cherokee journalist John Rollin Ridge. In pursuing the role of national bard, each of these fractures the received unitary image of the nation so assiduously promoted by literary nationalists of the mid-nineteenth century by viewing it from the perspective of one of its many constituent subcultures. And through their reconfiguration of the United States they not only bring out the competing claims of “local” communities on personal identity but also reveal the supranational, global dimension of some personal and group allegiances. Their poetry, and also that of Whitman, is accordingly read as particularly attracted to moments in “national” life when the tensions between these different levels, or dimensions, of identity are made manifest. And the unorthodox form of their poems commemorating events of collective significance is demonstrated to incorporate recognition of the contradictions inherent in their “marginal” social positioning.

Whitman is constantly kept in mind throughout the study, one of the important features of which is that it allows its comparative approach to modify the received view of his work. This becomes most apparent in the final chapter, in which Whitman's poem welcoming a deputation from imperial Japan, “A Broadway Pageant,” is persuasively read as expressive of his subcultural allegiances, in that it voices Whitman's defiant identification with the working masses who thronged the street, and who were being vilified in the popular press. Contrary to usual interpretation, the poem is also shown to be sensitive to the cultural “otherness” of the exotic Japanese representatives, in keeping with that authentic internationalist dimension of Whitman's vision for America that was in permanent uneasy tension with his sometimes rather redneck nationalist instincts.

In bringing these four figures together for purposes of (revealing) comparison, Whitley is careful not to minimize the difference between them. Disadvantaged each may have been by a deeply committed allegiance to a subnational collective, but their disadvantages are acknowledged to have been significantly different not only in kind but also in degree. Whitley also avoids simplifying the conflicted relation in which his chosen subjects stood to their respective subcultures. Snow, for instance, had to negotiate Mormonism's suspicion of female prophets, and the sect's careful policing of their powers, while Ridge's attitude towards mainstream America's assimilationist threat to Cherokee culture was so ambivalent as still to be difficult to determine. And while Whitfield consistently worked to extend American national consciousness to embrace black identities, he was also deeply attracted to the idea of creating a new, inclusive America elsewhere through mass migration.

Whitley's impressive study is therefore as scrupulous to register complexities as it is anxious to advance a challengingly strong, and credible, revisionist argument. And not the least of its achievements is that it manages to make a genuinely valuable contribution to the overcrowded field of contemporary Whitman scholarship, in which the law of diminishing returns otherwise seems increasingly evident.