It is perhaps surprising that, during his lifetime, Walt Whitman never fully enjoyed the fame and celebrity as America's poet of democracy that one might expect. Despite his best efforts at self-promotion in the mid-1850s, advertising his Leaves of Grass as the poem of America, Whitman was too old and frail to benefit from the celebrity that came knocking on his door in Camden in his last years. David Haven Blake's book traces well the trajectory of Whitman's lifelong flirtation with celebrity, tracking it against the development of ideas of fame, popular culture and fan worship from the Jacksonian era, through the antebellum period and into the Gilded Age. In an introductory chapter, Whitman's desire for celebrity is placed historically within discourses of popular culture in the mid-nineteenth century, seeing his efforts to achieve poetic fame as profoundly entangled within America's struggles to assert and maintain democracy, individualism and a modern economy. Celebrity figures in popular culture – P. T. Barnum, Jenny Lind, Edwin Forrest, James Macready, even Andrew Jackson – are seen as foils to Whitman's ambiguous and ambivalent struggles to get himself and his work noticed. Subsequent chapters each examine a theme that emerges from this examination of the impact of ideas of celebrity on Whitman's work, and such names and ideas of celebrity that attach to them recur throughout the book. In these chapters Blake writes knowledgably and interestingly on “Personality,” “Publicity,” “Intimacies” and “Campaigns,” chapters that, though thematic, manage to proceed fairly chronologically through Whitman's life.

There are moments of crisp insight throughout the book – especially in the underlying argument that Whitman believed that “the story of celebrity would be the story of democracy” (xii), and in the ironies surrounding the fact that in his later life Whitman purposefully complained about his lack of fame and public attention in order to garner attention for his final edition of Leaves of Grass – but the book adds little, really, to earlier studies (by, for example, Ed Folsom, David S. Reynolds, M. Wynn Thomas) that place Whitman within the popular, material and intellectual history of his day. The book is rather disappointing, then, because it never advances a powerfully convincing argument as to how and why celebrity took such a hold of Whitman (or, indeed, America in the nineteenth century). Fairly early in the book we are told, “From Emerson's exploration of representative men to Brady's gallery of famed Americans, the producers of American culture clearly tried to capitalize on the rhetorical power of fame” (43). Sadly, the book's analyses of Whitman's poetry, and its discussion of the culture of American celebrity, never display the sort of incisiveness about the rhetorical power of fame that is necessary to properly explain Whitman's difficult position – as poet, as democrat – within its structuring of desire. Nowhere, that is, does the book define or examine in detail exactly who, or what, those “producers of American culture” might be. So, like Whitman and the celebrity he so craved, this book rather misses its chances.