Gary Schmidgall's book takes its title from Walt Whitman's paean to inconsistency in “Song of Myself”:

Extrapolating from this, Schmidgall constructs a critical model of what he calls an “antithetical” Whitman (143), one whose work was shaped in part by transatlantic precursors, even though the poet sought explicitly to detach himself from such “antecedents” (4). The general point here is well taken, and Schmidgall is illuminating on ways in which Whitman incorporated (and, at times, directly quoted) Wordsworth in his own work, while refusing as a matter of principle to acknowledge these sources in order to bolster his pose of radical originality. However, the conceptual framework underlying this book is somewhat old-fashioned, focussing as it does on Whitman's intellectual relations with ten white men – Shakespeare, Milton, Burns, Blake, Wordsworth, with shorter sections on Scott, Carlyle, Tennyson, Wilde and Swinburne – and saying next to nothing about any kind of engagement with material culture. The ghost of Harold Bloom, evoked explicitly in Schmidgall's preface (xix), lurks behind this “anxiety-of-influence” approach, although he also relies here on twentieth-century reception historians such as the Danish scholar Frederik Schyberg, who developed in the 1930s an interest in parallel intellectual developments rather than direct “influence” as the crux of his comparative approach. Indeed, some of the most effective passages in Schmidgall's book come when he tracks specific ways in which British authors have been read over time in the United States, with his chapter on Milton chronicling how the Revolutionary generation (John Adams and Thomas Jefferson) understood the author of Paradise Lost as a political radical, in a way quite different to how he was later admired as a poet of Establishment “learning” by James Russell Lowell (78–79). This makes it more plausible to see how Whitman might creatively position himself as a “rude” and “rough” poet in a levelling Miltonic line (99).

There are, then, many good things in this book, but it is marred by a distinct lack of subtlety in its reading of poetry. Schmidgall has a populist template into which he seeks to shoehorn writers, proselytizing, for example, about how the “bedrock of the philosophical affinity of Blake and Whitman lies in a cluster of related i-words: individuality, imagination, inspiration, intuition, impulse” (167). One can almost see the PowerPoint slide for the Freshman lecture coming out here, but, apart from anything else, such a one-dimensional approach runs counter to the author's larger argument about the contradictory aspects of literary texts. Again, Schmidgall claims that “Arm'd and fearless” in “We Two Boys Together Clinging” represents the only “instance of paronomasia” in Leaves of Grass (46), an observation that quite misses the pun in this collection's very title. And in his Wordsworth chapter, Schmidgall descends into a reliance on database word counts, telling us that “Love is employed an astonishing 820 times by Wordsworth (nearly three hundred by Whitman)” (214), a conjunction that tells us precisely nothing. The problem here is that Schmidgall is so intent upon imaginatively representing these British poets as Whitman's contemporary camerados – he argues, for instance, that Whitman shared with Wilde an “ostentatious indolence combined with a kind of schmoozy bonhomie” (284) – that more complex intellectual differences simply get sidelined. Many of these retrospective analogies seem forced or vague – what does it mean to say of Milton and Whitman, for example, that both “were bards of personality” (81)? – and the reliance here on “remarkable parallels” (226) or transatlantic echoes that are “uncannily reminiscent” (225) of each other appears only intermittently convincing. Schmidgall might just as easily have conjured up an embattled rural Whitman, with reference to John Clare, or a jingoistic Whitman through discovering “remarkable parallels” with the British nationalist poet Henry Pye.

If this book had been more judiciously edited, it could have been an important intervention in Whitman studies. Schmidgall has used the poet's notebooks very effectively, and there is a wealth of information here both about Whitman's own views on a range of British poets and, more generally, about how British poetry itself was received in the United States. But I was left with the impression of this valuable material being compromised by a somewhat ramshackle theoretical framework, and it may be that this book will become most useful as a source of reference, albeit an invaluable one, for other scholars interested in the transatlantic dimensions of Whitman's poetry.