Walt Whitman, Yesterday & Today — A Reader’s Guide can be approached with a clearer sense of reading commitment from its source measurements: 13,408 words, 59 min estimated reading time, and 2 detected text sections.
The text analysis averages about 23.6 words per sentence, while the detected sections provide another way to judge how the source is divided.
Project Gutenberg metadata also associates the work with “Whitman, Walt, 1819-1892 -- Criticism and interpretation,” connecting these edition facts with the source record’s subject description.
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Read on Project GutenbergHenry Eduard Legler's 1916 volume does not set out to interpret Whitman as prophet or poet, but instead lets the words of his critics carry distinct impressions. The book opens with the 1855 publication of Leaves of Grass, a thin quarto of twelve poems without author or publisher, whose appearance provoked a tirade of rancorous condemnation. Legler compiles a striking catalog of abuse—'the slop-bucket of Walt Whitman,' 'entirely bestial,' 'rotten garbage of licentious thoughts'—drawn from contemporary reviews, suggesting an Anthology of Anathema comparable to attacks on Wagner or Ibsen.
The excerpts present a remarkable array of hostile epithets, many of which Legler collects in a single paragraph: 'noxious weeds,' 'impious and obscene,' 'disgusting burlesque,' 'broken out of Bedlam.' The Christian Examiner of Boston (1856) complained that the book 'openly deifies the bodily organs, senses, and appetites.' One critic compared Whitman's Eve to 'a drunken apple-woman, indecently sprawling in the slush and garbage of the gutter,' and his Venus to 'a Hottentot wench under the influence of cantharides and adulterated rum.' These attacks reveal not only the shock of Whitman's frankness but also the period's anxieties about bodily representation in literature.
Legler balances the abuse with measured praise. Robert Louis Stevenson, in his essay, acknowledges Whitman's 'rough, unrhymed, lyrical verse' and its 'fine processional movement,' but notes that it is 'often so rugged and careless that it can only be described by saying that he has not taken the trouble to write prose.' John Burroughs offers a more sweeping defense: just as England lies back of Tennyson and Scotland back of Carlyle, so 'America as a whole, our turbulent democracy, our self-glorification, our faith in the future, our huge mass-movements, our continental spirit, our sprawling, sublime and unkempt nature lie back of Whitman.' These contrasting assessments frame the central tension of the book.
Legler ultimately turns to Whitman's own words as the justest estimate. He quotes lines that embrace contradiction: 'I am of old and young, of the foolish as much as the wise; / Regardless of others, ever regardful of others, / Maternal as well as paternal, a child as well as a man, / Stuff'd with the stuff that is coarse, and stuff'd with the stuff that is fine.' The book concludes with Whitman's caution: 'I charge you forever reject those who would expound me, for I cannot expound myself.' Legler insists that for a just estimate, one must read all of Leaves of Grass—'a few blades will not suffice.'
Legler's approach is less a critical argument than a curated collision of voices. Readers will find here not a single interpretation but a spectrum of reactions—from venomous dismissal to reverent praise—that mirrors the polarized reception Whitman himself anticipated. The book is best approached as a documentary record of a literary controversy, one that illuminates both the poet and the cultural forces that shaped his reputation.
That rainy afternoon, Legler’s anthology of Whitman’s harshest critics felt almost tender—their outrage softened by time, like damp pages. Reading how even enemies circled back to his innocence, I set the book down and wandered to my childhood shelf. The same quiet certainty seemed to live there, in those old verses. Songs of Childhood — Themes and Context became the afternoon’s second, gentler rain.
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