Before Mick or Madonna, Walt

WASHINGTON — O Walt Whitman! Bard of America! Poet of Democracy! Singer of the body electric!

O Walt Whitman! Sage! Crackpot! Dirty old man! Lovable old coot! Rest stop on the Jersey Turnpike!

O Walt Whitman! Writer and rewriter and obsessive re-rewriter of his masterpiece, "Leaves of Grass," the book Bill gave Monica ...

O. Sorry about that. I guess I got a tad carried away there. I have been reading the special Whitman issue of VQR: The Virginia Quarterly Review, and I just couldn't stop myself from parodying Whitman, who is, along with Hemingway, the most easily parodied American writer.

The VQR issue celebrates the 150th anniversary of the first publication of "Leaves of Grass," back in 1855. As the 26 pieces in VQR prove, Whitman fits right into today's celebrity culture. He was not only a great poet, he also was a creator of the American art form of shameless self-promotion -- as VQR Editor Ted Genoways writes in his introduction, "the earliest example of that most American trick: self-invention."

The self Whitman invented was, of course, better than his actual self. In 1855, Whitman was a shy, bookish, semi-successful newspaperman. The character he created in "Leaves of Grass" was a ruffian, a rebel, the wandering poetic voice of the common man -- a stance later taken up by Woody Guthrie, Marlon Brando, Jack Kerouac, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen and Tupac Shakur, among many others.

Whitman was a genius at using the then-new medium of photography to present this semi-fictitious image to the world. As Ed Folsom reveals in VQR's wonderful gallery of photos, Whitman was as meticulous as Madonna in crafting pictures to convey his chosen persona.

In the photo that ran in the first edition of "Leaves," he wears rough workingman's clothes, his hat is tilted jauntily and one hand is in his pocket, the other perched defiantly on his hip. (VQR prints a photo of Mick Jagger striking a similar pose.) In an era when authors were invariably photographed wearing suits and sitting in libraries, this was, Folsom writes, "shocking."

And it worked: It established the Whitman persona. Reviewing the photo along with the poems, the New York Tribune noted that Whitman looked like a "loafer" and displayed an "air of mild defiance and an expression of pensive insolence" -- exactly the image Whitman wanted.