Walt Whitman's Mystical Ethics of Comradeship

A giant of American letters, Walt Whitman is known both as a poet and, to many, as an early precursor of the gay liberation movement. This revealing book recovers for today's reader a lost Whitman, delving into the original context and intentions of his poetry and prose. As Juan A. Herrero Brasas shows, Whitman saw himself as a founder of a new religion. Indeed, disciples gathered around him: the "hot little prophets" as they came to be called by early biographers. Whitman's religion revolved around his concept of comradeship, an original alternative to the type of competitive masculinity emerging in the wake of industrialization and nineteenth-century capitalism. Shedding new light on the life and original message of a poet who warned future generations against treating him as merely a literary figure, Herrero Brasas concludes that Whitman was a moral reformer and grand theorist akin to other grand theorists of his day.