In Walt We Trust: How a Queer Socialist Poet Can Save America from Itself

Percy Bysshe Shelley taught us that “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” True enough. But Walt Whitman has always been more than an unacknowledged legislator. He has been and remains our unacknowledged founder. Born as Thomas Jefferson was fretting that the revolutionary “Spirit of 76” was being lost, Whitman grabbed the twin standards of enlightenment and possibility and carried them across the bridge from the days of Tom Paine to the present. His radical journey is our radical journey, and John Marsh captures the very essence of Whitman, and America, in this brilliant book.

—John Nichols, Washington correspondent for The Nation

Marsh shares his affection for Walt Whitman in this gentle, thoughtful consideration of the poet’s relevance to 21st-century America. Beset by moral malaise in his 30s, the author ‘suffered from fully-grown doubts, not just growing doubts, about the meaning of life and the purpose of our country.’ Whitman’s insights on death, money, sex and democracy buoyed his spirits…. Marsh confesses his love for the legendary poet, and by the end of this insightful homage, readers are likely to feel the same.

—Kirkus Reviews

Marsh rises to the challenge of surveying the broad banks of Whitman’s work…. Prophetic, timely, and not nearly as impractical as he may sometimes seem (though just as flighty), Whitman is to Marsh just as much a poet for his time as for ours—though we have the benefit of hindsight to adopt the wisdom of his foresight.

—Boston Globe

In Walt We Trust is one of the most engaged and engaging books on Whitman that I’ve read in many years. Marsh offers us a kind of autobiography of his years of reading Whitman, revealing at every turn just why it is that Whitman matters—why, in fact, reading him is a matter of life and death. Marsh takes us on a cultural journey from Jimmy Carter’s ‘malaise’ speech to the Occupy movement to a trip across the East River on the recently reopened Brooklyn ferry to a strip club in Pennsylvania to a drive through beleaguered Camden, New Jersey, and at each stop we are brought back to Whitman’s poetry in surprising, moving, and revelatory ways. Once every generation or so, we need a book like this one to remind us why, in the twenty-first century, it is still so essential to keep Whitman close at hand.

—Ed Folsom, Professor of English, The University of Iowa; editor, Walt Whitman Quarterly Review; co-director, Walt Whitman Archive

A beautiful, moving, and original book about our nation’s greatest poet.

—Mark Edmundson, University Professor, University of Virginia; author, Why Teach?

As soon as I read John Marsh’s claim early in this fine new book of popular criticism, that in reading Whitman he learned how to die, I became his appreciative audience. Marsh does not buy into the mushy transcendental side of Whitman’s notion that death avails not, but looks to the poet’s views on ownership and property to understand the transience of life and the meaning of coming face to face with death. Along with his treatment of shame and shamelessness in Whitman’s poetry of the body, the connection of the greed for property and the fear of death is one of several original touches in this personal and engaging book based mainly on close reading of Whitman’s poems and prose works placed alongside reflections on the state of contemporary America. Even if you do not buy into Marsh’s big idea that Whitman can save us all, you will find much to admire in this charming and intelligent book of essays on America’s foremost poet.

—Jimmie Killingsworth, Professor of English, Texas A&M University; author, Whitman’s Poetry of the Body and Walt Whitman and the Earth

An extraordinary and inherently fascinating read, “In Walt We Trust: How a Queer Socialist Poet Can Save America from Itself” is very highly recommended for community and academic library collections. As informed and informative as it is thoughtful and thought-provoking, “In Walt We Trust” is thoroughly ‘reader friendly from beginning to end.

—Midwest Book Review