Modern Language Review

Assessing Walt Whitman’s legacy, in poetry, in the arts, and more generally in culture, is a task that has been carried out for a long time and by many scholars. There are many reasons for such attention to the poet’s reception—sometimes at the expense of more textual approaches. It partly results from Whitman’s own calls to the reader, which prompt a critical approach focused on reader response, and it is founded on the extraordinary history of the uses that were made of Whitman’s poetry and persona, often with a political or social agenda. Such a shift from the text to its reverberations accelerated in the past couple of decades, as the result of the development of Cultural Studies but also of Reception Studies in general (and not only of Whitman). A number of recent books bear witness to it, for example Kirsten Harris’s Walt Whitman and British Socialism (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016), Delphine Rumeau’s Fortunes de Walt Whitman (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2019), Caterina Bernardini’s Transnational Modernity and the Italian Reinvention of Walt Whitman, 1870–1945 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2021), and Dara Barnat’s Walt Whitman and the Making of Jewish American Poetry (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2023). The two books that are the subject of this review belong to this trend, though on different levels: Behnam M. Fomeshi’s The Persian Whitman is an academic study whose publication happened to coincide with Whitman’s bicentennial in 2019, while Poet of the Body—which does not deal exclusively with reception—is the catalogue of an exhibition that was held at the Grolier Club in New York in 2019.

Fomeshi’s monograph is a much-needed book. While studies on Whitman’s reception are numerous, the vast majority of them concentrate on the Western World (one could mention as an exception Whitman East and West: New Contexts for Reading Walt Whitman, edited by Ed Folsom (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2002)), and the Persian reception has not hitherto been studied. The book is therefore a valuable contribution to the field, and it gives access to data and material that are precious to the non-Persian speaker. Fomeshi explains that what [End Page 370] interests the Persian readership in American literature is mostly fiction, especially novels, and that few foreign poets have triggered interest as much as Whitman. The aim is therefore to understand why Whitman had such a particular impact, and, as stated in the Introduction, to contribute to the ‘globalisation of American studies’ as well as to ‘a better appreciation of Iranian culture’. To illuminate Whitman’s work and the history of Persian culture in their interaction is a great proposition but it sometimes falls short in its realization. The first three chapters are essentially an introduction to Whitman’s work with an emphasis on what will be of most interest to Persian readers, namely the intertwinement of the ‘Democratic’ and the ‘National.’ These chapters raise an interesting question: of what interest are Reception Studies to those who are not already familiar with the work under scrutiny? If the aim is to show the impact of Whitman’s poetry on a culture where he is not very well known, it is indeed welcome to provide an introduction. In this case however, the book is written in English and it is therefore very unlikely that the reader will need that much contextual guidance on nineteenth-century America and on Whitman’s work. Conversely, while much useful information is provided on the Persian context, more could have been given at times...