Lincoln’s Prophet

Gertrude Stein’s definitive skewering of Ezra Pound—“He was a village explainer, excellent if you were a village, but if you were not, not”—applies to an earlier American epic poet as well. The Walt Whitman of this novel (Pound would claim imaginative kinship with him in 1916) was trafficking in the same line of goods—the egotistical sublime—a few decades earlier. Not satisfied with having written an epic-length poem entitled “Song of Myself,” as well as many another poems on the same inexhaustibly interesting subject, Whitman spent his last years burnishing his image. Enfeebled by strokes, yet continuing to write, Whitman found a number of admirers (among them Richard M. Bucke of the asylum in London, Ontario), both in the United States and elsewhere, who happily made the pilgrimage to his small residence in Camden, New Jersey. The most diligent and inexhaustible was Horace Traubel, a man with an endless capacity for listening to and recording his hero’s abundant...