Good Gray Poet

WALT--Elizabeth Corbett--Stokes ($2.50). When Walt Whitman was seven years old he saw a shipwreck. "It made me shake, but I like to shake that way." When Walt was eleven Aaron Burr recommended the Arabian Nights to him. When he was thirteen Samuel Clemens told him of a Quaker preacher he had exhumed to make a death mask. Whitman shook again. By the time he was twenty he had successively been a typographer, reporter, editor, carpenter, novelist, teacher. A few months on a job and he shuffled off to another. He had such a lot to see.

He loved the men of cities--New York, New Orleans, Washington. He loved to drive a Broadway omnibus. He loved to listen to the stevedores on the Louisiana levees. He also loved a Creole. When she refused to make an honest man of him, he started Leaves of Grass. (He thought "Leaves" sounded better than "Blades"' but the printer didn't.) He wove the names of a string of box cars upon a broad broken page, "caught the rhythm and made it more rhythmical." He was to spend the rest of his life rewriting Leaves of Grass.

During the Civil War he was a nurse. Lincoln said "he looks like a MAN." The soldiers adored him but no one seemed to like his poetry. When he was gray and paralyzed a measure of recognition came to him, also a lady from England to marry him. He accepted the recognition, evaded the lady.

Authoress Corbett has written an absorbing and unique biography by means of a series of short dramatic scenes and purported dialogues--between Whitman and others and betwee Allen Poe to "two Dartmouth Seniors." The book presents a graphic account of a man who wished to live his life into his poetry.