"David Haven Blake situates Walt Whitman in an expanse of nineteenth-century American popular culture that stretches from patent medicines to presidential politics, revealing the poet's complicated, often inconsistent views on poetry, commerce, and celebrity. Like his contemporary P.T. Barnum, Walt Whitman understood that, in the emergent culture of celebrity, fame was less a fact than a performance. He drew on the rhetoric of advertising not just to promote his poetry but to expand its vocabulary, construct its audience, and tutor his readers in the proper reception of his work. The mark of the truly democratic poet, Whitman felt, was the crowd that had gathered around him." "Making use of notebooks, photographs, and archival sources, Blake provides a groundbreaking history of the rise of celebrity culture in the United States."--Jacket.