Song of himself

Like Whitman, 'Days' is smart, brimming, and a little wild

June 05, 2005

Specimen Days
By Michael Cunningham
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 308 pp., $25

O great barefoot poet of the sacred and profane! Walt Whitman played one against the other and doubled his odds by betting on both. ''I am the poet of the Body and I am the poet of the Soul," he wrote in ''Song of Myself"; if he could call grass ''the handkerchief of the Lord" without a whit of sentimentality, it was because a few lines later he saw it as ''the beautiful uncut hair of graves." America owes its life to Whitman, or perhaps its inner life, because he looked from sea to shining sea -- from its purple mountain majesties to its sweatshops and city streets -- and declared himself visionary orator of all.

Michael Cunningham saw gold in Whitman, saw delusion and possibility both, and has thus made him the sparkling sheen that forms ''Specimen Days" and hovers throughout it. A similar tactic was in play in ''The Hours," Cunningham's 1998 novel that paid homage to Virginia Woolf. But where ''The Hours" reinvented ''Mrs. Dalloway" in three intertwined stories, ''Specimen Days" uses Whitman as ghostly muse; the novel emulates the spirit of Whitman even as it grants him quotations from madmen and thieves. It is a love song of a novel, rich and melancholy and overflowing with smartness, and if it veers off-road a bit at the peak of its race -- well, even that seems a wildness in keeping with America's bard.

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