Dear Friend, let me warn you somewhat about myself-& yourself also. You must not construct such an unauthorized & imaginary ideal Figure, & call it W. W. and so devotedly invest your loving nature in it. The actual W. W. is a very plain personage, & entirely unworthy of such devotion. Whitman to Anne Gilchrist, " Whitman's insistence on '' absorbing his country, '' and his extraordinary success in translating his social context into poetry, has produced a rich tradition of biographical and historical criticism,# a tradition rejuvenated in recent years by the popularity of cultural studies.$ Indeed, Ed Folsom, the editor of The Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, notes in the introduction to his own cultural study of Whitman's work, a '' critical consensus '' that '' Whitman is best understood contextually, as a writer who reabsorbed many aspects of his culture into his work, a writer we best read by moving from the poetry out into the world that the work was woven from, a writer best understood in juxtaposition to just about any aspect of the culture we can name '' (Native Representations, ix). This tradition of scholarship is rich because it is, of course, broadly right in asserting a