Ed Folsom

Biography

Ed Folsom is the editor of the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, co-editor of the Whitman Archive, and editor of the Whitman Series at the University of Iowa Press. The Carver Professor of English at the University of Iowa, he is the author or editor of numerous books on Whitman, including Walt Whitman’s Native Representations, Whitman East and West,and Walt Whitman: The Centennial Essays.

See Work

ESSAYS / Spring 2005

“What a Filthy Presidentiad!”: Clinton’s Whitman, Bush’s Whitman, and Whitman’s America

By Ed Folsom

 

United States presidents have usually gotten exactly the Walt Whitman they deserved. During his own lifetime, Whitman admired and disdained presidents with unusual passion, rising to some of his most sublime language to evoke Lincoln (...