What Is the Grass may be the definitive book on Whitman’s life, afterlife and poetry. But it’s the moments in Doty’s own life—his first marriage to a woman, who had a son his age; his joy in his first love affairs with men—that the book truly glistens.

... excellent.

Doty's memoir is not only an exaltation of America's troubadour, but also a celebration of gay manhood, queerness, and the power and elasticity of poetry.

Doty, like Whitman, is gifted with words, a lover of beauty and of men, a New Yorker.

The great thing Doty accomplishes in What Is the Grass: Walt Whitman in My Life is that, while making a case for Whitman’s queer identity, he admits that 'anyone sympathetic to such desires cannot miss Whitman’s intent.' In other words, read into ​Leaves Of Grass​ as much queerness as you choose.

It’s not just that Doty is an extraordinarily fine writer whose every word sings on the page.

...an elegant blend of literary criticism and personal memoir.

... exuberant if uneven.

... a wistful record of a writer’s search for antecedents, and his delight in finding many of his own themes and obsessions prefigured in a well-known literary work.

... stunning.

... a remarkable book that defies easy classification.

... [a] sometimes startling mixture of memoir and literary criticism, providing an invigorating introduction to the continuing artistic value of Whitman’s output. This blend of the personal and critical appreciation, however, is stretched quite thin at times. Too often, Doty allows the focus on his own life and relations to distract from the greatness of his chosen master. One imagines Doty’s recounting of sexual experiences felt essential to him, perhaps mirroring Whitman’s un-blinkered celebration of life in all its manifest glory. And yet that is precisely where Doty’s cleanly crafted lyrical writing stumbles. Too often, the Whitman he celebrates is the egocentric theosophizer of appetites and urges, instead of a literary genius. As with Whitman, readers may be overwhelmed with Doty’s overabundance of imagery and intimate detail, but also (as with Whitman) audiences will find individual passages that can inspire, change, and sustain a life.

... lyrical.

Doty’s book seeks to explain an enduring mystery: the explosive appearance in 1855 of the first edition of Leaves of Grass, from a hack writer who had shown no previous brilliance, and who had no clear literary antecedents. 'Where on earth did it come from?' Doty wonders.

Academic critics of Dryden or Pope were not in the habit, the last time I checked, of interspersing their monographs with reminiscences of sex clubs in Manhattan. An affectionate excursus on that subject in Mark Doty’s What is the Grass announces that this is no ordinary piece of literary criticism.

Mark Doty has written a warm and intelligent account of Whitman, interweaving his personal responses to the poetry with autobiographical episodes, the lives and deaths of partners and friends and pets, and even, possibly, a spooky encounter with young Walt himself, who, at an intense moment, gazes through the features of a lover 'with the visionary dazzle of starlight in his eyes'.

Of the many poets I love, none has haunted me as Walt Whitman,' writes Mark Doty early in his moving book What is the Grass . Defying categories, Doty’s book is part appreciation, part criticism, and part memoir, a book in which the boundaries between Doty and his predecessor are sometimes blurred. Having spent a lifetime reading, studying, and teaching Whitman, Doty — the author of more than a dozen works of poetry and prose — reminds us just how revolutionary, how foundational this poet was, how fresh and surprising the poems remain.

A clear inspiration to Doty, the book documents the relationship he feels with Whitman on the poetic and personal levels—a distinction that is nearly imperceptible as one is part of the other. As gay men, Whitman and Doty both navigated worlds that attempted to close them in. But their art and will and pure need to live authentically rendered them free. Doty draws the lines of that freedom with clarity and grace in What is the Grass .

While all four sources receive Doty’s penetrating and illuminating scrutiny, the second, Whitman’s sexuality, which Doty shares, receives the most attention and the most autobiographical witnessing. Drawing on his own physical experience, Doty illustrates precisely what Whitman’s pervasive homoerotic imagery means and how it informs his poetic achievement and grand vision of life. The cosmic delight Doty adduces from Whitman’s sexuality burns bright throughout the book. Doty has given us a scintillating work of literary exegesis and gay memoir informed, as Whitman would want it, by heart, soul, and body alike..

Throughout, Doty displays a number of his gifts and writing techniques.