How did these complex and conflicting nineteenth-century perceptions of Whitman turn into the American-Renaissance consensus? Dowden's view of the ‘Poetry of Democracy’ proved useful in the modernist quest for a national canon based on Whitman's ‘spiritual democracy’ (H. A. Myers 1934: 239). After 1900 it became more important to reread Whitman in post-Kantian terms, and to turn Dowden's praise of Whitman's democratic primitivism into the modernist image of Whitman's ‘language experiment’ (Matthiessen 1941: 518). Whitman's modernist canonizers worked out more systematically what Whitman himself had implied rather than rigorously argued: that Leaves of Grass expresses America's deepest truths precisely because it is an experimental kind of music – a pure autonomous form that embodies its spiritual reference (‘America’) by analogy.

Whitman's modernist reinterpretation seems connected to an important structural change in the late-nineteenth-century print market, a shift towards an increasing homogenization of literary space. In the nineteenth-century literary landscape, highly dynamic cultural fields still intersected with ‘islands’ of more traditional literary communication where peer recognition continued to be dominated by external forms of validation. Romantic or mid-century literary intellectuals often combined symbolically privileged field-positions with popular success – Longfellow could be a genteel Harvard professor, an internationally respected literary artist, and a so-called ‘school-room poet’. To the degree that an increasingly dynamic print market homogenized the literary map, it became harder to combine symbolic recognition with an appeal to mass audiences.