BOOK REVIEW : Biography Pays Homage to Walt Whitman, ‘Nation’s 1st Great Poet’ : FROM NOON TO STARRY NIGHT: A Life of Walt Whitman, <i> by Philip Callow,</i> Ivan R. Dee, $28.50; 394 pages

It is among the most famous lines in American poetry--”I am large, I contain multitudes.” This, from the penultimate section of Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” evokes succinctly the poet’s expansive side, and simultaneously the problem Whitman poses as a biographical subject. Whitman, writes novelist, poet and sometime biographer Philip Callow, was “coarse and delicate, solitary and democratic, radical and conservative, fleshy and mystical, buffalo and hermit thrush, man and woman”--which is to say most things, at one time or another, and at any given moment on his way to becoming something else.

Whitman, in a word, is elusive--because he wanted to be, in part, but also because his many sides seem perpetually to contradict one another, colliding and churning in the great rush and movement that Whitman the poet celebrated. He comes down to us whole today because “Leaves of Grass,” and particularly its cornerstone, “Song of Myself,” shows the man in seemingly unposed moments in seemingly unposed language--in poetry that was, as Whitman once suggested all good poetry should be, “simple, natural, healthy--no griffins, angels, centaurs--no hysterics or blue fire--no dyspepsia, no suicidal intentions.”

Whitman’s claim as a poet lies in his commitment to artlessness, his desire to make poetry flesh, and of flesh, poetry . . . and yet there is art in his artlessness and an ethereal quality to his sensuality. He is the biographer’s nightmare, never fixed, departing (as Whitman himself puts it) “as air . . . I effuse my flesh in eddies, and drift it in lacy jags,” and then reappearing “under your boot-soles.”

Callow does a reasonable job describing the major moments in Whitman’s life. Born on Long Island, N.Y., in 1819, Whitman was an apprentice printer by the age of 12, a published writer at 19, and at 23 the editor of a Democratic newspaper, the New York Aurora. Like many other newspapermen of that age, he changed positions frequently, becoming a well-known figure in New York, but at bottom was little more than a well-connected hack.

And yet there was something special about Whitman, too: the way he gazed at the sky for hours, the way he yearned to write for the ages, the way he dressed--for a time as a dandy, later as a workman. He sought greatness instinctively, but had no means with which to achieve it, until he came to realize, to the depths of his soul, that greatness could lie in children, in mothers, in every living and even unliving thing. “All truths wait in all things,” he would soon write. “The insignificant is as big to me as any.”

“What an immense step it seems!”--that’s Callow’s comment on the alteration Whitman undergoes between 1849, when he was a simple journeyman editor, and 1855, when he published “Leaves of Grass” and changed the face of American poetry. Yet Callow--and this is the weakest part of “From Noon to Starry Night”--has no good explanation for the change; Whitman, somehow, developed the courage and commitment to ask readers, as he did in the preface to “Leaves of Grass,” to “stand up for the stupid and crazy . . . take off your hat to nothing known or unknown, or to any man or number of men . . . re-examine all you have been told in school or church or in any book, and dismiss whatever insults your soul.”

Callow tells of Whitman’s infatuation with opera, his native thriftiness, his relationships with his carpenter father and mentally handicapped brother, and his enormous love for his mother, but for all that we never learn exactly where Whitman’s talent came from, or why it turned in one particular direction.

Callow stays away from pop psychologizing, but this book could actually use more of it. He touches frequently on Whitman’s apparent homosexuality but rather too coyly, noting the poet’s “male-female nature,” his “facing both ways,” and “his luxuriating, easeful body, tending to voluptuousness” (which Callow says encouraged Whitman “to develop a reverence for mothers which had always been latent”).

It’s easy to think while reading “From Noon to Starry Night” that Callow is so taken with Whitman he feels only occasional need to explain him, knowing that explanations can take the life out of a man. Whitman knew as much himself: “Gentlemen, to you the first honors always!” he wrote of scientists and other thinkers in “Song of Myself,” with the caveat that “Your facts are useful, and yet they are not my dwelling.”

If Callow has given us only a silhouette of Whitman in this book--not the living, singing man--he has provided a readable, thoughtful homage. History has produced no one else like him (except perhaps Allen Ginsberg), and one can only hope “From Noon to Starry Night” will inspire many people to read, or re-read, the nation’s first great poet. His voice is so full, so guileless, it’s almost impossible to resist. Callow is as much Whitman’s champion here as biographer--but of course there’s no better Whitman champion than Whitman himself, who boldly told readers he would “fetch you whoever you are flush with myself.”