In 1919, Canadian admirers of Walt Whitman took thecentenary of his birth as an event worth celebrating. At her summer place, BonEcho, on Mazinaw Lake in eastern Ontario, the pioneer feminist Flora MacDonald Denisonunveiled a tribute she`d had carved into granite near some Native pictographs."Old Walt," the legend ran. "Dedicated to the Democratic Idealsof Walt Whitman...." In the late 1950s, Merrill Denison, the onetimeradio playwright who made a fortune turning out commissioned histories for someof Canada`s largest corporations, gave his mother`s property to the province asa park. Once there were Whitman clubs in severalCanadian cities. But by 1992, the I 100th anniversary of the poet`sdeath, the Whitmanite ranks had thinned out considerably. To most well-readCanadians, perhaps, Whitman no longer seemed a progressive voice trumpeting thehuman spirit (though that`s how he was depicted in Beautiful Dreamers, JohnKent Harrison`s fine Canadian feature film, released in 1990) but a stalkinghorsefor republican jingoism. As Beautiful Dreamers showed, Whitmanpaid an extended visit to Canada in 1880, when he was 61, as the guest of Dr.Richard Maurice Bucke, keeper of the insane asylum at London, Ontario (who, forall the good he did for the improvement of patient care, is one of thespectacular cranks of all Canadian history). Whitman kept a journal of hisstay, and as John Robert Colombo and Cyril Greenland note in Walt Whitman`sCanada (Hounslow Press), the document has a genuine rough charm about it. Itis, after all, an old newspaper-reporter`s account, full of train schedules andnotes on crops and buildings, but with flashes of travel writing, too, as whenWhitman finds Toronto "a lively dashing place. The lake gives it itscharacter." He had less to say of Montreal or of Kingston, though hisremarks on the latter can be found, contextualized, in another new book,Written in Stone: A Kingston Reader (Quarry Press), edited by Mary Alice Downieand M. -A. Thompson. Whitman`s diary is marred, however, bythe occasional crackpot outburst, such as a paean to "the great FreePluribus Unum of America, the solid Nationality of the present and the future,the home of an improved grand race of men and women...." Greenland (a retired psychiatrist) andColombo (the prolific editor and compiler whose interests, he admits freely,have increasingly turned from literature to the paranormal) are both avidWhitman collectors. They resolved to reprint the diary, along with a greatnumber of other relevant documents (including the transcription of a seance).Black Moss Press in Windsor agreed to publish the work but later found thecosts prohibitive. "Three academic or semi-academic presses then turned usdown without even seeing the manuscript," says Colombo. So he produced thebook himself on a laser printer, making a signed limited edition of 125rectangle copies full of clear facsimiles and sadly washed-out photos, in aCerlox binding with plastic covers. This piece of electronic homespun is oneof Colombo`s most appealing productions in years, with information arrangedscrapbook fashion to show how the cult of Whitman went from one generation tothe next. It took in such disparate figures as the cartoonist J. W. Bengough(attracted to Whitman`s politics) and the painter Lawren Harris (intrigued byhis transcendentalism as Ann Davis explored recently in her Oxford UniversityPress book, The Logic of Ecstasy: Canadian Mystical Painting 1920-1940). Unfortunately, but understandably giventheir agenda, the editors don`t include Hector Charlesworth`s 1920s essay onthe Canadian Whitman cult, for Charlesworth, at least in this matter, was asceptic. He praised Whitman`s "gusto of approach to every sensation thatconstitutes human existence...." He even condemned the American roundheadswho felt that Whitman "infringed the prerogative of the writers of the OldTestament" in matters of sexuality. But he couldn`t help repeating howentirely appropriate it was that Dr. Bucke, Whitman`s greatest champion, hisliterary executor, and his first and most hagiographic biographer, was, afterall, "an alienist" - a head-shrinker. Bucke`s famous book Cosmic Consciousness,published shortly before his death in 1902, made the case for Whitman (andJesus Christ and a few others) as giant milestones in the abiding evolution ofthe human brain and spirit. Greenland postulates, in his afterword to WaltWhitman`s Canada, that even egotistical old Walt might have choked on that one.(But I doubt it.)