Search results for ""author walt whitman"

THE NEW YORK OBSERVER: ONE OF THE TOP 10 BOOKS FOR FALL It’s no wonder that New York has always been a magnet city for writers. Manhattan is one of the most walkable cities in the world. While many novelists, poets, and essayists have enjoyed long walks in New York, not all of them have had favorable impressions. Addressing an endlessly appealing subject, Walking New York is a study of twelve American writers and several British writers who walked the streets of New York and wrote about their impressions of the city in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Seen through the eyes of Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, William Dean Howells, Jacob Riis, Henry James, Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser, James Weldon Johnson, Alfred Kazin, Elizabeth Hardwick, Colson Whitehead, and Teju Cole, almost all the works in Walking New York are about Manhattan, with only Whitman and Kazin writing about Brooklyn. Though the writers were often irritated, disturbed, and occasionally shocked by what they saw on their walks, they were still fascinated by the city William Dean Howells called “splendidly and sordidly commercial” and Cynthia Ozick called “faithfully inconstant, magnetic, man-made, unnatural—the synthetic sublime.” In this idiosyncratic guidebook to New York, celebrated writers ruminate on questions that are still hotly debated to this day: the pros and cons of capitalism and the impact of immigration. Many imply that New York is a bewildering text that is hard to make sense of. Returning to New York after an absence of two decades, Henry James loathed many things about “bristling” New York, while native New Yorker Walt Whitman both celebrated and criticized “Mannahatta” in his writings. Combining literary scholarship with urban studies, Walking New York reveals how this crowded, dirty, noisy, and sometimes ugly city gave these “restless analysts” plenty of fodder for their craft.

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The correspondence of Hannah Whitman Heyde (1823-1908), younger sister of poet Walt Whitman, provides a rare glimpse into the life of a nineteenth-century woman. Married to well-known Vermont landscape artist Charles Louis Heyde (1820-1892), Hannah documented in letters to her mother, Louisa Van Velsor Whitman (1795-1873), and other family members, her lived experience of ongoing physical and emotional abuse at the hands of her husband. Hannah has long been characterized in biographical and scholarly studies of Whitman’s family as a neurotic and a hypochondriac—a narrative promulgated by Heyde himself—but Walt Whitman carefully preserved his sister’s letters, telling his literary biographer that his intention was to document her plight. Hannah’s complete letters, gathered here for the first time and painstakingly edited and annotated by Maire Mullins, provide an important counternarrative, allowing readers insight into the life of a real nineteenth-century woman, sister, and wife to famous men, who endured and eventually survived domestic violence.

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Cultural Authority in the Age of Whitman deals with narratives of cultural legitimation in nineteenth-century US literature, in a transatlantic context. Exploring how literary professionalism shapes romantic and modern cultural space, Leypoldt traces the nineteenth-century fusion of poetic radicalism with cultural nationalism from its beginnings in transatlantic early romanticism, to the poetry and poetics of Walt Whitman, and Whitman's modernist reinvention as an icon of a native avant-garde. Whitman made cultural nationalism compatible with the rhetorical needs of professional authorship by trying to hold national authenticity and literary authority in a single poetic vision. Yet the notion that his 'language experiment' transformed essential democratic experience into a genuine American aesthetics also owes much to Whitman's retrospective canonization. What Leypoldt calls Whitmanian authority is thus a transatlantic and transhistorical discursive construct that can be approached from four angles: this book begins with an overview of transatlantic contexts such as the 19th-century literary field (Bourdieu) and the romantic turn to expressivism (Taylor); a detailed analysis of how Whitman's positions develop from the intellectual habitus and cultural criticism of Ralph Waldo Emerson follows, and in a third section Whitmanian authority is located within three conceptual fields that function as contact zones for European and American theories of culture: romantic notions of national style as a kind of music; place-centered concepts of national aesthetics; and traditional ideas about the aesthetic effects of democratic institutions. The final section, on Whitman's reinvention between the 1870s and the 1940s, discusses how the heterogeneous nineteenth-century perceptions of Whitman's work were streamlined into a modernist version of Whitman's nationalist program.

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The correspondence of Hannah Whitman Heyde (1823-1908), younger sister of poet Walt Whitman, provides a rare glimpse into the life of a nineteenth-century woman. Married to well-known Vermont landscape artist Charles Louis Heyde (1820-1892), Hannah documented in letters to her mother, Louisa Van Velsor Whitman (1795-1873), and other family members, her lived experience of ongoing physical and emotional abuse at the hands of her husband. Hannah has long been characterized in biographical and scholarly studies of Whitman’s family as a neurotic and a hypochondriac—a narrative promulgated by Heyde himself—but Walt Whitman carefully preserved his sister’s letters, telling his literary biographer that his intention was to document her plight. Hannah’s complete letters, gathered here for the first time and painstakingly edited and annotated by Maire Mullins, provide an important counternarrative, allowing readers insight into the life of a real nineteenth-century woman, sister, and wife to famous men, who endured and eventually survived domestic violence.

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Discover How Whitmans Spiritual Life and Vision Can Enlighten Your Own Whitmans collected poems and prose are not an object or icon to be gazed upon or revered but a transparency we look through to see ourselves with greater clarity, excitement, and meaning. They wake us up to our potential, to learning about and from ourselves. To experience his writing is to experience ourselves more deeply. from the Preface by Gary David Comstock Walt Whitman was the most innovative and influential poet of the nineteenth century. The self-proclaimed American Bard, Whitman challenged his contemporaries to resist conforming to society and shocked them with his embrace of the sensual. But beneath his manifesto for social revolution lies a vigorous call for spiritual revolution as well. This beautiful sampling of Whitmans most important poetry from Leaves of Grass, and selections from his prose writings, offers a glimpse into the spiritual side of his most radical themeslove for country, love for others, and love of Self. Whitman seeks to tear down the belief that the spiritual resides only in the religious and embraces the idea that nothing is more divine than humankind, nothing greater than the individual soul. Rich with passion, reverence, and wonder, this unique collection offers insight into Whitmans quest for self-discovery, which involved an ongoing mystical experience of the world. Though seemingly personal, his verse speaks to universal harmony and universal love, optimism and joy, and celebrates the outwardly mundane details of life through words electrified with love and spirit.

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Poetry has often been considered an irrational genre, more expressive than logical, more meditative than given to coherent argument. And yet, in each of the four very different poets she considers here, Helen Vendler reveals a style of thinking in operation; although they may prefer different means, she argues, all poets of any value are thinkers.The four poets taken up in this volume—Alexander Pope, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and William Butler Yeats—come from three centuries and three nations, and their styles of thinking are characteristically idiosyncratic. Vendler shows us Pope performing as a satiric miniaturizer, remaking in verse the form of the essay, Whitman writing as a poet of repetitive insistence for whom thinking must be followed by rethinking, Dickinson experimenting with plot to characterize life’s unfolding, and Yeats thinking in images, using montage in lieu of argument.With customary lucidity and spirit, Vendler traces through these poets’ lines to find evidence of thought in lyric, the silent stylistic measures representing changes of mind, the condensed power of poetic thinking. Her work argues against the reduction of poetry to its (frequently well-worn) themes and demonstrates, instead, that there is always in admirable poetry a strenuous process of thinking, evident in an evolving style—however ancient the theme—that is powerful and original.

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We live in an era defined by a sense of separation, even in the midst of networked connectivity. As cultural climates sour and divisive political structures spread, we are left wondering about our ties to each other. Consequently, there is no better time than now to reconsider ideas of unity. In The Ethics of Oneness, Jeremy David Engels reads the Bhagavad Gita alongside the works of American thinkers Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman. Drawing on this rich combination of traditions, Engels presents the notion that individuals are fundamentally interconnected in their shared divinity. In other words, everything is one. If the lessons of oneness are taken to heart, particularly as they were expressed and celebrated by Whitman, and the ethical challenges of oneness considered seriously, Engels thinks it is possible to counter the pervasive and problematic American ideals of hierarchy, exclusion, violence, and domination.

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During Walt Whitman's decade in Washington, DC, 1863-1873, he labored intensely, at times seeming to have three lives at once. He wrote the most distinguished journalism of his career; came into his own as a writer of letters; crafted memorable Civil War poetry, Drum-Taps and Sequel to Drum-Taps and later folded it into heavily revised and expanded versions of Leaves of Grass; and produced his searching but also flawed critique of American culture, Democratic Vistas. Whitman's work through the first three editions of Leaves often receives the highest praise, yet his writing in the Washington years is exceptional, too, by any reckoning--and is all the more remarkable given that he also cared for thousands of wounded and sick soldiers in Washington hospitals, serving as an attentive visitor. In addition, he served as a government clerk in various positions, most notably in the attorney general's office when much was accomplished on the road toward a multi-racial democracy including efforts to suppress the Ku Klux Klan, and much was also missed (both by the attorney general's office and by Whitman) in the efforts to advance a more just and vibrant union. This book analyses Whitman's integrated life, writings, and government work in his urban context to re-evaluate the writer and the nation's capital in a time of transformation. Drawing on an expanded Whitman corpus, including nearly 3,000 Whitman documents the author recently identified in the National Archives, Whitman in Washington demonstrates that the power of Whitman's Civil War and Reconstruction writing emerges, more fully than we could ever before have imagined, from his intimate knowledge of the capital city, its bureaucracies, and its tumultuous post-war history.

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Although the significance of Walt Whitman's thinking about African Americans and slavery to his poetry has been largely ignored by Whitman scholars, Martin Klammer argues that Leaves of Grass is a major text dealing with race relations in the mid-nineteenth century. Through a close historical analysis, Klammer reveals how the evolution of Whitman's attitudes—from pro-slavery to "Free Soilism" to a deep sympathy for slaves—parallels and inspires his emergence as a poet from the beginning of his career through the 1855 edition. The issue of slavery continually influenced Whitman's work, culminating in 1854 when public reaction to two national developments on the slavery question—the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act and the case of the fugitive slave Anthony Burns—suddenly created an audience more receptive to Whitman's views and compelled him to revise and publish the poems known as Leaves of Grass. At the heart of these poems is a radically new and sympathetic view of African Americans and of their significance to Whitman's vision of a multiracial, egalitarian society. While previous critics have described Whitman's puzzling, seemingly contradictory views on slavery, no other study has so thoroughly investigated Whitman and the question of slavery, nor understood the importance of slavery to Whitman's development as a poet.

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In "Mystical Discourse" D.J. Moores builds on the work of current transatlantic scholarship in a lucid analysis of the connections between William Wordsworth and Walt Whitman. As he demonstrates, the "transatlantic bridge" between both poets lies in their privileging of a type of mystical language he calls "cosmic" rhetoric, which served the function of ideological resistance, as it enabled them to rebel against Enlightenment modes of thinking and being. In a thorough engagement with the work of Wordsworth and Whitman, Moores shows that the cosmic rhetoric of both writers involves a subversive reorientation towards self and society, nature and God, and knowledge and religion, as well as a radical revisioning of language and poetics.

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We live in an era defined by a sense of separation, even in the midst of networked connectivity. As cultural climates sour and divisive political structures spread, we are left wondering about our ties to each other. Consequently, there is no better time than now to reconsider ideas of unity. In The Ethics of Oneness, Jeremy David Engels reads the Bhagavad Gita alongside the works of American thinkers Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman. Drawing on this rich combination of traditions, Engels presents the notion that individuals are fundamentally interconnected in their shared divinity. In other words, everything is one. If the lessons of oneness are taken to heart, particularly as they were expressed and celebrated by Whitman, and the ethical challenges of oneness considered seriously, Engels thinks it is possible to counter the pervasive and problematic American ideals of hierarchy, exclusion, violence, and domination.

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An investigation of how American poetry since Whitman makes its beginnings, with what means and to which political and aesthetic ends, and how it addresses fundamental questions about what the future is and how it may be affectednow. Although issues of futurity have become more and more central to literary and cultural studies in recent years, especially in environmental criticism, no scholarly work has yet addressed the topic of beginnings in American poetryin sufficient scope or detail or with adequate theoretical background. This book is a study of how beginnings are made in American poetry, and to what ends. It borrows Walt Whitman's term "future-founding" to establish a theory ofpoetic beginnings that asks how poetry relates to notions of the future and how it imagines, constructs, and influences this future in the present. Furthermore, it seeks to change the way literary scholars think about futurity with regard to American poetry: they most often conceive of it in terms of newness alone, yet a deeper theorization of beginnings must open up new ways of understanding the complexities of this relation. With chapters on Whitman, William Carlos Williams, Langston Hughes, Muriel Rukeyser, Allen Ginsberg, and future-founding poetry after 9/11, this book explains how American poetry makes its beginnings, with what means and to which political and aesthetic ends, and how it addresses fundamental questions about what the future is and how it may be affected now. Sascha Pöhlmann is Associate Professor of American Literary History at Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Munich.

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When a poet addresses a living person--whether friend or enemy, lover or sister--we recognize the expression of intimacy. But what impels poets to leap across time and space to speak to invisible listeners, seeking an ideal intimacy--George Herbert with God, Walt Whitman with a reader in the future, John Ashbery with the Renaissance painter Francesco Parmigianino? In Invisible Listeners, Helen Vendler argues that such poets must invent the language that will enact, on the page, an intimacy they lack in life. Through brilliantly insightful and gracefully written readings of these three great poets over three different centuries, Vendler maps out their relationships with their chosen listeners. For his part, Herbert revises the usual "vertical" address to God in favor of a "horizontal" one-addressing God as a friend. Whitman hovers in a sometimes erotic, sometimes quasi-religious language in conceiving the democratic camerado, who will, following Whitman's example, find his true self. And yet the camerado will be replaced, in Whitman's verse, by the ultimate invisible listener, Death. Ashbery, seeking a fellow artist who believes that art always distorts what it represents, finds he must travel to the remote past. In tones both tender and skeptical he addresses Parmigianino, whose extraordinary self-portrait in a convex mirror furnishes the poet with both a theory and a precedent for his own inventions. By creating the forms and speech of ideal intimacy, these poets set forth the possibility of a more complete and satisfactory human interchange--an ethics of relation that is uncoerced, understanding, and free.

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A groundbreaking new history of urban cruising through the lenses of urban poets The Poetics of Cruising explores the relationship between cruising, photography, and the visual in the work of leading poets, from Walt Whitman in the nineteenth century to Eileen Myles in the twenty-first. What is it that happens, asks Jack Parlett, and what is it that is sought, in this often transient moment of perception we call cruising, this perceptual arena where acts of looking between strangers are intensified and eroticized? Parlett believes that this moment is not only optical in nature but visual: a mode of looking that warrants comparison with the ways in which we behold still and moving images. Whether it’s Whitman’s fixation with daguerreotypes, Langston Hughes’s hybrid photographic works, or Frank O’Hara’s love of Hollywood movie stars, argues Parlett, the history of poets cruising abounds with this intermingling between the verbal and the visual, the passing and the fixed. To look at someone in the act of cruising, this history suggests, is to capture, consider, and aestheticize, amid the flux and instantaneity of urban time. But it is also to reveal the ambivalence at the heart of this erotic search, where power may be unevenly distributed across glances, and gendered and racialized bodies are marked. Thus, in identifying for the first time this confluence of cruising, poetry, and visual culture, Parlett concludes that the visual erotic economy associated with gay cruising today, exemplified by the photographic grid of an app like Grindr, is not a uniquely contemporary phenomenon. Innovative, astute, and highly readable, and drawing on compelling archival material, The Poetics of Cruising is a must for scholars of queer and LGBTQ literature and culture, modern and contemporary poetry, visual studies, and the history of sexuality.

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A groundbreaking new history of urban cruising through the lenses of urban poets The Poetics of Cruising explores the relationship between cruising, photography, and the visual in the work of leading poets, from Walt Whitman in the nineteenth century to Eileen Myles in the twenty-first. What is it that happens, asks Jack Parlett, and what is it that is sought, in this often transient moment of perception we call cruising, this perceptual arena where acts of looking between strangers are intensified and eroticized? Parlett believes that this moment is not only optical in nature but visual: a mode of looking that warrants comparison with the ways in which we behold still and moving images. Whether it’s Whitman’s fixation with daguerreotypes, Langston Hughes’s hybrid photographic works, or Frank O’Hara’s love of Hollywood movie stars, argues Parlett, the history of poets cruising abounds with this intermingling between the verbal and the visual, the passing and the fixed. To look at someone in the act of cruising, this history suggests, is to capture, consider, and aestheticize, amid the flux and instantaneity of urban time. But it is also to reveal the ambivalence at the heart of this erotic search, where power may be unevenly distributed across glances, and gendered and racialized bodies are marked. Thus, in identifying for the first time this confluence of cruising, poetry, and visual culture, Parlett concludes that the visual erotic economy associated with gay cruising today, exemplified by the photographic grid of an app like Grindr, is not a uniquely contemporary phenomenon. Innovative, astute, and highly readable, and drawing on compelling archival material, The Poetics of Cruising is a must for scholars of queer and LGBTQ literature and culture, modern and contemporary poetry, visual studies, and the history of sexuality.

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Life in the United States today is shot through with uncertainty: about our jobs, our mortgaged houses, our retirement accounts, our health, our marriages, and the future that awaits our children. For many, our lives, public and private, have come to feel like the discomfort and unease you experience the day or two before you get really sick. Our life is a scratchy throat. John Marsh offers an unlikely remedy for this widespread malaise: the poetry of Walt Whitman. Mired in personal and political depression, Marsh turned to Whitman--and it saved his life. In Walt We Trust: How a Queer Socialist Poet Can Save America from Itself is a book about how Walt Whitman can save America's life, too. Marsh identifies four sources for our contemporary malaise (death, money, sex, democracy) and then looks to a particular Whitman poem for relief from it. He makes plain what, exactly, Whitman wrote and what he believed by showing how they emerged from Whitman's life and times, and by recreating the places and incidents (crossing Brooklyn ferry, visiting wounded soldiers in hospitals) that inspired Whitman to write the poems. Whitman, Marsh argues, can show us how to die, how to accept and even celebrate our (relatively speaking) imminent death. Just as important, though, he can show us how to live: how to have better sex, what to do about money, and, best of all, how to survive our fetid democracy without coming away stinking ourselves. The result is a mix of biography, literary criticism, manifesto, and a kind of self-help you're unlikely to encounter anywhere else.

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As he was turning forty, Walt Whitman wrote twelve poems in a small handmade book he entitled “Live Oak, With Moss.” The poems were intensely private reflections on his attraction to and affection for other men. They were also Whitman’s most adventurous explorations of the theme of same-sex love, composed decades before the word “homosexual” came into use. This revolutionary, extraordinarily beautiful and passionate cluster of poems was never published by Whitman and has remained unknown to the general public—until now. New York Times bestselling and Caldecott Award–winning illustrator Brian Selznick offers a provocative visual narrative of “Live Oak, With Moss,” and Whitman scholar Karen Karbiener reconstructs the story of the poetic cluster’s creation and destruction. Walt Whitman’s reassembled, reinterpreted Live Oak, With Moss serves as a source of inspiration and a cause for celebration.

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“Whatever satisfies the soul is truth.” — Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass Leaves of Grass is a timeless collection of poems and essays penned by influential nineteenth-century writer Walt Whitman. This profound compilation explores topics such as nature, mysticism, mortality, transcendentalism, and democracy. Inspired by personal experiences and observations, Whitman spent almost four decades piecing together the complete work, sharing societal ideals and epiphanies about life that still resonate with readers today.

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First published in 1855 and extended by the author over the course of more than three decades, Leaves of Grass embodies Walt Whitman’s lifetime ambition to create a new voice that could capture the spirit and vibrancy of the young American nation, while celebrating at the same time “Nature without check with original energy”. Famously written in free verse and brimming with sensuous imagery and an unbridled love of nature and life in all its forms, and containing celebrated poems such as the ebullient ‘Song of Myself’ – described by Jay Parini as the greatest American poem ever written – and the elegiac ‘When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d’, Leaves of Grass is not only the finest achievement of a highly unique poet, but a founding text for American literature and modern poetry. Considered one of the most influential poets in American literature and a pioneer of free verse, Walt Whitman (1819–92) was also a prolific writer of essays and articles. Controversial in its time, his sprawling collection Leaves of Grass is regarded as his magnum opus.

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General Series Editors: Gay Wilson Allen and Sculley Bradley Originally published between 1961 and 1984, and now available in paperback for the first time, the critically acclaimed Collected Writings of Walt Whitman captures every facet of one of America's most important poets. Daybooks and Notebooks is an invaluable source for reference on Whitman's daily activities. This sixteen-year record supplements the biographical information provided in the six volumes of Whitman's Correspondence, functioning as an account book, diary, journal, commonplace book, and notebook all in one. When Whitman began to keep them, the Daybooks were a personal record of predominantly business matters. As William White wrote in the introduction, “He was not only the author but the publisher of his works: he was likewise his own business manager, ship, and promoter. Whatever records he kept, of his sales and distribution, of printing and binding figures, of poetry and prose he sent to newspapers and magazines . . . he entered on the right-hand pages.” Volume III thus offers a rare look at Whitman as a businessman, tending as much to practical matters as to art.

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As he was turning forty, Walt Whitman wrote twelve poems in a small handmade book he entitled “Live Oak, With Moss.” The poems were intensely private reflections on his attraction to and affection for other men. They were also Whitman’s most adventurous explorations of the theme of same-sex love, composed decades before the word “homosexual” came into use. This revolutionary, extraordinarily beautiful and passionate cluster of poems was never published by Whitman and has remained unknown to the general public—until now. New York Times bestselling and Caldecott Award–winning illustrator Brian Selznick offers a provocative visual narrative of “Live Oak, With Moss,” and Whitman scholar Karen Karbiener reconstructs the story of the poetic cluster’s creation and destruction. Walt Whitman’s reassembled, reinterpreted Live Oak, With Moss serves as a source of inspiration and a cause for celebration.

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General Series Editors Gay Wilson Allen and Sculley Bradley Originally published between 1961 and 1984, and now available in paperback for the first time, the critically acclaimed Collected Writings of Walt Whitman captures every facet of one of America's most important poets. In discussing letter-writing, Whitman made his own views clear. Simplicity and naturalness were his guidelines. “I like my letters to be personal—very personal—and then stop.“ The six volumes in The Correspondence comprise nearly 3,000 letters written over a half century, revealing Whitman the person as no other documents can. Volume II presents the poet during the years he was developing an international reputation. As they came to understand one of the most important American voices of the century, European writers such as Edward Dowden and John Addington Symonds began to correspond with Whitman. English author Anne Gilchrist wrote her first impassioned love letter to the American poet in 1871. Whitman characteristically waited six weeks before he replied, and his subsequent handling of the unwanted ardor proves a fascinating study of a lover who feared to be loved.

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Wise Words to Color offers a variety of Instagram-ready quotations and designs to color, guaranteed to inspire any recent graduate. With short words of advice from classic authors including Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman, this book is a keepsake just waiting for your creative touch. Printed on heavy stock with intricate black-and-white interiors and a distinctive uncoated cover with specs, this book is a beautiful gift-or a pick-me-up for yourself!

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General Series Editors: Gay Wilson Allen and Sculley Bradley Originally published between 1961 and 1984, and now available in paperback for the first time, the critically acclaimed Collected Writings of Walt Whitman captures every facet of one of America's most important poets. Daybooks and Notebooks is an invaluable source for reference on Whitman’s daily activities. This sixteen-year record supplements the biographical information provided in the six volumes of Whitman's Correspondence, functioning as an account book, diary, journal, commonplace book, and notebook all in one. When Whitman began to keep them, the Daybooks were a personal record of predominantly business matters. As William White wrote in the introduction, “He was not only the author but the publisher of his works: he was likewise his own business manager, ship, and promoter. Whatever records he kept, of his sales and distribution, of printing and binding figures, of poetry and prose he sent to newspapers and magazines . . . he entered on the right-hand pages.” Volume II thus offers a rare look at Whitman as a businessman, tending as much to practical matters as to art.

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Walt Whitman and Louisa May Alcott meet the horrors of the Civil War as they minister to its casualtiesAfter the Union Army’s defeat at Fredericksburg in 1862, Walt Whitman and Louisa May Alcott converge on Washington to nurse the sick, wounded, and dying. Whitman was a man of many contradictions: egocentric yet compassionate, impatient with religiosity yet moved by the spiritual in all humankind, bigoted yet soon to become known as the great poet of democracy. Alcott was an intense, intellectual, independent woman, an abolitionist and suffragist, who was compelled by financial circumstance to publish saccharine magazine stories yet would go on to write the enduring and beloved Little Women. As Lock captures the musicality of their unique voices and their encounters with luminaries ranging from Lincoln to battlefield photographer Mathew Brady to reformer Dorothea Dix, he deftly renders the war’s impact on their personal and artistic development.Inspired by Whitman’s poem “The Wound-Dresser” and Alcott’s Hospital Sketches, the ninth stand-alone book in The American Novels series is a masterful dual portrait of two iconic authors who took different paths toward chronicling a country beset by prejudice and at war with itself.

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Howard Mansfield muses on people, places, and life in his own hometown of Hancock, New Hampshire. “Whenever Howard Mansfield writes about the world around him, I pay attention.” Mel Allen, editor, Yankee magazine “It’s as if Walt Whitman had come out of the grave in the persona of Howard Mansfield for one more epic. I highly recommend this “small book” full of big ideas.” Ernest Hebert, prize-winning author of Howard Elman’s Farewell, The Old American, and nine other novels

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General Series Editors: Gay Wilson Allen and Sculley Bradley Originally published between 1961 and 1984, and now available in paperback for the first time, the critically acclaimed Collected Writings of Walt Whitman captures every facet of one of America's most important poets. Daybooks and Notebooks is an invaluable source for reference on Whitman's daily activities. This sixteen-year record supplements the biographical information provided in the six volumes of Whitman’s Correspondence, functioning as an account book, diary, journal, commonplace book, and notebook all in one. When Whitman began to keep them, the Daybooks were a personal record of predominantly business matters. As William White wrote in the introduction, “He was not only the author but the publisher of his works: he was likewise his own business manager, ship, and promoter. Whatever records he kept, of his sales and distribution, of printing and binding figures, of poetry and prose he sent to newspapers and magazines . . . he entered on the right-hand pages.” Volume I thus offers a rare look at Whitman as a businessman, tending as much to practical matters as to art.

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General Series Editors: Gay Wilson Allen and Sculley Bradley Originally published between 1961 and 1984, and now available in paperback for the first time, the critically acclaimed Collected Writings of Walt Whitman captures every facet of one of America's most important poets. In discussing letter-writing, Whitman made his own views clear. Simplicity and naturalness were his guidelines. “I like my letters to be personal—very personal—and then stop.” The six volumes in The Correspondence comprise nearly 3,000 letters written over a half century, revealing Whitman the person as no other documents can. This supplement updates the Correspondence with nearly 100 letters that appeared after the publication of the first five volumes. Featured in this volume is the earliest known extant letter from the poet, written in 1841, as well as many others documenting Whitman's personal relationships and publishing ventures, both in America and abroad. Volume VI also includes a detailed analysis of Whitman's income and finances over the last twenty-six years of his life. With a list of corrections and additions to Volumes I–V and a Composite Index of all Whitman's letters, this volume completes the definitive edition of the correspondence of America's greatest poet.

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A collectible new Penguin Classics series: stunning, clothbound editions of ten favourite poets, which present each poet's most famous book of verse as it was originally published. Designed by the acclaimed Coralie Bickford-Smith and beautifully set, these slim, A format volumes are the ultimate gift for poetry lovers. In 1855 Walt Whitman published his first collection of poetry, Leaves of Grass. The volume received great praise from leading Transcendentalist poet Ralph Waldo Emerson. This encouraged what would become a lifelong project as Whitman expanded and rewrote the volume until his death in 1892. Whitman's innovative use of free verse and the quotidian achieved his aim of reaching out to the everyday American. This edition, based on the earliest published version of 1855, features Whitman's most famous poem 'Song of Myself', an American epic inspired by his personal experiences.

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Pocos poetas poseen una voz tan personal, poderosa e influyente como Walt Whitman. Así lo afirma Juan Marqués en su presentación: el poeta de WestHills consiguió, sencillamente, decirlo todo. Whitman inauguró un mundo, afirmó o insinuó en él todo lo que deseaba o necesitaba afirmar o insinuar delnuestro y después lo clausuró, obteniendo y brindándonos un producto perfecto, macizo, sin grietas. Lo que cantaba de sí mismo lo cantó de todos nosotros,lo que dijo de América lo extendía a todos los rincones del universo.Hemos seleccionado para esta antología veintiséis poemas del célebre Canto de mí mismo, con una nueva traducción de Antonio Rivero Taravillo y unimpresionante trabajo gráfico de Kike de la Rubia.Ese Walt Whitman del que le hablé es lo que más me interesa actualmente. Acabo de leer su segundo libro y me ha sentado mejor que ningún otro libro en mucho tiempo.Henry David Thoreau

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It would have pleased Walt Whitman, that poet of urban motion, to envision his words coursing by electrified rail through a diverse, global city of 8 million souls. Since 1992, with the presentation of an excerpt from Walt Whitman’s “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” the Poetry in Motion program—co-sponsored by MTA Arts & Design and the Poetry Society of America—has brought more than 200 poems, in whole or in part, before the eyes of millions of subway and bus riders, offering a moment of timelessness in the busy day. The poems are by an eclectic mix of writers, from Sappho and Sylvia Plath to W. H. Auden, Rita Dove, Seamus Heaney, Nikki Giovanni, Patrick Phillips, and Aracelis Girmay. Each of the 100 poems gathered here has, in sixteen lines or less, the power to enliven the quotidian, provide nourishment for the soul, and enchant even the youngest among us.

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In 1855 Walt Whitman published Leaves of Grass, the work which defined him as one of America's most influential voices, and which he added to throughout his life. A collection of astonishing originality and intensity, it spoke of politics, sexual emancipation and what it meant to be an American. From the joyful 'Song of Myself' and 'I Sing the Body Electric' to the elegiac 'When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd', Whitman's art fuses oratory, journalism and song in a vivid celebration of humanity.

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General Series Editors: Gay Wilson Allen and Sculley Bradley Originally published between 1961 and 1984, and now available in paperback for the first time, the critically acclaimed Collected Writings of Walt Whitman captures every facet of one of America's most important poets. In discussing letter-writing, Whitman made his own views clear. Simplicity and naturalness were his guidelines. “I like my letters to be personal—very personal—and then stop.“ The six volumes in The Correspondence comprise nearly 3,000 letters written over a half century, revealing Whitman the person as no other documents can. This volume, together with Volume IV, covers the last seven years of Whitman's life, giving an almost day-by-day account of his long struggle with various ailments, his stoical acceptance of constant pain, but also his continuing energy. This period saw his supervision and publication of two complete editions of Leaves of Grass, as well as November Boughs and Good-bye My Fancy. Although Whitman himself admitted that many of his later poems were “pot boilers,” designed primarily to make money, his recognition and popularity continued to grow as his health declined. His poems were printed seemingly everywhere and the volume of critical commentary increased. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Whitman did not suffer from neglect of indifference.

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''Remarkable... entertaining... deft... moving... refreshing''Daily Telegraph''Textured literary portraits of the masculine mind and body''Raymond Antrobus, author of The Perseverance''Impeccably well researched and hugely enjoyable''Nicole Flattery, author of Nothing SpecialIn October 1960, James Baldwin and John Cheever spoke on a panel together at San Francisco State College. The troubled state of American society was under discussion, which Baldwin incisively diagnosed as a ''failure of the masculine sensibility''. Strange Relations explores this crisis in mid-century masculinity and the lives and works of four bisexual writers who fought to express and embody alternate possibilities. Building on Walt Whitman''s philosophy of the love between men, Ralf Webb considers the ways in which Tennessee Williams and Carson McCullers, as well as Cheever and Baldwin, resisted i

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General Series Editors: Gay Wilson Allen and Sculley Bradley Originally published between 1961 and 1984, and now available in paperback for the first time, the critically acclaimed Collected Writings of Walt Whitman captures every facet of one of America's most important poets. The two-volume set of Prose Works 1892 proves that Whitman's prose has a quality no less original and distinctive than his poetry. Originally written and published as newspaper dispatches, Specimen Days is a collection of Whitman’s on-the-spot notes of his experiences as a volunteer nurse in the hospitals in and around Washington during the Civil War. It contains, too, his nature studies, jotted down at the Stafford Farm near Camden during the years of convalescence after his paralysis in 1873. In these records of his observations, Whitman’s love and devoted care of the individual soldiers overshadow his concern for the course of the war itself and his interest in its major personalities. He sees, above all else, the wounded men in front of him, and these he describes in the simple, direct language that unmistakably marks his poetry as well.

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General Series Editors: Gay Wilson Allen and Sculley Bradley Originally published between 1961 and 1984, and now available in paperback for the first time, the critically acclaimed Collected Writings of Walt Whitman captures every facet of one of America's most important poets. In discussing letter-writing, Whitman made his own views clear. Simplicity and naturalness were his guidelines. “I like my letters to be personal—very personal—and then stop.” This collection of nearly 3,000 letters written over a half century reveals Whitman the man as no other documents can. Volume I includes the poet’s correspondence from Washington, DC, during the Civil War, where he nursed wounded and dying soldiers. Volume II presents the poet during the years he was developing an international reputation. As they came to understand one of the most important American voices of the century, European writers such as Edward Dowden and John Addington Symonds began to correspond with Whitman. Volume III covers the years in which Whitman radiated a personal and artistic magnetism, despite the paralysis that struck him in 1873. This period was full of important events, including the attempted censoring of Leaves of Grass, Whitman’s renewed friendship with William D. O’Connor, and the arrival in America of Whitman’s unrequited lover, Anne Gilchrist. Volumes IV and V cover the last seven years of Whitman’s life, giving an almost day-by-day account of his long struggle with various ailments, his stoical acceptance of constant pain, but also his continuing energy. Volume VI offers updates, corrections, and an index to the preceding volumes in the set.

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General Series Editors: Gay Wilson Allen and Sculley Bradley Originally published between 1961 and 1984, and now available in paperback for the first time, the critically acclaimed Collected Writings of Walt Whitman captures every facet of one of America's most important poets. The two-volume set of Prose Works 1892 proves that Whitman’s prose has a quality no less original and distinctive than his poetry. Volume II of Prose Works 1892 contains three of Whitman’s prose collections, Collect, November Boughs, and Good-Bye My Fancy. Whitman’s thoughts on a wide variety of topics are laid out in such essays as “Death of Abraham Lincoln,” “Some War Memoranda,” and “American National Literature.” Seven pieces not included in the original 1892 edition of the Complete Prose Works are also presented here, including “A Backward Glance O’er Travel’d Roads.“ In his preface, Stovall describes why the pieces were not part of Whitman’s printing and lays out his reasons for including them in this volume.

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General Series Editors: Gay Wilson Allen and Sculley Bradley Originally published between 1961 and 1984, and now available in paperback for the first time, the critically acclaimed Collected Writings of Walt Whitman captures every facet of one of America’s most important poets. In discussing letter-writing, Whitman made his own views clear. Simplicity and naturalness were his guidelines. “I like my letters to be personal—very personal—and then stop.” The six volumes in The Correspondence comprise nearly 3,000 letters written over a half century, revealing Whitman the person as no other documents can. Volume I includes the poet’s correspondence from Washington, DC, during the Civil War, where he nursed wounded and dying soldiers. In letters to his mother, Whitman describes the suffering and sorrow he encountered in unsanitary hospitals. He wrote to the parents of soldiers and offered hope—or consolation at the loss of an unsung hero. Soldiers who recovered and left the hospitals often wrote to Whitman, and he replied with friendly advice and paternal solicitude. As Whitman himself admitted, rarely was his heart so engaged as in these hospital scenes and war letters, which, like his greatest poems, reflect his characteristic themes—love and death.

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Taking Walt Whitman's Civil War poems as an inspiration, Rob Halpern's Music for Porn moves across the landscape of battlefields and homoerotic affect in an encompassing engagement of desire and death. Halpern work, constructed of poetry and lyric prose, evinces a world in which the physical and linguistic body are permeated by, and implicated in, the globalized maneuvers of modern warfare and capitalist endeavor.

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Mark Doty has always felt haunted by Walt Whitman’s bold, new American voice, and by his equally radical claims about body and soul and what it means to be a self. In What Is the Grass, Doty – a poet, a lover of men, a New Yorker, and an American – keeps company with Whitman and his mutable, landmark work, Leaves of Grass, tracing the resonances between his own experience and the legendary poet’s life and work.What is it, then, between us? Whitman asks. Doty’s answer is to explore spaces tied to Whitman’s life and spaces where he finds the poet’s ghost, meditating on desire, love, and the mysterious wellsprings of the poet’s enduring work. How does a voice survive death? What Is the Grass is a conversation across time and space, a study of the astonishment one poet finds in the accomplishment of another, and an attempt to grasp Whitman’s deeply hopeful vision of humanity.

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''I spring from the pages into your arms''Walt Whitman''s Leaves of Grass stands as one of the most influential and innovative literary works of the last two hundred years. Widely credited as the originator of free verse in English, Whitman abandoned the rules of traditional poetry--breaking the standard metred line, discarding the obligatory rhyming scheme, and using the emerging American vernacular with the formal precedents of the past while adopting the vernacular rhythms of his emergent American democracy. Most currently available texts reproduce the poetry from the Deathbed edition of Leaves, first published in 1892. Often obscured by the near-ubiquitous reprinting of this final edition, however, is the elaborate fluidity and daring of the various previous editions of Leaves. After the book''s initial publication in June 1855, Whitman revised and expanded the project a further seven times, with subsequent editions appearing in 1856, 1860, 1867, 1870-71, 1876, 1881-82, and at inte

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