Download or read book Walt Whitman and the American Reader written by Ezra Greenspan and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1990-10-26 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A far-ranging study of Whitman as a model of the nineteenth-century American writer.
Download or read book On Whitman written by C. K. Williams and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2017-01-31 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, Pulitzer Prize–winning poet C. K. Williams sets aside the mass of biography and literary criticism that has accumulated around Walt Whitman and attempts to go back to Leaves of Grass as he first encountered it—to explore why Whitman's epic "continues to inspire and sometimes daunt" him. The result is a personal reassessment and appreciation of one master poet by another, as well as an unconventional and brilliant introduction to Whitman. Beautifully written and rich with insight, this is a book that refreshes our ability to see Whitman in all his power.
Download or read book Walt Whitman s America written by David S. Reynolds and published by Vintage. This book was released on 1996-03-19 with total page 705 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Bancroft Prize and the Ambassador Book Award and Finalist for the National for the Book Critics Circle Award In his poetry Walt Whitman set out to encompass all of America and in so doing heal its deepening divisions. This magisterial biography demonstrates the epic scale of his achievement, as well as the dreams and anxieties that impelled it, for it places the poet securely within the political and cultural context of his age. Combing through the full range of Whitman's writing, David Reynolds shows how Whitman gathered inspiration from every stratum of nineteenth-century American life: the convulsions of slavery and depression; the raffish dandyism of the Bowery "b'hoys"; the exuberant rhetoric of actors, orators, and divines. We see how Whitman reconciled his own sexuality with contemporary social mores and how his energetic courtship of the public presaged the vogues of advertising and celebrity. Brilliantly researched, captivatingly told, Walt Whitman's America is a triumphant work of scholarship that breathes new life into the biographical genre.
Download or read book A Reader s Guide to Walt Whitman written by Gay Wilson Allen and published by Syracuse University Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Author of the biography of Whitman and several other books about the poet, general coeditor of The Collected Writings, and for 25 years the leading scholar of Leaves of Grass, Allen has now produced a critical guide for an intelligent reader's analysis and evaluation of current interpretations and approaches to Whitman's poetry. Its five sections are concerned with: a) the Whitman man-or-beast myth; 2) the 'long foreground' to the Leaves; 3) the nine editions, 1855-1892, of Whitman's book...; 4) the central themes or subject matter that give it unity, and the views of critics...; and 5) its form and structure as seen in a dozen individual lyrics. The result is a useful, valuable, and even remarkable capstone to a long career devoted to the study of 'A Bible for Democracy' (Whitman's phrase for Leaves of Grass).
Download or read book E Entertainment written by Kate Durbin and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "E! Entertainment sparkles with the static of TV personalities, the privileged dramas of MTV's The Hills and Bravo's Real Housewives, and the public tragedies of Amanda Knox and Anna Nicole Smith. Durbin traces the migratory patterns of the flightiest members of our televised demimonde, from the vacant bedrooms of the Playboy Mansion to the modern gothic of Kim Kardashian's fairytale wedding, rendering a fabulous, fallen world in a language of diamond-studded lavishness."--Page [4] of cover.
Download or read book Walt Whitman and the Culture of American Celebrity written by David Haven Blake and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2008-10-01 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is the relationship between poetry and fame? What happens to a reader's experience when a poem invokes its author's popularity? Is there a meaningful connection between poetry and advertising, between the rhetoric of lyric and the rhetoric of hype? One of the first full-scale treatments of celebrity in nineteenth-century America, this book examines Walt Whitman's lifelong interest in fame and publicity. Making use of notebooks, photographs, and archival sources, David Haven Blake provides a groundbreaking history of the rise of celebrity culture in the United States. He sees Leaves of Grass alongside the birth of commercial advertising and the nation's growing obsession with the lives of the famous and the renowned. As authors, lecturers, politicians, entertainers, and clergymen vied for popularity, Whitman developed a form of poetry that routinely promoted and, indeed, celebrated itself. Walt Whitman and the Culture of American Celebrity proposes a fundamentally new way of thinking about a seminal American poet and a major national icon.
Download or read book To Walt Whitman America written by Kenneth M. Price and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2005-10-12 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Walt Whitman "is America," according to Ezra Pound. More than a century after his death, Whitman's name regularly appears in political speeches, architectural inscriptions, television programs, and films, and it adorns schools, summer camps, truck stops, corporate centers, and shopping malls. In an analysis of Whitman as a quintessential American icon, Kenneth Price shows how his ubiquity and his extraordinarily malleable identity have contributed to the ongoing process of shaping the character of the United States. Price examines Whitman's own writings as well as those of writers who were influenced by him, paying particular attention to Whitman's legacies for an ethnically and sexually diverse America. He focuses on fictional works by Edith Wharton, D. H. Lawrence, John Dos Passos, Ishmael Reed, and Gloria Naylor, among others. In Price's study, Leaves of Grass emerges as a living document accruing meanings that evolve with time and with new readers, with Whitman and his words regularly pulled into debates over immigration, politics, sexuality, and national identity. As Price demonstrates, Whitman is a recurring starting point, a provocation, and an irresistible, rewritable text for those who reinvent the icon in their efforts to remake America itself.
Download or read book Walt Whitman Speaks His Final Thoughts on Life Writing Spirituality and the Promise of America written by Walt Whitman and published by Library of America. This book was released on 2019-04-23 with total page 155 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For the Whitman bicentennial, a delightful keepsake edition of the incomparable wisdom of America's greatest poet, distilled from his fascinating late-in-life conversations with Horace Traubel. Toward the end of his life, Walt Whitman was visited almost daily at his home in Camden, New Jersey, by the young poet and social reformer Horace Traubel. After each visit, Traubel meticulously recorded their conversation, transcribing with such sensitivity that Whitman’s friend John Burroughs remarked that he felt he could almost hear the poet breathing. In Walt Whitman Speaks, acclaimed author Brenda Wineapple draws from Traubel’s extensive interviews an extraordinary gathering of Whitman’s observations that conveys the core of his ethos and vision. Here is Whitman the sage, champion of expansiveness and human freedom. Here, too, is the poet’s more personal side—his vivid memories of Thoreau, Emerson, and Lincoln, his literary judgments on writers such as Shakespeare, Goethe, and Tolstoy, and his expressions of hope in the democratic promise of the nation he loved. The result is a keepsake edition to touch the soul, capturing the distilled wisdom of America’s greatest poet.
Download or read book Who Was Walt Whitman written by Kirsten Anderson and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2021-02-02 with total page 112 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How did a New York printer become one of the most influential poets of all time? Find out in this addition to the Who HQ library! Walt Whitman was a printer, journalist, editor, and schoolteacher. But today, he's recognized as one of America's founding poets, a man who changed American literature forever. Throughout his life, Walt journeyed everywhere, from New York to New Orleans, Washington D.C. to Denver, taking in all that America had to offer. With the Civil War approaching, he saw a nation deeply divided, but he also understood the power of words to inspire unity. So in 1855, Walt published a short collection of poems, Leaves of Grass, a book about the America he saw and believed in. Though hated and misunderstood by many at the time, Walt's writing introduced an entirely new writing style: one that broke forms, and celebrated the common man, human body, and the diversity of America. Generations later, readers can still find themselves in Whitman's words, and recognize the America he depicts. Who Was Walt Whitman? follows his remarkable journey from a young New York printer to one of America's most beloved literary figures.
Download or read book The Hatred of Poetry written by Ben Lerner and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2016-06-07 with total page 97 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The novelist and poet Ben Lerner argues that our hatred of poetry is ultimately a sign of its nagging relevance"--
Download or read book Leaves of Grass written by Walt Whitman and published by . This book was released on 1855 with total page 116 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Walt Whitman written by Walt Whitman and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2012 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Walt Whitman was a poetic Visionary. He published the first edition of this monumental work in 1855 and began his magnum opus with the words, "America does not repel the past of what it has produced." He asserted in his declaration: America is "essentially the greatest poem." And he qualified this remark by stating that the "genius of the United States," that which is at the core, the essence of the poem of America, is "always most in the common people." Whitman wrote for and about the common people, and wanted his work to somehow bring about a political renewal that would truly represent the grand Idea of democracy. In this book Whitman overturns centuries of Western political and social thought. Whitman's democratic vision was something so unprecedented in so many ways that his reception at first could be characterized as utter incomprehension. It is believed that only a couple hundred people, at most, read the original 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass and many of these readers did not know what to make of the book. Some people were completely outraged and offended. Others were enraptured. Whitman was the self appointed poet-prophet of America and created, where he saw a lack, a new democratic religious understanding for the modern world.
Download or read book Walt Whitman Selected Poems written by Walt Whitman and published by Library of America. This book was released on 2003-01-27 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: American literature and culture are inconceivable without the towering presence of Walt Whitman. Expansive, ecstatic, original in ways that continue to startle and to elicit new discoveries, Whitman’s poetry is a testament to the surging energies of 19th-century America and a monument to the transforming power of literary genius. His incantatory rhythms, revolutionary sense of Eros, and generous, all-embracing vision invite renewed wonder at each reading. Although he has been a defining influence for many poets—Garcia Lorca, Fernando Pessoa, Robinson Jeffers, and Allen Ginsberg—his style is ultimately inimitable, and his achievement unsurpassed in American poetry. “One always wants to start out fresh with Whitman,” writes Harold Bloom in his introduction, “and read him as though he never has been read before.” In a selection that ranges from early notebook fragments and the complete “Song of Myself” to the valedictory “Good-bye My Fancy!,” Bloom has chosen 47 works to represent “the principal writer that America—North, Central, or South—has brought to us.” About the American Poets Project Elegantly designed in compact editions, printed on acid-free paper, and textually authoritative, the American Poets Project makes available the full range of the American poetic accomplishment, selected and introduced by today’s most discerning poets and critics.
Download or read book Song of Myself written by Walt Whitman and published by Gildan Media LLC aka G&D Media. This book was released on 2024-03-20 with total page 68 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the Greatest Poems in American Literature Walt Whitman (1819-1892) was considered by many to be one of the most important American poets of all time. He had a profound influence on all those who came after him. “Song of Myself”, a portion of Whitman’s monumental poetry collection “Leaves of Grass”, is one of his most beloved poems. It was through this moving piece that Whitman first made himself known to the world. One of the most acclaimed of all American poems, it is written in Whitman’s signature free verse style, without a regular form, meter, or rhythm. His lines have a mesmerizing chant-like quality, as he sought to make poetry more appealing. Few poems are as fun to read aloud as this one. Considered to be the core of his poetic vision, this poem is an optimistic and inspirational look at the world in 1855. It is exhilarating, epic, and fresh in its brilliant and fascinating diction and wordplay as it tries to capture the unique meaning of words of the day, while also embracing the rapidly evolving vocabularies of the sciences and the streets. Far ahead of its time, it was considered by many social conservatives to be scandalous and obscene for its depiction of sexuality and desire, while at the same time, critics hailed the poem as a modern masterpiece. This first version of “Song of Myself” is far superior to the later versions and will delight readers with the playfulness of its diction as it glorifies the self, body, and soul. “I am large, I contain multitudes,”
Download or read book Leaves of Grass written by Walt Whitman and published by . This book was released on 1872 with total page 520 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The New Walt Whitman Studies written by Matt Cohen and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-11-21 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Highlights the latest currents in Whitman scholarship and demonstrates how Whitman's work transforms discussions in literary studies.
Download or read book Walt Whitman and the Civil War written by Ted Genoways and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2023-11-10 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shortly after the third edition of Leaves of Grass was published, in 1860, Walt Whitman seemed to drop off the literary map, not to emerge again until his brother George was wounded at Fredericksburg two and a half years later. Past critics have tended to read this silence as evidence of Whitman's indifference to the Civil War during its critical early months. In this penetrating, original, and beautifully written book, Ted Genoways reconstructs those forgotten years—locating Whitman directly through unpublished letters and never-before-seen manuscripts, as well as mapping his associations through rare period newspapers and magazines in which he published. Genoways's account fills a major gap in Whitman's biography and debunks the myth that Whitman was unaffected by the country's march to war. Instead, Walt Whitman and the Civil War reveals the poet's active participation in the early Civil War period and elucidates his shock at the horrors of war months before his legendary journey to Fredericksburg, correcting in part the poet's famous assertion that the "real war will never get in the books."
