More than 40 years after the inaugural volume's original publication, Ted Genoways brings scholars the latest volume in Walt Whitman: The Correspondence. Among the more than 150 letters collected in this volume are numerous correspondence concerning Whitman's Civil War years, including a letter sending John Hay, the personal secretary to Abraham Lincoln, a manuscript copy of O Captain, My Captain Additional letters address various aspects of the production of Leaves of Grass, the most notable being an extensive correspondence surrounding the Deathbed Edition, gathered by Whitman's friend...
More than 40 years after the inaugural volume's original publication, Ted Genoways brings scholars the latest volume in Walt Whitman: The Corresponden...
It is now difficult to imagine that, in the years before Whitman's death in 1892, there was real doubt in the minds of Whitman and his literary circle whether Leaves of Grass would achieve lasting fame. Much of the critical commentary in the first decade after his burial in Camden was as negative as that in Boston's Christian Register, which spoke of Whitman as someone who succeeded in writing a mass of trash without form, rhythm, or vitality. That the balance finally tipped toward admiration, culminating in Whitman's acceptance into the literary canon, was due substantially to the unflagging...
It is now difficult to imagine that, in the years before Whitman's death in 1892, there was real doubt in the minds of Whitman and his literary circle...
By reconsidering Whitman not as the proletarian voice of American diversity but as a historically specific poet with roots in the antebellum lower middle class, Andrew Lawson in Walt Whitman and the Class Struggle defines the tensions and ambiguities about culture, class, and politics that underlie his poetry.Drawing on a wealth of primary sources from across the range of antebellum print culture, Lawson uses close readings of Leaves of Grass to reveal Whitman as an artisan and an autodidact ambivalently balanced between his sense of the injustice of class privilege and his desire for...
By reconsidering Whitman not as the proletarian voice of American diversity but as a historically specific poet with roots in the antebellum lower mid...