This comprehensive volume celebrates the 150th anniversary of the 1855 edition of Walt Whitman s Leaves of Grass with twenty essays by preeminent scholars representing a variety of critical perspectives that focus exclusively on the original edition. Once regarded as primarily a collector s item, this edition is now viewed as the poet s most bold and compelling articulation of the possibilities of American democracy.The essays weave a rich tapestry of the most current, innovative criticism on this foundational book of American poetry. The contributors treat Whitman s poetry, his...

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...

These essays examine the role of periodicals like the Atlantic Monthly in the development of 19th century American literary culture.

This introductory guide to Walt Whitman weaves together the writer's life with an examination of his works.

- An innovative introductory guide to Walt Whitman.

- Weaves together the writer's life with an examination of his works.

- Focuses especially on Whitman's evolving masterpiece Leaves of Grass.

- Examines the material conditions and products of Whitman's -scripted life-, including his original manuscripts.

- Investigates Whitman's -life in print- - his belief that he could literally embody himself in his books.

This volume, a significant contribution to the reception history of Leaves of Grass, Specimen Days, and other works, reproduces the full range of the contemporary reviews of Whitman's various books. Brash and iconoclastic, revered and reviled at various times, Whitman came in for an astonishing array of commentary ranging from sympathy to hostility. Reviews by William Dean Howells, Henry James, Oscar Wilde and (writing anonymously) Whitman himself, and a host of other writers clarify much about both the poet and nineteenth-century American culture.