Word: walts
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...World, the end of exploration, recalling all the mistakes of every past civilization. One reason that Balboa (Keats mistakenly wrote Cortes) might have stood "silent upon a peak in Darien" is that he realized there was no place else on earth to travel to. Or as a Walt Whitman character said in "Facing West from California's Shores": "Where is what I started for so long ago? And why is it yet unfound...
...WALT WHITMAN was an American genius. He brought originality to an imitative literature, cutting and hewing poems out of the city streets and country ponds of a vast America. "The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem," he said in the 1855 preface to his masterwork, Leaves of Grass. Never before had an American writer captured this relationship between the word and the state, the poem and the nation. Emerson wrote Whitman a few weeks after the publication of Leaves of Grass, saying he found it "the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed...
...study Walt Whitman is to examine 19th century America, amidst its industrial clacking, economic growing pains, and political and social tension. Justin Kaplan appropriately spends a good part of his splendid biography creating the contexts for Whitman's experiences. On May 31, 1819, Kaplan tells us, Napoleon was dying of cancer on St. Helena, Virginian James Monroe was strutting about a rebuilt White House in knee breeches, a financial panic was threatening the young nation--and Walter and Louisa Whitman had their second child, named after his father but always called "Walt" by members of the family...
...twist. Covering the terrain of Whitman's life in about 400 pages, Kaplan repeatedly and judiciously quotes his subject's poems, prose, letters and diaries to lend his biography not only authenticity but a Whitmanesque spirit that a historical and strictly narrative book would have lacked. Thus, much of Walt Whitman: A Life is interior, approaching Whitman's experience through his own descriptions...
...time when America questions whether or not it is still the light of the world, it refreshes and reassures to discover a man who did beleive in the President as a redeemer, and democracy as a catalyst for love. A child of expansion and of manifest destiny, Walt Whitman embodied a sprit that no longer pervades the American consciousness. Kaplan revives Whitman and his dreams, revealing democratic vistas that have become blurred in our own time...