Word: whitmans
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...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...
...nation that ached for its own literature, Whitman contributed a poetic miracle, though not everyone at the time embraced him or his work with the same adulation as the well-established Emerson. In fact, many dismissed Leaves of Grass as an immoral book. Whitman himself never seemed entirely satisfied with the controversial collection, which he said allowed him to sound his "barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world...
...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...
NONFICTION: American Dreams, Studs Terkel ∙ Merton: A Biography, Monica Furlong ∙ Naming Names, Victor Navasky ∙ The Girl I Left Behind, Jane O'Reilly ∙ The Letters of Evelyn Waugh, edited by Mark Amory ∙ Walt Whitman, Justin Kaplan ∙ Vladimir Nabokov: Lectures on Literature, edited by Fredson Bowers
NONFICTION: American Dreams: Lost and Found, Studs Terkel Merton: A Biography, Monica Furlong ∙Naming Names, Victor Navasky ∙The Girl I Left Behind, Jane O'Reilly ∙The Letters of Evelyn Waugh, edited by Mark Amory ∙Walt Whitman, Justin Kaplan ∙Vladimir Nabokov: Lectures on Literature, edited by Fredson Bowers