Name: Walt Whitman: Selected Poems 1855-1892
SKU: 9635314
Price: 659.00 ZAR
Availability: InStock
Author: Whitman, Walt ; Schmidgall, Gary
ISBN: 9780312267902

portada Walt Whitman: Selected Poems 1855-1892

Type

Physical Book

Author

Walt Whitman

Illustrated by

Gary Schmidgall

Publisher

Stonewall Inn Editions

Year

2000

Language

English

Pages

560

Format

Paperback

Dimensions

22.6x15.2x3.3 cm

Weight

0.82 kg.

ISBN

0312267908

ISBN13

9780312267902

Synopsis "Walt Whitman: Selected Poems 1855-1892 "

A century after his death, Whitman is still celebrated as America's greatest poet. In this startling new edition of his work, Whitman biographer Gary Schmidgall presents over two hundred poems in their original pristine form, in the chronological order in which they were written, with Whitman's original line breaks and punctuation. Included in this volume are facsimilies of Whitman's original manuscripts, contemporary-- and generally blistering-- reviews of Whitman's poetry (not surprisingly Henry James hated it), and early pre-Leaves of Grass poems that return us to the physical Whitman, rejoicing-- sometimes graphically-- in homoerotic love. Unlike the many other available editions, all drawn from the final authorized or deathbed Leaves of Grass, this collection focuses on the exuberant poems Whitman wrote during the creative and sexual prime of his life, roughly between 1853 and 1860. These poems are faithfully presented as Whitman first gave them to the world-- fearless, explicit, and uncompromised-- before he transformed himself into America's respectable, mainstream Good Gray Poet through thirty years of revision, self-censorship, and suppression. Whitman admitted that his later poetry lacked the ecstasy of statement of his early verse. Revealing that ecstasy for the first time, this edition makes possible a major reappraisal of our nation's first great poet.

Walt Whitman

(Author)

View Author's Page

Walt Whitman (1819-1892) is, undoubtedly, the most influential poet in American literature. He was born in West Hills, Long Island, the second of nine children in a family close to the Quaker creed. At the age of eleven, he finished his formal education and began working as an apprentice at the weekly The Patriot, where he would start writing his first texts. After working for other newspapers and magazines, in 1850 he decided to fully dedicate himself to poetry. Five years later, the first edition of the famous Leaves of Grass was published, consisting of twelve poems and whose 795 copies were funded by the author himself. The poetry collection aroused great interest and was widely distributed, partly due to the fascination it sparked in philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson. During the Civil War, Whitman voluntarily served as a nurse in Washington D.C., an experience he would capture in The Great Army of the Sick (1863) and Memories of the War (1875). After the conflict ended in 1965, he published Drum-Taps. While employed at the Attorney General's Office, Whitman continued to raise the pen to write verses like those of "O Captain! My Captain!", which, along with others, would complete the successive editions of Leaves of Grass up to the ninth and definitive, which consisted of a total of more than four hundred poems.

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