In this book, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet C. K. Williams sets aside the mass of biography and literary criticism that has accumulated around the work and person of Walt Whitman, and attempts to go back to Leaves of Grass as he first encountered it, to explore why Whitman's epic "continues to inspire and sometimes daunt" him. The result is a personal reassessment and appreciation of one master poet by another, as well as an unconventional and brilliant introduction--or reintroduction--to Whitman.
In American Poetic Materialism from Whitman to Stevens, Mark Noble examines writers who share the assumption that personhood can be understood as a material event. Through new readings of Whitman, Emerson, Santayana, and Stevens, Noble uncovers a literary history wrestling with the consequences of its own materialism, and asks what this account of shared materiality can tell us about the most profoundly secular models of the modern subject.
A giant of American letters, Walt Whitman is known both as a poet and, to many, as an early precursor of the gay liberation movement. This revealing book recovers for today's reader a lost Whitman, delving into the original context and intentions of his poetry and prose. As Juan A. Herrero Brasas shows, Whitman saw himself as a founder of a new religion. Indeed, disciples gathered around him: the "hot little prophets" as they came to be called by early biographers.
American poet Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, is a collection of poems notable for its frank delight in and praise of the senses, during a time when such candid displays were considered immoral. Where much previous poetry, especially English, relied on symbolism, allegory, and meditation on the religious and spiritual, Leaves of Grass exalted the body and the material world.
The works of Walt Whitman have been described as masculine, feminine, postcolonial, homoerotic, urban, organic, unique, and democratic, yet arguments about the extent to which Whitman could or should be considered a political poet have yet to be fully confronted. Some scholars disregard Whitman's understanding of democracy, insisting on separating his personal works from his political works. A Political Companion to Walt Whitman is the first full-length exploration of Whitman's works through the lens of political theory.
