Walt Whitman is one of the most innovative and influential American poets of the nineteenth century. Focusing on his masterpiece Leaves of Grass, this book provides a foundation for the study of Whitman as an experimental poet, a radical democrat, and a historical personality in the era of the American Civil War, the growth of the great cities, and the westward expansion. Always a controversial and important figure, Whitman continues to attract admiration.
Poetry and Repetition - Walt Whitman, Wallace Stevens, John Ashbery
This book examines the function of repetition in the work of Walt Whitman, Wallace Stevens and John Ashbery. All three poets extensively employ and comment upon the effects of repetition, yet represent three distinct poetics, considerably removed from one another in stylistic and historical terms.
Walt Whitman and the Culture of American Celebrity
What is the relationship between poetry and fame? What happens to a reader's experience when a poem invokes its author's popularity? Is there a meaningful connection between poetry and advertising, between the rhetoric of lyric and the rhetoric of hype? One of the first full-scale treatments of celebrity in nineteenth-century America, this book examines Walt Whitman's lifelong interest in fame and publicity.
TTC Video – Classics of American Literature
Absorbing great American writing – the classics – is a unique way to understand the history of this country and to add to our own personal estate of literary wealth. Classic stories and poems of American literature are found in the pages of Franklin, Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, Dickinson, Twain, Whitman, Faulkner, James, Eliot, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Steinbeck, Morrison, and many others.
A Californian high-school student is murdered, and the obvious suspect is her fellow student, Chris Whitman. But Sergeant Pete Decker knows that the case has not been exhaustively investigated, even when Whitman confesses to the crime.