Conserving Walt Whitman S Fame

Author : Gary Schmidgall
Publisher : University of Iowa Press
Page : 479 pages
File Size : 49,7 Mb
Release : 2006-03-01
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781609380021

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Conserving Walt Whitman's Fame by Gary Schmidgall Pdf

It is now difficult to imagine that, in the years before Whitman's death in 1892, there was real doubt in the minds of Whitman and his literary circle whether Leaves of Grass would achieve lasting fame. Much of the critical commentary in the first decade after his burial in Camden was as negative as that in Boston's Christian Register, which spoke of Whitman as someone who “succeeded in writing a mass of trash without form, rhythm, or vitality.”That the balance finally tipped toward admiration, culminating in Whitman's acceptance into the literary canon, was due substantially to the unflagging labor of Horace Traubel, famous for his nine volumes of Whitman conversations but less well known for his provocative monthly journal of socialist politics and avant-garde culture, the Conservator.Conserving Walt Whitman's Fame offers a generous selection from the enormous trove of Whitman-related materials that Traubel included in the 352 issues of the Conservator. Among the revelatory, perceptive, and often entertaining items presented here are the most illuminating of the Conservator's more than 150 topical essays on Whitman and memoirs by many of his friends and literary cohorts that shed new light on the poet, his work, and his critical reception. Also important is the richer understanding these pages afford of Horace Traubel's own sophisticated, deeply humane, and feisty views of America.

Author : Gary Schmidgall
Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
Page : 401 pages
File Size : 48,5 Mb
Release : 2014
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780199374410

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Containing Multitudes by Gary Schmidgall Pdf

This study explores Walt Whitman's contradictory response to and embrace of several great prior British poets: Shakespeare, Milton, Burns, Blake, and Wordworth (with shorter essays on Scott, Carlyle, Tennyson, Wilde, and Swinburne). Through reference to his entire oeuvre, his published literary criticism, and his private conversations, letters and manuscripts, it seeks to understand the extent to which Whitman experienced the anxiety of influence as he sought to establish himself as America's poet-prophet or bard (and the extent to which he sought to conceal such influence). An attempt is also made to lay out the often profound aesthetic, cultural, political, and philosophical affinities Whitman shared with these predecessors. It also focuses on all of Whitman's extant comments on these iconic authors. Because Whitman was a deeply autobiographical writer, attention is also paid to how his comments on other poets reflect on his image of himself and on the ways he shaped his public image. Attention is also given to how Whitman's attitudes to his British fore-runners changed over the nearly fifty years of his active career.

Author : John E. Schwiebert
Publisher : McFarland
Page : 267 pages
File Size : 50,6 Mb
Release : 2023-01-04
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781476646091

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Walt Whitman by John E. Schwiebert Pdf

Walt Whitman created, in various editions of Leaves of Grass, what is arguably the most influential book of poems anywhere in the past 200 years. Whitman absorbed the world, transmuting it into poems that address a spectrum of topics--from democracy and religion to sexuality, gender, class, and identity. He exuberantly incarnated his epoch at the same time as he invoked "you"-- readers and "poets to come"--to join in a "poetry of the future." The first A to Z Whitman reference to incorporate 21st century scholarship, this work is ideal for readers who want a concise introduction to the major poems and prose and to the people, places, and topics central to his life. Each of the book's 142 entries is followed by cross-references to related entries and suggestions for further reading. Also included are a brief biography, a chronology of Whitman's life and major works, and a bibliography of some 300 primary and secondary sources on this most timeless and contemporary of poets.

Author : John E. Seery
Publisher : University Press of Kentucky
Page : 589 pages
File Size : 42,7 Mb
Release : 2011-01-28
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780813139838

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A Political Companion to Walt Whitman by John E. Seery Pdf

“Wonderful . . . a timely invitation to political and social theorists to take seriously this imaginative man who solicited us to think and sing democracy.” —Bonnie Honig, author of Emergency Politics 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. Editor John E. Seery and a collection of prominent theorists and philosophers uncover the political awareness of Whitman’s poetry and prose, analyzing his faith in the potential of individuals, his call for a revolution in literature and political culture, and his belief in the possibility of combining heroic individualism with democratic justice. A Political Companion to Walt Whitman reaches beyond literature into political theory, revealing the ideology behind Whitman’s call for the emergence of American poets of democracy. “Exceptionally rich and intellectually exciting.” —Choice

Author : Anonim
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 721 pages
File Size : 43,5 Mb
Release : 2024-02-01
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780192647788

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The Oxford Handbook of Walt Whitman by Anonim Pdf

More than a century after his death, Walt Whitman remains a fresh phenomenon. Startling discoveries and massive transcription efforts are enabling new insights into his life and achievements. In the past few years new breakthroughs have proliferated, including the publication of a long-lost Whitman novel, Jack Engle, along with a hitherto unknown health guide for urban men and previously undiscovered poems. Myriad other documents have become more readily available, including largely unmined troves of journalism, narrative and documentary prose, and experimental note-keeping. Leaves of Grass and Whitman's literary life as a whole are thus ripe for reconsideration. The Oxford Handbook of Walt Whitman embraces this expanded view of Whitman and charts new pathways in Whitman Studies by bringing in new perspectives, methods, and contexts.

Author : Anonim
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 52 pages
File Size : 47,7 Mb
Release : 2008
Category : Electronic
ISBN : UCAL:B5431613

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Walt Whitman Quarterly Review by Anonim Pdf

Author : Rafael Bernabe
Publisher : BRILL
Page : 301 pages
File Size : 55,5 Mb
Release : 2021-07-05
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9789004462748

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Walt Whitman and His Caribbean Interlocutors: José Martí, C.L.R. James, and Pedro Mir by Rafael Bernabe Pdf

Walt Whitman and His Caribbean Interlocutors: José Martí, C.L.R. James, and Pedro Mir explores the writings of Whitman and of three Caribbean authors who engaged with them: the Cuban writer and revolutionary José Martí; Trinidadian activist, historian and cultural critic C.L.R. James, and Dominican poet Pedro Mir.

Author : David Haven Blake
Publisher : Yale University Press
Page : 269 pages
File Size : 43,8 Mb
Release : 2008-10-01
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9780300134810

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Walt Whitman and the Culture of American Celebrity by David Haven Blake Pdf

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. Making use of notebooks, photographs, and archival sources, David Haven Blake provides a groundbreaking history of the rise of celebrity culture in the United States. He sees Leaves of Grass alongside the birth of commercial advertising and the nation's growing obsession with the lives of the famous and the renowned. As authors, lecturers, politicians, entertainers, and clergymen vied for popularity, Whitman developed a form of poetry that routinely promoted and, indeed, celebrated itself. Walt Whitman and the Culture of American Celebrity proposes a fundamentally new way of thinking about a seminal American poet and a major national icon.

Author : Walt Whitman
Publisher : University of Iowa Press
Page : 215 pages
File Size : 55,5 Mb
Release : 2009-04-10
Category : History
ISBN : 9781587299230

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Democratic Vistas by Walt Whitman Pdf

"Written in the aftermath of the American Civil War during the ferment of national Reconstruction, Walt Whitman's Democratic Vistas remains one of the most penetrating analyses of democracy ever written. Now available for the first time in a facsimile of the original 1870-1871 edition, with an introduction and annotations by noted Whitman scholar Ed Folsom that illuminate the essay's historical and cultural contexts, this searing analysis of American culture offers readers today the opportunity to argue with Whitman over the nature of democracy and the future of the nation." --Book Jacket.

Author : Adam C. Bradford
Publisher : University of Missouri Press
Page : 264 pages
File Size : 42,6 Mb
Release : 2014-12-18
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780826273161

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Communities of Death by Adam C. Bradford Pdf

To 21st century readers, 19th century depictions of death look macabre if not maudlin—the mourning portraits and quilts, the postmortem daguerreotypes, and the memorial jewelry now hopelessly, if not morbidly, distressing. Yet this sentimental culture of mourning and memorializing provided opportunities to the bereaved to assert deeply held beliefs, forge social connections, and advocate for social and political change. This culture also permeated the literature of the day, especially the works of Edgar Allan Poe and Walt Whitman. In Communities of Death, Adam C. Bradford explores the ways in which the ideas, rituals, and practices of mourning were central to the work of both authors. While both Poe and Whitman were heavily influenced by the mourning culture of their time, their use of it differed. Poe focused on the tendency of mourners to cling to anything that could remind them of their lost loved ones; Whitman focused not on the mourner but on the soul’s immortality, positing an inevitable reunion. Yet Whitman repeatedly testified that Poe’s Gothic and macabre literature played a central role in spurring him to produce the transcendent Leaves of Grass. By unveiling a heretofore marginalized literary relationship between Poe and Whitman, Bradford rewrites our understanding of these authors and suggests a more intimate relationship among sentimentalism, romanticism, and transcendentalism than has previously been recognized. Bradford’s insights into the culture and lives of Poe and Whitman will change readers’ understanding of both literary icons.

Author : Juan A. Hererro Brasas
Publisher : State University of New York Press
Page : 219 pages
File Size : 55,5 Mb
Release : 2010-03-24
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9781438430126

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Walt Whitman's Mystical Ethics of Comradeship by Juan A. Hererro Brasas Pdf

Recovers Walt Whitman as a self-conscious religious figure with an ethic based in male comradeship, one at odds with the temper of his times.

Author : Walt Whitman
Publisher : University of Iowa Press
Page : 207 pages
File Size : 42,5 Mb
Release : 2016-10-15
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781609384654

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Song of Myself by Walt Whitman Pdf

This book offers the most comprehensive and detailed reading to date of Song of Myself. One of the most distinguished critics in Whitman Studies, Ed Folsom, and one of the nation’s most prominent writers and literary figures, Christopher Merrill, carry on a dialog with Whitman, and with each other, section by section, as they invite readers to enter into the conversation about how the poem develops, moves, improvises, and surprises. Instead of picking and choosing particular passages to support a reading of the poem, Folsom and Merrill take Whitman at his word and interact with “every atom” of his work. The book presents Whitman’s final version of the poem, arranged in fifty-two sections; each section is followed by Folsom’s detailed critical examination of the passage, and then Merrill offers a poet’s perspective, suggesting broader contexts for thinking about both the passage in question and the entire poem.

Author : Joel Myerson,Sandra Harbert Petrulionis,Laura Dassow Walls
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 800 pages
File Size : 42,6 Mb
Release : 2010-04-16
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0199716129

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The Oxford Handbook of Transcendentalism by Joel Myerson,Sandra Harbert Petrulionis,Laura Dassow Walls Pdf

The Oxford Handbook of Transcendentalism offers an ecclectic, comprehensive interdisciplinary approach to the immense cultural impact of the movement that encompassed literature, art, architecture, science, and politics.

Author : M. Jimmie Killingsworth
Publisher : University of Iowa Press
Page : 238 pages
File Size : 45,8 Mb
Release : 2009-11
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781587295164

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Walt Whitman and the Earth by M. Jimmie Killingsworth Pdf

Now I am terrified at the Earth, it is that calm and patient, It grows such sweet things out of such corruptions, It turns harmless and stainless on its axis, with such endless successions of diseas’d corpses, It distills such exquisite winds out of such infused fetor, It renews with such unwitting looks its prodigal, annual, sumptuous crops, It gives such divine materials to men, and accepts such leavings from them at last. —Walt Whitman, from “This Compost” How did Whitman use language to figure out his relationship to the earth, and how can we interpret his language to reconstruct the interplay between the poet and his sociopolitical and environmental world? In this first book-length study of Whitman’s poetry from an ecocritical perspective, Jimmie Killingsworth takes ecocriticism one step further into ecopoetics to reconsider both Whitman’s language in light of an ecological understanding of the world and the world through a close study of Whitman’s language. Killingsworth contends that Whitman’s poetry embodies the kinds of conflicted experience and language that continually crop up in the discourse of political ecology and that an ecopoetic perspective can explicate Whitman’s feelings about his aging body, his war-torn nation, and the increasing stress on the American environment both inside and outside the urban world. He begins with a close reading of “This Compost”—Whitman’s greatest contribution to the literature of ecology,” from the 1856 edition of Leaves of Grass. He then explores personification and nature as object, as resource, and as spirit and examines manifest destiny and the globalizing impulse behind Leaves of Grass, then moves the other way, toward Whitman’s regional, even local appeal—demonstrating that he remained an island poet even as he became America’s first urban poet. After considering Whitman as an urbanizing poet, he shows how, in his final writings, Whitman tried to renew his earlier connection to nature. Walt Whitman and the Earth reveals Whitman as a powerfully creative experimental poet and a representative figure in American culture whose struggles and impulses previewed our lives today.

Author : David Haven Blake
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 251 pages
File Size : 51,5 Mb
Release : 2006
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 0300110170

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Walt Whitman and the Culture of American Celebrity by David Haven Blake Pdf

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. Making use of notebooks, photographs, and archival sources, David Haven Blake provides a groundbreaking history of the rise of celebrity culture in the United States. He sees Leaves of Grass alongside the birth of commercial advertising and the nation's growing obsession with the lives of the famous and the renowned. As authors, lecturers, politicians, entertainers, and clergymen vied for popularity, Whitman developed a form of poetry that routinely promoted and, indeed, celebrated itself. Walt Whitman and the Culture of American Celebrity proposes a fundamentally new way of thinking about a seminal American poet and a major national icon.