The Portable Walt Whitman (Penguin Classics)

The Portable Walt Whitman (Penguin Classics)
by Walt Whitman

The Portable Walt Whitman (Penguin Classics)
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Book Summary Information

Author: Walt Whitman
Editor: Michael Warner
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2003-12-30
ISBN: 0142437689
Number of pages: 608
Publisher: Penguin Classics

Book Reviews of The Portable Walt Whitman (Penguin Classics)

Book Review: The great American poet
Summary: 5 Stars

Whitman is the great American poet. Emily Dickinson has a greatness more metaphorically striking and acutely original in thought. And Wallace Stevens has a music which in its intellectual complexity perhaps transcends that of Whitman.
But Whitman is as Emerson rightly understood the essential American poet.
He is the voice of the new world, of a new land, of a new conception of mankind greater and more hopeful than any seen before. He is the cataloguer of continents and the master maker of the music of ordinary places and people.
He feels most deeply into the American story and is the great democrat of American poetry. His long lines have a freedom and a sense of expansiveness which embrace worlds and celebrate the sights and sounds of his native land. He more than anyone understood the poetry of American place-names. And he had a feeling for the natural motion of America's teeming new cities and long distant shores.
His 'Song of the Self' is a heroic American assertion of Mankind in its great exuberance of hopefulness. Yet no one more than him felt the pain of America's Civil War and its suffering, the lilacs that last in the dooryard bloomed.
There are certain parts of his great poem, set pieces such as 'When I heard the learned Astronomer ' or his lines on the observation of Animals that provide a kind of wake- up shock, a kind of revelation of Thought as Beauty.
He is the definitive American poet, whether we like every aspect of his barbaric yawp or not. Or whether we sometimes feel that his celebrations are misplaced and his self- singings mere aggrandizements.
The great continent, the great Westward expansion, the great thriving of a new world is as he pictured it a sequence of ever- expanding circles of a cosmos becoming greater and greater in time. And he gives that feeling, gives the sense that life has in it some mysterious greatness that moves us always to be more in the future than we can dream we are now.

Summary of The Portable Walt Whitman (Penguin Classics)

When Walt Whitman self-published Leaves of Grass in 1855 it was a slim volume of twelve poems and he was a journalist and poet from Long Island, little-known but full of ambition and poetic fire. To give a new voice to the new nation shaken by civil war, he spent his entire life revising and adding to the work, but his initial act of bravado in answering Ralph Waldo Emerson's call for a national poet has made Whitman the quintessential American writer. This rich cross-section of his work includes poems from throughout Whitman's lifetime as published on his deathbed edition of 1891, short stories, his prefaces to the many editions of Leaves of Grass, and a variety of prose selections, including Democratic Vistas, Specimen Days, and Slang in America.

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