Walt Whitman: Selected Poems: (American Poets Project #4) - Hardcover

Whitman, Walt

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1931082324 ISBN 13: 9781931082327

Publisher: Library of America, 2003

Synopsis

American literature and culture are inconceivable without the towering presence of Walt Whitman. Expansive, ecstatic, original in ways that continue to startle and to elicit new discoveries, Whitman’s poetry is a testament to the surging energies of 19th-century America and a monument to the transforming power of literary genius. His incantatory rhythms, revolutionary sense of Eros, and generous, all-embracing vision invite renewed wonder at each reading. Although he has been a defining influence for many poets—Garcia Lorca, Fernando Pessoa, Robinson Jeffers, and Allen Ginsberg—his style is ultimately inimitable, and his achievement unsurpassed in American poetry.

“One always wants to start out fresh with Whitman,” writes Harold Bloom in his introduction, “and read him as though he never has been read before.” In a selection that ranges from early notebook fragments and the complete “Song of Myself” to the valedictory “Good-bye My Fancy!,” Bloom has chosen 47 works to represent “the principal writer that America—North, Central, or South—has brought to us.”

About the American Poets Project
Elegantly designed in compact editions, printed on acid-free paper, and textually authoritative, the American Poets Project makes available the full range of the American poetic accomplishment, selected and introduced by today’s most discerning poets and critics.

About this title

About the Author

Walt Whitman (1819-1892) was born on Long Island and educated in Brooklyn, New York. He served as a printer's devil, journeyman compositor, itinerant schoolteacher, editor, and unofficial nurse to Northern and Southern soldiers, and is widely considered the greatest American poet of the ninetheenth century.

Harold Bloom is the author of over thirty books, including the New York Times bestsellers Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human; The Western Canon; and Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine, and has been the recipient of numerous honors, including a MacArthur Fellowship and the Gold Medal for Belles Lettres and Criticism from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University and is a former Charles Eliot Norton Professor at Harvard University.

Reviews

As for Whitman--collected and selected so often--what, or who, could possibly make another selection seem fresh? Who is definitely Harold Bloom, dean of American literary critics, who considers Whitman "the principal writer that America--North, Central, or South--has brought to us." Bloom's best single descriptive of Whitman is "immediate," to which any reader of "Song of Myself" will assent: Whitman is with his readers ("If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles"). Bloom is concerned with Whitman's construction of his all-encompassing persona, and he selects with that in mind: first, some fragments of what became "Song of Myself"; then the "Song" itself in its final form; then four great poems of, Bloom argues, persona-shaping crisis, as well as "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry"; and three sections of other, successively later poems. Bloom connects Whitman's project to the thesis of his The American Religion (1992) that the tendency of religion in America is to replace God with man, and with the fragments, Bloom presents explicit evidence of the attempt. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Library of America
• Publication date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1931082324
• ISBN 13: 9781931082327
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 221
• Editor: Bloom Harold