This book is the first to offer a comprehensive selection of Walt Whitman’s Civil War poetry and prose with a full commentary on each work. Ed Folsom and Christopher Merrill carry on a dialogue with Whitman (and with each other) as they invite readers to trace how Whitman’s writing about the Civil War develops, shifts, and manifests itself in different genres throughout the years of the war. The book offers forty selections of Whitman’s war writings, including not only the well-known war p...

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 passa...

First published to wide critical acclaim in 1981, this revised and expanded monumental anthology charts the ongoing American and international response to the legacy of the seminal poet Walt Whitman (1819-1892). Beginning with Ralph Waldo Emerson's famous 1855 letter ("I greet you at the beginning of a great career..."), this new edition contains responses from Thoreau, Pound, Lawrence, Neruda, Borges, Ginsberg, Jordan, Duncan, Le Sueur, Rich, Snyder and Alexie, among many others."...

The Story of My Life, first published in book form in 1903, is Helen Keller's autobiography detailing her early life, particularly her experiences with Anne Sullivan. Portions of it were adapted by William Gibson for a 1957 Playhouse 90 production, a 1959 Broadway play, a 1962 Hollywood feature film, and the Indian film Black. The book is dedicated to inventor Alexander Graham Bell, who was one of her teachers and an advocate for the deaf.

As featured in AMC's Breaking Bad*, given by Gale Boetticher to Walter White and discovered by Hank Schrader*. "I celebrate myself, And what I assume you shall assume, For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. I loafe and invite my soul, I lean and loafe at my ease....observing a spear of summer grass." So begins Leaves of Grass, the first great American poem and indeed, to this day, the greatest and most essentially American poem in all our national literatu...

A comprehensive collection of Whitman's most beloved works of poetry, prose, and short storiesWhen 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 Wal...

A fully unexpurgated collection that restores the sexual vitality and subversive flair suppressed by Whitman himself in later editions of Leaves of Grass.A century after his death, Whitman is still celebrated as America's greatest poet. In this startling new edition of his work, Whitman biographer Gary Schmidgall presents over 200 poems in their original pristine form, in the chronological order in which they were written, with Whitman's original punctuati...

Pulitzer Prize–winning poet C. K. Williams's personal reflection on the art of Walt WhitmanIn this book, Pulitzer Prize–winning poet C. K. Williams sets aside the mass of biography and literary criticism that has accumulated around 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 maste...

Beat! beat! drums!--blow! bugles! blow!Through the windows-through doors-burst like a ruthless force,Into the solemn church, and scatter the congregation,Into the school where the scholar is studying;Leave not the bridegroom quiet--no happiness must he have now with his bride,Nor the peaceful farmer any peace, ploughing his field or gathering his grain,So fierce you whirr and pound you drums--so shrill you bugles blow."- Excerpted from "Drum Taps"

In the midst of a crisis of democracy, we have much to learn from Walt Whitman’s journey toward egalitarian selfhood.Walt Whitman knew a great deal about democracy that we don’t. Most of that knowledge is concentrated in one stunning poem, Song of Myself.Esteemed cultural and literary thinker Mark Edmundson offers a bold reading of the 1855 poem, included here in its entirety. He finds in the poem the genesis and development of a democratic spirit,...

Offers insight into Whitmans quest for self-discovery, which involved an ongoing mystical experience of the world.

Poet Tim Kavi celebrated National Poetry Month 2013 with the publication of this essay on Walt Whitman: The Embodied Poet of Existence. Basically, the essay is a brief discussion of Whitman juxtaposed with one of his most famous poems,"I Sing the Body Electric." This ebook essay should be of interest to Walt Whitman fans, students, (using it as a resource and Study Guide for Whitman's "I Sing the Body Electric"), as well as Tim Kavi readers. In this essay, Tim Kavi offers a unique perspect...