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    The Poetry of Walt Whitman
    The Poetry of Walt Whitman
    The Poetry of Walt Whitman
    Audiobook1 hour

    The Poetry of Walt Whitman

    Written by Walt Whitman

    Narrated by Richard Mitchley, William Hootkins and Gideon Wagner

    4.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    Walt Whitman was an immense talent. And a prodigious one at that. Associated with the Free Verse movement his poems are usually on the longer side. Iconic works such as Leaves Of Grass divided opinion on their publication. Some argued it was obscene others such as Ralph Waldo Emerson rallied to his cause. Whitman was born on May 31st 1819 on Long Island. By the age of 11 his schooling was finished and he embarked on a series of jobs that eventually led to various newspaper editorships. He began to write poetry in the 1840s and in 1855 published his first of many versions of Leaves Of Grass. Thereafter he wrote solidly until his death on March 26, 1892. He is buried in Camden, New Jersey. Whitman wrote that “The proof of a poet is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it."
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherThe Copyright Group
    Release dateJan 1, 2014
    ISBN9781783941063
    The Poetry of Walt Whitman
    Author

    Walt Whitman

    Walt Whitman (1819–92) was an influential American poet and essayist, and is credited with being the founding father of free verse. He first published his culturally significant poetry collection ‘Leaves of Grass’ in 1855 from his own pocket, and revised and expanded it over thirty years. It is an essential element of America’s literary tradition, much taught in schools and universities around the world.

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    Reviews for The Poetry of Walt Whitman

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    • 5/5
      Oh Walt. Finished during bus ride home. Warning - Leaves of Grass may leave you wanting to hug strangers on the bus - so many stories hurtling to the Park and Ride.
    • 5/5
      Overall, a good narration and short audiobook. Very convenient while travelling
    • 5/5
      The end all and be all. Whitman makes my blood dance.
    • 5/5
      1. I have finished 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass. Exquisite. His main device is the catalog. He inventories America, good and bad. He loves the totality. I adored this first edition and look forward to reading final edition (1891-92) soon.

      What a paean to masculinity, its physicality, the play of physique through clothing--and without clothing. The naked male is here iconographic. It's always a surprise to me how very transparent he was in his preferences so early in our history. Women by contrast, though he seeks to balance his men with them, lack physical detail that brings the lusty descriptions of men to life. ("The Female equally with the Male I sing.") Yet women are far more likely to be described by their setting, the home, or their place amid a tumult of children, than for their sheer physicality. Part of this was simply the age, when there was great outrage against prurient feminine depiction, among so-called civilized society at least. Part seems to be Whitman's disinterest. I'm reminded of Michelangelo's Medici Tombs in Florence, whose female nudes have been criticized as too male, their musculature wrong, their breasts appended almost as an afterthought.

      3. Reading Specimen Days next, his big prose miscellany. This begins with an overview of both the paternal and maternal branches of his family and their lives on Long Island, New York, in the early 1800s. The description of L.I. Includes some of his boyish activities there, his friends and their exploits. It's a vivid dispatch from another world. That he writes of these matters so late in life--he visits the old family graveyards and resurrects his dead--lends special poignance. He moves on to his well-known visits to the bedsides of injured Civil War (1861-65) soldiers, mostly Union but Confederate also, among whom his brother George lay convalescing for a time. He writes letters home for the soldiers, distributes small amounts of money, listens to their tales, reads them the Bible, kisses a few, and watches them die. Most are amputees, some gravely ill with typhoid. Some laid helpless on the field of battle for days before being brought to primitive field hospitals. Oh heavens, what scene is this? – is this indeed humanity – these butcher's shambles? There are several of them. There they lie, in the largest, in an open space in the woods, from 200 to 300 poor fellows – the groans and screams – the odor of blood, mixed with the fresh scent of the night, the grass, the trees – the slaughter-house! O well is it their mothers, their sisters cannot see them – cannot conceive, and never conceived, these things.
      In the section called "A Cavalry Camp," Whitman's enthusiasm--can we call it ecstasy?--at for the first time being among actual soldiers, and not only the sick, seems to me keen. Back in Washington in August of 1863, he daily sees President Lincoln on L'Enfant's broad, dusty avenues. Before long they have a nodding acquaintence with each other. Sometimes the president is in a barouche, at other times he rides a grey horse amid a detachment of uniformed cavalry, swords drawn.

      Let me say this at the halfway point of Specimen Days, everything works! Every phrase is compelling. I have never read a more riveting collection of miscellaneous pieces. After the war, Whitman stayed in Washington to work in in the Office of the Attorney General in 1866 and '67 and, he says, "for some time afterward." In February 1873 he's stricken with a "paralysis" that sounds to me like stroke. It forces him to retreat to the famous little house in Camden, New Jersey. He's bed-ridden there through 1875 and '76. On recovery he is still partly disabled but is able to retreat to a country farm belonging to his friends the Staffords on "Timber Creek, twelve or thirteen miles from where it enters the Delaware." Here the book enters a nature phase. All I see before me now are descriptions of nature. It remains to be seen if I will be as beguiled by these pages as I was by his war recollections.

      More to come.
    • 5/5
      Very heavy - good for library, not good for beach reading - thin paper and small print. (need smaller book to tote in bag).Song of Myself... very tolerant and accepting of others (from all walks of life).