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Title: Walt Whitman: The Song of Himself by Jerome Loving ISBN: 0-520-22687-9 Publisher: University of California Press Pub. Date: 02 October, 2000 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.25 (4 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: The good gray poet of Camden
Comment: The poet died in 1892. In life he became notorious and a positive influence on the reformers of the day. The author states he supplied the model for the count in Bram Stoker's DRACULA. The first edition of LEAVES OF GRASS was 1855, the last 1881. Whitman was not as solitary as previously assumed. For the poet the Civil War became a marriage ceremony of sorts. At forty three Whitman was too old for the rigors of combat. In 1862 Whitman went to the front in search of his brother George. Subsequently traveling to Washington D.C. he began his career as a wound dresser. Whitman immersed himself in the pathos of the terrible struggle.
Whitman's capacity to love was the dynamo of LEAVES OF GRASS. He was a former printer, second son in the family. Whitman's ancestry was essentially Dutch and English. He concluded his formal schooling at age eleven. Between 1836 and 1841 Whitman taught at eight district schools on Long Island. By 1855 Whitman had read Emerson. In 1840 he made the prophetic announcement that he was thinking of writing a book. The tone of Whitman's early writings is moralistic. Whitman wrote a temperance novel entitled FRANKLIN EVANS.
Whitman was a privte poet who made public his boundless affection for the one in the many. Whitman was no New England reformer. His utopia was not an agrarian retreat. In the 1840's Whitman dressed in a conventional way. Whitman loved Indian names and thought the nation was losing something through its policy of Indian removal. At the same time he had Darwainian confidence that the Indians faced extinction. Whitman was appalled by capital punishment. He saw the matter within the context of the haves and the nave-nots.
The Bible was an influence later on his poetry. Whitman was editor of the BROOKLYN EAGLE 1846-1848. Whitman saw slavery as a social evil. He never became an abolitionist in a political or formal sense. Whitman lost his job and traveled south to New Orleans. He worked at the CRESCENT but later separated from that publication possibly by mutual agreement. His favorite poet was William Cullen Bryant. It may have occurred to him at this time that he was wearing out his opportunities in journalism. Travel beyond Long Island and New York City had fed his imagination at least.
Whitmam, a product of "charity schooling", was socially and economically different from Emerson and others. Whitman was involved in Free-Soil politics. He became the editor of the FREEMAN. As the paper adopted a softer tone, Whitman was pushed out of the editorial office. LEAVES OF GRASS began to take shape in his mind in the 1850's. Parallels abound between Emerson's first two collections of essays and Whitman's first three editions of LEAVES OF GRASS. Whitman was interested in problems of democracy and the development of genius. He probably heard or knew of Emerson's address "Natural Aristocracy." Whitman was awash in romantic ideas about art and the artist.
Whitman's favorite composers of opera were Rossini, Donizetti, Bellini, and Verdi. Italian opera emphasized the human voice over the orchestration. It is because of Italian opera that LEAVES OF GRASS may be read aloud. BEL CANTO sent Whitman into moments of rapture. LEAVES OF GRASS is a solitary act. The terms leaves and grass are printer's lingo. The use of leaves in a book title was common. Whitman felt that the genius in the United States was always in the common people. Emerson wrote that famous letter on July 21, 1855 greeting Whitman "at the beginning of a great career."
Whitman blurred the difference between poetry and prose. Whitman took the single line as the rhythmical unit. James Russell Lowell supported Whitman's poetry with reservations. Richard Moncton Milnes was a notable English supporter. Alcott left a full account of a visit with Whitman in 1856. Emerson thought the poet should use self-censorship on his Children of Adam poems for the 1860 edition. The only contemporary response to homosexuality and the Calamus poems was a letter of the English critic John Aldington Symonds in 1890. William Dean Howells and Henry James did not like the poetry in DRUM TAPS or any of the other offerings of Whitman. William Rossetti arranged for an English edition of LEAVES OF GRASS.
Whitman was a commencement speaker at Dartmouth in 1872. In the 1870's he moved to Camden and suffered the first stroke. Ill health did not prevent him from being productive in later life. His last essay treated Elias Hicks, a Quaker artist, who had been an influence on his work. This critical biography is excellent.
Rating: 5
Summary: Most comprehensive, and least theory-ridden Whitman Bio.
Comment: In this latest biography of quite possibly the most important American poet, Jerome Loving takes on a Herculean labor: to present the facts about a man who endeavored to create himself as an icon, and who has been taken up by a dozen causes and ideologies as one of their own (some have regarded Whitman as a religious figure on par with Christ, a homosexual liberator, or a proto-communist). The result of a great deal of combining and comparing, winnowing opinion, propaganda, and rumor, is a cautious, complex, and detailed view of the facts of Whitman's life.
On the issues currently 'hot' in debate about the poet (his homosexuality or lack thereof, his attitudes towards immigrants, women, and African-Americans), Loving doesn't succumb to the temptation to either sanctify his subject or make him simply a partisan of the current opinions, but rather weighs and presents the evidence in as close to an impartial manner as I've seen. The lack of a simplistic, overarching narrative to Loving's life of Whitman (the kind of narrative found in many other bios) is true to the facts of life and scholarship--sometimes we can't know. I've found this book scrupulously up-to-date; it corrects many factual errors found in earlier Whitman bios. It is required reading for any Whitman scholar, and a good read as well for those interested in knowing more about the Good Grey Poet than his poems tell us by themselves.
Rating: 4
Summary: "I felt as if I was by the poets side each and every moment.
Comment: After reading Loving's book on Whitman it only enhanced my spirit to read and analyze more of this Poet's life and poetry. I decieded to write about Whitman in my class at college and used Loving's book as a research means together with other books form the university library. I feel as if I know more about good "Old Walt" then I do my own family. This was truly a good read. Enjoy!!!
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Title: Walt Whitman's America : A Cultural Biography by David S. Reynolds ISBN: 0679767096 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 19 March, 1996 List Price(USD): $20.00 |
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Title: Walt Whitman : A Life by Justin Kaplan ISBN: 0060535113 Publisher: Perennial Pub. Date: 08 July, 2003 List Price(USD): $15.95 |
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Title: Emerson: The Mind on Fire by Robert D. Richardson, Barry Moser ISBN: 0520206894 Publisher: University of California Press Pub. Date: November, 1996 List Price(USD): $21.95 |
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Title: Intimate with Walt: Selections from Whitman's Conversations with Horace Traubel, 1882-1892 by Horace Traubel, Gary Schmidgall ISBN: 0877457670 Publisher: University of Iowa Press Pub. Date: 15 June, 2001 List Price(USD): $22.95 |
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Title: Walt Whitman: Poetry and Prose (Library of America) by Walt Whitman ISBN: 094045002X Publisher: Library of America Pub. Date: May, 1982 List Price(USD): $35.00 |
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