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Loading... Leaves of Grass (1855)by Walt Whitman, Lawrence Clark Powell (Editor), Walt Whitman   » 15 more Poetry Corner (11) Unread books (918) I feel like I read it after reading Paper Towns! (  )  ksmedberg | Aug 15, 2018 |  3.5 stars. (  ) UDT | May 1, 2018 | Whitman sings the song of America like no other poet I know--the outsized joy and pain, the affinity for common folk and the love of nature and the sheer overwhelming feeling of every sight and sound and industrious noise around him. "I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear," he wrote. Because of this some are tempted to see Whitman as a poet of pure exuberance--like a proto-hippie or, worse, like a garrulous Hallmark card. But Whitman doesn't shy away from pain at all--he embraces it like he embraces everything else--not in a way that cheapens or ignores it but in a way that feels it deeply too. He did, after all, endure the civil war (he served as a nurse in army hospitals--we might shudder to think what those were like) and wrote about the experience in his typically direct, personal way. Speaking of the personal, for many years I always brought an old tattered copy of Whitman with me backpacking, and whenever I had to endure a particularly awful commute, I'd listen to Whitman to calm down, to step outside myself and encounter something beautiful amid the soul-crushing traffic. Whitman has become like an old friend to me now, one I'll no doubt keep coming back to, no matter my station in life or what I'm going through. (  )1  MichaelBarsa | Dec 17, 2017 | Got to book 27 The good parts of this book is that it was very shocking material for the time by focusing on general sexuality and the material world instead of just being devoted to the spiritual. With that said I really hate his writing style. He tends to ramble on and on almost aimlessly. If you were to take a single stanza out and put it in a speech it would have a huge impact and may be a rallying point but having it over and over again makes the poem suffer from a bad case of diminishing returns. While some of his shorter poems are fantastic most are the long-winded mess making this book such a pain to read. I actually had to resort to free audiobooks about midway so that way I could do other things while trying to finish this book. (  ) Heather.Dennis | Nov 29, 2017 | Finally! ( ) tstan | Sep 4, 2016 |
 Whitman's verse-technique is still of interest to the prosodist. His basic rhythm is an epic one—the Virgilian dactyl-spondee—and his line often hexametric. He sometimes sounds like Clough's Amours de Voyage, though it would be hard to imagine a greater disparity of tone and attitude than that which subsists between these two Victorians. Nevertheless, both Clough and Whitman saw that the loose hexameter could admit the contemporary and sometimes the colloquial.. He has only one subject—acceptance of the life-death cycle and reverence for it—and, since he uses an invariable technique, Leaves of Grass has a unity to be found in few other poets' collected volumes... But Whitman's aim is rather to present a universal democratic vista in terms of the American myth. The America of his poems sometimes seems as symbolic as that of Blake, and the bearded figure that strides across it with a big hello—the Answerer, all things to all men—is as much a home-made archetype as the Giant Albion. Nature may have given the hint to the author of the "Leaves of Grass", but there exists no book or fragment of a book, which can have given the hint to them. All beauty, he says, comes from beautiful blood and a beautiful brain... Who then is that insolent unknown? Who is it, praising himself as if others were not fit to do it, and coming rough and unbidden among writers to unsettle what was settled, and to revolutionize, in fact, our modern civilization? You have come in good time, Walt Whitman! In opinions, in manners, in costumes, in books, in the aims and occupancy of life, in associates, in poems, conformity to all unnatural and tainted customs passes without remark, while perfect naturalness, health, faith, self-reliance, and all primal expressions of the manliest love and friendship, subject one to the stare and controversy of the world. Is contained inIs abridged inInspired
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(retrieved from Amazon Thu, 12 Mar 2015 18:13:38 -0400)
As energetic and diverse as the American life it describes, Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass has been loved by generations for its celebration of a brash young nation and one man's exuberant spirit. First published at the author's expense in 1955, this collection of poems was revised and enlarged throughout Whitman's lifetime, and is presented here in the final or "Deathbed edition" of 1892.… (more)
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Penguin Australia2 editions of this book were published by Penguin Australia.
Editions: 014303927X, 0451529731
Tantor MediaAn edition of this book was published by Tantor Media.
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