|
Loading... Leaves of Grass (1855)by Walt Whitman, Lawrence Clark Powell (Editor)
  
» 21 more Poetry Corner (24) Mind & Thought (7) Rory Gilmore Book Club (172) Fake Top 100 Fiction (47) Poetry Collections (72) Unread books (765)
 Marcos_Augusto | Jan 13, 2022 |  I'm enjoying this book of poetry just fine, but I've been slowly reading it for over a month now, and I keep forgetting that it even exists because I want to read other books way more than this one. So, I think that's the universe's way of telling me to put this down for now. I'll probably pick it back up in the future. (  ) FiraHunter | Nov 14, 2021 | I'm just going to say it: Walt Whitman was the King of List Poems. (At least, that's how I think of them.) He does tend to get repetitive after a while, so I certainly wasn't able to read this in one sitting... But I've always thought that poetry was meant to be savored a little at a time. Whitman will never be one of my favorite poets, but he certainly excelled at his craft. I enjoyed seeing the evolution of his writing as his life progressed, especially since he kept adding on to Leaves of Grass every so often. My favorite of his poems will always be "Song of the Open Road" and "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed." I found a few more I really enjoy upon completion of this book though: "A Clear Midnight," "Out of May's Shows Selected," "The Voice of the Rain," and "A Prairie Sunset." Whitman is a classic American poet and I'm glad I finally took the time to read this seminal work. I can't say I'll ever read it in its entirety again, but I'll definitely occasionally enjoy the poems I mentioned when my mood suits! (  ) bookwyrmqueen | Oct 25, 2021 | Poem  hpryor | Aug 8, 2021 | Some beauty scattered throughout and one of those books with lots of 'aha' moments where you realise you've seen references in popular culture but didn't understand the source. (  ) brakketh | Jul 31, 2021 |
 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. Belongs to Publisher SeriesIs contained inWhitman: Poetry and Prose by Walt Whitman (indirect) Leaves of Grass and Other Writings [Norton Critical Edition, 2nd Edition] by Walt Whitman (indirect) Leaves of Grass: First and "Death-Bed" Editions by Walt Whitman (indirect) Is abridged inInspiredHas as a student's study guide
This edition is based on the venerable Norton Critical Edition of Leaves of Grass (1973), edited by the late Scully Bradley and Harold Blodgett. No library descriptions found. 
|
Popular covers
 Google Books — Loading...GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)811.3 — Literature English (North America) American poetry Middle 19th century 1830–1861LC ClassificationRatingAverage: (4.11)
Is this you?Become a LibraryThing Author.
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Walt Whitman
Wikipedia in English (1)
19
The first edition included noted poems such as “Song of Myself” and “I Sing the Body Electric,” celebrating the beauty of the human body, physical health, and sexual passion. In a preface that was deleted from later editions, Whitman maintained that a poet’s style should be simple and natural, without orthodox metre or rhyme, like an animal or tree in harmony with its environment.
Among the 122 new poems in the third edition (1860–61) were Whitman’s “Calamus” poems, which record an intense homosexual love affair. His Civil War poems, Drum-Taps (1865) and Sequel to Drum-Taps (1865), were included in the fourth edition (1867). The seventh edition (1881–82) grouped the poems in their final order, and the eighth edition (1889) incorporated his November Boughs (1888). “Garrulous to the very last” (as he wrote), he contemplated death yet also wrote buoyant poems for his ninth, “deathbed” edition (1891–92). (