Walt Whitman The Song of Himself [Paperback]

Walt Whitman: The Song of Himselfis the first full-length critical biography of Walt Whitman in more than forty years. Jerome Loving makes use of recently unearthed archival evidence and newspaper writings to present the most accurate, complete, and complex portrait of the poet to date. This authoritative biography affords fresh, often revelatory insights into many aspects of the poet's life, including his attitudes toward the emerging urban life of America, his relationships with his family members, his developing notions of male-male love, his attitudes toward the vexed issue of race, and his insistence on the union of American states. Virtually every chapter presents material that was previously unknown or unavailable, and Whitman emerges as never before, in all his complexity as a corporal, cerebral, and spiritual being. Loving gives us a new Poet of Democracy, one for the twenty-first century.

Loving brings to life the elusive early Whitman, detailing his unhappy teaching career, typesetting jobs, quarrels with editors, and relationships with family and friends. He takes us through the Civil Warwith Whitman's moving descriptions of the wounded and dying he nursed, the battlegrounds and camps he visiteddemonstrating why the war became one of the defining events of Whitman's life and poetry. Loving's account of Whitman's relationship with Ralph Waldo Emerson is one of the most complete and fascinating available. He also draws insights from new material about Whitman's life as a civil servant, his Lincoln lectures, and his abiding campaign to gain acceptance for what was regarded by many as a dirty book. He examines each edition ofLeaves of Grassin connection with the life and times that produced it, demonstrating how Whitman's poetry serves as a priceless historical documentmarking such events as Grant's death, the completion of the Washington monument, Custer's defeat, and the Johnstown floodat the same time that it reshapes tlS+