Walt Whitman Speaks

Walt Whitman (born 1819) is widely considered to be the greatest of all American poets. Largely self-taught, he read voraciously, including works by the great classic writers – Homer, Dante, Shakespeare. In 1836, at the age of 17, he began his career as a teacher and continued to teach until 1841 when he turned to journalism as a full-time career. He founded a weekly newspaper, Long-Islander, and later edited a number of Brooklyn and New York papers. As well as journalism, Whitman became absorbed in poetry, writing in a unique and distinctive style. In 1855, he finished his seminal work Leaves of Grass. He died in 1892.; Brenda Wineapple is the author of Ecstatic Nation: Confidence, Crisis, and Compromise 1848-1877, a New York Times Notable Book, and White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. For Library of America, she has edited John Greenleaf Whittier: Selected Poems, volume 10 in the American Poets Project. Wineapple has received a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim fellowship, a Pushcart Prize, and, most recently, a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholars Award for The Impeachers: The Trial of Andrew Johnson and the Dream of a Just Nation.

'Walt Whitman Speaks enables us to listen in to his wondrous burblings as seldom before. As consmos-centred as he is self-centred, aswirl with spiritual and carnal longings, sharp with a put-down, exalted in his rambling earthiness, he is a delight to eavesdrop upon.'Michael Glover, The Tablet