Gary Schmidgall – författare

This study explores Walt Whitman's contradictory response to and embrace of several great prior British poets: Shakespeare, Milton, Burns, Blake, and Wordsworth (with shorter essays on Scott, Carlyle, Tennyson, Wilde, and Swinburne). Through reference to his entire oeuvre, his published literary criticism, and his private conversations, letters and manuscripts, it seeks to understand the extent to which Whitman experienced the anxiety of influence as he sought to establish himself as America's poet-prophet or bard (and the extent to which he sought to conceal such influence). An attempt is also made to lay out the often profound aesthetic, cultural, political, and philosophical affinities Whitman shared with these predecessors. It also focuses on all of Whitman's extant comments on these iconic authors. Because Whitman was a deeply autobiographical writer, attention is also paid to how his comments on other poets reflect on his image of himself and on the ways he shaped his public image. Attention is also given to how Whitman's attitudes to his British fore-runners changed over the nearly fifty years of his active career.

Walt Whitman burst onto the literary stage raring for a fight with his transatlantic forebears. With the unmetered and unrhymed long lines of Leaves of Grass, he blithely forsook "the old models" declaring that "poems distilled from other poems will probably pass away." In a self-authored but unsigned review of the inaugural 1855 edition, Whitman boasted that its influence-free author "makes no allusions to books or writers; their spirits do not seem to have touched him." There was more than a hint here of a party-crasher''s bravado or a new-comer''s anxiety about being perceived as derivative.But the giants of British literature were too well established in America to be toppled by Whitman''s patronizing "that wonderful little island," he called England-or his frequent assertions that Old World literature was non grata on American soil. As Gary Schmidgall demonstrates, the American bard''s manuscripts, letters, prose criticism, and private conversations all reveal that Whitman''s negotiation with the literary "big fellows" across the Atlantic was much more nuanced and contradictory than might be supposed. His hostile posture also changed over the decades as the gymnastic rebel transformed into Good Gray Poet, though even late in life he could still crow that his masterwork Leaves of Grass "is an iconoclasm, it starts out to shatter the idols of porcelain."Containing Multitudes explores Whitman''s often uneasy embrace of five members of the British literary pantheon: Shakespeare, Milton, Burns, Blake, and Wordsworth (five others are treated more briefly: Scott, Carlyle, Tennyson, Wilde, and Swinburne). It also considers how the arcs of their creative careers are often similar to the arc of Whitman''s own fifty years of poem-making. Finally, it seeks to illuminate the sometimes striking affinities between the views of these authors and Whitman on human nature and society. Though he was loath to admit it, these authors anticipated much that we now see as quintessentially Whitmanic.

A century after his death, Walt Whitman is still celebrated as America's greatest poet. In this provocative edition, Whitman biographer Gary Schmidgall presents over 200 of Whitman's finest poems in an unprecedented new format. Unlike the countless available editions of the final authorised or "deathbed" LEAVES OF GRASS OF 1892, this collection focuses on the exuberant poems Whitman wrote during the creative and sexual prime of his life. These poems are faithfully presented as Whitman first gave them to the world - fearless, explicit and uncompromised - before he transformed himself into America's respectable, grandfatherly Good Gray Poet through 30 years of revision, self-censorship and suppression.

Shakespeare and the Poet's Life explores a central biographical question: why did Shakespeare choose to cease writing sonnets and court-focused long poems like The Rape of Lucrece and Venus and Adonis and continue writing plays? Author Gary Schmidgall persuasively demonstrates the value of contemplating the professional reasons Shakespeare -- or any poet of the time -- ceased being an Elizabethan court poet and focused his efforts on drama and the Globe. Students of Shakespeare and of Renaissance poetry will find Schmidgall's approach and conclusions both challenging and illuminating.