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.

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.