Walter Whitman – författare

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.

Walt Whitman (1819-92) is the authentic voice of democratic America. After a childhood in Brooklyn, he spent many years in and around Manhattan and Washington, where he witnessed troops returning from the Civil War and tended wounded soldiers in the camp hospitals. Whitman's broad humanity, his love of cities (especially Manhattan), his sympathy with all conditions of people, and his visionary - even prophetic - sense of the reality of the American dream make him as much a poet for our time as he was for the time of the American Civil War and its aftermath. This selection of courageous and consoling poems focuses on Whitman's vision of democracy, his love of Manhattan, his sense of the future - and of the community of peoples of this earth.