Abstract
Whitman in the Twenty-first Century: Barack Obama, Paul Giles, Adrienne Rich, William Carlos Williams, William Gass (who “translates” “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer” into prose sentences). Emerson’s 1855 letter.
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Notes
- 1.
Barack Obama, A Promised Land. New York: Crown, 2020: 14.
- 2.
Paul Giles, American World Literature, an Introduction. Chichester: Wiley, 2019: 76–79, 89–90.
- 3.
Adrienne Rich, “Six Meditations in Place of a Lecture,” What Is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics, second edition. New York: Norton, 2003: 263.
- 4.
William Carlos Williams, “Preface,” Selected Essays of William Carlos Williams. New York: Random House, 1954: n.p. and “Against the Weather,” Selected Essays: 196–218.
- 5.
C. K. Williams, On Whitman. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016.
- 6.
William H. Gass, “Emerson and the Essay,” Habitations of the World: Essays. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985: 32.
- 7.
Gass, “Emerson and the Essay,” Habitations of the Word, 33.
- 8.
Whitman, “Preface, 1855” to Leaves of Grass, Leaves of Grass and Selected Prose. New York: Modern Library, 1950: 441; hereafter cited as Modern Library.
- 9.
Jerome Loving clarifies that even though Whitman made that comment, he had published the first three editions of Leaves of Grass before the Civil War began. Walt Whitman, The Song of Himself. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999: 22.
- 10.
Loving, Walt Whitman, 188–190. Emerson’s letter in full:
Dear Sir, I am not blind to the worth of the wonderful gift of “Leaves of Grass.” I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit & wisdom that America has yet contributed. I am very happy in reading it, as great power makes us happy. It meets the demand I am always making of what seemed the sterile & stingy nature, as if too much handiwork or too much lymph in the temperament were making our western wits fat & mean. I give you joy of your free & brave thought. I have great joy in it. I find incomparable things said incomparably well, as they must be. I find the courage of treatment, which so delights us, & which large perception only can inspire. I greet you at the beginning of a great career, which yet must have had a long foreground somewhere for such a start. I rubbed my eyes a little to see if this sunbeam were no illusion; but the solid sense of the book is a sober certainty. It has the best merits, namely, of fortifying & encouraging ….
- 11.
Angus Fletcher, “The Book of a Lifetime,” A New Literary History of America, ed. Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009: 306.
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Wagner-Martin, L. (2021). Introduction. In: Walt Whitman. Literary Lives. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77665-7_1
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