Walt Whitman Speaks
His Final Thoughts on Life, Writing, Spirituality, and the Promise of America
To mark the bicentenary of Walt Whitman's death, Carcanet publishesa distillation from Horace Traubel's conversations with the great American poet. Whitman speaks from the heart, an old man whochanged the course of American poetry and, by extension, the poetriesof Europe, Asia, Latin America... A young journalist and reformer, Traubel visited him nearly everyday at his home in Camden, New Jersey. Whitman liked to talk,especially about the big issues, spiritual, political, all he'd learned overseven decades of peace and war. Traubel's meticulous transcriptions were published in nine volumes. Brenda Wineapple (Ecstatic Nation) compiled this selection: the sage, visionary, and philosopher, advocate for expansive and liberated being, stands tall. Here, too, is the poet's worldly side – recalling the opprobrium heaped on Leaves of Grass forits poetic risks and sexual frankness; memories of Thoreau, Emerson, and Lincoln; his judgments of Shakespeare, Goethe, and Tolstoy; andhis sense of the Nation.
About the Author
Walt Whitman (1819-1892) was born in Brooklyn. He worked as a printer, teacher and journalist, and published the first of his series of poetry collections "Leaves of Grass" in 1855. During the Civil War he worked as a nurse in army hospitals in Washington, DC. In 1873 he suffered a stroke and settled in Camden, NJ.
