I Hear America Singing

by Whitman, Walt

• ISBN13: 9780856463402
• ISBN10: 085646340X
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2004-06-01
• Publisher: Carcanet Press Ltd.

Summary

Walt Whitman is the authentic voice of democratic America. Anvil's selection from his poems emphasises his continuing relevance at the start of a new millennium.

Author Biography

Born 1819 in Long Island, New York, Whitman began working at the early age of 13, having left school the year before. He was an office boy, then a printer's assistant on several of the newspapers around New York. Occasionally he contributed articles to the papers, writing some of the earliest reports of baseball games. From 1836-1841 he taught in schools in the Long Island area, then founded and edited the newspaper The Long Islander from 1836-1841. Later he worked as as editor of the paper Brooklyn Eagle, though he was fired because of his antislavery views. It wasn't until 1848 that he began seriously to apply himself to poetry, self-publishing Leaves of Grass, a compilation of 12 of his poems. This drew the praise of Ralph Waldo Emerson, who proclaimed in a letter to Whitman: "I greet you at the beginning of a new career." Whitman published a second volume of poems, Drum Taps, in 1865, which was better received by the public. Whitman died in Camden in 1892.

Table of Contents

from Inscriptions
One's-Self I Sing	p. 9
To Foreign Lands	p. 10
To a Historian	p. 11
Beginners	p. 12
To the States	p. 13
I Hear America Singing	p. 14
What Place is Besieged?	p. 15
Poets to Come	p. 16
from Starting from Paumanok: 12	p. 17
from Calamus
For You O Democracy	p. 19
City of Orgies	p. 20
I Dream'd in a Dream	p. 21
Salut au Monde!	p. 22
Crossing Brooklyn Ferry	p. 35
from Song of the Broad-Axe: 5	p. 43
from Birds of Passage
A Broadway Pageant	p. 45
from By the Roadside
I Sit and Look Out	p. 50
from Drum-Taps
First O Songs for a Prelude	p. 51
Year that Trembled and Reel'd Beneath Me	p. 55
Long, too Long America	p. 56
Give Me the Splendid Silent Sun	p. 57
Over the Carnage Rose Prophetic a Voice	p. 60
How Solemn as One by One	p. 62
from Memories of President Lincoln
Reversals	p. 63
from Autumn Rivulets
The City Dead-House	p. 64
I Was Looking a Long While	p. 65
Prayer of Columbus	p. 66
from Whispers of Heavenly Death
Whispers of Heavenly Death	p. 69
The Last Invocation	p. 70
Pensive and Faltering	p. 71
from From Noon to Starry Night
Mannahatta ('I was asking for something specific')	p. 72
A Clear Midnight	p. 74
from Songs of Parting
Thoughts ('Of these years I sing')	p. 75
The Sobbing of the Bells	p. 78
So Long!	p. 79
from Sands at Seventy
Mannahatta ('My city's fit and noble name resumed')	p. 83
America	p. 84
Broadway	p. 85
Life	p. 86
True Conquerors	p. 87
The United States to Old World Critics	p. 88
Stronger Lessons	p. 89
from Good-Bye My Fancy
Long, Long Hence	p. 90
The Commonplace	p. 91
from Old Age Echoes
One Thought Ever at the Fore	p. 92
While Behind All Firm and Erect	p. 93
A Thought of Columbus	p. 94
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