Laws for Creations

by Cunningham, Michael; Whitman, Walt

• ISBN13: 9780312426071
• ISBN10: 0312426070
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2006-04-18
• Publisher: Picador

Summary

In Walt Whitman, Michael Cunningham sees a poet whose vision of humanity is ecstatic, democratic, and sensuous. Just over a hundred years ago, Whitman celebrated America as it survived the Civil War, as it endured great poverty, and as it entered the Industrial Revolution, which would make it the most powerful nation on Earth. In Specimen Days Michael Cunningham makes Whitman's verse sing across time, and in Laws for Creations he celebrates what Whitman means to him, and how he appeared at the heart of his new novel. Just as the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Hours drew on the life and work of English novelist Viriginia Woolf, Specimen Days lovingly features the work of American poet Walt Whitman. Bringing together extracts from Whitman's prodigious writings, including Leaves of Grass and his journal, Specimen Days, Michael Cunningham's Laws for Creations provides an introduction to one of America's greatest visionary poets from one of our greatest contemporary novelists.

Author Biography

Michael Cunningham is the author of the bestselling novel The Hours, which won both the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award and was adapted into an Academy Award-winning film, A Home at the End of the World, also adapted for the screen, and Flesh and Blood, all published by FSG. He lives in New York.

Table of Contents

Introduction	ix
Michael Cunningham
POETRY
Selection from Leaves of Grass, The First Edition, 1855
``I celebrate myself''	5	(78)
Selections from Leaves of Grass, The Final Edition, 1891--1892
From ``Inscriptions''
Poets to Come	83	(1)
From ``Children of Adam''
I Sing the Body Electric (first stanza)	84	(1)
From ``Calamus''
City of Orgies	85	(1)
To a Stranger	86	(1)
Full of Life Now	87	(1)
Crossing Brooklyn Ferry	88	(8)
Song of the Answerer (first stanza)	96	(4)
Song of the Broad-Axe (fourth stanza)	100	(1)
From ``Birds of Passage''
To You	101	(4)
From ``Sea-Drift''
Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking	105	(8)
From ``Drum-Taps''
Give Me the Splendid Silent Sun	113	(3)
From ``Autumn Rivulets''
There Was a Child Went Forth	116	(3)
Laws for Creations	119	(1)
The Sleepers (first stanza)	120	(4)
From ``Whispers of Heavenly Death''
Whispers of Heavenly Death	124	(1)
O Living Always, Always Dying	125	(1)
From ``From Noon to Starry Night''
Mannahatta	126	(2)
As I Walk These Broad Majestic Days	128	(2)
A Clear Midnight	130	(1)
From ``Songs of Parting''
As the Time Draws Nigh	131	(1)
My Legacy	132	(1)
So Long!	133	(8)
PROSE
Selections from Specimen Days, 1882--1883
Opening of the Secession War	141	(1)
A Secesh Brave	142	(1)
A Night Battle, Over a Week Since	143	(4)
Battle of Gettysburg	147	(1)
Death of a Hero	148	(1)
Thoughts Under an Oak---A Dream	149	(1)
New Senses---New Joys	150	(1)
Nature and Democracy---Morality	151	(4)
Selections from Collect, 1882--1883
Darwinism---(Then Furthermore)	155	(3)
Monuments---The Past and the Present	158	(1)
The Last Collective Compaction	159	(4)
Preface to Leaves of Grass, The Final Edition, 1891--1892: A Backward Glance O'er Travel'd Roads	163

Excerpts

Introduction

In college, after I gave up modeling myself on Bob Dylan (I had trouble with his conversion to Christianity) and then on Genet (I just wasn’t French enough), I decided to try to become as much as possible like Walt Whitman. What propelled me was not the beauty of Whitman’s language (I was an undergraduate English major; I was drowning in the beautiful language of the dead) but the following passage, which I read late one night in my dormitory room as Pink Floyd seeped through the wall from the room next to mine:
 
Camerado, this is no book,
 
Who touches this touches a man,
 
(Is it night? are we here alone together?)
 
It is I you hold and who holds you,
 
I spring from the pages into your arms. . . .
 
Never before had a writer leaped off the page and touched me like that: directly, personally, erotically. It was my first experience of literature’s ability to telescope time—to forcefully remind the living that the no-longer-living were not only once as alive as we are now but were capable of imagining us, and a future with us in it, as vividly as we imagine them in the past. If it didn’t quite tear a hole in the fabric of mortality, it stretched it a considerable distance.
 
...
 
Copyright © 2006 by Mare Vaporum Corp

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Excerpted from Laws for Creations by Walt Whitman
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.