Leaves of Grass

by Belasco, Susan; Folsom, Ed; Price, Kenneth M.

• ISBN13: 9780803260009
• ISBN10: 0803260008
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2008-01-01
• Publisher: Univ of Nebraska Pr

Summary

This comprehensive volume celebrates the 150th anniversary of the 1855 edition of Walt Whitman'sLeaves of Grasswith twenty essays by preeminent scholars representing a variety of critical perspectives that focus exclusively on the original edition. Once regarded as primarily a collector's item, this edition is now viewed as the poet's most bold and compelling articulation of the possibilities of American democracy. The essays weave a rich tapestry of the most current, innovative criticism on this foundational book of American poetry. The contributors treat Whitman's poetry, his biography, his politics, his reception in the United States and abroad, race and ethnic issues, nineteenth-century America, and even the complex typographical history of the first edition ofLeaves of Grass. The volume also includes a tribute from the renowned poet Galway Kinnell.

Author Biography

Susan Belasco is a professor of English at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln and the editor of Whitman's Poems in Periodicals for The Walt Whitman Archive. Ed Folsom is the Carver Professor of English at the University of Iowa, coeditor of The Walt Whitman Archive, and editor of Whitman East and West: New Contexts for Reading Walt Whitman. Kenneth M. Price is the Hillegass Professor of American Literature at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, coeditor of The Walt Whitman Archive, and the author of To Walt Whitman, America.

 

Contributors: Susan Belasco, Lawrence Buell, Matt Cohen, Betsy Erkkila, Ed Folsom, Thomas C. Gannon, Ted Genoways, Jay Grossman, Walter Grünzweig, M. Jimmie Killingsworth, Galway Kinnell, Donald D. Kummings, Jerome Loving, William Pannapacker, Vivian R. Pollak, Kenneth M. Price, David S. Reynolds, M. Wynn Thomas, and Alan Trachtenberg

 

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Abbreviations
What We're Still Learning about the 1855 Leaves of Grass 150 Years Later	p. 1
Foregrounding the First Edition
Whitman, Marx, and the American 1848	p. 35
United States and States United: Whitman's National Vision in 1855	p. 62
Reading the First Edition
"One goodshaped and wellhung man": Accentuated Sexuality and the Uncertain Authorship of the Frontispiece to the 1855 Edition of Leaves of Grass	p. 87
Whitman at Night: "The Sleepers" in 1855	p. 124
Complaints from the Spotted Hawk: Flights and Feathers in Whitman's 1855 Leaves of Grass	p. 141
Contextualizing the First Edition
Leaves of Grass and the Poetry Marketplace of Antebellum America	p. 179
Leaves of Grass (1855) and the Cities of Whitman's Memory	p. 199
The Lost Negress of "Song of Myself" and the Jolly Young Wenches of Civil War Washington	p. 224
"Bringing help for the sick": Whitman and Prophetic Biography	p. 244
Aftereffects
The Visionary and the Visual in Whitman's Poetics	p. 269
Walt Whitman as an Eminent Victorian	p. 282
"To reach the workmen direct": Horace Traubel and the Work of the 1855 Edition of Leaves of Grass	p. 299
"Profession of the calamus": Whitman, Eliot, Matthiessen	p. 321
Whitman and the Cold War: The Centenary Celebration of Leaves of Grass in Eastern Europe	p. 343
The Life behind the Book
"A Southerner as soon as a Northerner": Writing Walt Whitman's Biography	p. 363
Why I Write Cultural Biography: The Backgrounds of Walt Whitman's America	p. 378
Songs of Myself; or, Confessions of a Whitman Collector	p. 402
A Poet Responds
"Strong is your Hold": My Encounters with Whitman	p. 417
The Critical Response
The First Leaves of Grass: A Bibliography	p. 429
Contributors	p. 457
Index	p. 462
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