Walt Whitman: Selected Poems 1855-1892

Front Cover
Macmillan, 1999 M08 23 - 530 pages
A fully unexpurgated collection that restores the sexual vitality and subversive flair suppressed by Whitman himself in later editions of Leaves of Grass.

A century after his death, Whitman is still celebrated as America's greatest poet. In this startling new edition of his work, Whitman biographer Gary Schmidgall presents over 200 poems in their original pristine form, in the chronological order in which they were written, with Whitman's original line breaks and punctuation. Included in this volume are facsimiles of Whitman's original manuscripts, contemporary - and generally blistering - reviews of Whitman's poetry (not surprisingly Henry James hated it), and early pre-Leaves of Grass poems that return us to the physical Whitman, rejoicing - sometimes graphically - in homoerotic love.

Unlike the many other available editions, all drawn from the final authorized or "deathbed" Leaves of Grass, this collection focuses on the exuberant poems Whitman wrote during the creative and sexual prime of his life, roughly between l853 and l860. These poems are faithfully presented as Whitman first gave them to the world - fearless, explicit and uncompromised - before he transformed himself into America's respectable, mainstream Good Gray Poet through 30 years of revision, self-censorship and suppression.

Whitman admitted that his later poetry lacked the "ecstasy of statement" of his early verse. Revealing that ecstasy for the first time, this edition makes possible a major reappraisal of our nation first great poet.

From inside the book

Contents

WHITMANS PREFACE
3
Long I thought that knowledge alone would suffice
8
Not heat flames up and consumes
14
WHITMANS UNSIGNED REVIEW BROOKLYN DAILY TIMES 1855
112
LEAVES OF GRASS 1856
119
Poem of Wonder at The Resurrection of The Wheat
130
Poem of The Road
140
Poem of Procreation
149
O hymen O hymenee
222
UNPUBLISHED INTRODUCTION 1861
267
Come Up from the Fields Father
273
A Farm Picture
278
Look Down Fair Moon
284
When Lilacs Last in the DoorYard Bloomd
291
O Captain My Captain
298
Reconciliation
304

Bunch Poem
155
Poem of The Propositions of Nakedness
157
Poem of The Sayers of The Words of The Earth
160
RALPH WALDO EMERSONS CONGRATULATORY LETTER
166
A CONVERSATIONAL POSTSCRIPT 1889
172
LEAVES OF GRASS 1860
175
ProtoLeaf
177
8 Splendor of falling day
188
Historian you who celebrate bygones
190
To oratiststo male or female
191
Poets to come
192
Me imperturbe
193
I was looking a long while
194
1 Elemental drifts
195
O bitter sprig 99
198
I sit and look out 99
199
Now I make a leaf of Voices
200
Lift me close to your face till I whisper
201
A Word Out of the Sea
208
1 To the garden the world
214
From that of myself
215
O furious O confine me not
217
You and Iwhat the earth is we are
218
Native moments when you come upon me
219
Once I passed through a populous city
220
In the new garden in all the parts
221
LEAVES OF GRASS 187172
313
Proud Music of the Storm
323
This Dust was Once the Man
329
The Untold Want
332
One Song America Before I Go
340
By Broad Potomacs Shore
348
Eidolons
360
Wandering at Morn
366
The Prairie States
372
Mannahatta
386
After the Dazzle of Day
389
After the Supper and Talk
395
AUTHORS NOTE TO 189192 EDITION
401
The Rounded Catalogue Divine Complete
407
Poems Published Before Leaves or Posthumously
413
Significant Passages from Whitman Manuscripts
423
Whitmans Observations on Leaves of Grass 188892
438
Contemporary Reviews of Leaves of Grass
448
November Philadelphia Evening Bulletin 30 October 1888
478
99
483
Notes on the Poems
485
Early in the morning 222
498
A Select Whitman Bibliography
517
Primeval my love for the woman I love
523
Copyright

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About the author (1999)

Walt Whitman was born on Long Island and raised in Brooklyn, New York, the son of a carpenter. He left school when he was 11 years old to take a variety of jobs. By the time he was 15, Whitman was living on his own in New York City, working as a printer and writing short pieces for newspapers. He spent a few years teaching, but most of his work was either in journalism or politics. Gradually, Whitman became a regular contributor to a variety of Democratic Party newspapers and reviews, and early in his career established a rather eccentric way of life, spending a great deal of time walking the streets, absorbing life and talking with laborers. Extremely fond of the opera, he used his press pass to spend many evenings in the theater. In 1846, Whitman became editor of the Brooklyn Eagle, a leading Democratic newspaper. Two years later, he was fired for opposing the expansion of slavery into the west. Whitman's career as a poet began in 1885, with the publication of the first edition of his poetry collection, Leaves of Grass. The book was self-published (Whitman probably set some of the type himself), and despite his efforts to publicize it - including writing his own reviews - few people read it. One reader who did appreciate it was essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson, who wrote a letter greeting Whitman at "the beginning of a great career." Whitman's poetry was unlike any verse that had ever been seen. Written without rhyme, in long, loose lines, filled with poetic lists and exclamations taken from Whitman's reading of the Bible, Homer, and Asian poets, these poems were totally unlike conventional poetry. Their subject matter, too, was unusual - the celebration of a free-spirited individualist whose love for all things and people seemed at times disturbingly sensual. In 1860, with the publication of the third edition on Leaves of Grass, Whitman alienated conventional thinkers and writers even more. When he went to Boston to meet Emerson, poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, essayist Oliver Wendell Holmes, and poet James Russell Lowell, they all objected to the visit. With the outbreak of the Civil War, Whitman's attentions turned almost exclusively to that conflict. Some of the greatest poetry of his career, including Drum Taps (1865) and his magnificent elegy for President Abraham Lincoln, "When Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd" (1865), was written during this period. In 1862, his brother George was wounded in battle, and Whitman went to Washington to nurse him. He continued as a hospital volunteer throughout the war, nursing other wounded soldiers and acting as a benevolent father-figure and confidant. Parts of his memoir Specimen Days (1882) record this period. After the war, Whitman stayed on in Washington, working as a government clerk and continuing to write. In 1873 he suffered a stroke and retired to Camden, New Jersey, where he lived as an invalid for the rest of his life. Ironically, his reputation began to grow during this period, as the public became more receptive to his poetic and personal eccentricities. Whitman tried to capture the spirit of America in a new poetic form. His poetry is rough, colloquial, sweeping in its vistas - a poetic equivalent of the vast land and its varied peoples. Critic Louis Untermeyer has written, "In spite of Whitman's perplexing mannerisms, the poems justify their boundless contradictions. They shake themselves free from rant and bombastic audacities and rise into the clear air of major poetry. Such poetry is not large but self-assured; it knows, as Whitman asserted, the amplitude of time and laughs at dissolution. It contains continents; it unfolds the new heaven and new earth of the Western world." American poetry has never been the same since Whitman tore it away from its formal and thematic constraints, and he is considered by virtually all critics today to be one of the greatest poets the country has ever produced.

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