Walt Whitman's America : A Cultural Biography
(David S. Reynolds
)
The greatest American poet is portrayed in this monumental biography as an essential American, not an isolated mystic but a man formed in large measure by his rapidly changing society. Drawing on his diligent research, and on his experience writing the monumental work Beneath the American Renaissance, noted scholar David S. Reynolds conclusively demonstrates the profound impact the popular culture of his day had on Whitman's awakening as an artist. The fascinating and compelling story of Whitman's life vigorously illuminates how a schoolteacher turned journalist became the robust and exuberant man who changed literature and single-handedly created modern poetry. This copious volume tells the story of 19th-century America as well as the story of the Whitman himself.
Walt Whitman: The Song of Himself
(Jerome Loving
)
Walt Whitman: The Song of Himself is the first full-length critical biography of Walt Whitman in more than forty years. Jerome Loving makes use of recently unearthed archival evidence and newspaper writings to present the most accurate, complete, and complex portrait of the poet to date. This biography affords fresh, often revelatory, insights into many aspects of the poet's life, including his attitudes toward the emerging urban life of America, his relationships with his family members, his developing notions of male-male love, his attitudes toward the vexed issue of race, and his insistence on the union of American states. Virtually every chapter presents material that was previously unknown or unavailable, and Whitman emerges as never before, in all his complexity as a corporal, cerebral, and spiritual being. Loving gives us a new Poet of Democracy, one for the twenty-first century
