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Walt Whitman Speaks

His Final Thoughts on Life, Writing, Spirituality, and the Promise of America

Walter Whitman

Edited by Brenda Wineapple

Cover of Walt Whitman Speaks edited by Brenda Wineapple
10% off
Categories: 19th Century, American, Memoirs
Imprint: Carcanet Classics
Publisher: Carcanet Press
Available as:
Paperback (208 pages)
(Pub. Dec 2019)
9781784108946
£14.99 £13.49
Digital access available through Exact Editions
  • Description
  • Author
  • Reviews
  • The young journalist and reformer Horace Traubel visited Whitman nearly every day at his home in Camden, New Jersey. Whitman liked to talk, especially about the big issues, spiritual, political - all he'd learned over seven decades of peace and war. To mark the bicentenary of Walt Whitman's death, Carcanet presents Brenda Wineapple's distillation from these conversations with the great American poet.

    Whitman speaks from the heart, an old man who changed the course of American poetry and, by extension, the poetries of Europe, Asia, Latin America. Here, too, is the poet's worldly side - recalling the opprobrium heaped on Leaves of Grass for its poetic risks and sexual frankness; memories of Thoreau, Emerson and Lincoln; his judgments of Shakespeare, Goethe and Tolstoy; and his sense of the Nation.
    Walter Whitman
    Walt Whitman (born 1819) is widely considered to be the greatest of all American poets. Largely self-taught, he read voraciously, including works by the great classic writers – Homer, Dante, Shakespeare. In 1836, at the age of 17, he began his career as a teacher and continued to teach until 1841 ... read more
    Brenda Wineapple
    Brenda Wineapple is the author of Ecstatic Nation: Confidence, Crisis, and Compromise 1848-1877, a New York Times Notable Book, and White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. For Library of America, she has edited ... read more
    'Walt Whitman Speaks enables us to listen in to his wondrous burblings as seldom before. As consmos-centred as he is self-centred, aswirl with spiritual and carnal longings, sharp with a put-down, exalted in his rambling earthiness, he is a delight to eavesdrop upon.'

    Michael Glover, The Tablet


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