Recent critical studies have emphasized the formal, mystical, and psychological dimensions of Walt Whitman's art, dwelling mainly upon his Emersonian and Transcendental sources. This study is the first book to undertake a detailed analysis of Whitman's entire work in relation to the political struggles of the 19th century. Erkkila repairs the split between the private and the public, the personal and the political, the poet and history, that has in the past defined the analysis and evaluation of Whitman's work. Her approach combines close reading and historicist analysis, examining his poems as both products and agents of the political culture of his time. Among the topics explored are the ways in which the politics of race, class, gender, capital, technology, western expansion, and war enter into the poetic design of "Leaves of Grass"; the relation between Whitman's (homo)sexual body and the body politic of his poems; and the ways in which the Civil War and its aftermath affected Whitman's artistic ordering and reordering of his work.
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"Simply one of the best books ever written on Whitman. Virtually every page of it is persuasive and much is entirely original.... Without question, it will be one of the books on Whitman that every reader should own."--Eric Sundquist, University of California, Berkeley
"Erkkila presents an extraordinary account of how Whitman's political purposes informed the most fundamental choices of his life and career, and in so doing she has written what is surely one of the two or three most valuable one-volume studies of Whitman ever produced."--South Atlantic Review
"A welcome attempt to show Whitman as writer and man living in and reacting to the political environment of his age....Her book is thorough and convincingly argued, and makes an important contribution to the study of American literature and culture."--Choice
"She always has something to say about the larger inferences of his work, about the assumptions behind it and the contradictions often hidden in those assumptions, and about the uneasy relation between Whitman's thought and the thought of his time....Will help most readers better to grasp the detail within the whole arc of Whitman's ideas."--Times Literary Supplement
"No other work has dealt so well and so fully with Whitman's political ideology or made so fine a connection between Whitman's sense of his artistic mission and his political-ideological orientation....Lucid, comprehensive, and well-reasoned, Professor Erkkila's book fills a serious need in Whitman studies both as a source book and as a orrective to other interpretations."--Journal of English & Germanic Philology
About the Author
Betsy Erkkila is at Northwestern University.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent and accessible work,
By Chris Gaul (Chicago, IL United States) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Whitman the Political Poet (Paperback)
When this study was originally published, it was considered quite radical to cast Whitman as a political poet - and this despite the fact that his ardent political commitments surface everywhere in his poetry. Although some of its radical luster has worn off, Erkkila's book remains one of the best ever treatments of Whitman. I would even recommend the book for non-scholars, as Erkkila writes engagingly and accessibly.
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democratic vistas, revolutionary formation, strong bird, pinions free, bridle leviathan, democratic mother, divine grammar, democratic nationality, war memoranda, political poet, hounded slave, revolutionary founders, national creation Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
Leaves of Grass, Whitman the Political Poet, Civil War, Song of Myself, New York, United States, Specimen Days, The Union War, Walt Whitman, These States, Sexual Desire, The Eighteenth Presidency, The Fractured State, American Revolution, Long Island, Fort Greene, War America, Sing the Body Electric, New World, The Sleepers, New Jersey, Burying President Lincoln, Declaration of Independence, Timber Creek, New England Browse Sample Pages:
Front Cover | Table of Contents | First Pages | Index | Surprise Me!
democratic vistas, revolutionary formation, strong bird, pinions free, bridle leviathan, democratic mother, divine grammar, democratic nationality, war memoranda, political poet, hounded slave, revolutionary founders, national creation Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
Leaves of Grass, Whitman the Political Poet, Civil War, Song of Myself, New York, United States, Specimen Days, The Union War, Walt Whitman, These States, Sexual Desire, The Eighteenth Presidency, The Fractured State, American Revolution, Long Island, Fort Greene, War America, Sing the Body Electric, New World, The Sleepers, New Jersey, Burying President Lincoln, Declaration of Independence, Timber Creek, New England Browse Sample Pages:
Front Cover | Table of Contents | First Pages | Index | Surprise Me!
Citations (learn more)
33
books
cite this book:
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- The Erotic Whitman by Vivian R. Pollak on 10 pages
- Whitman Possessed: Poetry, Sexuality, and Popular Authority by Mark Maslan on 7 pages
- The Architecture of Address: The Monument and Public Speech in American Poetry (Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory) by Jake Adam York on 7 pages
- The Cambridge Companion to Walt Whitman (Cambridge Companions to Literature) by Ezra Greenspan on page 89, page 132, and page 133
- Walt Whitman's Song of Myself: A Sourcebook and Critical Edition (Routledge Guides to Literature) by Walt Whitman on page 10, and Back Matter
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