This introductory guide to Walt Whitman weaves together thewriter’s life with an examination of his works. · An innovative introductory guide to Walt Whitman. · Weaves together the writer’s life with anexamination of his works. · Focuses especially on Whitman’s evolvingmasterpiece Leaves of Grass. · Examines the material conditions and products ofWhitman’s “scripted life”, including his originalmanuscripts. · Investigates Whitman’s “life in print”– his belief that he could literally embody himself in hisbooks. · Linked to a large electronic archive of Whitman’swork at www.whitmanarchive.org

During Walt Whitman's decade in Washington, DC, 1863-1873, he labored intensely, at times seeming to have three lives at once. He wrote the most distinguished journalism of his career; came into his own as a writer of letters; crafted memorable Civil War poetry, Drum-Taps and Sequel to Drum-Taps and later folded it into heavily revised and expanded versions of Leaves of Grass; and produced his searching but also flawed critique of American culture, Democratic Vistas. Whitman's work through the first three editions of Leaves often receives the highest praise, yet his writing in the Washington years is exceptional, too, by any reckoning—and is all the more remarkable given that he also cared for thousands of wounded and sick soldiers in Washington hospitals, serving as an attentive visitor. In addition, he served as a government clerk in various positions, most notably in the attorney general's office when much was accomplished on the road toward a multi-racial democracy including efforts to suppress the Ku Klux Klan, and much was also missed (both by the attorney general's office and by Whitman) in the efforts to advance a more just and vibrant union. Kenneth M. Price analyses Whitman's integrated life, writings, and government work in his urban context to re-evaluate the writer and the nation's capital in a time of transformation. Drawing on an expanded Whitman corpus, including nearly 3,000 Whitman documents Price recently identified in the National Archives, Whitman in Washington demonstrates that the power of Whitman's Civil War and Reconstruction writing emerges, more fully than previously imagined, from his intimate knowledge of the capital city, its bureaucracies, and its tumultuous post-war history.

For Walt Whitman, living and working in Washington, D.C., after the Civil War, Reconstruction meant not only navigating these tumultuous years alongside his fellow citizens but also coming to terms with his own memories of the war. Just as the work of national reconstruction would continue long past its official end in 1877, Whitman’s own reconstruction would continue throughout the remainder of his life as he worked to revise his poetic project—and his public image—to incorporate the disasters that had befallen the Union. In this innovative and insightful analysis of the considerable poetic and personal reimagining that is the hallmark of these postwar years, Martin Buinicki reveals the ways that Whitman reconstructed and read the war. The Reconstruction years would see Whitman transformed from newspaper editor and staff journalist to celebrity contributor and nationally recognized public lecturer, a transformation driven as much by material developments in the nation as by his own professional and poetic ambitions while he expanded and cemented his place in the American literary landscape. Buinicki places Whitman’s postwar periodical publications and business interests in context, closely examining his “By the Roadside” cluster as well as MemorandaDuring the War and Specimen Days as part of his larger project of personal and artistic reintegration. He traces Whitman’s shifting views of Ulysses S. Grant as yet another way to understand the poet’s postwar life and profession and reveals the emergence of Whitman the public historian at the end of Reconstruction. Whitman’s personal reconstruction was political, poetic, and public, and his prose writings, like his poetry, formed a major part of the postwar figure that he presented to the nation. Looking at the poet’s efforts to absorb the war into his own reconstruction narrative, Martin Buinicki provides striking new insights into the evolution of Whitman’s views and writings.

Walt Whitman is a poet of contexts. His poetic practice was one of observing, absorbing, and then reflecting the world around him. Walt Whitman in Context provides brief, provocative explorations of thirty-eight different contexts - geographic, literary, cultural, and political - through which to engage Whitman's life and work. Written by distinguished scholars of Whitman and nineteenth-century American literature and culture, this collection synthesizes scholarly and historical sources and brings together new readings and original research.

In the tumultuous decades of rapid expansion and change between the American Founding and the Civil War, Americans confronted a cluster of overlapping crises whose common theme was the difficulty of finding authority in written texts. The issue arose from several disruptive developments: rising challenges to the traditional authority of the Bible in a society that was intensely Protestant; persistent worries over America's lack of a “national literature” and an independent cultural identity; and the slavery crisis, which provoked tremendous struggles over clashing interpretations of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, even as these “parascriptures” were rising to the status of a kind of quasi-sacred secular canon. At the same time but from the opposite direction, new mass media were creating a new, industrial-scale print culture that put a premium on very non-sacred, disposable text: mass-produced “news,” dispensed immediately and in huge quantities but meant only for the day or hour. Perpetual Scriptures in Nineteenth-Century America identifies key features of the writings, careers and cultural politics of several prominent Americans as responses to this cluster of challenges. In their varied attempts to vindicate the sacred and to merge the timeless with the urgent present, Joseph Smith, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Theodore Parker, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Walt Whitman, Frederick Douglass, Martin Delany, Abraham Lincoln, and other religious and political leaders and men and women of letters helped define American literary culture as an ongoing quest for new “bibles,” or what Emerson called a “perpetual scripture.”

Walt Whitman created, in various editions of Leaves of Grass, what is arguably the most influential book of poems anywhere in the past 200 years. Whitman absorbed the world, transmuting it into poems that address a spectrum of topics--from democracy and religion to sexuality, gender, class, and identity. He exuberantly incarnated his epoch at the same time as he invoked "you"-- readers and "poets to come"--to join in a "poetry of the future." The first A to Z Whitman reference to incorporate 21st century scholarship, this work is ideal for readers who want a concise introduction to the major poems and prose and to the people, places, and topics central to his life. Each of the book's 142 entries is followed by cross-references to related entries and suggestions for further reading. Also included are a brief biography, a chronology of Whitman's life and major works, and a bibliography of some 300 primary and secondary sources on this most timeless and contemporary of poets.

Offers advice on writing essays about the poetry of Walt Whitman and lists sample topics.