Whitman's Poetry of the Body
Title | Whitman's Poetry of the Body PDF eBook |
Author | M. Jimmie Killingsworth |
Publisher | UNC Press Books |
Total Pages | 218 |
Release | 2016-08-01 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 1469620634 |
This book combines literary and historical analysis in a study of sexuality in Walt Whitman's work. Informed by his "new historicist" understanding of the construction of literary texts, Jimmie Killingsworth examines the progression of Whitman's poetry and prose by considering the textual history of Leaves of Grass and other works. Killingsworth demonstrates that Whitman's "poetry of the body" derives its radical power from the transformation of conventional attitudes toward sexuality, traditional poetics, and conservative politics. The sexual relation, with its promise of unity, love, equality, interpenetration, and productivity for partners, becomes a metaphor for all political and social relationships, including that of poet and reader. The effect of the poems is protopolitical, an altering of consciousness about the body's relation to other bodies, a shifting of the categories of knowledge that foretells political action. Killingsworth traces the interplay in Whitman's poetry between sexual and textual themes that derive from Whitman's political response to the historical turbulence of mid-century America. He describes a subtle shift in Whitman's prose writings on poetics, which turn from a view of poetry in the early 1850s as morally and politically efficacious to a chastened romanticism in the postwar years that frees the poet from responsibility for the world outside his poems. Later editions of Leaves of Grass are marked by the poet's deliberate repression of erotic themes in favor of a depoliticized aestheticism that views art not as a motivator of political and moral action but as an artifact embodying the soul of the genius.
Leaves of Grass
Title | Leaves of Grass PDF eBook |
Author | Walt Whitman |
Publisher | |
Total Pages | 518 |
Release | 1872 |
Genre | |
ISBN |
Poems by Walt Whitman
Title | Poems by Walt Whitman PDF eBook |
Author | Walt Whitman |
Publisher | |
Total Pages | 348 |
Release | 1901 |
Genre | |
ISBN |
Walt Whitman and the Body Beautiful
Title | Walt Whitman and the Body Beautiful PDF eBook |
Author | Harold Aspiz |
Publisher | Urbana : University of Illinois Press |
Total Pages | 312 |
Release | 1980 |
Genre | Biography & Autobiography |
ISBN |
Song of Myself ...
Title | Song of Myself ... PDF eBook |
Author | Walt Whitman |
Publisher | |
Total Pages | 126 |
Release | 1904 |
Genre | American poetry |
ISBN |
What Is the Grass: Walt Whitman in My Life
Title | What Is the Grass: Walt Whitman in My Life PDF eBook |
Author | Mark Doty |
Publisher | W. W. Norton & Company |
Total Pages | 217 |
Release | 2020-04-14 |
Genre | Biography & Autobiography |
ISBN | 1324006056 |
“[An] incisive, personal mediation.” —New York Times Book Review Mark Doty has always felt haunted by Walt Whitman’s perennially new American voice, and by his equally radical claims about body and soul. In What Is the Grass, Doty effortlessly blends biography, criticism, and memoir to keep company with Whitman and his Leaves of Grass, tracing the resonances between his own experience and the legendary poet’s life and work.
Earth, My Likeness
Title | Earth, My Likeness PDF eBook |
Author | Walt Whitman |
Publisher | North Atlantic Books |
Total Pages | 202 |
Release | 2010 |
Genre | Nature |
ISBN | 1556439105 |
"Earth, My Likeness is a collection of poetry by Walt Whitman that focuses on nature and contains much of his best and most vital work accompanied by beautiful watercolor illustrations"--Provided by publisher.