Overview

For the Whitman bicentennial, a delightful keepsake edition of the incomparable wisdom of America's greatest poet, distilled from his fascinating late-in-life conversations with Horace Traubel Toward the end of his life, Walt Whitman was visited almost daily at his home in Camden, New Jersey, by the young poet and social reformer Horace Traubel. After each visit, Traubel meticulously recorded their conversation, transcribing with such sensitivity that Whitman's friend John Burroughs remarked that he felt he could almost hear the poet breathing. In Walt Whitman Speaks, acclaimed author Brenda Wineapple draws from Traubel's extensive interviews an extraordinary gathering of Whitman's observations that conveys the core of his ethos and vision. Here is Whitman the sage, champion of expansiveness and human freedom. Here, too, is the poet's more personal side--his vivid memories of Thoreau, Emerson, and Lincoln, his literary judgments on writers such as Shakespeare, Goethe, and Tolstoy, and his expressions of hope in the democratic promise of the nation he loved. The result is a keepsake edition to touch the soul, capturing the distilled wisdom of America's greatest poet.

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9781094083148

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Reviews

Brenda Wineapple's pithy volume, in its bare-bones efficiency, allows us to appreciate...the best of Whitman's off-the-cuff remarks. -- Wall Street Journal A treasure of Walt unvarnished, reflective, and still firing on all cylinders into his seventies...Endlessly quotable and perfect for dipping into and savoring. -- The Guardian

"""A treasure of Walt unvarnished, reflective, and still firing on all cylinders into his seventies...Endlessly quotable and perfect for dipping into and savoring."" -- ""The Guardian"" ""Brenda Wineapple's pithy volume, in its bare-bones efficiency, allows us to appreciate...the best of Whitman's off-the-cuff remarks."" -- ""Wall Street Journal"""

Author Information

Walt Whitman was born on May 31, 1819, near Huntington, Long Island, New York. On July 4, 1855, the first edition of Leaves of Grass, the volume of poems that for the next four decades would become his lifes work, was placed on sale. Although some critics treated the volume as a joke and others were outraged by its unprecedented mixture of mysticism and earthiness, the book attracted the attention of some of the finest literary intelligences. His poetry slowly achieved a wide readership in America and in England, where he was praised by Swinburne and Tennyson. (D. H. Lawrence later referred to Whitman as thegreatest modern poet, andthe greatest of Americans. Whitman suffered a stroke in 1873 and was forced to retire to Camden, New Jersey, where he would spend the last twenty years of his life. There he continued to write poetry, and in 1881 the seventh edition of Leaves of Grass was published to generally favorable reviews. However, the book was soon banned in Boston on the grounds that it was obscene literature. In January 1892 the final edition of Leaves of Grass appeared on sale, and Whitman's life work was complete. He died two months later on the evening of March 26, 1892, and was buried four days afterward at Harleigh Cemetery in Camden. Horace Traubel (1858-1919) is best known as the author of a nine-volume biography of Whitman's final four years, Walt Whitman in Camden. He visited the poet virtually daily from the mid-1880s until Whitman's death in 1892. Brenda Wineapple is the author of several books including Ecstatic Nation: Confidence, Crisis, and Compromise, 1848-1877, named a best book of the year by The New York Times, among other publications; White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Hawthorne: A Life, winner of the Ambassador Award for Best Biography of the Year; and Sister Brother: Gertrude and Leo Stein. Her numerous other honors include a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Pushcart Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship, two National Endowment Fellowships in the Humanities, and, most recently, a National Endowment Public Scholars Award. She is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the Society of American Historians and regularly contributes to major publications such as The New York Times Book Review, The New York Review of Books, The Wall Street Journal, and The Nation. Henry Strozier is an actor with a forty-year career in numerous movies and television series. Also a voice-over artist, he has worked extensively in video games and audiobook narration, earning several AudioFile Earphones Awards.

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