Walt Whitman And The Civil War
Download Walt Whitman And The Civil War PDF/ePub or read online books in Mobi eBooks. Click Download or Read Online button to get Walt Whitman And The Civil War book now. This website allows unlimited access to, at the time of writing, more than 1.5 million titles, including hundreds of thousands of titles in various foreign languages.
Walt Whitman and the Civil War
Author: Ted Genoways
language: en
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Release Date: 2023-11-15
Shortly after the third edition of Leaves of Grass was published, in 1860, Walt Whitman seemed to drop off the literary map, not to emerge again until his brother George was wounded at Fredericksburg two and a half years later. Past critics have tended to read this silence as evidence of Whitman's indifference to the Civil War during its critical early months. In this penetrating, original, and beautifully written book, Ted Genoways reconstructs those forgotten years—locating Whitman directly through unpublished letters and never-before-seen manuscripts, as well as mapping his associations through rare period newspapers and magazines in which he published. Genoways's account fills a major gap in Whitman's biography and debunks the myth that Whitman was unaffected by the country's march to war. Instead, Walt Whitman and the Civil War reveals the poet's active participation in the early Civil War period and elucidates his shock at the horrors of war months before his legendary journey to Fredericksburg, correcting in part the poet's famous assertion that the "real war will never get in the books." Shortly after the third edition of Leaves of Grass was published, in 1860, Walt Whitman seemed to drop off the literary map, not to emerge again until his brother George was wounded at Fredericksburg two and a half years later. Past critics have te
Walt Whitman and the Civil War
"The central idea of this book was born of a longstanding interest in Whitman and his work, and the discovery that, though many phases of his life had already been diligently investigated, his relation to the Civil War had been left relatively unexplored."--Preface (C.I.G.; Philadelphia, October 15, 1932).
Walt Whitman's Civil War
In 1863 Walt Whitman first proposed to the publisher John Redpath a book about his Civil War experiences. It was never published. But in a draft prospectus Whitman described ”a new book . . . with its framework jotted down on the battlefield, in the shelter tent, by the wayside amid the rubble of passing artillery trains or the moving cavalry in the streets of Washington . . . a book full of the blood and vitality of the American people.” Walter Lowenfels has edited the book Whitman could only envision. From a mosaic of materials—newspaper dispatches, letters, notebooks, published and unpublished works—as well as thirty-six of Whitman's great war poems, Lowenfels has created a thrilling and unique document. Sixteen pages of drawings by Winslow Homer, another distinguished eyewitness, are reproduced here from the artist's field sketches. The result is a book that produces in the reader exactly what Whitman had hoped, one that captures ”part of the actual distraction, heat, smoke, and excitement of those times.”