The Poetry of Walt Whitman

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Nick Selby assembles some of the most important critical writings about Walt Whitman in order to demonstrate how critical debate about him has reflected changing perceptions of America itself. Beginning with essays by Emerson and Whitman, and reviews of the first edition of Leaves of Grass (1855), this Readers’ Guide discusses the literary expectations that Whitman transgressed, and continues by examining his gradual critical elevation into America’s spokesman, its ‘good gray poet’, and his place in the growth of ‘American Studies’ in the 1940s and 1950s. In its final chapters the Guide explores postmodern, cultural materialist, and ‘queer’ readings of Whitman’s poetry.

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