The Patriotic Poems of Walt Whitman
Walt Whitman didn't just write poetry. He attempted to capture the entire soul of America in language that had never been spoken before. Leaves of Grass, first published when the author was thirty-six and revised obsessively until his death, reinvented English verse. Gone were the familiar rhythms and rhyme schemes; in their place came something raw, muscular, and uncontainable, a poetic form as vast and argumentive as the nation itself. Here the self expands to include multitudes: "I celebrate myself, and sing myself." Soldiers march toward Antietam's mud, lilacs bloom beside a president's grave, the electric body sings with equal parts flesh and divine. This is democracy rendered not as abstraction but as flesh and labor and faces in a crowd. The carpenter, the prostitute, the mother, the soldier: all sacred, all American. This complete edition presents the final "deathbed" version Whitman spent his final decades refining, along with earlier versions of the major poems. It captures both the youthful radical who shocked Victorian readers and the aging sage wrestling with mortality. For anyone who wants to understand what it has meant, and what it might still mean, to be American, there is no more essential book.
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“Give me juicy autumnal fruit, ripe and red from the orchard."[]””
— Walt Whitman
“The President is there in the White House for you, it is not youwho are here for him,The Secretaries act in their bureaus for you, not you here for them,The Congress convenes every Twelfth-month for you,Laws, courts, the forming of States, the charters of cities, thegoing and coming of commerce and mails, are all for you.List close my scholars dear,Doctrines, politics and civilization exurge from you,Sculpture and monuments and any thing inscribed anywhere aretallied in you,The gist of histories and statistics as far back as the records reachis in you this hour, and myths and tales the same,If you were not breathing and walking here, where would theyall be?The most renown'd poems would be ashes, orations and playswould be vacuums.””
— Walt Whitman
“Come Muse migrate from Greece and Ionia,Cross out please those immensely overpaid accounts,That matter of Troy and Achilles' wrath, and Aeneas', Odysseus'wanderings,Placard "Removed" and "To Let" on the rocks of your snowyParnassus,Repeat at Jerusalem, place the notice high on Jaffa's gate and onMount Moriah,The same on the walls of your German, French and Spanishcastles, and Italian collections,For know a better, fresher, busier sphere, a wide, untried domainawaits, demands you.- Song of the Exposition””
— Walt Whitman
“The mark of true genius in the arts is an immediately recognizable style.””
— Walt Whitman
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Whitman, Walt. The Patriotic Poems of Walt Whitman. Lex, lex-books.com/book/the-patriotic-poems-of-walt-whitman-aef61e63-dda5-4fb2-805c-565b196a539a.Whitman, W. (n.d.). The Patriotic Poems of Walt Whitman. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/the-patriotic-poems-of-walt-whitman-aef61e63-dda5-4fb2-805c-565b196a539aWhitman, Walt. The Patriotic Poems of Walt Whitman. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/the-patriotic-poems-of-walt-whitman-aef61e63-dda5-4fb2-805c-565b196a539a.
