Walt Whitman's Life #7: His Notebooks & the Publication of "Leaves of Grass" (new episode)

An episode from 6/18/24: This is the seventh in a series of readings from biographies of Walt Whitman. I continue with Paul Zweig's Walt Whitman: The Making of the Poet, which focuses on the years preceding the publication of Leaves of Grass. Previous readings from Whitman biographies are here. Tonight, Zweig discusses the nature of Whitman's notebooks and journals up through the 1855 publication of the first edition of Leaves of Grass. The necessity Whitman felt, even in his notebooks, for addressing a public audience, and the influence of prose (Carlye, Emerson, the King James Bible) on his revolutionary poetry, all offer great insight into how Whitman was able to achieve what he did. You can support Human Voices Wake Us here, or by ordering any of my books: Notes from the Grid, To the House of the Sun, The Lonely Young & the Lonely Old, and Bone Antler Stone. I’ve also edited a handful of books in the S4N Pocket Poems series. Email me at [email protected].

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