Yet even the “world” itself is imagination, simply “the length of a human life,” as its etymology defines. The 150 years since Whitman’s Leaves of Grass was first published is a moment in any world so conceived, and the bridges to and from...
Whitman is a poet of all the senses, but listening, it seems, engaged him with special force: many of his work’s best-known passages set down what had come to him through the ear. No gesture of style so pronounced can be accidental, and I...
Walt Whitman had Keatsian “negative capability”—a certain shapelessness of personality, a peculiar power to obliterate himself and flow into some other being and speak it from within—and speak himself in the process. “I am the man—,” he...
One extraordinary feature of Whitman’s legacy is the variety of causes to which he has been summoned to lend support. The treatment of Whitman in mainstream academic anthologies aimed at U.S. high school and college students is a subject...
Midnight: the witching hour, a haunted time, moment of epiphany. It is at this moment that our swaggering national bard, epic chanter of democracy, becomes a tender and delicate solitary, who addresses something wordless and imperishable...
What some might call Whitman’s essentialism is only one of the features of his statement about the United States that might mark it, in some eyes, as dated, obsolete, historically confined and limited. Another is his use of the plural verb...
In summer 2004, fifty years after its debut, Godzilla played in cinemas all across the United States for the first time. Not the heavily reedited cult classic starring Raymond Burr but the original, Japanese-language picture that first...
What most people don’t know today is that Johnny Cash’s famous Folsom Prison concert was an event that had its beginnings many years before. Reverend Gressett ministered to prisoners in the California State Prison system. Gressett started...
Assuredly our twenty-sixth American president is far from being forgotten. On the contrary, of late there has been positively a resurgence of historical interest in him. Kathleen Dalton’s new biography, Theodore Roosevelt: A Strenuous Life ...
