Quantcast
Channel: Poetry | The Guardian
Viewing all articles
Browse latest Browse all 4232

What Is the Grass by Mark Doty review – Walt Whitman and me

0
0

From visions of a shadowy spirit to memories of love and loss … a contemporary US poet pays tribute to the persistent presence of Whitman

“I celebrate myself, and sing myself”: Walt Whitman lived by the unforgettable opening lines of his collection of poems, Leaves of Grass. When the book was first published in 1855, many of the anonymous reviews were later found to have been written by Whitman himself. “An American bard at last!” one of them declared.

The confidence was remarkable, coming from a Brooklyn boy who had gone to school only until the age of 11, and had, in the years before publication, worked through a series of unstable jobs as a schoolteacher, a typesetter, a carpenter and a journalist. But the 12 poems in the first edition of Leaves of Grass lived up to their hype. They seemed to have emerged from a sensibility steeped in “long dumb” and forbidden voices, breaking free, with their plainspeak, their cascading clauses and subclauses, from the older constraints of diction, metre and rhyme. Whitman perceived US democracy itself as a literary undertaking, capable of absorbing anything and everything, projecting its “barbaric yawp to the rooftops of the world”.

Related: The best recent poetry collections – review

Continue reading...

Viewing all articles
Browse latest Browse all 4232

Latest Images

Trending Articles



Latest Images