Subject Area: Whitman, Walt
Gibson, Brent2001 0-7734-7577-X 336 pages
This volume helps chronicle the ever-expanding body of scholarship on America’s first world-renowned poet. This annotated bibliography collects a wide array of books, journals, dissertations, and essay collections and offers them in an easy-to–use arrangement. After an introduction, the first part contains English-language works about Walt Whitman, the second part, foreign-language works.
Price: $219.95
Schmidt, Bernard
2004 0-7734-6370-4 148 pages
Personalism was a philosophic movement centered in Boston and led by Borden Parker Bowne. His disciples, Albert C. Knudson, Ralph Tyler Flewelling, and Egdar Sheffield Brightman, gave it energetic if not long life; the therapist-philosopher Carl Rogers is its only well-known, modern proponent. The Personalist Forum is the journal for the small, hardy group of scholars who publish in this field. Dr. Bernard Schmidt argues with telling effect that there were literary precursors to the Boston Personalists whom scholars need to study if the movement is to be thoroughly understood. Walt Whitman published his article “Personalism” in The Galaxy in 1868. Along with his Personalistic declarations in Democratic Vistas (1871), it provokes the idea that Whitman was a Personalist who used his philosophy to undergird “Song of Myself.”
The book stresses emergence rather than decline. Whitman and Alcott were important voices in American Personalistic literature, the former speaking through “Song of Myself,” the latter through a clear and well-reasoned dispute with Emerson. Of course, both had other Personalistic pronouncements. So this study emphasizes the impact of Personalism on American literature; this has not been done before. It shows that Alcott had more to say in his letters, journals, and books than Emerson and more modern critics have allowed. Whitman’s reputation has been made, but his Galaxy article “Personalism” reveals an added dimension of his thought. With its cosmic optimism, it shares the direction of Arthur O. Lovejoy’s Great Chain of Being. Let not obscurity diminish the value of American literary Personalism, which comes to us in seminal form from Whitman and the lesser light Alcott.
Price: $139.95
Schwarzmann, Georg
2010 0-7734-4728-8 316 pages
This study analyzes the impact of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman on José Martí and his search for a political and cultural design for postcolonial Latin America. Martí integrated Emerson’s call for individual self-reliance and for cultural independence from Europe, as well as Whitman’s embrace of liberty and democracy and his poetry and prose reveal the formal and conceptual influence of the two North American writers.
Price: $219.95
Will, Frederic
1993 0-7734-3046-6 212 pages
This is a collection of personal essays (on multinational sensibility; the godmaking impulse), letters (a mini-Bildungsroman in personal correspondence), scholarship (a study of several Marxist social critics; extended queries into Whitman's thrush-theme), and a tale (of revolutionary intensity in the contemporary city). The lead essay `Rearranging my shelves', is a prolonged meditation on book-classification , and all it involves in implicit assumptions about the organization of the intelligible world. The book probes the interrelations of loss and redemption, in art and the religious, and argues complexly for the notion of the artist as a priest. Finally, it brings to the surface fresh understandings of the tension between beauty and goodness, a perennial polarity for critical understanding.
Price: $179.95
Martin, Doug
2004 0-7734-6415-8 174 pages
This work suggests that Walt Whitman, in Leaves of Grass, combines both free verse and traditional prosody in mimetic ways. This study follows the thought of Pasquale Jannacone’s 1897 work, Walt Whitman’s Poetry and the Evolution of Rhythmic Forms, a work not translated from the Italian until 1973, and thus highly ignored by American scholars. This study, however, is more in-depth in its use of the accentual-syllabic approach to prosody.
Price: $159.95
Haigney, Jessica
1990 0-88946-114-7 124 pages
Examines Wylie Sypher's suggestion that the closest literary equivalent of French Impressionist painting may be Walt Whitman's poetry. Examines the interrelationship of the theoretical concepts of Realism and Impressionism and their roots in Romanticism. Formulates five major concepts that embody Impressionistic theory and technique in painting and applies these analytic criteria, amended to the different medium, to Whitman's poetic technique.
Price: $139.95