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Poems by Walt Whitman
Walt Whitman
Synopsis "Poems by Walt Whitman"
This Library of America edition is the most comprehensive volume of the work of Walt Whitman ever published. It includes all of his poetry and what he considered his complete prose. It is also the only collection that includes, in exactly the form in which it appeared in 1855, the first edition of Leaves of Grass. This was the book, a commercial failure, which prompted Emerson’s famous message to Whitman: “I greet you at the beginning of a great career.” These twelve poems, including what were later to be entitled “Song of Myself” and “I Sing the Body Electric,” and a preface announcing the author’s poetic theories were the first stage of a massive, lifelong work. Six editions and some thirty-seven years later, Leaves of Grass became one of the central volumes in the history of world poetry. Each edition involved revisions of earlier poems and the incorporation of new ones. In 1856, for example, he added such poems as “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” and “Spontaneous Me;” in the third edition (1860), “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” and two new sections, “Calamus” and “Children of Adam.” In the fourth (1867), he incorporated the Civil War poems published a few years earlier as Drum-Taps and Sequel to Drum-Taps, including the poems on the death of Lincoln, notably “When Lilacs Last in the Door Yard Bloom’d.” As it progressed, it was hailed by Emerson, Thoreau, Rosetti and others, but was also, as with the sixth edition in 1881–82, beset by charges of obscenity for such poems as “A Woman Waits for Me.” Printed here is the final, great culminating edition of 1891–92, the last supervised by Whitman himself just before his death. Whitman’s prose is no less extraordinary. Specimen Days and Collect (1882) includes reminiscences of nineteenth-century New York City that will fascinate readers in the twenty-first, notes on the Civil War, especially his service in Washington hospitals, and trenchant comments on books and authors. Democratic Vistas (1871), in its attacks on the misuses of national wealth after the Civil War, is relevant to conditions in our own time, and November Boughs (1888) brings together retrospective prefaces, opinions, and random autobiographical bits that are in effect an extended epilogue on Whitman’s life, works, and times. Here it all is, the complete Whitman—elegiac, comic, furtive, outrageous—the most innovative and original of American authors.
Walt Whitman (1819-1892) es, sin lugar a dudas, el poeta más influyente de las letras estadounidenses. Nació en West Hills, Long Island, siendo el segundo de nueve hijos en una familia cercana al credo cuáquero. A los once años finalizó sus estudios formales y empezó a trabajar como aprendiz en el semanario The Patriot, donde comenzaría a escribir sus primeros textos. Tras su paso por otros periódicos y revistas, en 1850 decidió dedicarse plenamente a la poesía. Cinco años más tarde vería la luz la primera edición de la celebérrima Hojas de hierba, integrada por doce poemas y cuyos 795 ejemplares fueron costeados por el mismo autor. El poemario despertó gran interés y fue ampliamente distribuido, en parte por la fascinación que despertó en el filósofo Ralph Waldo Emerson. Durante la Guerra de Secesión, Whitman ejerció voluntariamente como enfermero en Washington D.C., experiencia que recogería en El gran ejército de la enfermedad (1863) y Memorias de la guerra (1875). Finalizado el conflicto en 1965, publicó Redobles de tambor. Mientras se empleaba en la Oficina del Fiscal General, Whitman siguió alzando la pluma para escribir versos como los de «¡Oh, Capitán! ¡Mi Capitán!», que, junto a otros, irían completando las sucesivas ediciones de Hojas de hierba hasta la novena y definitiva, que constó de un total de más de cuatrocientos poemas.
