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Walt Whitman Speaks by Walt Whitman
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Walt Whitman Speaks

His Final Thoughts on Life, Writing, Spirituality, and the Promise of America

$15.26

Retail price: $16.95

Discount: 9%

This title is not eligible for purchase with membership credits. Why?

Narrator Henry Strozier
Length 5 hours 16 minutes
Language English
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For the Whitman bicentennial, a delightful keepsake edition of the incomparable wisdom of America’s greatest poet, distilled from his fascinating late-in-life conversations with Horace Traubel

Toward the end of his life, Walt Whitman was visited almost daily at his home in Camden, New Jersey, by the young poet and social reformer Horace Traubel. After each visit, Traubel meticulously recorded their conversation, transcribing with such sensitivity that Whitman’s friend John Burroughs remarked that he felt he could almost hear the poet breathing. In Walt Whitman Speaks, acclaimed author Brenda Wineapple draws from Traubel’s extensive interviews an extraordinary gathering of Whitman’s observations that conveys the core of his ethos and vision. Here is Whitman the sage, champion of expansiveness and human freedom. Here, too, is the poet’s more personal side—his vivid memories of Thoreau, Emerson, and Lincoln, his literary judgments on writers such as Shakespeare, Goethe, and Tolstoy, and his expressions of hope in the democratic promise of the nation he loved. The result is a keepsake edition to touch the soul, capturing the distilled wisdom of America’s greatest poet.

Walt Whitman (1819-1892) was born in Westhills, Long Island, and acquired his education in Brooklyn, New York. At thirteen he learned typesetting, and two years later he taught a country school. He contributed to the Democratic Review before he was twenty-one. At thirty he traveled through the Western States, spending one year in New Orleans editing a newspaper. Returning home, he took up carpentry and building, which he followed for a while. During the War of the Rebellion, he spent most of his time in the hospitals and camps, in the relief of sick and disabled soldiers. In 1856, Walt published a volume entitled Leaves of Grass. This volume showed unquestionable power and great originality, and it is considered one of the central volumes in the history of world poetry. Walt continually expanded and revised the book over the course of much of his lifetime. His labors among the sick and wounded made great impressions; these took form in his mind and were published under the title Drum Taps. Walt's poems lack much of the standard of recognized poetic measure. He has a style that is peculiar to himself, and his writings are full of meaning, beauty, and interest.

Henry Strozier is an actor with a forty-year career in numerous movies and television series. Also a voice-over artist, he has worked extensively in video games and audiobook narration, earning several AudioFile Earphones Awards.

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Reviews

“A treasure of Walt unvarnished, reflective, and still firing on all cylinders into his seventies…Endlessly quotable and perfect for dipping into and savoring.”

“Brenda Wineapple’s pithy volume, in its bare-bones efficiency, allows us to appreciate…the best of Whitman’s off-the-cuff remarks.”

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