Celebrating the various ethnic traditions that melded to create what we now call American literature, Whitman did his best to encourage an international reaction to his work. But even he would have been startled by the multitude of ways in which his call has been answered. By tracking this wholehearted international response and reconceptualizing American literature, Walt Whitman and the World demonstrates how various cultures have appropriated an American writer who ceases to sound quite so narrowly American when he is read into other cultures' traditions.

In this first comprehensive study in English of Walt Whitman's reception in the German-speaking countries, Walter Grunzweig posits a very broadly based notion of culture, embodying a wide variety of elements such as high literature, politics, youth movements, sexuality, and other subcultures.

"Walt Whitman, though not a Jewish poet, has served as a crucial figure within the tradition of Jewish American poetry, starting in the mid-nineteenth century, until today. However, the genealogy of Jewish American poets responding to Whitman is wider and more nuanced than often recognized. Due to Allen Ginsberg's overt adoption of Whitman, it is often believed that Ginsberg is the only Jewish American poet to have engaged with Whitman's poetic style and democratic ethos. This book reveals how the lineage of poets responding to Whitman extends far beyond Ginsberg, and that Ginsberg himself receives Whitman through earlier Jewish American poets, like Charles Reznikoff. This project presents such a genealogy of poets in dialogue with Whitman (and each other), from Emma Lazarus and Adah Isaacs Menken, through twentieth-century poets, such as Charles Reznikoff, Karl Shapiro, Kenneth Koch, Muriel Rukeyser, Adrienne Rich, Marge Piercy, and Alicia Suskin Ostriker, Gerald Stern, and beyond. By researching Whitman's role in this tradition systematically, in the work of individual poets, and in the framework of Jewish American poetry more broadly, this book seeks to fill a gap in the understanding of these dynamics, and to invite other scholars to examine the Whitman-Jewish connection. A major finding in this book is that Whitman has been adopted by Jewish American poets as a liberal symbol against elements in High Modernist literary culture, which the poets perceived to be exclusionary and anti-Semitic. Thus, there is a negotiation of the vexed territory of being Jewish in America through an alignment with Whitman. As such, the turn to Whitman serves as a mode of exploring Jewish and American identity, whereby Walt Whitman the poet is imagined to be Jewish and American"--

In this first comprehensive study in English of Walt Whitman's reception in the German-speaking countries, Walter Grunzweig posits a very broadly based notion of culture, embodying a wide variety of elements such as high literature, politics, youth movements, sexuality, and other subcultures.

Includes almost 760 entries ranging in length from 3,100 words on the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass to 140 words on Elizabeth Leavitt Keller. Entries include biographical data; thematic, formal and technical considerations; discussions of the poet's social and personal life; and commentary on all of Whitman's works, including poem clusters, major poems, essays, and lesser known works such as the novel Franklin Evans and two dozen short stories. A chronology and genealogy are included. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Loving offers a sharp focus of the man who is generally considered America's greatest poet. This splendid work reveals him as fully as anything can, except his poems.

The Routledge Encyclopedia of Walt Whitman presents a comprehensive resource complied by over 200 internationally recognized contributors, including such leading Whitman scholars as James E. Miller, Jr., Roger Asselineau, Betsy Erkkila, and Joel Myerson. Now available for the first time in paperback, this volume comprises more than 750 entries arranged in convenient alphabetical format. Coverage includes: biographical information: all names, dates, places, and events important to understanding Whitman's life and careerWhitman's works: essays on all eight editions of Leaves of Grass, major poems and poem clusters, principal essays and prose works, as well as his more than two dozen short stories and the novel, Franklin Evansprominent themes and concepts: essays on such major topics as democracy, slavery, the Civil War, immortality, sexuality, and the women's rights movement.significant forms and techniques: such as prosody, symbolism, free verse, and humourimportant trends and critical approaches in Whitman studies: including new historicist and cultural criticism, psychological explorations, and controversial issues of sexual identitysurveys of Whitman's international impact as well as an assessment of his literary legacy. Useful for students, researchers, librarians, teachers, and Whitman devotees, this volume features extensive cross-references, numerous photographs of the poet, a chronology, a special appendix section tracking the poet's genealogy, and a thorough index. Each entry includes a bibliography for further study.

Walt Whitman's poetry, especially his Civil War poetry, attracted settings by a wide variety of modern composers in both English- and German-speaking countries. The essays in this volume trace the transformation of Whitman's nineteenth-century texts into vehicles for confronting twentieth-century problems-aesthetic, social, and political. The contributors pay careful attention to music and poetry alike in examining how the Whitman settings become exemplary means of dealing with both the tragic and utopian faces of modernism. The book is accompanied by a recording by Joan Heller and Thomas Stumpf of complete Whitman cycles composed by Kurt Weill, George Crumb, and Lawrence Kramer, and the first recording of four Whitman songs composed in the 1920s by Marc Blitzstein.

"This study gauges the effects that Walt Whitman's poetry had in Italy in the period from 1870 to 1945: the reactions it provoked, the aesthetic and political agendas it came to sponsor, and the creative responses it facilitated. But it also investigates the contexts and causes of Whitman's success abroad, in the lives, backgrounds, beliefs, and imaginations of the people who encountered it. Ultimately, it chronicles the evolution of a literature intent on regenerating itself and moving toward modernity. Bernardini gives particular attention to women writers and noncanonical writers often excluded from previous discussions of Whitman's Italian reception. The book is grounded in archival studies and examination of primary documents, which led to a series of noteworthy discoveries. While the main focus is on the Italian literary scene, the history of the reception retraced here is constantly evaluated in relation to other cultures that were also intent, in those same years, on reading and recreating Whitman. Studying Whitman's reception from a transnational perspective shows how many countries were simultaneously carving out a new modernity in literature and culture. In this sense, Bernardini not only shows the interconnectedness of various international agents in understanding and contributing to the spread of Whitman's work, but, more largely, a constellation of similar pre-modernist and modernist sensibilities. This stands in contrast to the notion of sudden innovation: modernity was not easy to achieve, and most of all, it did not imply a complete refusal of tradition. Instead, a continuous and fruitful negotiation between tradition and innovation, and not a sudden break with the literary past, is at the very heart of the Italian and transnational reception of Whitman"--

Recovers Walt Whitman as a self-conscious religious figure with an ethic based in male comradeship, one at odds with the temper of his times.