Walt: 674 books

Walt Whitman worked as a nurse in an army hospital during the Civil War and published Drum-Taps, his war poems, as the war was coming to an end. Later, the book came out in an expanded form, including “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd,” Whitman's passionate elegy for Lincoln. The most...

First published in 1855 with Whitman’s own money, Leaves of Grass is a highly sensual collection of verses that became a monument to American poetry. The journalist, philosopher, clerk, and Civil War nurse spent the following four decades revising and expanding the work from twelve poems...

Discover How Whitmans Spiritual Life and Vision Can Enlighten Your Own Whitmans collected poems and prose are not an object or icon to be gazed upon or revered but a transparency we look through to see ourselves with greater clarity, excitement, and meaning. They wake us up to our potential,...

Published in 1871, Democratic Vistas is perhaps Walt Whitman’s most important prose work. Disenchanted with the pervasive corruption during the period of Reconstruction, he examines democracy and its problems during this era, arguing for a balance between individualism and democracy, and ultimately expressing his belief in the triumph of the democratic ideal.

Walt Whitman’s “The Wound-Dresser” is a sixty-five-line free-verse poem in four sections describing the suffering in the Civil War hospitals and the poet’s suffering, faithfulness to duty, and developing compassion as he tended to soldiers’ physical wounds and gave comfort. Published at...

In December of 1862, having read his brother's name in a casualty list, Walt Whitman rushed from Brooklyn to the war front, where he found his brother wounded but recovering. But Whitman also found there a "new world," a world dense with horror and revelation. Memoranda During the War is...

50 classic poems reflowing in a modern medium. Originally published in black ink on white paper, 16 traditional poets have now been rendered digitally for e-readers. Poetry is the oldest and most flexible art form, and has migrated from performances to papyrus rolls to printed pages. Far from...

In May 1860, Walt Whitman published a third edition of Leaves of Grass. His timing was compelling. Printed during a period of regional, ideological, and political divisions, written by a poet intimately concerned with the idea of a United States as “essentially the greatest poem,” this new edition...

The Patriotic Poems by Walt Whitman.

Not many people know that Walt Whitman—arguably the preeminent American poet of the nineteenth century—began his literary career as a novelist. Franklin Evans, or The Inebriate: A Tale of the Times was his first and only novel. Published in 1842, during a period of widespread temperance activity,...

at the age of twenty-five he was pulled down from the wall trying to escape from the Gudalajara State Penitentiary...and that wasn't even the lowest point of his life. It was never easy for Richard Burns, from a troubled adolescence through years of incredible and dangerous adventures. The one...

For far too may Americans, stumbling through life is such a chore that many are fortunate that breathing is involuntary. Far too many make life moves and choices based on the skimpiest of logic, relying, instead, on stupidity and ignorance to guide the way. There is no immunity from this stupidity...

Finalist for the 2006 Gelber Prize: "A brilliant contribution to the American foreign policy debate."—Anatol Lieven, New York Times Book Review At a time when America's dominance abroad was being tested like never before, Taming American Power provided for the first time a "rigorous...

John F. Kennedy is killed in Texas; controversies spring up over his remains, his successor’s swearing-in, a dubious autopsy, the arrest of one suspect; large groups attempt to interrogate the suspect; equally large groups attempt to transfer him, but he becomes the first person murdered—and silenced—on...