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“One can hardly imagine our debt, as a culture, to Walt Whitman, who was able to summon a vision as defiantly idiosyncratic yet as thoroughly central and representative as any in the history of our poetry.”
-- Jay Parini, “The Columbia History of American Poetry”
On my library trip, I thought I would pick up an anthology of poems, and while I was browsing, I happened onto Parini’s survey and critical study of American poetry, which looks like a graduate course on the subject, and a course that I would like to try. It looks like fun. Though, I will have to lay Hamlet aside for a while to fit it into my busy life.
Nevertheless, the above quote, taken from the introduction, is a little discouraging. I have never been able to find much in Whitman that is to my liking. In the last month, for instance, I was giving “Leaves of Grass” another crack, and it just does not sing to me. Ninety percent of it strikes me as loose prose, and not very gripping or inspiring prose at that. But it is not like the book is centrally about Whitman, and I am still good to go.
-- Jay Parini, “The Columbia History of American Poetry”
On my library trip, I thought I would pick up an anthology of poems, and while I was browsing, I happened onto Parini’s survey and critical study of American poetry, which looks like a graduate course on the subject, and a course that I would like to try. It looks like fun. Though, I will have to lay Hamlet aside for a while to fit it into my busy life.
Nevertheless, the above quote, taken from the introduction, is a little discouraging. I have never been able to find much in Whitman that is to my liking. In the last month, for instance, I was giving “Leaves of Grass” another crack, and it just does not sing to me. Ninety percent of it strikes me as loose prose, and not very gripping or inspiring prose at that. But it is not like the book is centrally about Whitman, and I am still good to go.
