Walt Whitman's Native Representations

by Ed Folsom

Walt Whitman looked to many different areas of American culture to develop a distinctively American poetry. This book investigates four of the areas he found most fertile for his own poetic development: the evolution of American dictionaries, the growth of the national sport of baseball, the decimation of American Indians, and the development of American photography. From each of these cultural activities, Whitman absorbed key aesthetic lessons that helped him compose his poetry.

Genres: Poetry

218 pages, Paperback

First published April 29, 1994

About the author

Ed Folsom, the Roy J. Carver professor of English at the University of Iowa, is the editor of the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, codirector of the online Whitman Archive, and editor of the Whitman Series at the University of Iowa Press. He lives in Iowa City, Iowa.

Reviews

[Jeremy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Smart and very readable.