LOW FLAT RATE $9.90 AUST-WIDE DELIVERY

Close Notification

Your cart does not contain any items

Song of Myself

Walt Whitman

$22.99

Paperback

Not in-store but you can order this
How long will it take?

QTY:

English
Vintage
01 October 2015
'I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable, / I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.'

To mark 160 years since its first publication, a new edition of the great American poet's most famous work

Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself. (I am large, I contain multitudes.)

Abundant, ecstatic, generous, courageous - this is the first American epic poem, a celebration of selfhood and a catalogue of nineteenth-century American life of all ages and races. Revolutionary in style and controversial in content when it was first published in 1855, Whitman's masterwork has since inspired generations with its intoxicating rhythms and images, and its inclusive, praiseful joy.

THE ORIGINAL 1855 TEXT
By:  
Imprint:   Vintage
Country of Publication:   United Kingdom
Dimensions:   Height: 197mm,  Width: 130mm,  Spine: 7mm
Weight:   77g
ISBN:   9780099595540
ISBN 10:   0099595540
Pages:   96
Publication Date:  
Audience:   General/trade ,  ELT Advanced
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active

Walt Whitman was born on 31 May 1819 in Long Island, New York. Without much formal education, he began work at an early age as an office boy, printer and school teacher. His first major collection of poetry, Leaves of Grass, was self-published in 1855. During the American Civil War, Whitman volunteered as a nurse at military hospitals in Washington, and his experiences inspired his next collection, Drum-Taps, published in 1865, and Memoranda During the War (1875). Whitman was an ardent Democrat, and wrote several poems to Abraham Lincoln, including 'O Captain! My Captain'. His poetry was seen by many as immoral, and was the cause of his dismissal from a post as clerk in the Department of the Interior, but he won praise from his contemporaries Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, and his work was enthusiastically received by poetic circles in England. Having survived a paralysing stroke in 1873, Whitman left Washington for Camden, New Jersey, where he continued to write up until his death on 26 March 1892.

Reviews for Song of Myself

Grand but intimate, earthy but also dreamy * Observer * Whitman had a fluid personality that made him able to ''merge'' invisibly, and with great empathy, with the images of other people and events that lodged in his mind...unprecedented assembling of rhythm, sound, language and images * New York Times * The great unrhymed, long-lined, self-celebratory sensation of the 1850s * Lost Angeles Times *


See Also