Song of Ourselves

Whitman was a great sage, a wise man, a mage, but he would have been happier with a simpler term. Perhaps just a friend, someone who might take your hand and point out the path. And that is exactly what Mark Edmundson does in this ecstatic book: he gives us a visionary glimpse of Whitman's own vision. Song of Ourselves is a book about why we need to read Whitman now, by a writer as large-souled as his subject.--Michael Gorra, author of The Saddest Words: William Faulkner's Civil War What better way to imbibe the intoxicating stanzas of Walt Whitman's Song of Myself than in the company of Mark Edmundson, author of the brilliantly argued Why Read? In Song of Ourselves Edmundson explicates and amplifies Whitman's great wake-up call with an exuberant tenderness reached through decades of study and teaching. Here you will find our American ur-text, Whitman's irreverent bible of New World democracy, revealed.--Megan Marshall, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Margaret Fuller: A New American Life and Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast There could be no better time than the present for Mark Edmundson's tribute and guide to Walt Whitman. Song of Ourselves is a stirring and worthy evocation of the great poet of American democracy. Edmundson inhabits Whitman. Edmundson is Whitman's companion, as Whitman is ours through all of our vexations, taking stock of multitudes still to come.--Todd Gitlin, author of The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage Mark Edmundson's portrait of Walt Whitman proves that our greatest poet is also an essential spiritual guide for twenty-first-century America. With his moving account of Whitman's visiting the Civil War wounded, as well as his reading of Song of Myself, Edmundson makes a resounding case for the humane, democratic sympathy we now need so much.--David Mikics, author of Slow Reading in a Hurried Age and editor of The Annotated Emerson Accessible, conversational, thoughtful, and eloquent, Edmundson has found his wonderfully distinctive and compelling voice in a book that is fascinated by democracy, fellow-feeling, sympathy, imagination, tyranny, and hierarchy. Song of Ourselves is one of the great books about literature, partly because it is about so much more than literature.--Adam Phillips, author of On Wanting to Change 'What of Walt can we use?' Mark Edmundson asks urgently in Song of Ourselves. This lyrical, forthright, and intimate book pays tribute to Whitman in a thoroughly Whitmanian spirit, guiding us through a revelatory reading of Song of Myself and the poem's fulfillment in Whitman's experience of tending wounded soldiers in Civil War hospitals. Edmundson has composed a learned and unpretentious hymn to democracy and its greatest American bard. --Rosanna Warren, author of Max Jacob: A Life in Art and Letters