Whalt Whitman

Title: Whitmans lives
Known As: Whitman, Walter; Whitman, Walt
  American Poet ( 1819 - 1892 )
Author(s): Jeffrey Meyers
Source: The Antioch Review. 63.4 (F only 2005): p755. From literary productions Resource Center.
Document Type: Biography
Bookmark: Bookmark this Document
affluent Text:
New Entry://
 
The central questions of Whitmans life and work--the reputation of his sexuality and value of his poems--were tainted from the start by the calculated lies and distortions he supplied to his early biographers. He wanted fame and lived long adequate to care rough posterity. Like his admirers, he was cowed by the everyday morality and tried to cover up or forswear whatever offended the public. Influenced by the earlier worshipful, sanitized versions of Whitman, after scholars blindly refused to see the significance of the Calamus poems. Theyd devoted their replete(p) careers to his work and wanted to protect their academic investment. The love that make bold not speak its name remained mute until the 1980s. Whitman, in all his garrulous and glorious egoism, still retains the aura of the guru he so cunningly constructed in his lifetime. Biography is supposed to illuminate the subjects character, just now most of these books reveal more about their authors constraints and preoccupations than they do about Whitman.




The fourteen Whitman biographies fall into three general categories. They began with personal accounts by his friends, published in his lifetime by John Burroughs and Richard Maurice Bucke, or shortly after his death by Thomas Donaldson and Horace Traubel, and the sycophancy by his English disciple, John Addington Symonds. Whitman himself silently edited and part wrote the offset printing two books. The second group was headed by W. C. Rivers, who first revealed the poets homosexuality, and included, amongst 1926 and 1955, three useful but pretty harmful academic books by Emory Holloway, Henry Seidel Canby, and Gay Wilson Allen. More recently, between 1980 and 2000, there have been two...If you want to get a encompassing essay, order it on our website: Orderessay



If you want to get a full essay, wisit our page: write my essay .