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Words on WhitmanThe reason we are so enthusiastically celebrating the 150th anniversary of Whitman's "Leaves of Grass" and not the 150th anniversary of Robert Browning's "Fra Lippo Lippi" or Matthew Arnold's "Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse"--both published in 1855--is that only Whitman's poem speaks to us across time with all of its original intimacy and urgency. Whitman remains the most available of poets, right there under our boot soles and still whispering in our ears. What an amazing combination of vanity and prescience it was that told him we would still be listening so keenly a century and a half later. Will any poem written this year have such gravitational appeal to the readers of 2165? The smart money says No. —Billy Collins, former U.S. Poet Laureate, 2001-2003 Today, 150 years after its first publication, we now celebrate a work that was almost ignored at first and condemned as obscene during the poet's lifetime. Today, it is the shining star of American poetry. —Jerome Loving, author of Walt Whitman: The Song of Himself (1999) Whitman runs both north and south. He was introduced to Latin America and the Spanish-speaking world through José Marti. Later on Pablo Neruda became Whitman's greatest disciple in the Spanish language. But Whitman influenced many others in Spain and Latin America. In fact, at one point he arguably had more influence over there than he did in this country. I see myself as a Puerto Rican poet, a poet coming out of the so-called Nuyorican experience, and a poet in the tradition of Whitman. There is no contradiction at all. To this day, Whitman gets his greatest reception in the poetry world on the margins, on the fringes, in the places where poets understand what it means to be silenced or suppressed or neglected. There Whitman lives and breathes. —Martín Espada, poet and author of Alabanza: New and selected poems 1982-2002 (2003) 2005 marks the 150th anniversary of a landmark event in literary history: the publication of the first edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. Ralph Waldo Emerson judged the volume “the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom America has yet contributed.” Whitman himself commented that the 1855 edition had “an immediateness,…an incisive directness” absent from the later editions, adding: “We miss that ecstasy of statement in some of the after-work.” The first edition represented the original Whitman. This was Whitman at his freshest and, arguably, his most experimental. Everything about it—the unusual jacket and title page, the exuberant preface, the twelve free-flowing poems embracing every realm of experience—was new. This year is an ideal time to celebrate this dazzling volume. —David S. Reynolds, author of Walt Whitman's America (1995) One hundred and fifty years after he wrote Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman continues to speak to, for, and through his beloved American people. From poets to pop stars, farmers to firefighters, socialists to sociologists to socialites, he has inspired countless responses in a myriad of styles and forms. Walt Whitman and America came of age together. The ten years leading up to the publication of Leaves of Grass and the decade following saw not only the transformation of a hack writer to America’s greatest poet, but a culturally immature and politically insecure nation into a vibrant world community with a strong sense of identity and purpose. The country inspired Whitman’s art, and his words celebrated and consecrated America. —Karen Karbiener, Curator of Walt Whitman and The Promise of America, 1855-2005 (2005) South Street Seaport, New York City |
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