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Overview
Just as the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Hours drew on the life and work of English novelist Viriginia Woolf, Specimen Days lovingly features the work of American poet Walt Whitman. Bringing together extracts from Whitman's prodigious writings, including Leaves of Grass and his journal, Specimen Days, Michael Cunningham's Laws for Creations provides an introduction to one of America's greatest visionary poets from one of our greatest contemporary novelists.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780312426071 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Picador |
| Publication date: | 04/18/2006 |
| Edition description: | First Edition |
| Pages: | 208 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.48(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Laws for Creations
By Whitman, Walt
Picador
Copyright © 2006
Whitman, Walt
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0312426070
Introduction
In college, after I gave up modeling myself on Bob Dylan (I had trouble with his conversion to Christianity) and then on Genet (I just wasn't French enough), I decided to try to become as much as possible like Walt Whitman. What propelled me was not the beauty of Whitman's language (I was an undergraduate English major; I was drowning in the beautiful language of the dead) but the following passage, which I read late one night in my dormitory room as Pink Floyd seeped through the wall from the room next to mine:
Camerado, this is no book,
Who touches this touches a man,
(Is it night? are we here alone together?)
It is I you hold and who holds you,
I spring from the pages into your arms. . . .
Never before had a writer leaped off the page and touched me like that: directly, personally, erotically. It was my first experience of literature's ability to telescope time--to forcefully remind the living that the no-longer-living were not only once as alive as we are now but were capable of imagining us, and a future with us in it, as vividly as we imagine them in the past. If it didn't quite tear a hole in the fabric of mortality, it stretched it a considerable distance.
...
Copyright 2006 by Mare VaporumCorp
Continues...
Excerpted from Laws for Creations
by Whitman, Walt
Copyright © 2006 by Whitman, Walt.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Introduction by Michael CunninghamPoetry
Selection from Leaves of Grass, The First Edition, 1855
"I celebrate myself"
Selections from Leaves of Grass, The Final Edition, 1891-1892
From "Inscriptions"
Poets to Come
From "Children of Adam"
I Sing the Body Electric (first stanza)
From "Calamus"
City of Orgies
To a Stranger
Full of Life Now
Crossing Brooklyn Ferry
Song of the Answerer (first stanza)
Song of the Broad-Axe (fourth stanza)
From "Birds of Passage"
To You
From "Sea Drift"
Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking
From "Drum-Taps"
Give Me the Splendid Silent Sun
From "Autumn Rivulets"
There Was a Child Went Forth
Laws for Creations
The Sleepers (first stanza)
From "Whispers of Heavenly Death"
Whispers of Heavenly Death
O Living Always, Always Dying
From "From Noon to Starry Night"
Mannahatta
As I Walk These Broad Majectic Days
A Clear Midnight
From "Songs of Parting"
As the Time Draws Nigh
My Legacy
So Long!
Prose
Selections from Specimen Days, 1882-1883
Opening of the Secession War
A Secesh Brave
A Night Battle, Over a Week Since
Battle of Gettysburg
Death of a Hero
Thoughts Under an Oak—A Dream
New Senses—New Joys
Nature and Democracy—Morality
Selections from Collect, 1882-1883
Darwinism—(Then Furthermore)
Monuments—The Past and the Present
The Last Collective Compaction
Preface to Leaves of Grass, The Final Edition, 1891-1892: A Backward Glance O'er Travel'd Roads