Download The Modern Scholar: Walt Whitman and the Birth of Modern American Poetry AudioBook Free
In this course we'll explore how Walt Whitman broke with the tyranny of European literary forms to determine a broad, new tone for American poetry. By throwing besides the stolid conventions and clichéd meters of old Europe, Walt Whitman produced an essential, powerful form of verse, one expressive of the nature of his " new world " and its own undiscovered countries, both physical and spiritual, personal and gloriously public. Passionate democracy is what Whitman called his invention, and like the innovations of Edison, it would convert not only the tactics of its field but also the bigger measurements of American life. Whitman known as what it was to be American, he catalogued and indexed and sang and scribed it, and his affect on his contemporaries and his descendants transcends the limitations of poetry and becomes, in many ways, the story of young America.
