Walt Whitman, like Emerson and Abraham Lincoln, is synonymous with nineteenth-century America. His was the voice of a poet advocating something entirely new: a democracy of the heart. His collection, Leaves of Grass, and his great elegy to Abraham Lincoln, `When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd', speak as clearly now as they did when they were first published over a hundred years ago. Yet, when he died on 26 March 1892, he was still relatively unknown and it was left to Kafka to say later that `His life is his real masterpiece.'
In this biography in Whitman's centenary year, the first to be published outside America for more than thirty years, Philip Callow examines the baffling and often contradictory life of a figure who still, to some extent, remains a mystery: a confessional poet whose secrets were never told. Like many great American writers he was essentially a loner, who carved his place in literature against awesome odds.
Contains 8 pages of b/w illustrations.
