Scott Russell Sanders – Writers on the Classics #3

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A century and a half after its publication, this book still challenges our materialistic way of life, questions our infatuation with new technology, illuminates our place in the natural world, and inspires us to seek spiritual insight.

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Published in ever-larger collections over several decades, Whitman’s poems, like the prose of Mark Twain, helped secure a place in world literature for American speech.  The whole, rambling collection is a celebration of this land, its democratic ideals, and its people.

Unimaginative readers in our day attack this book for using the n-word in referring to people we now call African Americans.  But thoughtful readers recognize that the novel is a profound critique of racism and slavery.  It is also, as Ernest Hemingway and others have pointed out, the book that brought the American vernacular into world literature.

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The famous recluse of Amherst composed her poems largely in secret, and they were published, in successively more complete editions, only after her death.  Spooky, quirky, by turns amusing and mystical, these poems have inspired and enchanted generations of readers and writers.