Whitman throws down a challenge to the genteel contemporary readers of Tennyson and Longfellow. Whitman's poetry of dynamism, of power and excitement: he can still surprise us, as he surprised his first readers. His poetry is democratic, socially inclusive, sexually and emotionally daring: Whitman deliberately casts himself as a barbarian, "one of the roughs", so as to signal his rejection of elitism. And exploring the recesses of his world, he also explores the recesses of his own mind with a subtlety that belies some of his own self-advertisement.
This is the most comprehensive paperback edition available, with introduction and chronology of Whitman's life and times.
