In this elegant study, Walt Whitman's democratic, consensual idealism emerges for the first time as truly central to his poetic achievement. Though Whitman's democratic idealism has often been dismissed as a blindness to the political complexities of his day, Kerry C. Larson argues that the poet was in fact vitally engaged in the problems of preserving social continuity at a time (1855-60) when the specter of disunion and fractricidal war grew increasingly ominous. Whitman conceived his poems as vehicles for social ...
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In this elegant study, Walt Whitman's democratic, consensual idealism emerges for the first time as truly central to his poetic achievement. Though Whitman's democratic idealism has often been dismissed as a blindness to the political complexities of his day, Kerry C. Larson argues that the poet was in fact vitally engaged in the problems of preserving social continuity at a time (1855-60) when the specter of disunion and fractricidal war grew increasingly ominous. Whitman conceived his poems as vehicles for social integration whose entire aim was to dramatize the joining of the many and the one, speaker and listener, universal and particular without subordinating either term. For Whitman, the poet's role was to be "the better President," the figure in whose person all contending interests and competing factions would be resolved. The importance of "drama" in Larson's title is borne out in his argument that Whitman's most memorable poems depict the goal of consent as an active process, something to be achieved rather than merely affirmed. By way of making this drama vivid, these poems project a fictive audience or interlocutor which, in being invoked by the poet, furnishes him with a partner in the ongoing dialogue of voices Leaves of Grass both embodies and records.
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Add this copy of Whitman's Drama of Consensus (Hb) to cart. $28.50, new condition, Sold by Scholars Attic rated 5.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Lake Barrington, IL, UNITED STATES, published 1988 by Chicago Univ.
Add this copy of Whitman's Drama of Consensus to cart. $28.75, good condition, Sold by Midtown Scholar Bookstore rated 5.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Harrisburg, PA, UNITED STATES, published 1989 by University of Chicago Press.
Add this copy of Whitman's Drama of Consensus to cart. $50.00, like new condition, Sold by Great Expectations Rare Books rated 5.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Staten Island, NY, UNITED STATES, published 1988 by University of Chicago Press.
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As New. No Jacket. Book. 8vo-over 7æ-9æ" tall. Hardcover, green cloth lacking dust-jacket. 269 pages. Bibliographical References, Index. First edition, first printing with full number line. No previous ownership marks. A clean, fresh, unmarked copy, appears unread and like new.
Add this copy of Whitman's Drama of Consensus to cart. $61.68, good condition, Sold by Bonita rated 4.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Newport Coast, CA, UNITED STATES, published 1989 by University of Chicago Press.
Add this copy of Whitman's Drama of Consensus to cart. $216.38, new condition, Sold by Bonita rated 4.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Newport Coast, CA, UNITED STATES, published 1989 by University of Chicago Press.