In Walt We Trust: How a Queer Socialist Poet Can Save America from Itself

By John Marsh

Life within the usa at the present time is shot via with uncertainty: approximately our jobs, our mortgaged homes, our retirement money owed, our health and wellbeing, our marriages, and the long run that awaits our kids. for plenty of, our lives, private and non-private, have come to believe just like the soreness and unease you adventure the day or ahead of you get particularly unwell. Our existence is a scratchy throat. John Marsh bargains an not likely treatment for this common malaise: the poetry of Walt Whitman. Mired in own and political melancholy, Marsh became to Whitman—and it kept his existence. In Walt We belief: How a Queer Socialist Poet Can shop the US from Itself is a booklet approximately how Walt Whitman can store America’s existence, too.  
 
Marsh identifies 4 resources for our modern malaise (death, funds, intercourse, democracy) after which appears to a specific Whitman poem for reduction from it. He makes simple what, precisely, Whitman wrote and what he believed by way of exhibiting how they emerged from Whitman’s existence and instances, and by way of recreating the locations and incidents (crossing Brooklyn ferry, traveling wounded squaddies in hospitals) that encouraged Whitman to put in writing the poems. Whitman, Marsh argues, can express us how you can die, the way to settle for or even rejoice our (relatively talking) forthcoming dying. simply as very important, even though, he can exhibit us the right way to dwell: the best way to have higher intercourse, what to do approximately cash, and, better of all, easy methods to continue to exist our fetid democracy with no coming away stinking ourselves. the result's a mixture of biography, literary feedback, manifesto, and one of those self-help you’re not likely to come across wherever else.

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Com/wp-srv/politics/special/clinton/icreport/icreport. htm. forty nine. Kenneth Starr, “The Starr Report,” half 2, Washington put up, 1998, http://www. washingtonpost. com/wp-srv/politics/special/clinton/icreport/icreport. htm. 50. Kenneth Starr, “The Starr Report,” half 1, Washington put up, 1998, http://www. washingtonpost. com/wp-srv/politics/special/clinton/icreport/icreport. htm. INTERLUDE II: used to be WALT WHITMAN homosexual? 1. Walt Whitman, “In Paths Untrodden” in chosen Poems 1855–1892: a brand new variation, ed. Gary Schmidgall (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), 223. 2. James E. Miller, Jr. , Walt Whitman: An Encyclopedia, “Calamus” (New York: Routledge, 1998), ninety seven. three. Walt Whitman, “When I Heard on the shut of Day,” in chosen Poems, 234. four. Walt Whitman, “Hours carrying on with Long,” in chosen Poems, 232–33. five. Walt Whitman, “Who Is Now analyzing This? ,” in chosen Poems, 237–38. 6. Whitman, “Hours carrying on with Long,” 232. 7. See Jerome Loving, “Emory Holloway and the hunt for Whitman’s ‘Manhood,’” Walt Whitman Quarterly evaluation 11/1 (1993), 12–14. eight. Hershel Parker, “The genuine ‘Live Oak, with Moss’: directly speak about Whitman’s ‘Gay Manifesto,’” 19th Century Literature 51/2 (1996), 157. nine. Horace Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden, ed. Sculley Bradley, vol. three (New York: Mitchell Kennerley, 1914), 298. 10. Walt Whitman to Moncure D. Conway, November 1, 1867, The Correspondence: 1842–1867, ed. Edwin Haviland Miller, vol. 1 (New York: long island college Press, 1961), 346–47. eleven. Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself,” in Leaves of Grass (1855; repr. , ny: Library of the US, 1982), 31. 12. Whitman, “Paths,” 223. thirteen. Ibid. 14. Walt Whitman, “Not warmth Flames Up and Consumes,” “Whoever you're preserving Me Now In Hand,” and “To a Stranger,” in chosen Poems, 236, 226, 241. 15. Walt Whitman, “Roots and Leaves Themselves Alone,” in chosen Poems, 235. sixteen. Walt Whitman, “I pay attention It was once Charged opposed to Me,” in chosen Poems, 243. 17. “Leaves of Grass,” The Saturday overview, July 7, 1860, http://www. whitmanarchive. org/criticism/reviews/leaves1860/anc. 00044. html. 18. Jerome Loving, Walt Whitman: The track of Himself (Berkeley: college of California Press, 1999), 414. 19. it may be, as one Whitman student has lately written, that “the topic of homosexuality was once absolutely sealed to the yank mind,” yet that isn't totally precise. One disgusted reviewer (Rufus Griswold) of the 1855 version of Leaves of Grass referred obliquely to “Peccatum illud horribile, inter Christianos non nominandum” (that terrible sin to not be named between Christians). in particular, the Latin word spoke of sodomy, which was once now not, it's going to appear, completely sealed to the yankee brain. with regards to homosexuality and the yank brain, see Walt Whitman’s Mystical Ethics of Comradeship: Homosexuality and the Marginality of Friendship on the Crossroads of Modernity (Albany: kingdom collage of latest York Press, 2010), three. See Rufus W. Griswold, “Review of Leaves of Grass (1855),” The Criterion, November, 10, 1855, http://www. whitmanarchive. org/criticism/reviews/leaves1855/anc.

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