Understanding The Christen Whitman Criticism

Whitman directed his strongest criticism at the clergy, who were often the death penalty’s strongest supporters or at least complicit, according to whitman, for their failure to denounce the practice: The academy at best, whitman once told traubel, has its eyes set in the back of its head. It is naturally retrospective, not prospective. Whitman himself, at different times, was both—in youth more prospective than retrospective; In age, the opposite.

Whitman proclaimed in the 1855 edition of leaves of grass, in words that powerfully express the new forms of “unlocked” human sexual and social being his poems imagine and command: Rejecting the notion that whitman's poetry is to be understood as an attempt to create a new religion, modern criticism has developed three (sometimes overlapping) views toward the. It is our hope that this section of the archive will grow significantly as we secure copyright releases to more works of criticism. We strongly urge scholars to retain electronic rights by filling out a sparc addendum to contracts, allowing for the retention of electronic rights.