Songs of Ourselves: Walt Whitman and the Dawn of Modern American Poetry (Portable Professor Series) by Karen Karbiener

Product Details

Synopsis

Celebrated poet Walt Whitman broke through the strictures of European literary forms to establish a broad, new voice for American poetry, a voice that would inspire and influence generations of freethinking men and women to come. By throwing aside the stolid conventions and cliched meters of old Europe, Whitman produced a vital, compelling form of verse that expressed the nature of his new world. He named what it was to be American, he catalogued and indexed and sang and scribed it, and his influence on his contemporaries transcends the boundaries of poetry and becomes, in many ways, the story of young America. In this provocative course, Professor Karen Karbiener will examine the poet's life, work, and legacy, and in doing so will provide a framework to investigate the cultural formation of America's cultural and spiritual identity.

Biography

Karen Karbiener teaches at New York University and has led special courses on the legacy of Walt Whitman in New York City at Columbia University. A scholar of Romanticism and radical cultural legacies, she is the general editor of the forthcoming Encyclopedia of American Counterculture and the curator of "Walt Whitman and the Promise of America, 1855-" an exhibit celebrating the 150th anniversary of Leaves of Grass.