Chattel slavery, also called traditional slavery, is so named because people are treated as the chattel (personal property) of the owner and are. EMANCIPATION in NEW YORK. Most of the Revolutionary leaders who came to power in New York in 1777 had anti-slavery sentiments, yet, as elsewhere in the North, the. No American writer has been more influential, nationally and internationally, than Walt Whitman. Poets from his time to our own, in the United States. Library Card Number or EZ Username Last Name or EZ Password * Phone (Last four digits) *Not required for EZ Login. Get information, facts, and pictures about Sudan at Encyclopedia.com. Make research projects and school reports about Sudan easy with credible articles from our FREE. Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938: Maximum Struggle for a Minimum Wage. When he felt the time was ripe, President Roosevelt asked Secretary of. Re- Scripting Walt Whitman: An Introduction to His Life and Work. Our collaboration on this book began in 1. Major Authors on CD- ROM: Walt Whitman (Primary Source Media, 1. At that time, we began tracking and writing about the evolution of Leaves of Grass from manuscript to print and from edition to edition. Later, we co- authored the Whitman biography for the Dictionary of Literary Biography: Antebellum Writers in New York (Bruccoli Clark Layman, Gale Group, 2. Walt Whitman Archive (www. That work stands behind and informs this work. Part of chapter 2 appeared in another form as Ed Folsom, . Doings and Undoings': Walt Whitman's Writing of the 1. Leaves of Grass. So much of what we have learned about Whitman and his work derives from the extraordinary work our colleagues and graduate students are doing every day on the Archive. Introduction. No American writer has been more influential, nationally and internationally, than Walt Whitman. Poets from his time to our own, in the United States and around the world, have talked back to Whitman, carrying on the conversation that he initiated over 1. America and eventually produce a republic equal to its ideals. It is difficult to become a poet in the United States without at some point coming to grips with Whitman, answering the challenge that he issued to future generations, to the . This continual deferral of the ideal was Whitman's style; he set in process a history and a literature that would struggle toward democracy, even if they would never fully attain it. His poetry was written to initiate response, revision, process, and his own compositional techniques emphasized his refusal to reach conclusion. Whitman was the ultimate reviser, continually reopening his poems and books to endless shuffling, retitling, editing, and reconceptualizing. Leaves of Grass was Whitman's title for a process more than a product: every change in his life and in his nation made him reopen his book to revision. Whitman's desire was for a democracy that celebrated the self yet sang the ensemble, a democracy that worshipped the individual and the communal, that indeed defined democratic individuality as the ability to imagine and empathize with the vast variety of other individualities that composed the nation: . Whitman's continual wrestling with the problems and challenges of the emerging American democracy and the developing American democratic art has had a surprisingly widespread impact on other countries as well, where his democratic ideas and radical poetics have taken root and emerged in new hybrids as his work mixes with other national literatures. There are now many different Walt Whitmans at work in various poetic traditions, influencing writers in distinctive ways—in some countries he is the poet of socialism, in others the poet of spiritualism, in others still the poet of radical sexuality. His work has been translated into all the major languages of the world, and in several languages there are multiple and competing translations of Leaves of Grass. Even in the United States, the variety of reactions to Whitman's poetry is staggering; American poets have as often rejected him as they have embraced him. The remarkable fact is that everyone, at some point, has to confront Whitman, wrestle with his structuring of poetry, the nation, democracy, and the self: . Lawrence and Virginia Woolf to Charles Tomlinson and Anthony Burgess; from Jos. That project has convinced us that a new kind of introductory book on Whitman now needs to be written. In our ongoing efforts to re- edit Whitman's work on the web, we are motivated not so much by a desire to reproduce in electronic form the many things brilliantly accomplished by the monumental Collected Writings of Walt Whitman (2. New York University Press, 1. Perhaps the oddest choice made by the New York University Press editors was never to present, anywhere in the 2. Leaves of Grass, a document of primary importance in literary history. In fact, with the exception of the final . The three- volume Variorum Edition of Leaves of Grass was originally slated to present all the manuscripts, periodical publications, and book publications of Whitman's poems, but it ended up dealing only with the book publications, leaving the important manuscript origins and early periodical versions all but inaccessible. A projected second Variorum Edition, dealing with materials not accounted for in the first Variorum, has never materialized. Our electronic archive is steadily making available an increasing number of poetry manuscripts, a development that is revealing a previously unknown side of Whitman's creative process. We therefore call our book Re- Scripting Walt Whitman: An Introduction to His Life and Work. Every book about Whitman, of course, rewrites the script of Whitman's life and work, altering the meaning of his work and emphasizing certain events in his life. Our book certainly re- scripts Whitman in that sense, but our title is further meant to suggest a recurring emphasis in the following pages: we are rethinking Whitman's life in terms of his script, those thousands of manuscript pages that he left behind and which, to this day, have not been adequately studied. Whitman has always been thought of as the . Because of this, we often have viewed Whitman as a poet who begins and ends in print, when in fact he labored hard in script. From his early notebooks, where we can trace the first seeds of Leaves of Grass, through his final years, where he struggled against failing health to scribble out his last poems, Whitman's most intense struggles were in script, in that tough, originating workshop where words first meet paper. That's where the process began that resulted in Whitman's eventual identification of himself with his book. Our book pursues the metonymic relation that Whitman famously employed between himself and his work (. We weave together an account of Whitman's life and an account of his works, especially his evolving masterpiece Leaves of Grass. In a sense, we follow Justin Kaplan's notion that . Once we begin to think about Whitman through the lens provided by digital resources, new questions become accessible and new problems emerge. Certainly some of the inadequacy of older models of criticism becomes clear. Many of us still talk about . Yet this poem took various forms and had various titles in the six different editions of Leaves of Grass from 1. Our discussion highlights Whitman's evolving work—including the material production of the books themselves—in the context of his life. Many aspects of books that Whitman typically controlled—including typeface, margins, ornamentation, and the like—communicate in subtle but powerful ways to readers, and in ways that have been for the most part ignored. We are looking, in other words, at Whitman's life as a writer—his writing life. In doing so, we emphasize his . We also investigate his . Our narrative attempts to illuminate both Whitman's life and his work by focusing on those places where they most thoroughly meld. We begin with a consideration of what it meant to grow up in the age of accelerating print. Whitman's childhood took place in and around New York City, which at the time was experiencing an explosion in print technology and printed products. From his schooling through his newspaper apprenticeships, Whitman was formed in key ways by the technological developments that made cheap paper and cheap printing accessible to the quickly expanding population of the US. As a young teenager, Whitman was already publishing professional written work. He was surrounded by a vibrant and chaotic newspaper- and book- publishing world, where the very nature of a genre like . He was an aspiring fiction writer, journalist, and poet. As a schoolteacher, he was fascinated by the new development of school textbooks, and he had much to say about the kinds of books America should be having its young people read. There are ways, in fact, to see the first edition of Leaves of Grass (which begins with a poem about a child asking a deceptively simple question—. We examine in detail some of his notebooks and manuscript jottings in which Leaves was born, and we explore how those manuscripts teach us a great deal about Whitman's poetry—its forms, its compositional process, its meanings. Our third chapter treats Whitman's first two editions of Leaves (1. These were possibly Whitman's most radical editions, at once challenging publishing conventions and creating new conventions. Examining these editions in their material, aesthetic, and ideological aspects opens a window into Whitman's thinking as a thirty- something newspaper man who was groping for a new genre to express his radical notions of democracy, reading, writing, and absorptive American identity. These years, too, are still something of a mystery, involving the haunting and intimate manuscript cycle of male- male love poems that he never published but instead reworked into a much more public statement of camaraderie that became a centerpiece of the edition of Leaves that he construed to be an . Whitman did not think of himself primarily as a poet, but rather as a writer, and his work always probes the borders between prose and poetry, fiction and nonfiction, realism and romanticism. His work is at its most radical when he finds the conduits and seepages that allow him to explore ideas and events in genre- breaking ways. The Civil War notebooks, out of which grow his poems Drum- Taps and his prose Memoranda During the War, are the workshop where we can see the poems when they were still prose, can trace the prose becoming poems, and can experience his life among the wounded soldiers in hospitals becoming words, occasionally literally stained by the blood of the young men he was nursing. In the American Reconstruction period, Whitman engaged in his own process of . As the nation was reconstructing itself politically and healing from the war, Whitman undertook the complete reordering and rebuilding of Leaves of Grass.
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