Minor Prophecy: Walt Whitman's New American ReligionMany of Walt Whitman's earliest readers hailed him as a religious prophet. For them, Leaves of Grass was more than literary art; it was sacred scripture. Recent scholarship has, however, dismissed those early enthusiasts as naive, if not crazy. David Kuebrich's new study of Whitman corrects that academic oversight by giving the early Whitmanites their due as the critics who most clearly perceived the nature and purpose of the poet's labors—to begin a new religion. Kuebrich's thorough, intelligent study, based squarely on textual evidence, offers a revisionist interpretation of America's great poet, returning religious vision and spirituality to the center of Whitman studies. |
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... sense of participating in a level of being which , although immaterial , is nevertheless felt to be more real than the natural order . Whitman had this sense of a more important form of knowledge in his encounters with certain objects ...
... sense responding to Whitman's beginning , but of course this in itself does not adequately explain Whitman's ... sense of mystical union with his readers . Whitman recognized that a deeply felt sense of union with earlier exemplary ...
... sense of possibility . It is this unchecked optimism which raises the question of Whitman's relevance to a century that has experi- enced the Great Depression , two world wars , and now our present sense of appalling economic injustice ...
Contents
Reconsidering Whitmans Intention | 1 |
A New Religion | 12 |
Interpreting Historys Meaning | 27 |
Copyright | |
8 other sections not shown