Walt Whitman's Native Representations (Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture)

About this book

For Whitman, it was all a question of turning cultural actions, as quickly as possible, into language: he set out to absorb the "agitated and turbulent" conditions of his cultural present and to go about the work of "wording the future with undissuadable words," rejecting nothing in the culture and trying instead to "force discrepancies into range," to bring the "boiling-hot days" to voice, and to do it all "on native principles."