Eating Poetry (XXXII) – The Ecstasy of Unreasoning Happiness

. Patricia Hampl’s fine essay in the spring The American Scholar,  F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Essays From the Edge, surveys the background to Fitzgerald‘s “The Crack Up” essays, published  in Esquire in 1936. She finds in the controversial product of Fitzgerald’s attempt to write himself back from personal and authorial oblivion a meeting point in consciousness between poetry and […]

Eating Poetry (XXVIII) – “I Depart from Materials”

  “Camerado! This is no book; Who touches this touches a man.” When Walt Whitman‘s Leaves of Grass was published in its first edition in 1855, it was admired by some, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, and not so by others. Wrote Thomas Wentworth Higginson, ” It is no discredit to Walt Whitman that he wrote ‘Leaves […]

Walt Whitman Reads “Space and Time”

Here’s a virtual movie of the great Walt Whitman reading his poem Space and Time”” From Leaves of Grass Published in 1900. This edited segment of Section 33 and 46 of “Leaves of Grass””Song of myself” is read by Orson Welles in a recording he originaly made for BBC Radio in 1953. All rights are […]

Eating Poetry (XIX) – Year of Meteors

Walt Whitman The Meteor of 1860 by Frederic Church From Astronomy Picture of the Day Explanation: Frederic Church (1826-1900), American landscape painter of the Hudson River School, painted what he saw in nature. And on July 20th, 1860, he saw a spectacular string of fireball meteors cross the Catskill evening sky, an extremely rare Earth-grazing […]

Writers Write

“Camerado! This is no book; who touches this touches a man.” Walt Whitman, “So Long,” from Leaves of Grass ——– Related articles by Zemanta On Whitman by C K Williams: review (telegraph.co.uk) Scientists identify meteor event in Walt Whitman poem (seattletimes.nwsource.com) Walt whitman (1819 – 1892) (slideshare.net) Walt Whitman Meteor Mystery Solved by Astronomer Sleuths […]