Walt Whitman And The Making Of Jewish American Poetry

"Walt Whitman, though not a Jewish poet, has served as a crucial figure within the tradition of Jewish American poetry, starting in the mid-nineteenth century, until today. However, the genealogy of Jewish American poets responding to Whitman is wider and more nuanced than often recognized. Due to Allen Ginsberg's overt adoption of Whitman, it is often believed that Ginsberg is the only Jewish American poet to have engaged with Whitman's poetic style and democratic ethos. This book reveals how the lineage of poets responding to Whitman extends far beyond Ginsberg, and that Ginsberg himself receives Whitman through earlier Jewish American poets, like Charles Reznikoff. This project presents such a genealogy of poets in dialogue with Whitman (and each other), from Emma Lazarus and Adah Isaacs Menken, through twentieth-century poets, such as Charles Reznikoff, Karl Shapiro, Kenneth Koch, Muriel Rukeyser, Adrienne Rich, Marge Piercy, and Alicia Suskin Ostriker, Gerald Stern, and beyond. By researching Whitman's role in this tradition systematically, in the work of individual poets, and in the framework of Jewish American poetry more broadly, this book seeks to fill a gap in the understanding of these dynamics, and to invite other scholars to examine the Whitman-Jewish connection. A major finding in this book is that Whitman has been adopted by Jewish American poets as a liberal symbol against elements in High Modernist literary culture, which the poets perceived to be exclusionary and anti-Semitic. Thus, there is a negotiation of the vexed territory of being Jewish in America through an alignment with Whitman. As such, the turn to Whitman serves as a mode of exploring Jewish and American identity, whereby Walt Whitman the poet is imagined to be Jewish and American"--

A rich and provocative overview of Jewish American poetry.

Winner of the Bancroft Prize and the Ambassador Book Award and Finalist for the National for the Book Critics Circle Award In his poetry Walt Whitman set out to encompass all of America and in so doing heal its deepening divisions. This magisterial biography demonstrates the epic scale of his achievement, as well as the dreams and anxieties that impelled it, for it places the poet securely within the political and cultural context of his age. Combing through the full range of Whitman's writing, David Reynolds shows how Whitman gathered inspiration from every stratum of nineteenth-century American life: the convulsions of slavery and depression; the raffish dandyism of the Bowery "b'hoys"; the exuberant rhetoric of actors, orators, and divines. We see how Whitman reconciled his own sexuality with contemporary social mores and how his energetic courtship of the public presaged the vogues of advertising and celebrity. Brilliantly researched, captivatingly told, Walt Whitman's America is a triumphant work of scholarship that breathes new life into the biographical genre.

Traces the life and career of Walt Whitman through a period of transition.

How have Jews reshaped their identities as Jews in the face of the radical newness called America? Julian Levinson explores the ways in which exposure to American literary culture -- in particular the visionary tradition identified with Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman -- led American Jewish writers to a new understanding of themselves as Jews. Discussing the lives and work of writers such as Emma Lazarus, Mary Antin, Ludwig Lewisohn, Waldo Frank, Anzia Yezierska, I. J. Schwartz, Alfred Kazin, and Irving Howe, Levinson concludes that their interaction with American culture led them to improvise new and meaningful ways of being Jewish. In contrast to the often expressed view that the diaspora experience leads to assimilation, Exiles on Main Street traces an arc of return to Jewish identification and describes a vital and creative Jewish American literary culture.

Singing in a Strange Land explores how the history and cultural conditions of Jewish poetry and poetic production—from the destruction of the Second Temple and Babylonian exile to medieval Spain, the Nazi Holocaust, the contemporary Gulf War, and the second Palestinian intifada—have shaped "Jewish American poetry"; and, through analyses of important poems by significant Jewish American poets, how they shape Jewish American cultural identity.

Explores the ways in which Jewish American poetry engages persistent questions of modern Jewish identity.

Walt Whitman, Where the Future Becomes Present invigorates Whitman studies by garnering insights from a diverse group of writers and intellectuals. Writing from the perspectives of art history, political theory, creative writing, and literary criticism, the contributors place Whitman in the center of both world literature and American public life. The volume is especially notable for being the best example yet published of what the editors call the New Textuality in Whitman studies, an emergent mode of criticism that focuses on the different editions of Whitman’s poems as independent works of art.