Specimen Days In America Primary Source Edition PDF Download

"Alfred Kazin writes in his Introduction to this book, "In 1882, when Walt Whitman finally put into one untidy package, Specimen Days and Collect, reminiscences of his early youth, his various 'memoranda' of the Civil War, his travel diaries and 'nature notes' after the war, he was almost at the point of becoming that mythic figure, the universal poet, that he celebrated in his own poems." This edition of Specimen Days sets out to celebrate Whitman as he glorified himself—as a persona of cosmic proportions and a poet of universal sympathies. Far more than a diary or a series of random jottings, Specimen Days is Whitman's most personal and extensive prose statement. It provides contact with a poet's mind at its source; with youth, middle and old age; with intense and lyric observations of a nation at war and peace; a changing, vigorous people and an expanding continent. The entire text of the 1882 edition is here presented, enhanced by original and often unpublished contemporary photographs. Assembled from private and public collections throughout the country, these photographs invest Whitman's descriptions of his early years in New York, his experiences as a male nurse in Washington during the Civil War, and his later life as a near paralytic with a reality unattempted and unavailable in earlier editions. Here is the Civil War as seen and described by an ardent supporter of the Northern cause; the soldiers resting in the fields, the wounded in the hospitals, the troops entering Washington in triumph. The final section contains a comprehensive selection of photographs of Whitman; from a portrait of the young poet, age twenty-eight, who worked as a compositor for a New York newspaper, to the powerful portraits by Thomas Eakins taken shortly before the poet's death in 1892." --