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Cargando... Días ejemplares de Américapor Walt Whitman
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b'I obey my happy hour's command, which seems curiously imperative. May-be, if I don't do anything else, I shall send out the most wayward, spontaneous, fragmentary book ever printed.'/bOne of the best kept secrets of modern autobiographical literature, Whitman's autobiography moves in brisk, episodic fashion to chronicle the life of one of the world's best loved and most influential poets. Experimental in form, lyrical in expression, and rich in experiential content, Specimen Daysstill awaits a much wider readership than it has hitherto commanded. Whitman gives us his life as lived in relation to the shifting urban and rural ecologies of a young nation -a nation that had freshly emerged from catastrophic civil war and that was assuming the vanguard of artistic,technological, economic, political, and philosophical modernity.ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expertintroductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more. No se han encontrado descripciones de biblioteca. |
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Google Books — Cargando... GénerosSistema Decimal Melvil (DDC)811.3Literature English (North America) American poetry Middle 19th century 1830–1861Clasificación de la Biblioteca del CongresoValoraciónPromedio:
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In fact, Whitman wrote a lot more prose, but some of that wasn't discovered until 2016. Walt Whitman wrote a novel, Life and Adventures of Jack Engle, which was serialized in 1852. He also wrote a series of articles Manly Health and Training, literally "Man's Health". In 1877, he published Democratic Vistas, a book partly about America and partly literary criticism.
Specimen Days is likewise hard to pinpoint. What kind of book is it, really? It seems to be a bit of everything, some parts are most likely diary entries, and some are memoirs, some are essay-like meditations. Whitman wrote that he first wanted to call it "Cedar-Plums Like" and he describes it as "a melange of loafing, looking, hobbling, sitting, traveling—a little thinking thrown in for salt, some literary meditations, some of my own caprices, meditations, egotism (...).
The first entry or first passage of Specimen Days seems to be an editorial note by Whitman. It is dated July 2nd, 1882, and observes that the work before us is "incongruous and full of skips and jumps (...) a huddle of diary-jottings, war-memoranda of 1862-'65, Nature-notes of 1877-'81, with Western and Canadian observations". On the whole, the work seems very spontaneous, as free of restraints as the best parts of Leaves of Grass. However, the work as a whole is thoroughly edited, as is shown by the extensive notes that are provided. They are called "end notes", but they aren't collected at the end of the book, but rather at the end of each passage. The touch of the editor is also noticeable in the first section of the book, which appears to provide a chronological early life of the author, describing his hometown.
The collection of prose fragments is a bit of a jumble, although it does seem to be in chronological order. It doesn't have "parts" as I suggested above. In as far as there are portions or sections distinguishable in the work, these segments do not have a length that is representative for the period they refer to. The first portion is devoted to his youth is relatively long, but there is one short passage that seems to sum up all operas Whitman saw or remembered during a period of almost ten years in his life.
The whole book consists of "jottings" short prose entries or passages that are usually only about 200 or 300 words long. In some cases they are dated, but usually only with the day and the month, it often isn't clear which year.
For all the quirks and oddities of the work, Specimen days in America is a wonderful work to read. Regardless of whether it is really about Walt Whitman (although it seems to be), it gives a great impression of life in America during the mid to late nineteenth century, with intense descriptions of Whitman's experiences visiting the wounded soldiers during the American Civil War, and later his lyrical descriptions of nature.
Published late in his life, it seems Whitman was aware that his strength lay in spontaneous, unedited works. It seems he wanted to publish these diary jottings as pure as possible. In many ways, Walt Whitman seems to have been a truly free man, who would not let him be bound or tied down by convention. This unhemmed freedom is strongly felt in Leaves of Grass and it is equally strongly present in Specimen Days. ( )