Walt Whitman (1819-92) is the authentic voice of democratic America. After a childhood in Brooklyn, he spent many years in and around Manhattan and Washington, where he witnessed troops returning from the Civil War and tended wounded soldiers in the camp hospitals.

 

Whitman's broad humanity, his love of cities (especially Manhattan), his sympathy with all conditions of people, and his visionary - even prophetic - sense of the reality of the American dream make him as much a poet for our time as he was for the time of the American Civil War and its aftermath.

 

This selection of courageous and consoling poems focuses on Whitman's vision of democracy, his love of Manhattan, his sense of the future - and of the community of peoples of this earth.