![]() If you wish, you can, of course, skip this video.Īnother letter, entirely textual, and quite short – you have received both the lengthy letter on Wordsworth’s Prelude Book One, and this hour-plus video on Whitman from me in the past week or two – will come next week, on a five line poem by classical Greek poet, Simonides. Here is the YouTube (and if you want to skip the introductory claptrap, go to minute 3:50). There is, alas, a tiny bit of time lag in the synchronization of the speaking/listening. Walt Whitman s 'Song of Myself' is the most famous of the twelve poems originally published in Leaves of Grass, the collection for which the poet is most widely known. If you want to see it ‘full screen,’ just click on the little truncated square box in the lower right corner. You can hear my voice, and see a small picture of myself talking, in the video, which is primarily comprised of sections of Whitman’s text of “Song of Myself.” As the poem is long, the talk is long: An hour and ten minutes, and if you are a masochist you can sit through twenty minutes of questions from my audience in St. Johnsbury Atheneum, one of America’s – and not just Vermont’s – great libraries.Ĭan one adequately address “Song of Myself” in one talk? No. As I say in the talk, and as I deeply believe, it is the greatest poem ever written in America. This spring I sort of bit the bullet and decided to talk on “Song of Myself,” Whitman’s longest and most monumental poem. Emily Dickinson, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, A.R. ![]() I have, over the past decade, given a series of talks in Vermont libraries sponsored by the Vermont Council on the Humanities. ![]() This is a change of pace from my usual offerings. ![]()
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