Laws for Creations
In Walt Whitman, Michael Cunningham sees a poet whose vision of humanity is ecstatic, democratic, and sensuous. Just over a hundred years ago, Whitman celebrated America as it survived the Civil War, as it endured great poverty, and as it entered the Industrial Revolution, which would make it the most powerful nation on Earth. In Specimen Days Michael Cunningham makes Whitman's verse sing across time, and in Laws for Creations he celebrates what Whitman means to him, and how he appeared at the heart of his new novel.

Just as the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Hours drew on the life and work of English novelist Viriginia Woolf, Specimen Days lovingly features the work of American poet Walt Whitman. Bringing together extracts from Whitman's prodigious writings, including Leaves of Grass and his journal, Specimen Days, Michael Cunningham's Laws for Creations provides an introduction to one of America's greatest visionary poets from one of our greatest contemporary novelists.

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Laws for Creations
In Walt Whitman, Michael Cunningham sees a poet whose vision of humanity is ecstatic, democratic, and sensuous. Just over a hundred years ago, Whitman celebrated America as it survived the Civil War, as it endured great poverty, and as it entered the Industrial Revolution, which would make it the most powerful nation on Earth. In Specimen Days Michael Cunningham makes Whitman's verse sing across time, and in Laws for Creations he celebrates what Whitman means to him, and how he appeared at the heart of his new novel.

Just as the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Hours drew on the life and work of English novelist Viriginia Woolf, Specimen Days lovingly features the work of American poet Walt Whitman. Bringing together extracts from Whitman's prodigious writings, including Leaves of Grass and his journal, Specimen Days, Michael Cunningham's Laws for Creations provides an introduction to one of America's greatest visionary poets from one of our greatest contemporary novelists.

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Laws for Creations

Laws for Creations

Laws for Creations

Laws for Creations

Overview

In Walt Whitman, Michael Cunningham sees a poet whose vision of humanity is ecstatic, democratic, and sensuous. Just over a hundred years ago, Whitman celebrated America as it survived the Civil War, as it endured great poverty, and as it entered the Industrial Revolution, which would make it the most powerful nation on Earth. In Specimen Days Michael Cunningham makes Whitman's verse sing across time, and in Laws for Creations he celebrates what Whitman means to him, and how he appeared at the heart of his new novel.

Just as the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Hours drew on the life and work of English novelist Viriginia Woolf, Specimen Days lovingly features the work of American poet Walt Whitman. Bringing together extracts from Whitman's prodigious writings, including Leaves of Grass and his journal, Specimen Days, Michael Cunningham's Laws for Creations provides an introduction to one of America's greatest visionary poets from one of our greatest contemporary novelists.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780312426071
Publisher: Picador
Publication date: 04/18/2006
Edition description: First Edition
Pages: 208
Product dimensions: 5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.48(d)

About the Author

Walt Whitman was an American poet, essayist, journalist, and humanist. He was a part of the transition between Transcendentalism and realism, incorporating both views in his works. Whitman is among the most influential poets in the American canon, often called the "father of free verse".

Michael Cunningham is the author of A Home at the End of the World, Flesh and Blood, The Hours (winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Pulitzer Prize), Specimen Days, By Nightfall, The Snow Queen, and A Wild Swan, as well as Land's End: A Walk in Provincetown. He lives in New York.

Read an Excerpt



Laws for Creations



By Whitman, Walt


Picador



Copyright © 2006
Whitman, Walt

All right reserved.


ISBN: 0312426070



Introduction

In college, after I gave up modeling myself on Bob Dylan (I had trouble with his conversion to Christianity) and then on Genet (I just wasn't French enough), I decided to try to become as much as possible like Walt Whitman. What propelled me was not the beauty of Whitman's language (I was an undergraduate English major; I was drowning in the beautiful language of the dead) but the following passage, which I read late one night in my dormitory room as Pink Floyd seeped through the wall from the room next to mine:
 
Camerado, this is no book,
 
Who touches this touches a man,
 
(Is it night? are we here alone together?)
 
It is I you hold and who holds you,
 
I spring from the pages into your arms. . . .
 
Never before had a writer leaped off the page and touched me like that: directly, personally, erotically. It was my first experience of literature's ability to telescope time--to forcefully remind the living that the no-longer-living were not only once as alive as we are now but were capable of imagining us, and a future with us in it, as vividly as we imagine them in the past. If it didn't quite tear a hole in the fabric of mortality, it stretched it a considerable distance.
 
...
 
Copyright 2006 by Mare VaporumCorp


Continues...



Excerpted from Laws for Creations
by Whitman, Walt
Copyright © 2006 by Whitman, Walt.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Table of Contents

Introduction by Michael Cunningham

Poetry

Selection from Leaves of Grass, The First Edition, 1855

"I celebrate myself"

Selections from Leaves of Grass, The Final Edition, 1891-1892

From "Inscriptions"

Poets to Come

From "Children of Adam"

I Sing the Body Electric (first stanza)

From "Calamus"

City of Orgies

To a Stranger

Full of Life Now

Crossing Brooklyn Ferry

Song of the Answerer (first stanza)

Song of the Broad-Axe (fourth stanza)

From "Birds of Passage"

To You

From "Sea Drift"

Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking

From "Drum-Taps"

Give Me the Splendid Silent Sun

From "Autumn Rivulets"

There Was a Child Went Forth

Laws for Creations

The Sleepers (first stanza)

From "Whispers of Heavenly Death"

Whispers of Heavenly Death

O Living Always, Always Dying

From "From Noon to Starry Night"

Mannahatta

As I Walk These Broad Majectic Days

A Clear Midnight

From "Songs of Parting"

As the Time Draws Nigh

My Legacy

So Long!

Prose

Selections from Specimen Days, 1882-1883

Opening of the Secession War

A Secesh Brave

A Night Battle, Over a Week Since

Battle of Gettysburg

Death of a Hero

Thoughts Under an Oak—A Dream

New Senses—New Joys

Nature and Democracy—Morality

Selections from Collect, 1882-1883

Darwinism—(Then Furthermore)

Monuments—The Past and the Present

The Last Collective Compaction

Preface to Leaves of Grass, The Final Edition, 1891-1892: A Backward Glance O'er Travel'd Roads

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