Essential Walt Whitman CD

by Walt Whitman, Ed Begley (Read by)

Overview

One Great Author. One Great CD.

A poem by Whitman may be whoops and hollers, or beating of drums, or the ebb of the tide singing to itself among the stones, or laments in the night or cries of ecstasy. Indeed, Whitman was the wind which blew poetry from its moorings in tradition and sent it into fresher waters; his poems celebrating the grandness of the human condition are cadenced for the voice and meant to be spoken aloud. In this recording drawn from the Caedmon archives, reader Ed Begley, Sr. performs selections from Whitman’s lifelong work, Leaves of Grass.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780061566417
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	06/03/2008
Series:	Caedmon Essentials Series
Edition description:	Unabridged, 1 CD, 1 hour
Product dimensions:	4.80(w) x 5.50(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

Walt Whitman was born on Long Island, New York in 1819. He spent most of his early life in Brooklyn where he served as editor for a number of newspapers for brief periods. His first major work, Leaves of Grass, was published in 1855 and was subsequently published in nine enlarged editions throughout his lifetime. In 1862 in the midst of the Civil War, Whitman set out for the battlefield to find his wounded brother and continued to volunteer in hospitals throughout the length of the war. He died in 1892.

Ed Begley, Sr. was a prolific radio actor and from 1944-1948 he played the title role in the radio version of Charlie Chan. In 1947, Begley created the role of benighted war profiteer Joe Keller in Arthur Miller's All My Sons. He was a familiar figure in TV's "golden age" of the 1950s, and appeared 789 times as the William Jennings Bryan counterpart in the Broadway drama Inherit the Wind.

Editorial Reviews

Even though these selections were recorded in 1959 and 1969, the production and sound quality are impressively clear. Ed Begley does an admirable job of narrating, but at times he takes on the tenor and intonation of a fire-and-brimstone preacher, not so much performing the poems and selections as reading them with gusto. While this approach works well for such poems as "I Hear America Singing," it loses some of its effect as the selections march on, inasmuch as the listener starts to lose track of the poems' actual words and meanings. However, Begley does depart from his grandiloquent style for such poems as "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd," which he reads with appropriate calm and introspection that communicate the power of Whitman's honest words. A.H.A. © AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine

OCT/NOV 08 - AudioFile