Walt Whitman and the Making of Jewish American Poetry

Walt Whitman and the Making of Jewish American Poetry PDF Author: Dara Barnat
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
ISBN: 1609389085
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 216

Get Book Here

Book Description
Walt Whitman has served as a crucial figure within the tradition of Jewish American poetry. But how did Whitman, a non-Jewish, American-born poet, become so instrumental in this area of poetry, especially for poets whose parents, and often they themselves, were not “born here?” Dara Barnat presents a genealogy of Jewish American poets in dialogue with Whitman, and with each other, and reveals how the lineage of Jewish American poets responding to Whitman extends far beyond the likes of Allen Ginsberg. From Emma Lazarus and Adah Isaacs Menken, through twentieth-century poets such as Charles Reznikoff, Karl Shapiro, Kenneth Koch, Muriel Rukeyser, Adrienne Rich, Marge Piercy, Alicia Suskin Ostriker, and Gerald Stern, this book demonstrates that Whitman has been adopted by Jewish American poets as a liberal symbol against exclusionary and anti-Semitic elements in high modernist literary culture. The turn to Whitman serves as a mode of exploring Jewish and American identity.

Walt Whitman and the Making of Jewish American Poetry

Walt Whitman and the Making of Jewish American Poetry PDF Author: Dara Barnat
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
ISBN: 1609389085
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 216

Get Book Here

Book Description
Walt Whitman has served as a crucial figure within the tradition of Jewish American poetry. But how did Whitman, a non-Jewish, American-born poet, become so instrumental in this area of poetry, especially for poets whose parents, and often they themselves, were not “born here?” Dara Barnat presents a genealogy of Jewish American poets in dialogue with Whitman, and with each other, and reveals how the lineage of Jewish American poets responding to Whitman extends far beyond the likes of Allen Ginsberg. From Emma Lazarus and Adah Isaacs Menken, through twentieth-century poets such as Charles Reznikoff, Karl Shapiro, Kenneth Koch, Muriel Rukeyser, Adrienne Rich, Marge Piercy, Alicia Suskin Ostriker, and Gerald Stern, this book demonstrates that Whitman has been adopted by Jewish American poets as a liberal symbol against exclusionary and anti-Semitic elements in high modernist literary culture. The turn to Whitman serves as a mode of exploring Jewish and American identity.

Walt Whitman and the Making of Jewish American Poetry

Walt Whitman and the Making of Jewish American Poetry PDF Author: Dara Barnat
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
ISBN: 1609389077
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 216

Get Book Here

Book Description
"Walt Whitman, though not a Jewish poet, has served as a crucial figure within the tradition of Jewish American poetry, starting in the mid-nineteenth century, until today. However, the genealogy of Jewish American poets responding to Whitman is wider and more nuanced than often recognized. Due to Allen Ginsberg's overt adoption of Whitman, it is often believed that Ginsberg is the only Jewish American poet to have engaged with Whitman's poetic style and democratic ethos. This book reveals how the lineage of poets responding to Whitman extends far beyond Ginsberg, and that Ginsberg himself receives Whitman through earlier Jewish American poets, like Charles Reznikoff. This project presents such a genealogy of poets in dialogue with Whitman (and each other), from Emma Lazarus and Adah Isaacs Menken, through twentieth-century poets, such as Charles Reznikoff, Karl Shapiro, Kenneth Koch, Muriel Rukeyser, Adrienne Rich, Marge Piercy, and Alicia Suskin Ostriker, Gerald Stern, and beyond. By researching Whitman's role in this tradition systematically, in the work of individual poets, and in the framework of Jewish American poetry more broadly, this book seeks to fill a gap in the understanding of these dynamics, and to invite other scholars to examine the Whitman-Jewish connection. A major finding in this book is that Whitman has been adopted by Jewish American poets as a liberal symbol against elements in High Modernist literary culture, which the poets perceived to be exclusionary and anti-Semitic. Thus, there is a negotiation of the vexed territory of being Jewish in America through an alignment with Whitman. As such, the turn to Whitman serves as a mode of exploring Jewish and American identity, whereby Walt Whitman the poet is imagined to be Jewish and American"--

Walt Whitman and Jewish American Poetry

Walt Whitman and Jewish American Poetry PDF Author: Dara Barnat
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : American poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 223

Get Book Here

Book Description


Jewish American Poetry

Jewish American Poetry PDF Author: Jonathan N. Barron
Publisher: UPNE
ISBN: 9781584650430
Category : American poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 364

Get Book Here

Book Description
A rich and provocative overview of Jewish American poetry.

Collage of Myself

Collage of Myself PDF Author: Matt Miller
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 0803234422
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 318

Get Book Here

Book Description
Collage of Myself presents a groundbreaking account of the creative story behind America's most celebrated collection of poems. In the first book length study of Walt Whitman's journals and manuscripts, Matt Miller demonstrates that until approximately 1854 (only a single year before the first publication of Leaves of Grass), Whitman---who once speculated that Leaves would be a novel or a play---was unaware that his ambitions would assume the form of poetry at all. Collage of Myself details Whitman's discovery of a remarkable new creative process that allowed him to transform a diverse array of texts into poems such as "Song of Myself" and "The Sleepers." Whitman embraced an art of fragments that encouraged him to "cut and paste" his lines into ever evolving forms based on what he called "spinal ideas." This approach to language, Miller argues, represents the first major use in the Western arts of the technique later know as collage, an observation with significant ramifications for our reception of subsequent artists and writers. Long before the modernists, Whitman integrated found text and ready made language into a revolutionary formulation of artistic production that anticipates much of what is exciting about modern and postmodern art. Using the Walt Whitman Archive's collection of digital images to study what were previously scattered and inaccessible manuscript pages, Miller provides a breakthrough in our understanding of the great American literary icon.

Singing in a Strange Land

Singing in a Strange Land PDF Author: Maeera Shreiber
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780804734295
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 287

Get Book Here

Book Description
Singing in a Strange Land explores how the history and cultural conditions of Jewish poetry and poetic production—from the destruction of the Second Temple and Babylonian exile to medieval Spain, the Nazi Holocaust, the contemporary Gulf War, and the second Palestinian intifada—have shaped "Jewish American poetry"; and, through analyses of important poems by significant Jewish American poets, how they shape Jewish American cultural identity.

Walt Whitman

Walt Whitman PDF Author: Paul Zweig
Publisher: New York : Basic Books
ISBN:
Category : Poets, American
Languages : en
Pages : 392

Get Book Here

Book Description
Traces the life and career of Walt Whitman through a period of transition.

Walt Whitman, Where the Future Becomes Present

Walt Whitman, Where the Future Becomes Present PDF Author: David Haven Blake
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
ISBN: 1587296381
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 201

Get Book Here

Book Description
Walt Whitman, Where the Future Becomes Present invigorates Whitman studies by garnering insights from a diverse group of writers and intellectuals. Writing from the perspectives of art history, political theory, creative writing, and literary criticism, the contributors place Whitman in the center of both world literature and American public life. The volume is especially notable for being the best example yet published of what the editors call the New Textuality in Whitman studies, an emergent mode of criticism that focuses on the different editions of Whitman’s poems as independent works of art.

Not One of Them in Place

Not One of Them in Place PDF Author: Norman Finkelstein
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 0791490548
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 208

Get Book Here

Book Description
Not One of Them in Place is the first book to examine the ways in which Jewish belief, thought, and culture have been shaped and articulated in modern American poetry. Based on the idea that recent American poetry has gravitated between two traditions—romantic and symbolist on the one hand, modernist and objectivist on the other—Norman Finkelstein provides a theoretical framework for reading the Jewish-American canon, as well as close readings of well known and less established poets, including Allen Ginsberg, Charles Reznikoff, Louis Zukofsky, Harvey Shapiro, Armand Schwerner, Hugh Seidman, and Michael Heller. Not One of Them in Place presents this poetry in a clear and nuanced style, paying equal attention to its historical and its aesthetic dimensions.

Exiles on Main Street

Exiles on Main Street PDF Author: Julian Levinson
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253000289
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 258

Get Book Here

Book Description
How have Jews reshaped their identities as Jews in the face of the radical newness called America? Julian Levinson explores the ways in which exposure to American literary culture -- in particular the visionary tradition identified with Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman -- led American Jewish writers to a new understanding of themselves as Jews. Discussing the lives and work of writers such as Emma Lazarus, Mary Antin, Ludwig Lewisohn, Waldo Frank, Anzia Yezierska, I. J. Schwartz, Alfred Kazin, and Irving Howe, Levinson concludes that their interaction with American culture led them to improvise new and meaningful ways of being Jewish. In contrast to the often expressed view that the diaspora experience leads to assimilation, Exiles on Main Street traces an arc of return to Jewish identification and describes a vital and creative Jewish American literary culture.