About the Author

Walt Whitman (1819-1892) was born on Long Island and educated in Brooklyn, New York. He served as a printer's devil, journeyman compositor, itinerant schoolteacher, editor, and unofficial nurse to Northern and Southern soldiers, and is widely consideredthe greatest American poet of the ninetheenth century.Harold Bloomis the author of over thirty books, including the New York Times bestsellersShakespeare- The Invention of the Human;The Western Canon; andJesus and Yahweh- The Names Divine, and has been the recipient of numerous honors, including a MacArthur Fellowship and the Gold Medal for Belles Lettres and Criticism from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University and is a former Charles Eliot Norton Professor at Harvard University.

Reviews

“Who, could possibly make another selection [of Walt Whitman] seem fresh? Who is definitely Harold Bloom, dean of American literary critics, who considers Whitman ‘the principal writer that America—North, Central, or South—has brought to us.’ . . . Bloom connects Whitman’s project to the thesis of his The American Religion (1992) that the tendency of religion in America is to replace God with man, and with the fragments, Bloom presents explicit evidence of the attempt.” —Booklist