Walt Whitman

Harvard FAS

One of the major poets in the English language, Whitman also became an emblem of an American possibility, a beacon of what we now call queer identities, and a catalyst for modernism worldwide. How did he do it? What makes the poems so good? How did he react to his own time, and to the writings of his contemporaries? And how did the writers who came after him learn from him? We'll read all his poems, some of his prose, other writers from that era (including Emerson, Douglass and Louisa May…