Walt Whitman's Reconstruction

In this analysis of the considerable poetic and personal reimagining that is the hallmark of the postwar years, this book reveals the ways that Whitman reconstructed and read the American civil war. It sees him transformed from newspaper editor and staff journalist to celebrity contributor and nationally recognized public lecturer, a transformation driven as much by material developments in the nation as by his own professional and poetic ambitions while he expanded and cemented his place in the American literary landscape.