The Letters of Anne Gilchrist and Walt Whitman

Whitman, Walt, 1819-1892Project Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 3.6
Word count
364K words
Chapters
37

Tags

English Originals Foreign Literature Literary ArchivesPortrait GalleryLove EntanglementsLiterary GiantsLife PhilosophySpiritual ComfortTender SentimentWestern ThoughtCross-Cultural ViewFemale Perspective

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.The Letters of Anne Gilchrist and Walt Whitman by Anne Gilchrist and Walt WhitmanAuthor: Whitman, Walt, 1819-1892,Language: English, Class: PS: Language and Literatures: American and Canadian literature, Release Date: Feb 24, 2011

Editor's review

This book collects the correspondence between Anne Gilchrist and Walt Whitman, offering primary material for understanding nineteenth-century Anglo-American literary exchange and private affection. Readers can see how a British woman reader moved from admiration of Whitman's poetry to a long-term, candid correspondence with him; the letters also reflect aspects of Whitman's later life, creative views, and health. As a public-domain ebook from Project Gutenberg, it is easy to search and cite, and serves as a supplementary text for studying Whitman's reception history, epistolary literature, or biography writing. Read it not for plot momentum but for subtle shifts in tone, address, and topics between the two, understood within the nineteenth-century transatlantic cultural context. For general readers, it is more like a side door into the poet's personal world.

Who it's for

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Reading tips

  1. Read selected Whitman poems first, then the letters, to better understand the texts and emotions mentioned.
  2. Read chronologically, using sticky notes to mark changes in forms of address, health, and creative topics.
  3. Read a few letters at a time, with brief annotations alongside background material on nineteenth-century Anglo-American literature.

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

Contents

  1. 1
  2. 2
  3. 3
  4. 4
  5. 5
  6. 6
  7. 7
  8. 8
  9. 9
  10. 10
  11. 11
  12. 12
  13. 13
  14. 14
  15. 15
  16. 16
  17. 17
  18. 18
  19. 19
  20. 20
  21. 21
  22. 22
  23. 23
  24. 24
  25. 25
  26. 26
  27. 27
  28. 28
  29. 29
  30. 30
  31. 31
  32. 32
  33. 33
  34. 34
  35. 35
  36. 36
  37. 37

FAQ

Is this book a biography written by Whitman himself? No. It is a collection of letters between Anne Gilchrist and Whitman, primary material rather than a systematic biography. Readers can obtain first-hand material from it, but a reliable Whitman biography is still needed for a full life story.
Does reading this book require a strong command of English? The letters are generally not very difficult, but they involve nineteenth-century written expression, literary allusions, and personal phrasing, so intermediate or higher English reading ability is recommended. When encountering unfamiliar expressions, read the surrounding context first rather than checking every word.
Is it suitable for academic citation? It can be used as a public-domain primary source, especially for studying Whitman's reception history and letter culture. When citing, note the edition information and page numbers, and check the original electronic text to avoid mixing editorial notes into the letters themselves.

This site is an index: you start “Search all sources” in your browser, and the entries it lists all point to third-party sites; please judge their availability yourself.

About the author

Whitman, Walt, 1819-1892 Author

Walt Whitman (1819-1892) was an American poet whose biographical details are limited in publicly available sources, yet whose work has had a profound influence. His representative work Leaves of Grass broke with traditional meter through free verse, celebrating the individual, democracy, and nature in an expansive, rhythmic language, and is regarded as an important marker of the modern transformation of American poetry. Another collection, Drum-Taps, along with The Wound Dresser and The Patriotic Poems of Walt Whitman, draws largely on war and nursing experience, with a plain and deeply moving tone that shows concern for ordinary people. Complete Prose Works and Poems by Walt Whitman also collect his prose and verse. His writings have been translated into many languages, such as Grashalmen and Poèmes de Walt Whitman, and have circulated widely.