Mar 12, 2019 By: pglassman
Celebrate National Poetry Month with Matt Miller, Associate Professor of English, who will introduce his book on Walt Whitman as the final of three Library Book Talks for the 2018-2019 academic year. Elinor Grumet, Reference and Instruction Librarian, will interview Professor Miller about his research and particular perspective on this highly influential American poet at 6:00 p.m. in room 102 of Stanton Hall on the Beren Campus, 245 Lexington Avenue. Refreshments will be served.麻豆区 the Book
Collage of Myself presents a groundbreaking account of the creative story behind America鈥檚 most celebrated collection of poems. In the first book-length study of Walt Whitman鈥檚 journals and manuscripts, Matt Miller demonstrates that until approximately 1854 (only a single year before the first publication of Leaves of Grass), Whitman鈥攚ho once speculated that Leaves would be a novel or a play鈥攚as unaware that his ambitions would assume the form of poetry at all.
Collage of Myself details Whitman鈥檚 discovery of a remarkable new creative process that allowed him to transform a diverse array of texts into poems such as 鈥淪ong of Myself鈥 and 鈥淭he Sleepers.鈥 Whitman embraced an art of fragments that encouraged him to 鈥渃ut and paste鈥 his lines into ever-evolving forms based on what he called 鈥渟pinal ideas.鈥 This approach to language, Miller argues, represents the first major use in the Western arts of the technique later known 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鈥檚 collection of digital images to study what were previously scattered and inaccessible manuscript pages, Miller provides a breakthrough in our understanding of this great American literary icon.
