What is the Grass _ Walt Whitman in My Life

Doty, Mark

ISBN 10: 1787332438 / ISBN 13: 9781787332430

Published by Jonathan Cape, London, 2020

About this Item

black cloth, silver lettering, dust jacket, 277 pp Standard shipping (no tracking or insurance) / Priority (with tracking) / Custom quote for large or heavy orders.

Seller Inventory # 103480

Bibliographic Details

• Title: What is the Grass _ Walt Whitman in My Life
• Publisher: Jonathan Cape, London
• Publication Date: 2020
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1787332438
• ISBN 13: 9781787332430
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: Cloth/dust jacket Octavo.
• Condition: Very good
• Dust Jacket Condition: very good
• Seller catalogs:
  • Biography

About this title

Synopsis

Mark Doty has always felt haunted by Walt Whitman’s bold, new American voice, and by his equally radical claims about body and soul and what it means to be a self. In What Is the Grass, Doty – a poet, a lover of men, a New Yorker, and an American – keeps company with Whitman and his mutable, landmark work, Leaves of Grass, tracing the resonances between his own experience and the legendary poet’s life and work.

What is it, then, between us? Whitman asks. Doty’s answer is to explore spaces tied to Whitman’s life and spaces where he finds the poet’s ghost, meditating on desire, love, and the mysterious wellsprings of the poet’s enduring work. How does a voice survive death? What Is the Grass is a conversation across time and space, a study of the astonishment one poet finds in the accomplishment of another, and an attempt to grasp Whitman’s deeply hopeful vision of humanity.

About the Author

Mark Doty is the author of more than ten volumes of poetry and three memoirs. His many honours include the National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, a Whiting Writers’ Award, a Lila Wallace–Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award, and, in the UK, the T. S. Eliot Prize. He is a professor at Rutgers University and lives in New York City.