Discover How Whitmans Spiritual Life and Vision Can Enlighten Your OwnWhitmans collected poems and prose are not an object or icon to be gazed upon or revered but a transparency we look through to see ourselves with greater clarity, excitement, and meaning. They wake us up to our potential, to learning about and from ourselves. To experience his writing is to experience ourselves more deeply.from the Preface by Gary David ComstockWal...

Offers insight into Whitmans quest for self-discovery, which involved an ongoing mystical experience of the world.

Aan essay by American transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau that was first published in 1849. In it, Thoreau argues that individuals should not permit governments to overrule or atrophy their consciences, and that they have a duty to avoid allowing such acquiescence to enable the government to make them the agents of injustice. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Disobedience_(Thoreau)

Helen Keller, American author, political activist, and lecturer, was the first deaf-blind person to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree. Born in 1880 she fell ill at an early age with an illness, possibly scarlet fever or meningitis, which did not last very long yet unfortunately left her both deaf and blind. When Helen was six years old her mother, having been inspired by an account in Charles Dickens’s 'American Notes' of the successful education of another deaf and blind wom...

In 1855, Walt Whitman self-published the first edition of Leaves of Grass, a visionary collection of twelve poems. Leaves of Grass is a celebration of life, nature, humanity, and the uniquely American form of mysticism known as Transcendentalism.Leaves of Grass employs a vibrantly innovative style of free verse and explores previously unmentionable subject matter. Glorifying nature, lauding the senses and sexuality, and eulogizing the human body, this maj...

Abraham Lincoln read it with approval, but Emily Dickinson described its bold language and themes as "disgraceful." Ralph Waldo Emerson found it "the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet produced." Published at the author's expense on July 4, 1855, Leaves of Grass inaugurated a new voice and style into American letters and gave expression to an optimistic, bombastic vision that took the nation as its subject. Unlike many other editions of Leaves of Grass, which r...

As featured in AMC's Breaking Bad*, given by Gale Boetticher to Walter White and discovered by Hank Schrader*. "I celebrate myself, And what I assume you shall assume, For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. I loafe and invite my soul, I lean and loafe at my ease....observing a spear of summer grass." So begins Leaves of Grass, the first great American poem and indeed, to this day, the greatest and most essentially American poem in all our national literatu...

A comprehensive collection of Whitman's most beloved works of poetry, prose, and short storiesWhen Walt Whitman self-published Leaves of Grass in 1855 it was a slim volume of twelve poems and he was a journalist and poet from Long Island, little-known but full of ambition and poetic fire. To give a new voice to the new nation shaken by civil war, he spent his entire life revising and adding to the work, but his initial act of bravado in answering Ralph Wal...

In 1855 Walt Whitman published Leaves of Grass, the work which defined him as one of America's most influential voices, and which he added to throughout his life. A collection of astonishing originality and intensity, it spoke of politics, sexual emancipation and what it meant to be an American. From the joyful 'Song of Myself' and 'I Sing the Body Electric' to the elegiac 'When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd', Whitman's art fuses oratory, journalism and song in a vivid celebration of...