Rokhl’s Golden City: A different take on Walt Whitman
Third in a series on the American left: a tale of buried treasure
The epiphany that led to a national literature’s single greatest achievement: tucked in a prosaic, newly discovered early novel are the seeds of ‘Leaves of Grass’
What Walt Whitman can tell us about our democracy
A scholar discovers a hidden text by the great American author of ‘Song of Myself.’ But can the celebrated democrat survive the politics of 21st-century academia?
A tale of two Edgars, and the predestination of names
Comment of the Week
When he left the world of observance, a young San Franciscan took with him the trops for chanting Torah and applied them to the works of Walt Whitman
Philip Roth’s legacy of writerly narcissism left a generation of young novelists with the wrong idea of what makes great literature
The writer Delmore Schwartz is largely forgotten today, but he once captured the anxieties and hopes of the Jewish intellectuals of the 1930s and stunned his generation with his poems and short stories
Robert Pinsky’s career-spanning Selected Poems highlights his movement from meditative formalist to Whitmanesque bard