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Walt Whitman: Selected Poems

Edited by Harold Bloom

“Who, could possibly make another selection [of Walt Whitman] seem fresh? Who is definitely Harold Bloom, dean of American literary critics, who considers Whitman ‘the principal writer that America—North, Central, or South—has brought to us.’ . . . Bloom connects Whitman’s project to the thesis of his The American Religion (1992) that the tendency of religion in America is to replace God with man, and with the fragments, Bloom presents explicit evidence of the attempt.”—Booklist

Overview
News & Views
Table of Contents

Overview

News He “lived and breathed literature”—Library of America remembers Harold Bloom, 1930–2019
November 5, 2019

News Happy 200th birthday, Walt Whitman
May 31, 2019

Interviews Walt Whitman speaks!—embraces multitudes, and becomes our contemporary
May 31, 2019

American literature and culture are inconceivable without the towering presence of Walt Whitman. Expansive, ecstatic, original in ways that continue to startle and to elicit new discoveries, Whitman’s poetry is a testament to the surging energies of 19th-century America and a monument to the transforming power of literary genius. His incantatory rhythms, revolutionary sense of Eros, and generous, all-embracing vision invite renewed wonder at each reading. Although he has been a defining influence for many poets—Garcia Lorca, Fernando Pessoa, Robinson Jeffers, and Allen Ginsberg—his style is ultimately inimitable, and his achievement unsurpassed in American poetry.

“One always wants to start out fresh with Whitman,” writes Harold Bloom in his introduction, “and read him as though he never has been read before.” In a selection that ranges from early notebook fragments and the complete “Song of Myself” to the valedictory “Good-bye My Fancy!,” Bloom has chosen 47 works to represent “the principal writer that America—North, Central, or South—has brought to us.”

Harold Bloom (1930–2019) was the author of over forty books, including the New York Times bestsellers Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human; The Western Canon; and Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine, and the recipient of numerous honors, including a MacArthur Fellowship and the Gold Medal for Belles Lettres and Criticism from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He was Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University and a Charles Eliot Norton Professor at Harvard University.

About the American Poets Project
Elegantly designed in compact editions, printed on acid-free paper, and textually authoritative, the American Poets Project makes available the full range of the American poetic accomplishment, selected and introduced by today’s most discerning poets and critics.
News & Views

News He “lived and breathed literature”—Library of America remembers Harold Bloom, 1930–2019
November 5, 2019

News Happy 200th birthday, Walt Whitman
May 31, 2019

Interviews Walt Whitman speaks!—embraces multitudes, and becomes our contemporary
May 31, 2019

News | Video Documentary project locates Walt Whitman’s “multitudes” in today’s Deep South
May 31, 2019

News Photo tour: Walt Whitman’s New Jersey, scene of his recovery and final rest
May 31, 2019
Table of Contents

Introduction by Harold Bloom

I. Early Notebook Fragments of “Song of Myself”
“I am your voice—It was tied in you—In me it begins to talk”
“I am the poet of reality”
“One touch of a tug of me has unhaltered all my senses but feeling”
“Afar in the sky was a nest”
“The crowds naked in the bath”
“In vain were nails driven through my hands”
“There is no word in any tongue”

II.
Song of Myself

III.
“I wander all night in my vision”
Crossing Brooklyn Ferry
Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking
As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life
When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d

IV.
Poets to Come
To the Garden the World
From Pent-up Aching Rivers
I Sing the Body Electric
A Woman Waits for Me
Spontaneous Me
Ages and Ages Returning at Intervals
O Hymen! O Hymenee!
I Am He that Aches with Love
Facing West from California’s Shores
As Adam Early in the Morning

V.
In Paths Untrodden
Scented Herbage of My Breast
Whoever You Are Holding Me Now in Hand
Of the Terrible Doubt of Appearances
City of Orgies
I Saw in Louisiana a Live-Oak Growing

VI.
On the Beach at Night
The World below the Brine
A Hand-Mirror
The Dalliance of Eagles
As Toilsome I Wander’d Virginia’s Woods
The Wound-Dresser
Reconciliation
There Was a Child Went Forth

VII.
Chanting the Square Deific
A Noiseless Patient Spider
O Living Always, Always Dying
The Last Invocation
A Clear Midnight
Good-Bye my Fancy
When the Full-Grown Poet Came
Good-Bye my Fancy!
“Respondez! Respondez!”

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ISBN: 978-1-931082-32-7 252 pages

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