Specimen Days Author:Walt Whitman In the spontaneous prose of this great work Walt Whitman reveals himself as prophetic explorer of Civil War hospitals, brilliant abstractionist of Nature and teeming cities, critic of morals and literature. — The emerging portrait is that of a man with huge and relentless spirit who advocates endurance in the face of despair, robust tenderness in... more » opposition to pettiness.
In these pages--vast, American, informed--the reader cannot but catch the extent to which even the smallest occasion is a point of departure for Whitman's mystique of camaraderie, his total immersion in life, his thundering, almost blasphemous defiance of death.« less