Specimen Days Author:Walt Whitman Walt Whitman's most neglected masterpiece In the spontaneous prose of this great work Walt Whitman reveals himself as prophetic explorer of the Open Road, printer, editor, wound-dresser in Civil War hospitals, brilliant abstractionist of Nature. The emerging portrait is that of a man with huge and relentless spirit who advocates endurance in t... more »he face of despair, robust tenderness in 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. Intro by Richard Chase.« less